The silence was cosmic.
Rain no longer fell. It hovered — droplets suspended mid-air as if time had hiccupped. The static in the air no longer buzzed; it howled, a hollow frequency only the mind could hear.
And then they saw it.
No, felt it first.
Not weight. Not movement. But proximity — like standing in a small room and realizing a planet was breathing next to you.
Above them, the storm clouds peeled back, not dispersed by wind but pushed aside, slowly and reverently, like curtains drawn back by invisible hands. There, behind them, the curve of something immense, stretching beyond the horizon in all directions.
A coil—no, a continent of coiled flesh, dull gray, layered in patterns unnatural to biology but too intricate to be artificial. It was alive. And it was watching.
Then the eye opened.
Not in the clouds—but across the sky.
A monstrous eye, spanning hundreds of kilometers—its crescent moon-shaped pupil shifting slightly, dilating. It wasn't in orbit. It was the orbit—the moon replaced. Reality bent around it, light folding like silk on the edge of a blade.
"That's... not an Echoform," Saline whispered. "That's a world."
Jerome dropped to one knee, covering his mouth.
"That's a goddamn world-eater."
No one moved.
Because the very act of blinking felt like it would draw attention. As if the abomination's awareness was soundless and surgical, threading into every nervous system it surveyed.
Ferez's voice broke the paralysis.
"Run. I don't care what direction. Just move."
A vibration followed — not from the earth, but from everything. As if the rules of up and down were arguing. Mountains began to tilt, pulled toward the sky, bending like wax under a flame. The clouds above didn't swirl—they spiraled, sucked into the coils that were slowly uncoiling, revealing even larger limbs spanning thousands of meters across the landscape.
A ripple passed through the rain — a distortion of gravitational rhythm.
Push. Pull. Push. Pull.
The squads stumbled as the terrain warped beneath them. A hill collapsed inward. A forest a kilometer away lifted from the earth like paper and was crushed midair by something unseen.
Then the scream.
Reality tore.
A sound like a billion mirrors shattering underwater. It pierced thought, scraped dreams. One of the younger Veilers fell screaming, blood pouring from his ears before his head caved in — not crushed, emptied.
"MOVE NOW!" Seyfe roared.
Saline ignited a fire barrier. Emi erected ice spires to scatter the creature's gaze — pointless, but instinctual. Jerome launched concussive blasts to slow the imploding terrain as the groups dived behind a descending ridge that was rapidly forming into an unnatural slope.
"It's folding the landscape," Emi cried. "It's not just distorting it—it's redefining it!"
As they fell into the shelter of the distorted trench, Seyfe looked up one last time.
And it blinked.
The moon-sized eye. The pulse of it sent wind in reverse.
"It's not looking at us," he said. "It's... cataloguing us."
A long pause.
And then—
A smile.
Not on a face. Not with teeth. But in a shift of the eye's curve, in the ripple of gravity, in the understanding it exuded.
"It's aware."
It didn't need to speak.
But if it had, the words would have been clear:
You were brought here. You are mine now.
It was as if the world held its breath.
Then, it opened.
Above the endless storm-wrapped sky, the coiled abomination — this unknowable god-worm — began to part.
A mouth formed.
Not with muscle. Not with lips. But with spatial permission — the sky simply unfolded, tearing open in a radial burst of blackened cloud and pulsing energy.
Rows upon rows of golden fangs emerged — jagged and regal like the pillars of forgotten temples, each the size of a skyscraper. They glistened not with saliva, but with a honeyed venom, thick and slow, each drop plummeting and carving craters into the ground below.
"It's... smiling again," Jerome said, breathless.
And then came the rain.
Black. Thicker than before. Acidic. Alive.
The corrupted downpour fell like liquid void, melting foliage, warping exposed metal, and sizzling as it hit the ice and flame constructs left by Emi and Saline. It didn't simply fall — it chose where to land.
"Take cover!" Seyfe yelled, grabbing a squad member and pushing them behind a collapsed ridge.
From the maw, something else came.
A low hum. A vibration. A whisper woven into the atoms.
Then it lunged.
The creature's tongue — a massive, thorned, scaled tendril the color of rotten moonstone — lashed downward. The sky warped around it as it pierced through the atmosphere with devastating velocity, raking toward the trench where Seyfe's squad and the others had retreated.
SKREEEAAAGHHHHH!!!
The impact shattered the hillside.
Tons of earth vaporized.
The trench exploded upward as the tongue collided, tearing a scar through the land. The squad scattered, the gravitational recoil flipping entire rock formations. Thunder snapped the air as Saline erupted her core, unleashing a wall of flame that was immediately doused in black rain.
"It's aiming! IT'S AIMING!" Emi screamed as she raised a glacial barrier, only for the tongue to shatter it mid-formation.
Seyfe and Ferez dove together, barely dodging the whiplash that carved a gouge thirty meters deep into the field.
"That's not a probe—it's feeding!" Ferez shouted, eyes wide.
"Or testing us," Seyfe replied, breath heaving. "This is just... play."
Jerome, clothes torn and blood on his temple, stood up beside them.
"We're too clustered. We need to disperse!"
"And go where?!" Emi snapped. "The entire sky is its maw!"
Above them, the tongue coiled back, shimmering with venom, before splitting into three separate barbed extensions, each one shifting independently — intelligent, aware.
"Here it comes again!" Saline shouted, flames roaring around her like a living cloak.
Seyfe clenched his fists. The tremor in his core. The saturation rising.
"On my mark," he said, eyes glowing faintly. "We hit it back."
"Hit it?" Ferez gasped. "That thing's the size of a mountain range!"
"So we hit it hard enough it remembers we aren't prey."
The tongue snapped forward again, targeting their flank.
"Now!"
Saline and Jerome leapt first, one engulfed in fire, the other surging with explosive force. Emi followed, creating platforms of frozen rain midair as she redirected the acidic rainfall back at the tongue. Ferez and Seyfe sprinted into the epicenter of the blast zone, each veering opposite directions.
Boom!
A chain reaction of concussive bursts lit up the ridge as Jerome detonated the terrain beneath the tongue, staggering it briefly. Saline's flame coiled into a spear, thrust directly into the first barb. It hissed and recoiled, a spurt of silver ichor spewing out, burning the grass below into ash.
"It bleeds," Emi muttered.
"Then it can die," Seyfe said, rising to his feet.
The eye above narrowed slightly.
And then — a new ripple, one deeper, more ancient.
As if it had grown curious.
The hiss that poured from the abomination's throat was not air.
It was remembrance — a cursed fog woven from ancient breath, laced with echoes of dying timelines and twisted reality.
"Fuck—this is bad!" Seyfe coughed, stumbling backward as the mist engulfed them.
Vision blurred. Senses warped.
All color dulled. Even flame dimmed.
The fog scattered the squads like leaves. One moment they were close, the next they were alone—each of them isolated in a private cocoon of swirling, soundless grey.
"Saline?""Emi?""Jerome—!?""Ferez!!"
"Where are we—"
Screams cracked the mist.
Some far off, some horrifyingly near.
The other squad that had joined them — only faintly visible through the haze — was the first to fall. One by one, their silhouettes blinked out, devoured not by claws or flame, but by something else. Something that simply reached out and claimed them. Their weapons clattered to the earth seconds later, lifeless.
"Shit—scatter!!" Jerome's voice rang out, half-choked by fog. "Don't clump up!"
But it was too late.
The creature roared.
It wasn't sound. It was command — a vibration that shattered the fog, clearing the field in a single pulse of force. The pressure wave collapsed the rain, halted the storm momentarily, and revealed the cost.
Crater.
Dozens of them.
Massive, scorched impressions left by something... beyond artillery, beyond explosions. Where there was once terrain, now there was nothing. Not even blood. Only impact. Entire ridges were gone.
Hope evaporated. Rationality cracked.
"What—what is this…?"
Ferez's eyes scanned the ruined field.
"This isn't... this isn't an echoform," Emi whispered, still trembling. Her silver hair stuck to her face with black rain and fog dew. "It's not a mutation. It's not... alive."
Jerome muttered, "We're in something's dream."
High above, the serpentine abomination twisted with grotesque elegance — its scales reflecting the gray, moonlit void. It watched, studying, entertained by the way its prey scattered like insects in the wake of a flame.
"It's playing with us," Saline said with dread. Her fire flickered weakly as she tried to keep the group warm and together.
And then—
The sky tore open again.
The beast's maw gaped once more — infinite rows of golden fangs retracting and then launching downward, not as tendrils now, but as meteoric bolts, each tooth a divine spear.
FWWWWWWOOOOMMMMMMMM—!!!
The fangs rained down, smashing into the already-ruined terrain. Each one pierced the earth like falling stars, splitting stone and ejecting molten debris into the skies.
"MOVE!!" Seyfe roared, tackling Emi aside as one of the fangs buried itself in their last cover.
A squad member — unknown name, unfamiliar face — was bisected mid-run by a falling fang, their scream cut clean in half.
The truth hit Seyfe in the pit of his stomach.
This isn't about killing us. It's about breaking us...This isn't just death.This is the god of despair hunting its playthings.
He gritted his teeth. "This isn't an echoform... this is something else."
The rain continued to fall.
Black.
Heavy.
Sentient.
Each droplet a whisper.
Each crater a grave marker.
And above it all — the eye, vast and unmoving, watched with that crescent-moon pupil and silently rejoiced in the chaos.