He had been here before.

That realization came first as the between-space formed around him, and it changed the experience immediately. The violent disorientation never arrived. His feet touched the surface sooner than he expected, and this time he was ready for it. The ground held firm beneath him, solid enough to push back against his weight like a real floor.

He steadied himself, then forced himself to study the space before reacting further.

The expanse stretched in every direction he checked. Forward. Behind him. Both sides. Upward without any ceiling coming into sight. Whiteness filled the entire space, though he still could not identify a source for it.

One direction seemed brighter than the others, or perhaps received light first. When he turned toward it, the effect remained consistent.

That meant the space could still be navigated. He could establish orientation instead of drifting inside meaningless distance.

He started listing the details.

No objects. No landmarks. No sound from any direction. The surface beneath his boots had texture when he pressed down, responsive despite lacking visible material. The place reacted to pressure, even if he could not yet grasp the rules behind it.

He stopped moving and waited to see whether the space itself would respond.

One moment the surrounding space was empty. The next entities occupied it, both near and impossibly distant at once, obeying the warped sense of proximity the between-space had shown him before.

There were four of them.

The first possessed mass without proper anatomy. It was roughly the size of a bull, though the comparison only worked at a distance. Its surface looked stitched from incompatible tissue types forced together without logic. Muscle met exposed layers that should have been skin and the underneath pressed outward in uneven movements, but nothing supported the pressure.

It lacked corporeality until it faced him.

He watched the entire shift carefully and still saw no movement responsible for the change.

The second looked built from raw energy discharge. The shape suggested arms, a torso, and something approximating a head, but the body never stabilized. Energy dissolved and rebuilt each section continuously, as though the creature was reconstructing itself over and over inside the space. Only two dots remained fixed during the process.

Those dots turned toward him while the rest of the body failed to follow.

The third stood nearly three men tall and carried roughly human proportions. No joints interrupted the length of its limbs, its pale surface remained completely uniform, with no recesses for eyes, no mouth, genitals or any feature. It was essentially a sack of bland skin.

One side faced him.

When he shifted position, that side adjusted with him immediately.

The fourth matched human proportions more closely, but every surface reflected. The reflections were abhorrent, showing alternate states of the entity itself.

None of the reflections showed him at all.

None of them spoke.

He remembered that he had been the one to initiate communication last time.

"Good day. Can you understand me?"

The flesh entity convulsed. Multiple points beneath its surface pushed outward at once before sinking back again. Beorn watched carefully, trying to determine whether the reaction represented communication or involuntary response.

The energy figure’s two fixed dots aligned more directly toward him. The discharge along itself tightened inward, consolidating.

The reflective entity multiplied its images. Every reflected version turned toward his position before the surfaces settled back into their previous cycle.

The pale one did not move.

He tried again. Simplicity seemed safer here. The more complex the wording became, the more chances there were for misunderstanding.

"I was here before. I came through a fracture. I am not from this place."

The flesh entity changed position instantly.

No movement bridged the distance. It was simply closer now than before. The pressure beneath its surface intensified, visible across larger portions of its body.

The energy figure expanded into a broader shape. Its arms extended outward, and the posture shifted from observation toward something more active.

The reflective entity cycled through positions its body had not physically taken yet, several of them carrying obvious aggression.

The pale entity remained where it stood.

Beorn asked the question he had come to ask.

"The crack in the sky. The scar. Do you know what it is? Did you make it?"

All three reacted at once.

The flesh entity bulged harder from within, muscles and skin deforming consecutively. The energy figure overloaded itself, discharge spilling beyond the boundaries required to maintain a body, its arms dissolving back into raw energy. The reflective entity accelerated through impossible states faster than he could track.

Then the space itself changed, and Beorn realized the entities were not causing it alone.

The surface beneath his boots lost firmness. The directional distinctions he had established began collapsing into each other. The light that had once arrived from a direction spread unevenly, folding inward toward a center that refused to stay fixed.

The between-space was compressing.

The three entities were driving the compression together, intentionally or instinctively.

Beorn had no prepared response.

He stood inside a place his own reality could not fully coexist with, and the laws carried inside him reacted automatically. They spread outward without conscious effort, the same way heat transferred through metal. It happened because of what he represented inside this environment.

As the surrounding space destabilized, the laws tied to his existence pushed outward and reasserted themselves.

The three entities were caught inside that reassertion.

The flesh entity reacted first.

Pressure hit it from every direction at once, driving inward against whatever had been forcing itself outward from inside it.

Its body failed.

Bulges flattened. Flesh caved inward, then burst apart somewhere else. Masses shoved through ruptures only to be crushed back into the body hard enough to tear new openings. Things that should have stayed buried surfaced for an instant before vanishing back into the collapse.

The creature convulsed violently.

And Beorn recognized it.

Fear.

Then distance opened between them.

The thing did not run in any way he could follow. One moment it was there, writhing beneath impossible pressure. The next it was far away.

Fragments hung where it had been. Torn matter. Distorted traces of wet liquid.

Then even those were gone.

The energy figure came apart from the inside.

Its shifting form tightened suddenly, pulled inward by a force it could not resist. Light folded back through itself. Its limbs collapsed into blazing streams that punched through its own body.

The two fixed dots flared.

The first went dark.

The second burned brighter as the rest of the figure collapsed toward it, discharge lashing wildly across the shrinking form.

Then that one vanished too.

What remained contracted into a dense knot of violent light.

It recoiled and fled into the distance with frantic speed.

The reflective entity shattered.

Every mirrored surface showed a different version of the collapse. One reflection carried breaks the others did not. Another showed pieces missing entirely. Others twisted through states that changed too quickly for the eye to hold.

Cracks raced across the mirrored body.

The different versions stopped matching one another. The body could no longer decide what it wore, where its limbs belonged, what parts of it still existed.

The thing recoiled from itself.

And it ran.

The broken reflections kept tearing across its surface as it withdrew, as though the damage were still spreading through it while it escaped.

None of them advanced now.

Beorn watched them retreat and understood, with sudden cold certainty, what he was seeing.

The entities were afraid.

The pale entity had still not moved.

Beorn focused on it carefully.

"I didn’t mean to do that to them." 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

The statement was only partially certain. His presence had triggered the reaction without consulting his intentions either way. Still, it was the most accurate explanation available to him.

The pale entity gave no response.

Beorn continued anyway. He studied the featureless surface facing him.

"Can you tell me what this place is? What the scar in the sky is? Where I come from?"

He asked every question together because he did not know how much time remained. The between-space itself might reject his presence eventually. The duration had always been an estimate, and estimates became unreliable inside environments that ignored familiar rules.

The pale entity tilted its head.

Beorn stopped moving immediately.

The gesture was unmistakably human. A slow tilt, roughly forty-five degrees to one side, exactly like someone considering a difficult statement across a table.

The pale entity had remained completely motionless since his arrival. Through every attempt at communication, through the compression of the space, through the retreat of the others, it had never reacted physically.

Now it moved.

Beorn stayed silent and watched.

The pale entity extended the end of one limb. The limb terminated in the same smooth, featureless surface as the rest of its body. It served the purpose of a hand without resembling one.

The entity pressed it against a point in the space above them.

The space cracked at the point of contact.

Color spilled through the fracture before Beorn consciously recognized it. Recognition came a moment later.

What waited beyond the crack matched the Scar.

The very jagged profile visible from every rooftop in Ashmark and every open stretch of Badlands sky. Every uneven angle matched the wound he had spent months avoiding looking at directly for too long.

From this side, the Scar was brighter.

From this side, it glowed internally.

Beorn stared at it.

From the outside world, the Scar had always resembled a wound forced open and left unresolved across generations because nobody understood how to close it. From inside the space connected to it, the meaning shifted into something else entirely.

He did not yet understand what.

This was not the place to solve that question.

He turned back toward the pale entity one final time.

"I see. Thank you for the assistance."

This time he did not hesitate.

He turned toward the lavender fracture and started walking.

The glow intensified as he approached. The jagged line expanded across his vision, occupying more of the space ahead and above him. The lavender deepened steadily, becoming denser, more complete, until the between-space itself faded beside the light pouring through the crack.

He kept moving forward.

The lavender consumed everything.