The space Tenebris had occupied remained empty in a way Judge could not look at for too long. It was not a gap. It was not an absence. It was a wound reality refused to acknowledge. The air flowed through it, light passed through it, and yet something fundamental was missing, as if the world had briefly forgotten how to account for what had been there.
Judge stood hunched, breath ragged, the aftertaste of nihility still crawling through his veins. His heart still collected ether like a vacuum cleaner, but it was there present unlike his previous state.
The man stood across from him, a cane resting lightly against the ground, gaze steady. The false terrains he had created earlier dissolved one by one, peeling away like discarded drafts of reality. What remained was bare earth and open air, deceptively simple, almost polite.
Then Tenebris stepped forward, and the world shifted unnaturally with him.
