The Silence Between Storms
The world was still.
No explosions. No collapsing timelines. No memory loss.
For the first time in days, Earth breathed freely—but peace felt like a borrowed lie.
Robert Reynolds—or whatever he had become—stood atop the Rocky Mountains, silent and unmoving, his presence bending clouds around him like orbiting rings. Golden-black light pulsed slowly from his skin, rising like heat waves. He didn't blink. He didn't speak. He simply existed.
And the world watched.
---
Metropolis – Justice League Tower
"The rewrite stopped, but it's not over," Batman said, glancing over lines of data projected on the central holotable. "The Architect was only one node. A failsafe. It warned of others."
"The Prime Architects," Superman said grimly. "The original designers?"
"Worse," Diana replied, folding her arms. "The ones who oversee creation itself."
"She means beings who think we're stories written wrong," Green Lantern muttered. "And they're coming to edit us."
---
Meanwhile – Fortress of Solitude
Superman stood alone, analyzing the readings left behind after Sentry's collapse and the Architect's destruction. The data was staggering—dimensional echoes, shifts in quantum layering, even spikes in pre-universal coding.
Then he found it: a pulse in the Bleed.
A warning, etched in reality like a dying scream.
> "THE VOID HAS BEEN AWAKENED. THE CORE MUST BE STABILIZED. THE INEVITABLE IS COMING."
"What's the Core?" he whispered.
But deep down, he feared he already knew.
---
Above the Rocky Mountains
Robert's body trembled.
The skies cracked open again, not with storms or death—but with sound.
It was like hearing the end of a song being rewritten mid-note.
A voice, layered in ten thousand harmonics, spoke above him.
> "Instance: Void-Sentinel. You have corrupted the central recursion line."
> "Your deviation has been marked. We are coming."
Above him, a shape began to emerge in the clouds—massive, triangular, impossibly real. A ship? A being? A law?
None could say.
But even Sentry—reborn, radiant, silent—looked up.
And for the first time… he stepped back.