The laughter of the Paradox Eater died away into silence so complete it seemed to devour sound itself. In that void between moments, Reed felt a presence that was sickeningly familiar—a consciousness that had haunted the edges of his awareness for centuries, waiting for precisely this moment of absolute desperation.
"Hello, Reed."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, carrying the weight of cosmic inevitability. Reed's corruption-touched awareness recoiled as the darkness between the crystalline formations began to coalesce into a shape that hurt to perceive directly.
Nihil Prime. The First Dark. The entity that had offered him power when he was nothing more than a broken hero bleeding out in the ruins of his first great failure.
