Cassius watched the portal tear Christian and Daisy away from him, their forms stretching like taffy before vanishing completely. Golden light flared around his fingers as he tried to grab them, but the void swallowed his efforts like a hungry beast. One second they were plunging through dimensional space together; the next, he was falling alone through absolute darkness.
“Christian!” he shouted, his voice sounding thin and wrong in the non-space between realities. “Daisy!”
No answer came. Just the terrible, familiar silence that had been his only companion for twenty-five centuries.
The darkness thickened around him, no longer the neutral void of Christian’s portal but something alive and hungry. Something he recognized with bone-deep terror.
“No,” Cassius whispered as his light tried
