Chapter 138: Daughter of Chaos
The first reality anchor died with a sound like screaming mathematics.
Vexara stood in the quantum foam between dimensions, her child’s form wreathed in impossible geometries as she reached into the fundamental structure of existence itself. The anchor—a crystalline construct the size of a moon that kept the local cluster of realities from bleeding into each other—cracked along lines that hurt to perceive.
"There," she whispered, her voice carrying harmonics that made causality hiccup. "One less rule to follow."
The Rift Walker had been born from the ashes of Reed Thorne’s little girl. Where once there had been a child who had nightmares, now there was something that made nightmares seem reasonable by comparison. Vexara had stopped trying to control her nature—instead, she had embraced it with the terrifying logic that only children possessed.
If the current order of reality was broken, if it created paradoxes like her and Kaedon, if it forced impossible choices and generated endless suffering—then perhaps chaos was preferable.
The destruction of the first anchor sent ripples through seventy-three adjacent realities. Physical laws began to blur at the edges. On the world of Penance, gravity suddenly flowed upward for seventeen minutes, while on Haven’s Reach, cause and effect reversed themselves, leaving philosophers trying to explain how conclusions had preceded premises.
But Vexara wasn’t finished. She had identified forty-seven reality anchors within her expanding sphere of influence, and she intended to destroy them all.
The Dimensional Cascade began in earnest as the second anchor fell.
This one had been hidden within the core of a collapsed star, its gravitational field so intense that only beings of cosmic power could approach it. Vexara walked through the event horizon like stepping through a curtain, her nightmare-court following in perfect formation. The creatures that had once been chaotic manifestations of her sleeping mind were now ordered, purposeful—dreams given direction by a dreamer who had learned to lucid-walk through existence itself.
"The mathematics are screaming," observed the Butterfly of Bleeding Equations, one of Vexara’s more aesthetically pleasing horrors. Its wings were covered in formulae that rewrote themselves with each flutter, solving and creating paradoxes in equal measure. "Reality is beginning to notice what we’re doing."
"Good," Vexara replied, her small hands crackling with power that made neutron stars look stable. "It’s about time reality learned some humility."