Shattering of Constants

There comes a moment when every decision coalesces into one pointed clarity. And as Verin sprang forward, his form contorting with impossible geometries, I felt in my chest the weight of Malakai's trust-the echo of his final request. The box. Whatever it contained might be our last hope.

I forced both hands forward, not with starfire, but with something deeper. The crystalline walls of the Moon Tower had been singing to me since I entered, their resonance matching something in my blood. Now I pulled on that connection hard.

The effect was instantaneous and horrific. The crystal walls shrieked, their ancient harmonics shattered by my desperate gambit. Verin stumbled, his changed body especially vulnerable to the discordant frequencies. The floor beneath us started to splinter, facets of reality showing through the cracks.

"What have you done?" he gasped, his voice shifting through multiple octaves.

I didn't wait for him to answer, diving past as he struggled still to hold his form, I slapped my hand onto the door of the Celestial Chamber. Scripts which laced its surface flared, into recognition - not of me, per se, but of the essence of starweaver coursing through every practitioner of the art.

Beyond the doorway, the room took my breath away. It was a perfect sphere, its walls of crystal so pure it was almost invisible. At its center floated a pedestal of what looked like frozen starlight, and upon it.

"Stop!

Verin's voice was different, now, overtones that made reality shudder. I turned to see him filling the doorway, his form barely contained by three-dimensional space. Where his fingers touched the crystal walls, they began to transform, patterns of corruption spreading like frost.

"You don't know what's in that box," he said. "What Malakai has done. The knowledge it contains-it's not meant for minds bound by linear time."

"And what you're becoming is better?" I snapped, moving closer to the pedestal. "Look at yourself, Verin. Look at what this 'truth' has done to you."

For a moment, something flickered in those cosmic eyes-a flash of the scholar he had once been, the middle brother who had watched over siblings with quiet pride. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by something vast and hungry and utterly alien.

"We are becoming what we were always meant to be," he said, and now his voice was a chorus of impossible harmonies. "The Old Ones remember when reality was fluid, when consciousness itself could shape the nature of existence. The giant-kings didn't protect humanity - they imprisoned it in a cage of fixed laws and immutable constants."

Resting on a pedestal of latticed wood was a small, unassuming box made from some kind of metal I had never seen. The symbol on it was Malakai's family seal, but the marking rippled and shifted with my gaze to hint at symbols beneath.

"Even now, you cling to these fragments of order," Verin said, gesturing with the staff as he moved another step into the room. The crystal walls ruffled-like water-around him. "But order is an illusion, Sera. A comforting fiction we make for ourselves, to avoid the truth of existence."

My hands wrapped around the box. In an instant, understanding flooded through me-not words or images, but understanding itself. I knew what Malakai had known, what had compelled him to find the Keeper of Broken Things, what had compelled him to reach for the Key of Unmaking.

The truth struck me like a blow: The Old Ones weren't invading our reality.

They were remembering it.

Before the giant-kings, before the Seal, before even the very concept of fixed physical laws, reality had been.different. Consciousness and existence were not separate things but complementary facets of the same underlying truth. The Old Ones weren't entities from another dimension-they were fragments of that original state of being, memories of what existence had been before it was bounded by rules and reasons.

And now they were waking up.

There was a sound in the chamber like silk tearing as Verin's form finally burst the bonds of conventional space. He overloomed me, a being of fractal complexities and recursive impossibilities. In gaps in his substance, I saw other realities, other possibilities: worlds where the giant-kings had failed, where the Old Ones had never been bound, where consciousness was free to mold the very stuff of existence.

"Give me the box," he said, his hand reaching out with limbs that existed in more dimensions than I could fathom.

Instead, I opened it.

Light erupted outward, but not the now-familiar luminescence of stars or moons; rather, something far, far older. The clean light of possibility itself, in some mad way distilled and crystallized through the desperate genius of Malakai. And in that instant, that blinding instant, I knew what he had done and why he had sent me here while he plunged into the terrors filling the streets below.

He had not only unraveled the mystery of the Old Ones but also found a way to recall what happened afterwards.

In an instant, the light touched Verin, his body transparent in that instant; I could see through him into what he was becoming: not a higher form of existence, but a living wound in reality, a cancer of consciousness futilely attempting to rewrite the laws that made existence itself possible.

He shrieked-a shriek torn from the fibre of dimensions. Fissures appeared across the crystal walls, insufficient now to restrain what was being unleashed. As rents spread across its face I saw behind the seven moons that hung above them pale, so tenuous against light from the box was welling up.

And then, as the very fabric of reality began to unravel before my eyes, I did the only thing I could do: reach into the box and grasp what lay within, embracing whatever price such knowledge would demand.

The last thing I saw, before consciousness changed, was Verin's face, human for a single moment longer, twisted in a rictus of horror and recognition. Then the light took everything, and the world started to shift.

Above us, the seven moons continued their eternal dance, witness to a transformation that would change not just our world but the very nature of reality itself.

Somewhere down below, out in the streets, Malakai fought on-buying time with his own transformation, in hopes that when the time came, I would understand what must be done.

He needn't have worried. I understood now.

I understood it all.