Time fractured around Shia as she faced Shavia across the crumbling expanse of the Ancient Library. Seven artifacts hovered around her like celestial bodies, their surfaces rippling with unstable energy patterns. The eighth—the Nullification artifact—rested in Shavia's perfect hand, its obsidian surface drinking in the surrounding light.
"You don't understand what you're interfering with," Shavia said, her voice resonating at frequencies that made Shia's evolved form vibrate painfully. "This is not destruction. This is apotheosis."
Outside, reality continued its grotesque transformation. The sky had ceased to exist in any recognizable form, replaced by undulating mathematical patterns that occasionally parted to reveal glimpses of other dimensions being consumed by their awakening world. Buildings, trees, even people were being reshaped at the subatomic level, their matter repurposed into new forms that defied conventional physics.
