The explosion didn't come with a bang, but rather with a sucking silence.
Furnace number 09 broke like a fragile egg shell. However, instead of flames consuming the room, the super-hot steam that gushed out froze in the air, turning into sharp black ice crystals. The air pressure dropped drastically, causing the lungs of the slaves inside the Under-Belly to collapse instantly.
Cynewulf stands at the center of the anomaly. His fingers still gripping the "stitch" of reality he saw a thread of pale light pulsing in the same direction as his heartbeat.
"What... are you doing, Ceorl?" The voice came from the young slave beside him, Elkan. However, Elkan is no longer intact. Half his face had been blistered from the steam, revealing a whitened jawbone, while his eyes were melting out of their lids. He did not die instantly; In Aethelgard's nightmarish world, death often comes too late.
Cynewulf did not answer. He felt The Price starting to charge. The memory of his mother's face, the only fragment of warmth he had, began to fade, erased by the black ink that crept into his mind. Instead, his head was filled with impossible geometric formulas and visions of cities built from the bones of stars.
"I... saw him," Cynewulf whispered. Her voice was no longer hers. It was the resonance of thousands of overlapping sounds.
Suddenly, the steel wall of the Under-Belly in front of them creaked violently. Not because of a machine explosion, but because something from outside was tearing apart the dimension. The three meter thick metal buckled and tore like wet paper. From that gap, a manifestation emerged that had no identity.
The creature has no fixed mass. It is a collection of thousands of insect wings made of broken glass, vibrating so fast they create visual distortions. In the center of the mass of wings, a giant ancient mechanical clock was embedded in the pulsating transparent flesh. The clock hands were spinning counter-clockwise at a crazy speed.
Eoten.
The light emitted by the creature made Elkan's remaining skin dry out and turn to ash in a matter of seconds. The room began to forcefully age; iron pipes rusted and crumbled to dust in the blink of an eye.
Cynewulf felt the pull of the World-Breaker in his soul. He saw the stitches of reality that bound the creature to this world. With anger born from years of slavery, he jerked his hand, as if pulling an invisible lever.
"Gedwimor: Unstitch!"
The reality around Eoten is split. Space itself tore, revealing a white void beyond. The creature's glass wings began to fall off one by one, not because they were cut, but because their existence in this world was being erased from the "script" of creation.
However, the entity was not silent. The sound of his clock ticking increased to a high frequency screech that ruptured Cynewulf's eardrums. Fresh blood flowed from his ears and eyes.
At the same time, upstairs in the Hall of Honor of the House of Æthelred a nobleman named Lord Alaric was sipping wine when the floor beneath his feet began to shake. He didn't know that the slave he hated had just torn the curtain off the world. Little did he know that in the next few hours, he would beg for death as the city of Oakhaven began to sink into the Sea of Nightmares.
Cynewulf fell to his knees. Some of his memory about how to read has been lost. He looked at his hands which were now shining with a cold silver light.
"If I must become a slave to fate," growled Cynewulf as he stared at the monster that was beginning to disintegrate before him, "then I will rewrite that fate with their blood."
The airtight door that Hrothgar had locked earlier suddenly exploded from the outside. But what came in was not a savior, but the Iron Synod troops in their steam armor, their weapons were not directed at the monster, but at Cynewulf.
"Subject detected," said one of the soldiers behind a brass mask. "Take the core. Let the monster eat the rest."