He moved first. He pushed past Susan and grabbed the loose edge of a broken support beam. With a hard swing, he slammed the beam into the creature's hand. The fingers snapped. Not broken—dislocated, bending too easily—as it yanked them back through the wall.

Steve exhaled a shaky, relieved breath.

The creature screamed.

Not a cry. A signal.

The beacon flared white.

"Run!" Cain snapped.

They sprinted. Cain shoved rubble aside, carved a path fast enough for Susan to limp through. Steve crawled under a split arch and almost tripped on his own feet, but adrenaline kept him moving.

Behind them, the creature slammed the wall again. The crack widened. Stone dust misted the air.

Cain shoved his shoulder into the final slab blocking the exit. It tilted, toppled outward, crashed down the stairs beyond. Sunlight hit his eyes—weak dusk light, but enough to show they had reached the outside ring of the ruin.

"Move!" Cain pushed them forward.

They stumbled down the stairs, emerging into the courtyard of broken statues—the place they'd entered hours ago before everything went sideways. The sky burned orange across the horizon, the last light of day washing over fractured marble and dried grass.

Susan doubled over, bracing on her knees. "Okay. Think we bought time."

The wall behind them imploded.

The creature crawled out, its movements jerky and fast, like each limb operated on its own mind. No eyes. Just that slit-mouth, opening wider now, peeling up toward where its nose should've been.

Steve choked out, "You've got to be kidding me."

Cain grabbed the nearest intact statue piece—a broken arm carved in granite—and hurled it at the creature. It hit the thing dead center. The creature absorbed the impact like clay, body denting inward before snapping back into shape.

"Great," Susan muttered, pulling a knife from her boot. "It's elastic."

"That's not elastic," Cain said. "It's unfinished."

"What does that even—"

He didn't answer. He felt it again—the mark on his arm responding to the thing. This wasn't a Fallen's servant. It was something they'd sent still forming, a construct built from leftover essence and designed to track whatever triggered the beacon.

Meaning it was here for him.

The creature lunged.

Cain intercepted it, slamming his forearm across its neck. It clamped its too-wide mouth around his wrist. It didn't bite. It held him, jaw locking like a vise.

Susan attacked from the side, driving her knife into its flank. The blade sank in but didn't bleed. The creature twisted, knocking her away with a single, violent jerk.

Steve threw stones. None mattered.

Cain felt the cold spreading from where its mouth touched him, sinking through the marks on his skin.

The creature was reading him.

Not killing.

Syncing.

Cain grabbed its head with his free hand and forced it back. It hissed, jaw widening until the split nearly reached its skull.

The marks on Cain's arm surged once—then burned hot.

He slammed his marked palm into the creature's chest.

Light ruptured between them. Not bright. Not holy. A raw discharge of whatever the Watcher had left in him. The creature convulsed, shrieked without sound, and tore backward, its form distorting like fabric caught in a gale.

Cain drove forward and struck again.

This time the creature collapsed inward, folding into itself, shrinking until it snapped out of existence like a candle being pinched.

Silence dropped hard.

Cain staggered and braced on a fallen slab. The cold in his arm settled into an ache deep in the bone.

Susan limped toward him. "Cain. Look at me."

"I'm still here."

"Barely."

Steve pointed shakily at the vanished creature. "That… thing… was hunting you. Just you."

Cain didn't deny it.

Susan stepped closer. "The Fallen sent it. That's what the beacon pulled."

Cain stared back at the ruined hall, at the dying light in the fracture.

"They won't stop with one," he said.

The sun dipped lower.

The sky darkened.

And for the first time since the Watcher fell, Cain understood exactly what the Fallen had noticed when the tether touched him:

He was marked.

And they intended to reclaim what their corrupted brother had left inside him.

Cain stepped through the breach with the weight of two worlds dragging at his shoulders. The shattered horizon behind him folded in on itself like a dying star, sealing the last trace of Nebula's collapse. The moment the rift closed, silence snapped over the new plane—an unnatural, pressurized stillness, as if the air itself hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.

He took one step and felt the ground ripple. Not shift—ripple—as if reality here hadn't fully congealed and was still deciding how firm it wanted to be.

"Great," Cain muttered. "Another construction zone of a universe."

His boots sank half an inch into a texture that wasn't dirt, but not liquid either—something like half-cooled glass. He crouched, pressed a fingertip to it, and watched faint light veins pulse outward from the contact point.

Living terrain.

Fantastic.

He stood and looked ahead. A vast plain stretched into a hazy violet horizon, the sky above roiling in turbulent layers, each a different shade of stormlight. Cloud formations twisted through shapes that resembled faces, then hands, then symbols he half-recognized from ancient watcher scripts—messages, or warnings. Hard to tell which.

Cain walked.

He didn't bother taking a cautious pace; caution had stopped being a meaningful concept several catastrophes ago. Whatever this place was, it was stitched from the debris of a realm Nebula tore to pieces—and Cain had followed because he had no choice. Nebula's implosion didn't erase a being like that. It scattered him. And scattered pieces eventually crawl back to each other.

Cain wasn't going to wait around for that.

A low thrum vibrated under his feet. The ground flexed again, firmer this time. As the trembling settled, the plain ahead warped—folding upward, creating an incline that rose like a hill forming in fast-forward.

Cain frowned. "You adjusting to me, or are you trying to herd me?"

The hill finalized with a snap, and a single structure broke the horizon: a spire. Black. Seamless. Taller than any cathedral of the Fallen or the Divine. It was slender and needle-straight, stabbing so far up it pierced the lowest layer of swirling clouds.

Cain exhaled through his teeth. "That's subtle."