Bills covered the dining table like a losing hand in a card game he never meant to play. Overdue rent, utilities creeping upward, medical bills from injuries he couldn’t explain to any doctor without risking being committed. Lucraen Hollowpage sat hunched over them, elbows pressed to the wood, eyes half-focused on numbers that gave him migraines.

“These jobs ain’t cutting it,” he muttered.

The apartment hummed with a tired silence.
The kind of silence people fall into when fighting battles no one else sees.

On the opposite chair lay the bazooka—disassembled, scarred, blackened from Texas and cracked from the Deacon’s unmanifest backlash. Lucraen wiped down the barrel gently, the way someone handles a wounded animal they still trust with their life.

“You’re held together by tape, prayer, and spite,” he whispered. “Same as me.”

The cloth bag Draven had given him sat untouched… until tonight. Lucraen reached inside and removed one of the small black cubes—cold as the grave, weighty like regret. It pulsed once between his fingers.

Lucraen frowned.
That had never happened before.

The cube pulsed again—
and the world folded like an origami map burning from its center.

The apartment dissolved into paper-thin sheets of light.
The chair collapsed inward like a swallowed dream.
The floor vanished beneath his feet—

—and Lucraen stood in a vast field of shimmering ash that looked like snow but felt like static against his boots. The sky above was a spiraling storm of drained colors swirling into a single vanishing point. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

Except her.

She stood a few feet away, leaning against a broken marble pillar as if she’d been waiting forever—
a woman with a face carved from dangerous beauty, half bathed in a red glow that shimmered across her cheek like spilled neon. Her hair fell in wild black waves around her shoulders, tied loosely behind her with a tie that made her look effortlessly lethal. Tiny horns peeked subtly from behind her hairline, elegant rather than monstrous.
Her eyes—glacial, bright, impossibly sharp—seemed to reflect multiple realities at once.

Her skin glittered along the red side, like cosmic frost.
Her lips were a soft metallic sheen.
Her posture casual.
Her presence anything but.

Void and the Snowflake.
One entity.
Two aspects.
United in a single, impossible be-ness.

“Human,” she said, her voice soft but echoing as if spoken in a cathedral. “You really shouldn’t be here.”

Lucraen blinked. “I’ve been getting that a lot lately.”

Her expression sharpened, mixing annoyance and fascination. “You’re alive. That’s… shocking.”

Lucraen folded his arms. “Glad I could surprise you.”

“No,” she said, stepping closer. “I mean truly shocking. The Phau’drexhs should have awakened by now. They should have devoured your world whole. Your cities should be ashes drifting across a silent ocean.”

She circled him slowly, like someone examining a puzzle piece that shouldn’t fit.
“And yet here you stand. Breathing. Irritating. Entirely too alive.”

Lucraen eyed her warily. “What are you saying?”

Her gaze dropped to the small cube in his hand. “That thing is why you’re still standing.”

He lifted it. “This?”

“Yes,” she said. “The cube reacts to faith. Your faith. Without it, you would have been erased three timelines ago.”

Lucraen blinked. “Draven gave these to me.”

At Draven’s name, her eyes flickered with something… complicated. Something Lucraen couldn’t place.

“You and Draven know each other?” he asked, trying to read the fusion of her Void-cold and Snowflake-warm expression.

A sharp, dismissive smile curled her lips. “Our relationship is none of your business.”

“That’s not a no.”

She glared at him, but the glare was strange, almost… defensive.

“The cubes matter,” she snapped. “Not your curiosity. They are your arsenal, your shield, and your curse in the battles ahead. They will respond to whatever part of you believes most deeply.”

“Well,” Lucraen said, closing his fingers over the cube, “my faith in God—”

He didn’t finish.

Her laughter ripped through the Antithesis like shattered glass.
It was hysterical, echoing, uncontrolled—beautiful and horrifying all at once.
She doubled over, tears of mirth glittering at the corners of her eyes.

“Oh, Lucraen,” she said breathlessly, “you really are adorable.”

He frowned. “What’s so funny?”

She leaned close, brushing a fingertip under his chin, voice sinking into a whisper of doom-tinged sweetness:

“God is dead.”

The sky cracked.

The ground split beneath them.
The Antithesis folded inward like crushed paper.
Void’s shadow expanded, swallowing light.
Snowflake’s glittering cheek dissolved into a red smear of cosmic dissolution.

“Wake up, Lucraen Hollowpage,” she whispered.
“And pray you’re ready.”

Everything imploded.

---

Lucraen snapped back into the apartment, gasping. The cube lay dormant in his palm. The bazooka still lay open on the table. The bills remained scattered like fallen leaves.

His heart slammed against his ribs as if trying to escape.

The apartment door unlocked.

Tess walked in, exhausted but smiling softly when she saw him.

“There you are,” she said gently. “You hungry, babe?”

She dropped her bag, rolled her shoulders, and moved toward the kitchen. “I can make us something quick. I just picked up some chicken and—”

The window exploded with white light.

Tess flinched. “What the—Lucraen?”

He moved before he understood why, pulling her away from the counter—

—as the sky outside split open.

Not clouds.
Not lightning.
The sky—the dome of reality—cracking apart like glass under a hammer.

From behind the fracture spilled a shadow darker than black, absorbing the world’s color, swallowing daylight, rolling across Baltimore like the beginning of the end.

Lucraen stared upward, breath frozen in his chest.

Tess whispered, “Lucraen… what’s happening?”

He closed his hand around the cube
as the world darkened.

“…Baltimore is telling us a bad joke.”