Phei did not break eye contact with Kyle.

He leaned in slightly. His grin had not moved — it had only grown wider, hungrier, the kind of grin that belonged on something ancient and starving.

"You’re nothing. Submit."

"AAAAAAAGH — NO — NO — PHEI — PLEEEEASE — DON’T —"

"Cosmic Dragon Face."

Kyle’s scream climbed into a sonic that broke the fabric of reality itself.

The throbbing in the room accelerated into a frantic, arrhythmic convulsion, the chamber itself entering cardiac arrest. No longer a slow pulse — a violent, meaty pounding like a dying heart trying to explode out of its cage.

The Void-Ice chains anchoring Kyle’s limbs began to vibrate with unholy frequency, black-violet frost cracking and reforming in jagged spikes that tore fresh grooves into his wrists and ankles.

Tendrils of reality in the corners of the room started to fray and bleed, space warping visibly at the edges — geometry losing all confidence in itself, the angle where one wall met another suddenly becoming a screaming, negotiable wound.

Time stuttered and tore.

For one half-heartbeat Phei saw Kyle’s face in three different positions simultaneously — the scream continuing in all three, blood flowing in impossible directions, eyes rolling in separate agonies — before reality gritted its teeth and snapped him back into one consistent, suffering body with a wet, cosmic crack.

The room was about to come apart at the seams.

Phei could feel it coming apart — something ancient and catastrophically large was waking up inside the boy on the chains, and the physical space around that awakening was no longer sufficient to contain the pure, primordial hell being dragged out of him.

The air itself tasted of ozone and burning souls.

"Eira!"

Eira was moving before the thought had finished forming.

She waved one tiny hand.

A thin shimmer of blue-white light passed across the corner where Cassiopeia was seated, and Cassiopeia — couch, Macallan, bare feet and all — vanished into a bubble of folded space that erased her from the room as cleanly as a thumbprint wiped from glass.

Protected. Elsewhere. Out of range of whatever fresh layer of damnation was about to unfold.

Eira’s second motion was faster.

She flew to Phei’s side.

Her small hand closed around his wrist with a strength that had no business in a frame that small.

With merciless precision she guided his index finger forward and pressed the pad of it flat against the centre of Kyle’s forehead — right in the space where a moment ago three beads of blood had marked a perfect triangle of invocation.

The contact was clean.

But the effect was more instantaneous and merciless.

Phei’s amethyst eyes went flat — the light in them simply died, as if someone had slammed shut every window into his soul while some deeper, hungrier process used his body as a living conduit for cosmic domination. Empty. Hollow. Not dead, or sleeping — absent, temporarily evacuated from his own face while the Dragon reached through him like a hand wearing a glove made of meat.

Kyle’s remaining eye did the exact same thing. The terror in it drained away in a single horrified instant. The one working pupil dilated to full, bottomless black and held there, unresponsive — a window into a mind that had just been yanked out of its owner’s control.

Kyle’s scream stopped.

Mid-note.

Severed as if a wire had been cut by a god who had grown bored of the noise. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

The throbbing in the room slowed, faltered, stilled.

But not before something moved.

From inside Kyle’s chest — somewhere beneath the long diagonal cut Phei had opened across his sternum earlier — red tendrils began to surface.

They were deeper, brighter, wrong in a way that hurt to look at directly — a violent, pulsing, arterial red that wore the appearance of blood while being something far older, far hungrier, something that had been waiting in the dark since before the concept of pain existed.

It moved with cold, predatory intention. It had a mood. It was angry.

The tendrils surged upward through the gash in Kyle’s chest and lashed outward — three, then five, then a dozen — whipping through the air toward Phei in a coordinated, furious predatory strike, each one tipped with barbs of pure progenitor malice.

Phei did not withdraw his finger.

His free hand came up subcounciously — slow, bored, almost contemptuous — and met the tendrils head-on.

His palm struck the nearest one. The tendril screamed in a frequency that was not sound, writhed like a living nerve set on fire, and snapped sideways across the room, discharging itself into the far wall and leaving a long charred streak of smoking, reality-scorched drywall.

Phei struck the next one. And the next.

Everywhere the tendrils touched his skin, thin precise cuts opened across his hand — clean surgical slits across the backs of his fingers, the heel of his palm, the base of his thumb.

His own dark blood welled up in each one and immediately refused to drip, frost crystallising along the edges of the wound before gravity could pull anything loose.

The cuts reopened with every new impact, his hand becoming a living latticework of fine red lines as he swatted tendril after tendril aside like flies at a picnic — casual, effortless, delighted.

Kyle, meanwhile, had started bleeding from his ears.

Thin streams of that same unnatural red slid down from both eardrums, tracking along his jawline and mixing with the ruin of his face. He was still not screaming. The finger on his forehead held him in a perfectly suspended, helpless unconsciousness, absent from whatever cosmic rape was being done to the progenitor soul trapped inside him.

His body was cooperating against its own will — a puppet whose strings had been seized by something vastly more cruel.

Eira watched.

Small. Crystalline. Not blinking.

Her tiny face held no expression Phei would have recognised — something older than any of the masks she typically wore for him. Something patient. Something doing terrible, ancient maths.

When enough of the red tendrils had discharged harmlessly into the walls, and the backlash pulses inside Kyle’s body had stabilised to a manageable level of torment, she waved her free hand a third time.

The cratered suite — the Void-Ice chains, the splintered couch across the far corner, the ruined drywall, the pooled blood, the cracked fireplace, the shattered crystal, the king bed with its silk comforter now flecked red — all of it folded away in a long slow ripple, the way a tablecloth is drawn smoothly off a table by a hand that had grown tired of the mess.

The room did not exist anymore.

In its place —

A dark forest.

Black trees. Taller than any trees had a right to be. Canopy so thick that no sky showed through, only an endless, suffocating void above. A damp, rich, ancient air smelling faintly of wet leaves and something underneath the leaves that had been breathing there for longer than any forest should have been allowed to stand — something patient, something hungry, something that remembered every soul that had ever screamed here.

The ground was soft. The ground was also listening.

Phei was unconscious.

He lay on his back on the forest floor, his arm still extended, his index finger still pressed firmly to the centre of Kyle’s forehead where a triangle of three blood-beads had briefly appeared. The contact had not broken.

Kyle was unconscious beside him.

The red tendrils had retreated somewhere deep inside the boy’s body, waiting, coiled, seething.

The Void-Ice chains had dissolved into the air. The cuts on Phei’s hand had sealed shut by his Regeneration ability the moment the suite had folded away. His grin had gone. His face, in unconsciousness, looked almost young — almost innocent.

Eira hovered above them both, wings perfectly still.

She surveyed the forest. Scanned the tree line. Registered, without flinching, the things watching her from between the trunks that were choosing — wisely — not to approach.

Her small mouth moved.

"Things," she murmured, to no one in particular, "are about to become chaotic."

The forest did not disagree.

It only watched. And waited. And smiled with a thousand unseen teeth.