The world became a nightmare.

There was no longer a wall. Nor was there the hole, or any sign of the explosion that would have caused it. Darkness consumed everything, but it hardly stifled her sight. It only revealed the morphing of space that twisted and wrung her mind beyond what she could understand.

Nix blinked, trying to reorient herself, but the landscape grew no more comprehensible. Screams, both real and twisted, rang in her ears. The ground gave way beneath her, and she found herself hanging up-side down, yet gravity failed to hold her.

She blinked again, and suddenly the only thing she could see was blood.

A cavern, miles long, held a warped ocean of blood that boiled across each surface. Towering beasts clambered forth, breaching the surface everywhere she looked. Monstrous, god-like amalgamations stood as tall as Still Tower. Blood clung to them. It formed their very existence from nothing.

Her blood.

Nix flinched away as an enormous claw crashed down on her, and suddenly she found herself drowning. She choked. Blood scraped its way down her throat. She flailed as a current dragged her away, pulling her through the esophagus of a giant before she felt herself floating through space.

Somehow, she was dry. She was in a dark void surrounded by stars. They weren’t only above her; they were everywhere. It was almost calming after her body had been tossed around so harshly, but a deep, instinctual dread consumed her as her gaze flickered over her surroundings.

A star shifted into an eye.

She barely even caught it, but as soon as she became aware, all other stars opened. A billion stars opened their eyes to gaze down at her.

Nix felt a terror she’d only experienced once before.

Her heart thrummed in her chest, and she swore it was ready to burst. Glancing down at her arms, she found her blood boiling as it rushed through her veins.

The watching eyes blinked out of existence as one, but Nix’s terror and dread didn’t disappear. She could feel it. She didn’t know how, but she could feel the maw holding trillions of fangs galaxies apart all bearing down on her.

Her brain ached, like it was suddenly crushed beneath an impossible weight. Emotions not her own washed over her mind, but even they made little sense. Amusement mixed with disdain. Hate empowered sentimentality. She couldn’t tell if it was her mind breaking down, or the world speaking to her, but none of it matter through the agony.

And just as suddenly as it all started, it was gone.

Nix’s legs hit metal and she slumped to the ground. Her hands touched metal. Metal soaked in blood.

A guttural scream snapped Nix’s head up. No longer was this the underground warehouse of the Fleshsmiths, but a nightmarish battlefield. Corruption filtered through everything; more intense than Nix had ever seen it. The ceiling, walls and ground all contorted in mind-numbing complexity. It twisted directions like ‘up’ or ‘straight’ into foreign concepts.

Any objects in the warehouse had been given life and morphed into monstrosities. A timber crate fractured into a splintered beast and lashed out at the nearest cultist. Shredded by a thousand stakes, they didn’t live long. Wires struck out from the wall like snakes, constricting a woman before snapping back into the wall where the exposed panel had perverted into a vicious maw waiting to swallow her.

Perception was unreliable. Where a wall would be one moment, the next it would be a screaming cultist being plucked apart limb-by-limb by a physical mass of darkness.

Nix’s eyes fell on a man whose very muscles had grown a life of their own. His biceps convulsed within his skin, before breaking free and running off, leaving the cultist’s arms hanging by nothing but bone.

She couldn’t snap her eyes away from the horrid sight. His screams continued. Each second they morphed further by the dense corruption. By the time his eyes, too, decided to flee his head, his screams sounded more like the snarls of a beast far too many octaves below what a human could produce.

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It thumped through her chest, and she didn’t know how her mind hadn’t collapsed from the strain.

But worst of all were the amalgamations. They rose from the blood that was everywhere. They pounced through the incomprehensible landscape and tore through human bodies like they were tissue paper. At least, the big ones did.

Some of the cultists had formed a group to fight them off, but the corruption was their undoing. They couldn’t keep their backs to one another when the moment you took your eyes off them, they would disappear.

This was… so much worse than she’d been expecting. No normal amount of corruption could do something this horrible. Especially not shift the world around her as drastically as it had before. Nix knew what this was, but she could hardly believe it.

A Dark Star Event.

She had to get out of here. The initial explosion of corruption was only the start. If what she’d heard was true, then those titanic amalgamations she’d seen in that bloody cavern might be the least of her worries.

Corruption shifted, destroyed, and remade entire sections of Coral beyond repair when Dark Stars appeared. They were disasters you wouldn’t want to be on the same side of the platform, no less right in the heart.

If Nix stayed, she could forget the cults discovering her; she wouldn’t survive the next five minutes. But Dark Star Events were renowned for being impossible to escape. Their intense corruption flooded through everything and continually redirected you back to the core. You couldn’t escape unless you had the perception of a…

Nix’s eyes landed on Little God.

Well, that will do. A laugh escaped her despite the situation, and she couldn’t stop the grin from rising to her face.

“Eyeball, you think you could lead me back to the ward?”

“I can see,” he said with a nod.

She moved to follow, but made it barely three steps before she stopped. Something had caught her eye. Across from her, a single figure stood unreacting to all the horrors that occurred around them. Nix’s ward-mate K’tan brought to be a sacrifice.

It was Ari.

Ari-ai, the Omen Artisan hopeful that — along with Dan — had shown Nix kindness. She may have seemed reluctant at the start, but she’d never stated any opposition, and eventually accepted Nix’s presence.

K’tan had chosen to sacrifice Ari.

It shouldn’t have struck Nix as hard as it did. She’d never even talked to the girl until today. But she couldn’t look away. The girl who, only hours ago, had shared a meal with her now stood between a mess of monsters and corruption, unable to do anything because of the dream-bug latched to the back of her head.

The girl was surrounded. Amalgamations were all around her, and the moment one turned their attention away from the screaming cultists, then Ari was dead.

Nix couldn’t help her. With her weak body and the number of monsters around, she’d be lucky to survive herself. Forget helping her. Nix needed to worry about her own safety. Her own future. Ari would be happy that the cultists that tried to sacrifice her were properly given their rightful punishment.

Ari was already dead, and as much as Nix hated it, she couldn’t stay. She would only be another casualty if she did.

But as she tried to move, to follow that floating eyeball that watched her with a curiosity completely detached from the nightmare around it, she found her legs wouldn’t budge. Her Feat sense slid over her names almost without her notice.

She had an option.

If it was anyone else, anyone besides the two that showed Nix not everyone saw her with disdain, then she wouldn’t have hesitated. She would have turned and left them to their unfortunate fate. Only because it was Ari did her ethereal fingers slide between ‘Ine’ and ‘Oth’.

To help meant sacrificing her time. It meant increasing the chance of returning fate to its original path. Nix didn’t want to allow any of her mutations to grow. But… she also didn’t want to let Ari die.

She shows me a few hours of kindness and I’m already ready to risk everything for her. A laugh trembled out of Nix’s throat. I hope I don’t regret this.

Nix had two options before her. First, was to follow the same path of mutations as last time. She knew what she would get, and she knew how close it would bring her to being discovered. The other option, was a dice roll.

There was no way to know what sort of mutations ‘Ine’ held. It was a gamble. She could receive something that could make fighting these amalgamations a breeze… but it could just as easily lug her with something she would never be able to hide.

The risk held an enticement Nix almost couldn’t resist. What if she got something incredible? What if there was a mutation that would allow her to truly fight back against the cults, to fight and win every conflict she faced.

It was an attraction she’d felt many times before. Between fits of hatred towards her mutations for landing her in captivity, she often dreamed of one being her freedom. Of a power so great none could oppose.

But Nix knew that was nothing but a pipe dream.

She’d made that same hope over and over for years. The next one will help. I’ll be free if I get something good. But it was never good enough.

The sudden screaming howl of an abomination as it turned on Ari made the decision for Nix. She’d learnt not to leave her life in the hands of fate, and she wasn’t about to do the same for a friend.

Nix ran forward. Her touch grabbed ‘Oth’, and opened.

The mutations accelerated.