EVR-PARADOX
A deep hum pulsed through Orion Vale's skull, like the dying echo of a collapsing star. His fingers twitched against cold, wet pavement, his senses reeling as fragmented images flickered behind his eyelids. A pressure built behind his temples, something foreign yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream forcing its way into waking thought.
Where am I?
The last thing he remembered was—what was it? A train station? A battlefield? A burning city? His mind clawed at memories that slipped away like sand through his fingers. He reached for something tangible, something to ground him, but the more he tried to remember, the further the details receded into the void.
Orion's eyes snapped open.
Above him stretched a sky split in two—one half an endless neon-lit cityscape, the other a vast medieval kingdom crowned with floating spires. The line between them shimmered, a broken mirror of realities forced together. Buildings twisted at unnatural angles, their structures shifting between eras and technologies. The air itself pulsed, as if struggling to decide what it should be—thick with the scent of oil and smoke one moment, crisp with the fragrance of rain-soaked stone the next.
Panic clawed up his throat. He pushed himself upright, his breath hitching. Around him, the street was cracked, uneven, as if the world itself had been sewn together from mismatched pieces. To his left, a rusted billboard displayed EXISTENCE IS A DESIGN, its edges flickering between languages he didn't recognize. To his right, a cobblestone path led to an ancient cathedral that bled into a glass-and-steel skyscraper. A door in the alley ahead warped between a wooden tavern entrance and a high-tech security gate.
He wasn't dreaming. This was real.
A sharp voice snapped him out of his trance.
"Hey! You're not supposed to be here."
Orion turned just in time to see a figure step out from the shadows—a woman dressed in a mix of tactical armor and flowing robes, her eyes glowing with shifting constellations. Her presence felt like a gravitational pull, an anchor in the storm of his fractured reality. Something inside him stirred. Déjà vu? Recognition? He couldn't tell.
"You need to move, now," she ordered, glancing over her shoulder. "Before they find you."
Before who finds me?
Orion's pulse quickened as the air behind the woman rippled. A group of figures emerged—faceless, clad in obsidian armor that seemed to drink the light around them. Their presence sent a static charge through the air, like a reality glitching just by their existence. The moment their hollow visors turned toward him, an overwhelming sense of dread seized his chest.
Eschaton Judges.
The name surfaced in his mind unbidden, carrying with it a weight he didn't understand. He didn't know how he knew them, only that they weren't here to talk.
The woman grabbed his wrist. "Run."
Orion ran.
The world blurred around him, shifting with every step. One moment he was sprinting through a cyberpunk alley lined with neon signs, the next he was dodging through an ancient market where merchants bartered with glowing relics. A temple's stone columns melted into steel scaffolding, then into the skeletal remains of a ruined civilization. His mind reeled, his very existence slipping between the cracks of reality itself.
"Keep going!" the woman shouted. "Don't stop, no matter what!"
But Orion barely heard her. Something in his chest was burning, a deep, pulsing sensation like a second heartbeat. A force, raw and untamed, swirled through him, whispering in languages he had never heard yet somehow understood.
Then—
The sky shattered.
A crack, sharp and piercing, split across the heavens. The world stuttered, glitching like a corrupted file. A monstrous shadow loomed from the rift, an amorphous entity with too many eyes and a voice that hummed beneath reality itself.
A pull deep in his chest, a force dragging him inward. A sensation he had felt before but could never name.
"No!" the woman yelled, reaching for him. But it was too late.
Orion's body twisted as gravity collapsed around him, and as the world was torn apart once more, he understood one thing:
This was only the beginning.