Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 148: The Broken Mirror

The dimensional breach tore open like a festering wound across the grey sky, and from it poured horrors that had never been meant to exist.

Alexia stood atop the Obsidian Spire’s highest platform, her crystalline wings spread wide to catch the impossible winds that howled between realities. Below her, the survivors of the New Silence scrambled for cover as nightmares given form began to rain from the twisted sky.

A creature that was simultaneously inside-out and right-side-up crashed into the wasteland, its anatomy a study in contradictions. It had no flesh, only the concept of flesh. No bones, only the mathematical certainty that bones should exist. When it moved, reality hiccupped around it like a corrupted recording.

"The Nightmare Realms are bleeding through," Thane reported, his equation-body flickering with distress as he processed the dimensional data. "She’s lost control completely."

Alexia’s enhanced vision pierced the chaos to find its source. There, at the center of the breach, floated Vexara—but calling her Vexara seemed almost insulting to the memory of the sister she’d once known.

The Dimension Witch hung in the air like a broken marionette, her form constantly shifting between states of being. One moment she appeared as the young woman Alexia remembered; the next, she was a fractal nightmare of mirrors and shadows, each reflection showing a different version of herself screaming. Her hair moved like liquid darkness, and when she blinked, entire micro-dimensions opened and closed behind her eyelids.

"Vexara!" Alexia called out, her voice carrying across the dimensional static. "I know you can hear me!"

The Witch’s head snapped toward her with movements that defied anatomy. When their eyes met, Alexia saw depths that spoke of eons spent in isolation—not the months she’d believed, but eons. Time moved differently in the dimensional flux, and Vexara had experienced lifetimes of solitude in the spaces between thoughts.

"Sister..." The word came from a dozen mouths that opened across Vexara’s form. "Sweet sister... do you see them? Do you see what they made me become?"

Around the Dimension Witch, reality continued to fracture and reform. The nightmares pouring from her subconscious weren’t random—they were memories made manifest. Alexia could see fragments of their childhood twisted into monstrous shapes, their parents’ faces melting into expressions of disappointment and fear.

"I see you," Alexia said, launching herself from the Spire with a thought. Her crystalline wings caught the void-winds, carrying her toward the dimensional breach. "I see my sister who used to steal sweets from the kitchen. Who used to comfort me during thunderstorms."

"That child is dead!" Vexara shrieked, and her voice shattered three nearby dimensions into component atoms. "I killed her! I had to! She was too weak to survive what I’ve seen!"

As Alexia flew closer, she could see the truth written in the chaos around her sister. This wasn’t madness born of isolation—this was the madness of someone who had tried to hold onto sanity while witnessing the impossible.

Vexara had been fighting her own war.

The revelation hit Alexia like a physical blow. While she’d been rebuilding civilization from the ashes, Vexara had been battling something far more insidious—fragments of entropy that had escaped Kaedon’s dissolution. Pieces of the Void Sovereign’s consciousness that had lodged themselves in the dimensional flux like malignant tumors.

"You don’t understand!" Vexara’s form stabilized slightly, and for a moment Alexia could see her sister’s true face beneath the nightmare. "The entropy... it’s still there! Growing! Learning! Kaedon didn’t just die—he evolved!"

The War of Reflected Horrors began in earnest as Vexara’s subconscious defenses activated. Every trauma she’d experienced, every moment of despair and rage, took on physical form and launched itself at Alexia. She found herself battling mirror-versions of their parents that screamed accusations, phantom-Kaedons that whispered promises of oblivion, and countless reflections of herself twisted into symbols of failure and inadequacy.

But Alexia pressed forward, her own power lashing out to destroy the nightmare constructs. She realized that fighting them was pointless—they would just regenerate from Vexara’s endless well of pain. Instead, she had to reach the source.

"Vex," she called out, using the childhood nickname that made her sister’s thrashing briefly still. "Show me. Show me what you’ve been fighting."

The dimensional breach widened, and Alexia saw into the heart of Vexara’s private hell. There, coiled like a serpent in the deepest reaches of the flux, was something that made Kaedon’s void-form look benign by comparison. It was entropy given consciousness, nothingness that had learned to want. It fed on the concept of existence itself, growing stronger with every reality it touched.

And Vexara had been containing it. Alone. For eons.

"I can’t... I can’t hold it anymore," Vexara whispered, her voice suddenly small and broken. "It’s too strong. It whispers to me, sister. It shows me visions of what will happen if it escapes. The New Silence will seem like paradise compared to what it wants to create."

Alexia reached her sister’s side, her hand closing around Vexara’s flickering wrist. "Then we’ll fight it together. Like we should have from the beginning."

But Vexara shook her head, and her smile was infinitely sad. "No. There’s only one way to stop it now. Only one way to seal the largest Void Scar before it spreads to consume everything you’ve built."

Understanding dawned with horrible clarity. "Vex, no. There has to be another way—"

"This is my heroism, sister. This is my moment to be the hero I always wanted to be."

Vexara’s form began to stabilize, drawing power from the dimensional breach itself. The nightmare constructs around them dissolved as she pulled all of her scattered consciousness back into focus. For the first time since her return, she looked truly human again.

"Tell me about them," she said quietly. "About Mother and Father. In your memories, how do they remember me?"

Alexia’s throat tightened. "They remember you laughing. They remember you singing lullabies when I couldn’t sleep. They remember loving you more than existence itself."

Vexara nodded, tears that fell upward into the void streaming from her eyes. "Good. Good. Then perhaps... perhaps I won’t be forgotten entirely."

She turned toward the seething mass of entropy at the heart of the dimensional flux, and her voice carried a power that made reality itself listen:

"MOTHER! FATHER!" she cried into the void where their scattered consciousness might still linger. "I KNOW I WAS NEVER THE DAUGHTER YOU WANTED! I KNOW I WAS SELFISH AND PROUD AND AFRAID! BUT I LEARNED! I LEARNED TO LOVE SOMETHING MORE THAN MYSELF!"

The entropy-thing writhed, sensing what was coming. But it was too late.

Vexara opened her arms and let herself fall into the heart of the Void Scar, her consciousness expanding to encompass the entire dimensional breach. She became the seal—not just blocking the entropy, but transforming it, turning its hunger for nothingness into a prison of pure being.

The last thing Alexia heard was her sister’s voice, no longer distorted by madness, speaking words that would echo in her mind forever:

"The Lament of the Last Princess: I loved imperfectly, but I loved completely. Remember me not as I was, but as I chose to become."

The dimensional breach collapsed with a sound like reality taking its first breath. The nightmare constructs vanished. The Void Scar sealed itself with crystalline walls that pulsed with Vexara’s sacrifice.

But as Alexia floated in the sudden silence, something impossible happened. The crystals containing her parents’ consciousness fragments began to resonate, their light growing stronger. From the sealed Void Scar came whispers—familiar voices speaking in unison:

"Our daughter... our beautiful daughter... we hear you... we remember... we’re coming home..."

And in the distance, where the largest Void Scar had been, something new began to take shape. Not another nightmare, not another aberration.

A doorway.

Leading to a place that shouldn’t exist.

A place where the laws of thermodynamics ran backward, where entropy meant creation instead of destruction, and where the dead could speak to the living as equals.

Someone was calling her name from beyond that doorway.

Someone with Kaedon’s voice, but filled with warmth instead of void.

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