At first, the cracks only looked like wounds in the sky.

Long black lines across the white ceiling of Heaven. Ugly, deep, glowing at the edges like something hot had burned through the world and forgot to close behind it.

Then they started moving.

Slow. Careful. Like fingers spreading across glass.

Athena saw it before most of them did.

She knelt with one knee on the ground, spear laid beside her, one hand pressed flat against the white plain. Her eyes were half-closed, but she wasn’t resting. She was listening. Not to sound. To structure. To pressure. To the way space bent and corrected itself.

Hermes appeared beside her in a flash—then stumbled.

That alone made several gods look over.

Hermes never stumbled.

He frowned, checked his own feet, then the ground.

"...I was aiming for over there."

Athena opened her eyes. "How far?"

Hermes pointed behind him. "About twenty steps."

Athena’s face went tight. "You landed three inches from where you started."

Hermes stared. Then looked up at the cracks. "...That’s not funny."

"No," Athena said. "It isn’t."

She stood and lifted her hand. A thin silver line of divine energy stretched from her palm and traced through the air. It should have gone straight.

It didn’t.

Halfway forward, the line bent left, looped once, then cut downward and vanished into a hairline fracture in the ground. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Athena went still.

Apollo walked over, bow still in hand. "What is it?"

Athena didn’t answer at once. She created another line. This one split into three. One strand went forward. One went upward. The last went backward and brushed against her own shoulder.

Ares saw it and barked a laugh. "Even your magic’s confused."

Athena looked at him. Ares stopped laughing. "...Bad?"

"Very."

That was all she said. And because it was Athena, that was enough to make everyone nearby pay attention.

Across the battlefield, a group of angels carried one of their wounded away. One had no wing. Another had a cracked halo, light leaking from it in thin streams. They moved carefully, whispering among themselves, still trying to act like order existed.

Then one of them froze.

Not by choice. His foot was in the air. His hand was outstretched. His face was turned toward his companion. He stayed like that for one breath. Two.

Then the world around him snapped backward. Only around him.

The angel’s foot returned to the ground. His hand lowered. The cracked halo healed for half a second. His missing wing reappeared in a flash of clean white light.

His eyes widened. He gasped like a man pulled from deep water.

"I’m—"

Then time corrected itself.

The wing vanished again. The halo cracked. The wound returned. The angel collapsed, screaming.

Every sound on that part of the field died.

Even Uriel turned. Gabriel’s expression shifted into something close to grief. Raphael moved instantly, kneeling beside the angel, hands glowing. He tried to stabilize the wound, calm it, but his light flickered around the edges.

"The injury keeps repeating," Raphael said, voice tight. "It’s happening and unhappening at the same time."

Michael stepped closer. "Can you heal him?"

Raphael didn’t look up. "I don’t know."

That answer did more damage than panic could have. Raphael always knew.

Athena felt the disturbance from where she stood. She moved quickly now, not running, but close. Hermes followed. Apollo and Artemis came too. Even Ares trailed behind, sword on his shoulder, all jokes gone.

Athena stopped a few steps from Raphael and looked at the angel. Then at the space around him.

"Localized temporal recoil," she said.

Hermes frowned. "Say that like I’m drunk."

"Time snapped backward around him. Then forced itself forward again."

Hermes looked at the twitching angel. "...That sounds worse when I understand it."

"It is."

A tremor passed beneath them. Not an earthquake. A shift.

The white plain rippled.

For one second, the battlefield disappeared. In its place stood a green forest. Tall trees. Deep roots. A sky full of ravens. Snow on the branches.

Odin’s head snapped up. "Asgard," he whispered.

Then it vanished. The white plain returned. But not fully. A single black raven remained, sitting on a broken spear. It looked around. Cawed once. Turned to ash.

Odin’s one eye narrowed. Thor tightened his grip on Mjolnir. "That was home."

Odin nodded. "For a heartbeat."

Another ripple. Water burst across the plain. Not much. Just enough to wet the ground around Poseidon’s feet.

The sea god froze. The water was dark blue. Salt-heavy. Alive with memory. He crouched and touched it with two fingers. His expression changed.

"The Aegean."

Zeus, standing a short distance away, turned at that. Poseidon looked up at him. "This is from Earth."

The water evaporated before anyone could speak.

Then came another shift. A piece of the battlefield near the far edge became a black desert under red stars. A dead Egyptian shrine appeared for the blink of an eye, half-buried in sand. No gods stood there. No priests. Just abandoned stone and silence. Then gone.

A group of lesser spirits screamed as their bodies flickered, half in Heaven, half somewhere else. One of them looked down and saw his arm becoming smoke, then bark, then feathers, then flesh again.

"What’s happening to me?" he cried.

Athena turned sharply. "Don’t move!"

Too late.

He stepped back. The wrong part of him stepped into the wrong realm. His body twisted.

Hermes blurred forward, grabbed him by the neck of his armor, and yanked him back. The spirit hit the ground, gasping, whole again but shaking.

Hermes looked at Athena. "...How many places are overlapping?"

Athena’s mouth tightened. "Too many."

The answer traveled. Gods started looking at the cracks differently now. Not as wounds. As doors. As mouths. As mistakes waiting to swallow someone.

Wukong appeared upside down from a broken chunk of floating ground, tail wrapped around a jagged piece of white stone. "So let me get this straight. Heaven’s cracking, time’s hiccupping, homes are leaking through, and if we step wrong, we become soup?"

Athena looked at him. "Yes."

Wukong blinked. Then slowly grinned. "That is horrible."

"Don’t enjoy this."

"I’m trying very hard."

Kratos walked past them, carrying a wounded god under one arm like a sack of grain. He looked at the cracks. Then at Athena. "How do we stop it?"

Athena didn’t answer. That was the problem.

She looked across the battlefield. At the broken sky. At the fractures in space. At gods and angels standing too close to edges they didn’t understand.

At Zeus.

He was watching the cracks too. But his expression was different. He wasn’t just worried. He was listening.

The black lightning around his fingers moved again. Slow. Interested.

Athena saw it and felt her stomach tighten. "Father."

Zeus looked at her.

"Don’t."

He didn’t ask what she meant. He knew. The chaos inside him could probably close some of these wounds. Maybe even most of them. But every time he used it, something changed. Every time he reached deeper, he came back less like the man she knew.

Zeus looked back at the sky. "I know."

Another section of Heaven twisted. A dead angel nearby suddenly sat up, eyes wide, whole and glowing. He looked at Michael. "Commander?"

Michael’s face went pale. The angel smiled, confused. Then the light left him. His body fell again. Dead.

This time no one moved for a moment.

Raphael lowered his head. Gabriel closed his eyes. Uriel looked away.

Even Ares said nothing.

Athena took a slow breath. Then she lifted her spear and drove the butt of it into the ground.

Silver lines shot out from the impact, spreading in a wide circle. They crossed the fractures, marked unstable points, traced fault lines through reality itself. More and more appeared, until the battlefield was covered in a glowing map only she fully understood.

Hermes stepped closer. "How bad?"

Athena stared at the map. For once, she didn’t answer immediately. That scared him more than anything.

Finally, she spoke. "If this was just Heaven breaking, we could repair it." She looked up. Her eyes were sharp, but underneath that sharpness was fear. "This isn’t just Heaven."

Zeus stepped closer. "What is it?"

Athena’s fingers tightened around her spear. "The realms are bleeding into each other. Time’s slipping. Space has lost fixed boundaries in several places. The death of the Tribunal didn’t just remove a ruler. It removed a central law."

The cracks above them widened again. Somewhere far away, a mountain from another world appeared in the sky, upside down, then vanished.

Athena looked at all of them. Gods. Angels. Monsters. Kings. Warriors. All suddenly small under a broken universe.

Her voice dropped, but everyone heard it.

"If this spreads... existence won’t hold."