"To save everything, I must become the lock. I only hope someone, somewhere, remembers the key."
The stars are screaming.
Across a thousand realities, the same fate unfolds: collapse, erosion, silence. Worlds once vibrant—brimming with life, heroes, struggle—fall into ruin. Not by war. Not by hunger. But by erasure.
A dark ripple bleeds across the multiverse, like ink spilled on parchment, consuming page after page of existence.
In Earth-2319, the last city floats in a suspended sea of broken gravity. Buildings drift like forgotten dreams. The sky has no color—just a pale shimmer where the edges of time used to be.
At the center, atop a cracked tower of glass and stone, stands a lone figure. His cape is torn. His face, scarred. His eyes burn with power he neither asked for nor wanted.
Kael Iskandar—this version of him—is no longer a boy. He is what remains after too many losses. After choosing wrong one too many times.
A machine hums before him: the Fragmentum Drive, cobbled together from Stark tech, Kree crystal logic, and remnants of a Sorcerer's Mirror Gate. The device flickers, unstable.
Behind him, the world collapses further. A shadow approaches—vast, endless, humming with his own voice.
Eidolon.
"You still run," the entity says, shape shifting from smoke to mirror.
Kael doesn't turn around. He lifts a shard of light—the last uncorrupted piece of this reality—and feeds it into the Drive.
"I'm not running," Kael murmurs. "I'm sending a warning."
"You'll only delay me. Every Kael is me eventually."
"Then maybe it's time one of us broke the pattern."
The sky shatters like glass.
Kael slams his palm down, activating the Fragmentum Drive. The light spirals upward, across timelines, seeking out an anchor—a version of himself untouched by this curse. Someone who still remembers what it means to hope.
A voice whispers across time:
"Let me fall."
The machine explodes.
And Kael Iskandar—this Kael—disintegrates into stardust.
The ripple continues. The multiverse dies a little more.
But far away, on a different Earth, under a blue sky in a city called Jakarta...
...a meteor tears the heavens open.
[To Be Continued in Chapter 1: The Crack in the Sky]