Story 1100: The World That Shouldn't Be

It began as a whisper from beneath the skin of reality. Not a sound, but a knowing—a tremor in the soul of every creature still clinging to life after the Eclipse.

When Mara Quinn opened her eyes, she wasn’t sure if they were her own.

The sky no longer followed logic. It pulsed in impossible colors—wet, glassy, and echoing. Mountains hung like chandeliers from the clouds. Rivers flowed upward. The stars blinked like eyes. This was not Earth.

It was The World That Shouldn’t Be.

Born from the closing of the Tear, it was a failed compromise—a bastard hybrid of realms that could not coexist. Eldritch and organic. Divine and dead. Every broken truth from the old world stitched itself into this new grotesque patchwork of existence.

Cities floated like corpses in amniotic haze. Forests grew upside-down. Time hiccupped and rebounded in fragments.

And the dead? They no longer shambled.

They watched.