The Devourer of Realities stood thirty feet tall, its form a constantly shifting mass of hungry void that made the Void Empress's darkness look like candlelight. Where it stepped, existence simply ceased—not destroyed, not absorbed, but erased so completely that the concept of "having been there" vanished.

"Well," the Chaos Eternal said with forced lightness, "this complicates things."

"You," the Devourer spoke in a voice like the silence between heartbeats, "have been making noise across ...