Felix’s home disappeared beneath the cliff and out of sight. Dumbfounded, disbelieving, he continued to stare with the rest of the crowd.

“Sofie took Half-Valley,” someone said.

“Why?” asked another, voicing a hundred thoughts.

Anxiety, rage, guilt, and a well of ugly feelings wound around Felix’s heart. “Why…”

“Noooo!” The girl with purple veils ran towards the stairs. “Wait! Don’t go!”

It was pure instinctual denial of reality. Hundred percent illogical. And yet, Felix found himself spurred on by that same desperation, as he willed his exhausted limbs into motion and chased after the falling Half-Valley. Mom. Linda. Hannes. He couldn’t lose them. He refused to even think of losing them, and so he ran.

Tips of the falling Half-Valley’s mountains shifted sideways, as Sofie changed direction. Felix turned and sprinted to the edge of the Abyss, where horror awaited him.

Almost a kilometer of oddly warped and torn Abyss sprawled between Felix and home. Crumbs of Surface trailed after the Half-Valley, pieces of buildings from the edges, tips of the mountains, and loose shards of earth. Every pained breath, the distance grew, too fast to ever catch up to even if the distance had been a flat road, nevermind... this.

The Abyss surrounding Half-Valley was a boiling chaos. Caverns and vistas opened and closed rapidly in the horizon and world below. Mountains flattened and rose. Plateaus shifted between biomes, revealing the wilder untamed Abyss beyond the safe zone. Below, up, all around and across the sky, tears in the reality flashed with visions of a starless void, where shattered pieces of incomprehensible vistas floated in loose constellations. Felix’s brain hurt to watch the sight.

“Mom!” Felix shouted, collapsing on the edge, holding his head.

They were gone.

No. No, no, no, it can’t be possible. Think Felix, Think! Maybe they hadn’t made it back? How long ago was the first round anyway? Not that long. Yeah, they couldn’t have made it back. That’s it! They are still here, and they might need help.

Felix shot up and scanned Forttown.

Smoke billowed from the edge where the Half-Valley had been snapped. Urgent voices shouted around the corner. Felix ran that way.

Bii’s pinging cut pierced Felix with a stake of guilt and regret. He knew. He warned us, and I ignored him. Guilt that he immediately repressed. No way could Felix allow himself to start wallowing on that rabbit-hole of what-ifs.

“Not now,” Felix snapped. “I need to find Linda and mom. We’ll talk later.”

A sad ping faded into silence.

Felix jogged back to Forttown’s mainstreet. A few knights were already there, rushing into buildings and herding the seniors out.

A gust whipped breaths of dust across the town. Motes of light and shards of Abyss floated up from the spot where the Half-Valley had snapped off. With them came a flood of tiny denizens: fuzzy boys, crawling squirrels, and many queer blobs and insectoids. Even Abyssal plants were migrating, crawling up the walls, and ruining flowerpots to stake their claim on the Surface. Though the mess would be a pain to clean up, it wasn’t an immediate threat to anyone.

“Mom! Linda! Hannes!” Felix pushed through a herd of seniors as he ran down the street.

He passed an empty cafe, where denizens broke bottles and burrowed into an abandoned Reclamation Day buffet. A home where an elderly man swelled into a feline beast with a wrinkly man’s face, and began snatching denizens off his bookshelf. A roofed garden, where white-haired folk continued to sit and play chess, despite a copper torch in knight’s armor trying to pull them up.

“Listen to me! You need to evacuate, or the longcat will eat you!” she screamed. She looked at him.

Felix averted his gaze and ran towards the empty street. “Mom! Linda! Hannes! Anyone?”

Five more buildings of Surface left before the crack. They had to be somewhere there, right? They had to…

“Please! I’m begging you, run!” shouted the knight in despair.

Felix’s boots skidded on the road. He turned one-eighty, and rushed back. Chills ran crept down his neck, when he entered the roofed garden, and spotted the longcat.

Its sagging furred body wove a worming trail across the wilting flowers and bushes. Hollow eyes of its feline face were a hole into an empty cavity. It was a seemingly innocuous sack of fur and skin, but all the kids knew of the horrors of the longcat. How it hungered for laughter of humans, how craved their attention, and the violent tales of how it fulfilled that thirst.

A senile chuckle from a chessplayer taking the pawn of his enemy caused the longcat to turn its head. In a blink, it lengthened towards the pair of seniors, nearly reaching their legs.

Bii pinged in caution.

“I know. I know. I know. Not the best idea.” Felix ran up to the knight. “Hey! I’ll help.”

“Thank the Lords. Help me move these two.” With a heave-ho, she picked up one of the seniors.

“Right!” Felix slid his arms around the other, and began dragging him away. The longcat bumped against the table. In the blink of an eye, its body wrapped a knot around the hardwood furniture, and crushed it.

The senior let out a groaning wail and started kicking. “CHEATING! CHEATING! It was my turn!”

“Aaaah-ha-ha-ha-ha,” laughed the other senior. “Aaaah-ha-ha-ha!”

Longcat grew towards the senior on the knight’s back, its face licking her heels. In a spur of madness, Felix ran up to the knight and grabbed her senior’s hand, draining the intent from him. A surge of inane and mad impulses filled a slot in his relic. The man fell silent. The longcat stopped.

“Thanks!” the knight was huffing behind her visor.

Felix nodded, suppressing the surge of pride from making him smile. “Yeah. No problem.”

They carried the two elders outside, and returned for seconds. Longcat now rested at the center of the room, one chuckle away from strangling any of the dozen remaining chess veterans. Three knights sprinted past the building, heading towards the edge. Felix and the knight each picked up one and began hauling them out.

“Hey. Hey. Hey!” One elder shouted to his partner from the other side of the garden.

His partner leaned forward, cupping her ear. “Huuuuuhhhh? What did you say?”

“You ever heard what happened when a denizen, a delver, and a knight went over the yonder?”

“Seriously?” Both Felix and the knight cried out.

“A denvizer and night? Huuuhh? Speak clearly?”

The grandpa leaned back, holding his chest, drawing a deep breath as his wrinkled lips curled upward and parted to chuckle. “OH...”

Longcat turned. The knight’s limbs blazed bright pink as she let go of the elder she had been holding.

“...HO…

Longcat began to elongate towards the elder, too fast for Felix’s eyes to track. The knight accelerated across the room, vaulting over chess-matches, topping tables. Her left gauntlet glowed hot-pink, dripping liquid light. She brought it down towards the longcat. Her right hand reached out to push the elder away from it.

“...HO.”

Wood snapped. Armor groaned. A girl’s scream was cut into a choked gurgle. Blood soaked the longcat’s fur around the knot it had woven over a twisted set of black armor. Limbs poked out of it in unnatural angles, their pink light fading, as silverlight of the knight’s copper torch flickered and died.

“Well, the denizen made a nest, the delver stole its eggs, and the knight preached folks of the next town over about the end of the world,” finished the senior.

“Huuuuhhh? Duty. I don't get it.”

“HO-HO—”

Crunch. Wooden chess pieces rolled across the garden tiles. Only splatters remained of the two seniors.

Felix’s heart drummed in his ears. Adrenaline rushed through his veins and a primal disgust built at the bottom of his throat. He tried not to look at the pink viscera or the red stains, and willed his trembling limbs to drag the closest senior out.

“Felix!” Saga, Daniel, and Elina ran up to him, relics manifested and spears in their hands. “Felix, are you alright?” Sage brushed blood off his cheek.

“F-fine.” Felix nodded, gagging on the word as he pointed at the carnage in the garden.

“Elina. Flood the place,” Daniel commanded, and blew a curtain of shiny clear bubbles over her mantle of down. She threw the feathers of her cloak forward, engulfing the garden. Gently floating, they landed, and those which touched the longcat burst into iridescent liquid, which sizzled and corroded through the denizen. The longcat writhed in pain, shrinking through the knots and turns of its elongated body until it retreated around the corner.

Without delay, the trio then moved to evacuate the survivors. Felix slapped his face, ashamed to have been so dazed. He moved to carry the closest grandpa outside.

“I can help.”

“Felix, we’ve got this,” said Saga. “Dangerous denizens are coming up. Go see what you can do deeper inland. Lead the people to the closest knight, or evacuate them straight to the fortress. We have to keep people within the Anchoring Pillars’ range until HQ can send a night torch to stabilize the Abyss.”

Who was this woman? When had she gotten this ironclad composure? Had it only been three years?

She had grown into a copper torch and a genuine knight. He had stood still, dreaming of the Abyss, barely working at all to make it real.

“Okay.” Felix nodded, heading for the street.

“Stay safe. You hear me? Don’t you dare die!” she called out after him.

Felix flashed her a forced grin. “You too!”

Ignoring the burn of exhaustion in his limbs and lungs, Felix jogged uphill against the stream of knights rushing to the greatest danger. People ran every which way. Buildings crumbled. Fires flared up, casting hot orange shadows over the cobblestone streets. Everywhere he looked, elderly people struggled to leave their homes.

Felix ran in to help. Bii ran beside him, pinging to point out people he might’ve otherwise missed. He earned a knee to the nose, while prying a stubborn grandma from her prized piano. He lost a nail clearing a collapsed doorway to get a grandpa out of a fuzzy boy infested building, and helped a young rabbit loaner evacuate his thirty-three floppy ears into individual pet-carriers.

A sudden sleepiness forced Felix to dismiss both relics. Gust of wind filled the street with smoke. Eyes watering, Felix choked on the smoke, ready to turn around, when he spotted people inside a building next to the fire.

“Hey! You need to come out!”

No reaction.

Coughing, Felix approached. “Hey! We’re evacuating to the fortress. Get out now!”

He pushed through the smoke, and froze, stunned by what he saw.

“Erik?”

“Felix?” Startled, Erik spun around.

The window of an upscale relic shop was shattered. Inside, Erik and Karin were emptying the shelves into burlap sacks. Mugshot was behind the counter, scooping chips and other currency into his backpack. A gray curly haired woman lay deeper inside the shop, unmoving.

“What are you doing?” Felix managed to ask.

Erik looked at the victim, then back at Felix. A lieu of expressions crossed his face, as he manifested his relic. “What does it look like we’re doing?” Crimson chitin sprouted around his limbs and body, encasing him entirely under its bulky mass. His face elongated into a scaled snout, and the blue burn of his eyes brightened to unnatural intensity. No doubt about it, Erik had used a shard of the potency orb on his relic.

“Turn around, or this will get ugly,” Erik growled through jagged teeth.