The sky cracked
991 Words
The sky cracked.
No thunder followed only silence, stretched across the city like a taut wire. From the silence came the pull, the sense of a presence vast enough to weigh down not only air, but memory, thought, and even time itself.
Xenos stood at the edge of the fractured skyline, Alice at his side, her silver hair glinting faintly in the strange twilight that now hung above. Micron remained in the shadows behind them, clutching his ribs, still recovering.
The voice descended not from the heavens, but from everywhere.
“Contractor of the Fallen Star… the Master calls.”
The words pressed against the mind like a sea pressing glass. Buildings trembled though untouched. Windows wept with condensation as though reality itself sweated under the weight of that declaration.
Alice froze, instinctively reaching toward Xenos. But he did not move. His eyes sharpened measured, calm, even as the pressure deepened.
He whispered, mostly to himself:
“Finally.”
The Contractor appeared again, not as he had before human-like, polite, veiled. No. This time his form was closer to what served him. His body folded into four intersecting silhouettes, each moving in ways the others did not, his smile splitting into too many faces.
“You should not exist,” the Contractor said softly, almost mournfully. “Yet here you are, shaping eternity with mortal hands. How many doors must you break before you understand ?”
Xenos interrupted without raising his voice.
“Enough.”
The word itself struck like a blow. The Contractor staggered only slightly, but enough. His forms twisted, correcting themselves as if reality itself stitched them back together.
Then he spoke again.
“You wield a light that is not your own. A fragment of one who stood at the threshold of omniscience. Yet even with that… your steps reach only to the second veil of infinity.”
Alice gasped, the air sharp in her lungs. Micron frowned. He didn’t understand the scale of the words, but he knew the tone: condescension.
Xenos did not flinch.
“To you, perhaps. To us…” He tilted his head, as if pointing not at the city, not even at their world, but beyond beyond their story. “…to us, eternity is the breath between blinks. Your scale, your ‘thresholds,’ your layers of infinity they’re irrelevant when the core is already broken.”
For the first time, the Contractor’s smile faltered.
“You speak as if you stand beyond the lattice of creation.”
“I stand where time itself has no purchase,” Xenos replied. His tone was even, but his words carried weight. “That’s why I ended your avatar in moments. To you it was instant. To me, it was eternity lived and ended. Every counter, every adaptation, every collapse of possibility I exhausted all of them before the first second passed.”
Alice stared at him, wide-eyed. Micron muttered under his breath:
“...So that’s how.”
The Contractor’s forms trembled, his faces flickering like candle flames in a storm. Still, he persisted.
“Then let us test it. If your eternity can span beyond what should not be spanned ”
The ground shattered. Not beneath their feet, but above their heads the sky folding downward like a canvas torn loose. From within the rift came it: a greater echo of Yog-Sothoth’s presence. Not the Master itself, but something closer than before.
The avatar of eyes and geometries descended, each orb a sun collapsing, each angle cutting deeper than steel. The city bent, gravity twisting in five directions at once.
Alice staggered, barely keeping her footing. Micron nearly blacked out.
But Xenos only stepped forward, his shadow lengthening unnaturally, stretching farther than the light should allow. Chains flickered into existence around his arms, heavy and half-materialized, carved with symbols not written in any known language. They hissed as though alive.
The Contractor whispered, horrified:
“…Chains of the Nameless Mother…”
Alice looked to Xenos. “What what are you doing?”
His answer was calm.
“Borrowing.”
The avatar struck. Not with claws or blades, but with sheer existence the crushing imposition of infinite weight. The world beneath them screamed, concrete and steel bleeding into liquid shadow.
Xenos moved once. Just once.
The chains sang.
The blow didn’t vanish. It didn’t get blocked. Instead, it was rewound the event itself dragged backward, the strike un-happening, reality bending under his command.
The Contractor screamed.
“That is forbidden !”
Xenos’s eyes flared violet, his voice cutting through the distortion.
“Then forbid me.”
He pulled. The chains surged forward, not to bind the avatar, but to tear open the veil behind it ripping apart the false horizon that cloaked Yog-Sothoth’s true influence.
And for an instant just an instant the world glimpsed it.
A presence not meant to be perceived. A sea of thought without borders. An intelligence that was not a mind, but the concept of knowing itself.
Alice dropped to her knees, hands clutching her head. Micron’s nose bled, vision dimming. Even the Contractor staggered, his forms collapsing into one.
Xenos alone stood.
He whispered, almost like a promise:
“When He calls my name… I’ll already have answered.”
The chains flared white. The rift slammed shut.
The avatar dissolved, shrieking in silence as its many eyes blinked out one by one.
The Contractor bleeding shadow from too many mouths retreated, collapsing into smoke. But his last words lingered:
“You cannot run from Him. And when He hungers… there will be nothing left to anchor you.”
Silence fell again.
Only the rain remained.
Alice rose weakly, shaking. Her gaze fixed on Xenos, who stood unflinching amid the aftermath.
She asked, voice trembling, “What… are you?”
Xenos didn’t look at her, eyes still scanning the vanishing cracks in the sky.
“Bored,” he said softly.
And that, somehow, frightened her more than anything else.
- Writer
