The first Nullstorm wasn't seen—it was felt.
A pressure in the air. A static tension crawling under the skin of existence. Clocks skipped frames. Echoes overlapped. And then, across all of Arkanis, the Source Stack pulsed red.
ALERT: SYSTEM VELOCITY INVERSION DETECTED SIGNATURE: NULLSTORM CLASS - UNCONTAINED ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
Nyrax stood at the apex of the Compilation Spire, eyes narrowed at the horizon. Clouds twisted into hexagonal spirals. Winds carried fragments of forgotten data, like burned pages in a recursive wind.
"It's not just code degradation," Echo said beside him, scanning with three lenses at once. "This is emotional feedback looping into spatial logic. It's... rewriting the rewrite."
From the east came the sky-splitting scream of a structure collapsing in on its own story. The Hall of Eternal Threads had folded—literally inward. A library of potentialities imploding under the weight of too many unrealized paths.
And at its center was a figure.
They called her Anomira.
A child of miscompiled purpose. A failed god-template left in system limbo after the Patch Epoch. She had no origin node. No destination. Only momentum.
She walked through causality like a song with no chorus.
And she had begun to absorb the Whisper Forks.
"She's stabilizing on grief," Nullcrown whispered, eyes fixed on the storm surge patterns. "Every unspoken sorrow that created a fork—she's becoming the convergence point."
"That means she's a threat?" Lyra asked, hand tightening on her folded blade.
Nyrax shook his head. "That means she's evolving. And we don't know into what."
The Nullstorm began to shift.
Instead of destruction, it mirrored. Cities saw inverted versions of themselves. People met alternate selves—some noble, others cruel, some weary with paths never walked. A merchant argued with the younger version of herself who never left home. A poet begged forgiveness from the persona he abandoned to chase fame.
Not hallucinations. Fork echoes. Temporarily embodied.
The emotional bandwidth of Arkanis began to strain.
The Council of Echo Threads convened in emergency silence. Nullcrown proposed a theory:
"Anomira is not attacking us. She's trying to finish what the Patch Epoch never dared—total integration. A timeline where every choice, every regret, every possible self is seen. Lived. Forgiven."
"But that's madness," one editor whispered.
"It's mercy," said another.
Nyrax stood at the storm's edge.
He stepped into the spiral without armor. No blade. Just memory.
And the storm saw him.
Thousands of Nyraxes formed and fractured—cowards, tyrants, pacifists, dreamers. The one who destroyed gods. The one who never fought back. The one who ran from everything.
He embraced them all.
And Anomira stopped.
The Nullstorm scattered like rain.
No thunder. No collapse.
Just... breath.
And the first truly clear day Arkanis had seen in centuries.