Fractured Reality

The world didn't just split—it unraveled.

Orion staggered back as the chamber collapsed around him, the walls peeling away like decayed parchment. The symbols that once flickered with knowledge now burned with an eerie, void-like glow, warping into impossible patterns.

The presence before him—the thing that should not be—bled further into existence. Its form did not follow the rules of reality. It was a shifting contradiction, a hole where something should have been, yet something where there should have been nothing.

Lyra moved first.

With a sharp breath, she raised her blade, the edge humming with resonant energy. She lunged, slashing toward the entity's center.

Her strike never landed.

Instead, the blade sank into the empty air before it, vanishing—no, erasing itself.

Lyra gasped, stumbling back as her weapon ceased to exist. Her hands were empty where once there had been steel. As if the blade had never been forged.

Orion barely had time to process what he had just seen before the thing took another step forward.

The Vault Keeper spoke in a sharp, urgent tone. "Do not engage it. This is not a foe you can fight."

Lyra clenched her fists. "Then what do you suggest? Running?"

"Not running." The Keeper's gaze remained locked onto the entity. "Surviving."

The entity moved again, and the air in the chamber cracked.

Orion felt it before he saw it—a pull, a tear inside himself.

The thing wasn't attacking in a conventional sense. It wasn't striking. It was undoing.

Something inside him wavered.

A memory—no, a fragment of his existence—trembled, flickering.

His heart pounded. If he stayed here any longer, would he—?

No.

Not again.

Gritting his teeth, Orion focused. He reached inward, calling upon the force that had been growing inside him ever since he first entered this forgotten place. The same power that had resonated with the obelisk, the same force that had whispered to him in the void.

It answered.

A pulse of light flared from his hands, a brilliant silver glow that cut through the entity's presence like a blade through mist.

For the first time, the thing hesitated.

The Vault Keeper's eyes widened. "That energy—"

No time to question it.

Orion grabbed Lyra's wrist, his other hand reaching out toward the Keeper. "Move!"

The Keeper hesitated for only a moment before nodding.

Orion turned, focusing all of his will into a single thought—get out.

The chamber responded. The collapsing walls shuddered, and then—

Reality bent.

The three of them vanished.