Anor'ven extended his hand.
Not out of duty.
Not as a hollow gesture.
But because, for once, it felt natural.
The movement was simple.
A quiet instinct, born from days walking side by side.
Asveri hesitated.
Tired.
Shaken.
Yet something drew him.
He reached out.
Fingers brushed.
Cold and warm met.
And then—
Existence collapsed.
There was no light.
No darkness.
Only a blinding, deafening force that ripped everything apart.
Time broke.
Not gently.
Not quietly.
It shattered with violence.
It accelerated.
A rush.
A flood.
Years.
Decades.
Centuries.
Ages.
All devoured in an instant.
Worlds born and erased like careless brushstrokes.
Nations rising in fire and falling in ash.
Kings crowned, betrayed, forgotten.
Children laughing, dying, vanishing into echoes.
Faster.
The sun flared, collapsed, ignited again.
Cities grew and rotted, their names lost to silence.
Rivers dried, oceans swallowed continents, stars blinked in and out of existence.
Faster.
Laughter turned to screams.
Screams turned to whispers.
Whispers into nothing.
Faster.
Asveri gasped — but air did not exist here.
His lungs burned.
His chest tightened.
He clutched his throat.
He was suffocating.
Strangled by centuries.
Drowning in millennia.
Next to him, Anor'ven stood frozen.
Unmoving.
But his eyes — wide, hollow — betrayed something unfamiliar:
Shock.
Even he was caught.
Even he could not stand untouched before the madness of time unleashed.
Their bodies could not endure.
The universe rejected them.
What they witnessed was not meant for minds — not even fragments of divinity.
And so —
It expelled them.
With savage force, they were torn apart.
The hand broke.
The link snapped.
And they fell.
They fell through eternity.
Through the skeletons of empires.
Through forgotten prayers and unborn dreams.
Through screams that would never find ears.
Through laughter that never knew joy.
They fell, choking on the weight of ages.
And then —
Impact.
The real returned like a blade.
Metal.
Dust.
Cold.
Asveri hit the ground first, rolling, gasping, clutching at nothing.
Anor'ven followed moments later, landing like a statue thrown from heaven.
Smoke drifted lazily above.
Steel towers loomed — stitched with wires and crowned with chimneys.
Strange neon signs flickered weakly in a tongue neither of them knew.
In the distance, engines hummed.
Somewhere, hollow music played.
A world foreign.
Industrial.
Worn.
They had been thrown across eternity.
Into a time beyond their knowing.
For long moments, neither moved.
Asveri lay there, eyes wide, chest heaving.
Anor'ven sat still, hands resting on cold pavement.
Their eyes met.
No words passed.
Not because they refused to speak.
But because — for the first time — they did not understand.
The connection.
The rupture.
The scream of cycles.
The suffocation of eternity.
None of it made sense.
They stared, hollow and lost.
Finally, Asveri looked away, his body still shaking.
He already knew.
He would have to face whatever this was.
Master it, or be crushed by it.
Beside him, Anor'ven closed his eyes briefly.
No answers came.
Only silence.
And together, disconnected, yet bound, they sat amidst the quiet hum of a world neither belonged to.
— Fable 1 —
— Wounded Eternity —
— END —