The air went still.
Not in the way of silence or quiet anticipation.
No—this was a stillness so absolute that it suffocated movement itself.
The wails of the surviving Pallid Mermaids had ceased. Their grotesque, veined bodies stiffened mid-hover, their frozen faces locked in unnatural anticipation. It was as if they were waiting—no, bracing.
Then, I felt it to the very core of my soul
Something immense. Something beyond anything that could be contained.
It wasn't approaching. It wasn't moving. It was simply—arriving through force and sheer dimensional weight of its own existence.
A slow, creeping pressure sank into the very fabric of this space, a suffocating weight that did not belong in a realm as small as this.
And then.
The sky fractured.
Not a crack, not a tear—but a failure of space itself to accommodate something that should not fit.
