Chapter Text
The ceiling had a crack in it.
Not a big one. Not the kind that meant the roof was about to cave in or anything dramatic like that. Just a thin, spidery line that ran from the light fixture to somewhere behind the wardrobe, like the plaster had quietly given up on holding itself together and nobody had bothered to notice.
Ethan Cole had been staring at it for forty-seven minutes.
He knew it was forty-seven minutes because his phone was face-down on the nightstand and he'd flipped it over exactly once — at 6:13 AM — before deciding that the time didn't matter and setting it back down. That had been forty-seven minutes ago. He hadn't moved since.
The morning light bled through the gap in his curtains, a pale grey wash that made everything in his room look like it existed in a photograph someone had desaturated. His desk was buried under a geological layer of notes, half-finished manuscripts, and energy drink cans that had become tiny ecosystems of their own. Three monitors sat dark on the desk — one for writing, one for reference, one for the shows and games and comics he consumed like oxygen. Posters lined the walls in no particular order: the Invincible logo in blood-splattered yellow, a faded Stranger Things Season 2 promo he'd bought at a charity shop, a framed Spider-Man: Homecoming print he'd gotten signed at a convention three years ago. Bookshelves overflowed with Percy Jackson paperbacks, World of Warcraft lore compendiums, StarCraft art books, dog-eared Harry Potter editions, and a complete run of DCeased in protective sleeves.
His world. All of it. Neatly contained in a twelve-by-fourteen room in a flat that smelled like old carpet and instant noodles.
What are you doing?
The thought arrived uninvited, as it had every morning for the past — what, three months? Four? He'd stopped counting. It wasn't depression, exactly. He'd been depressed before and this wasn't that. Depression was a weight. This was more like... an absence. Like someone had opened a valve somewhere and all the pressure that was supposed to keep him moving, keep him wanting things, had just quietly hissed out.
He was twenty-four. He had a Creative Writing degree that had cost more than his car — not that he had a car — and a part-time job at a bookshop that paid just enough to keep the lights on and the Wi-Fi running. He wrote. God, he wrote constantly. Notebooks full of stories, worlds, characters he loved with a ferocity that sometimes embarrassed him. Sixty thousand words into a novel he'd been working on for two years. Fan fiction that had actual followings online. None of it paid. None of it mattered, not in the way the world measured mattering.
His mum asked him every Sunday when he was going to "sort himself out." His mates from uni had real jobs now — marketing, finance, one of them was doing something with AI that Ethan didn't fully understand but apparently paid enough for a flat in London. And here he was. Staring at a crack in the ceiling in Newcastle, trying to remember why he'd thought any of this was going to work out.
You're a walking encyclopedia of fictional worlds and you can't figure out your own.
He almost laughed at that. Almost.
Ethan sat up. The mattress springs protested — they always did, the bed was older than he was — and he swung his legs over the side, bare feet hitting cold laminate floor. He caught his reflection in the mirror on the back of his door and paused.
Brown eyes. Dark hair that couldn't decide if it wanted to be wavy or just messy. A face that was — fine. It was fine. Not ugly, not striking, just a face. The kind of face that blended into crowds. He'd joked once that he had "main character energy trapped in an NPC body," and his mate Danny had laughed so hard he'd spit out his drink, which was the closest thing to a compliment Ethan had received in months.
He exhaled. Ran a hand through his hair. Stood up.
"Right," he muttered to no one. "Shower. Tea. Exist. In that order."
He took one step toward the door.
The air split.
There was no other word for it. The air in front of him simply came apart, like reality was a curtain and something enormous had grabbed a fistful of it and pulled. A seam of light tore open in the space between his bed and the door — not white light, not any single colour — but a churning, impossible spectrum that hurt to look at directly. Colours he didn't have names for bled into each other, folding and refolding like something alive.
Ethan stumbled backward, his heel catching the bed frame. "What the f—"
The pull hit him like a riptide.
It grabbed him — not his body, not exactly, but something deeper, something at the core of him — and yanked. His feet left the floor. His arms pinwheeled. He opened his mouth to scream and the sound was ripped away before it left his throat, swallowed by the roaring, thundering cascade of everything that was suddenly rushing past him.
He was falling. No — not falling. Falling implied a direction. This was movement without direction, acceleration without velocity, a sensation like being fired from a cannon through wet concrete while simultaneously being everywhere at once.
The portal — because that's what it was, his panicking brain supplied unhelpfully, it's a portal, you've written about these a hundred times — had swallowed him whole.
And then the visions started.
A town. Small. American. Autumn leaves on the ground and Christmas lights strung across porches.
But something was wrong with it. The shadows were too deep. There was a crack in the sky — not a cloud, a crack — and through it, something vast and dark and alive pulsed like a heartbeat made of nightmare. Vines of living darkness spread across the ground like veins, and somewhere, distantly, a girl with a shaved head screamed and the earth shook*—*
Hawkins. That was Hawkins.
The vision shattered like glass and another slammed into its place.
A city. Gleaming. Modern. A figure in a yellow-and-blue suit streaked across the sky, fists forward, jaw set — and then something hit him from above, a blur of white and purple, and the figure cratered into the pavement so hard the street buckled for three blocks. Blood. So much blood. The figure in yellow crawled out of the rubble, one eye swollen shut, teeth gritted, and flew back up—
Oh God. Invincible. That was Mark Grayson.
Another shatter. Another world.
New York. But not quite — the skyline was subtly different, the Avengers Tower sitting where the MetLife Building should have been. A kid in a red-and-blue suit swung between buildings with a whoop of pure, ridiculous joy, firing webs with the casual confidence of someone who'd done this a thousand times and still couldn't believe his luck—
Spider-Man. Peter Parker.
Faster now. The visions were coming faster.
A bridge. Massive. A battlecruiser hung in the void of space, scarred and battered, and a man in marine armour sat alone in the command chair, staring at a holographic image of a woman with red hair. His hand was wrapped around a bottle. His eyes were the eyes of someone who'd watched the person they loved become something unrecognizable—
The Hyperion. Jim Raynor.
Ethan tried to scream, tried to grab onto something, anything, but the current had him and it wasn't letting go.
A flash of green light. A watch — no, not a watch, the Omnitrix — cycling through alien silhouettes on the wrist of a teenager standing atop a Highbreed warship as it burned in the atmosphere, his expression caught somewhere between terror and determination—
Ben. Ben Tennyson.
A cathedral. Stained glass. A boy — barely more than a boy — knelt before a golden altar, light streaming down over him, his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He wore the armor of a king but moved like someone who wasn't sure he'd earned the right. A city of impossible grandeur spread beyond the windows. Lions and gold and the distant rumble of something ancient stirring beneath the mountains—
Stormwind. Anduin Wrynn.
Darkness. Pure, oppressive, crawling darkness — and then a flash of something silver-white bursting through it like lightning through storm clouds. A young man, older than a boy but not by much, standing in what looked like a corridor in the Ministry of Magic, dark energy coiling around him like smoke, his eyes blazing with something ancient and barely contained. The shadows loved him. That was the wrong word. The shadows obeyed him—
A wizard. An Obscurial. A living one.
And then—
A wall. Made of ice. Stretching from horizon to horizon, impossibly high. Beyond it, dead things moved through dead forests, and somewhere in the south, a silver-haired woman walked through fire—
Westeros.
The visions shattered all at once. The roaring stopped. The colours died. The pull released him like a hand opening, and Ethan Cole tumbled through the last membrane of whatever cosmic fabric had been carrying him—
—and slammed face-first into dirt.
Hard dirt. Dry dirt. The kind of dirt that tasted like concrete dust and failure.
Ethan groaned, rolling onto his back. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been individually taken apart, examined, and put back together by someone who'd lost the instruction manual. His ears were ringing. His vision was blurred. The sky above him was a sick, yellowed grey, like the atmosphere itself was bruised.
He lay there for a long moment, breathing. Just breathing.
Then he sat up, and the world swam into focus.
It was wrong. All of it.
The ground was cracked and broken, fissured like dried mud that had been baked by a sun that didn't give a damn anymore. In every direction, there was ruin. Shattered buildings. Collapsed overpasses. Cars — dozens, hundreds of them — scattered across what had once been a road, most of them burned down to skeletal frames. The remains of a city stretched out around him, but it wasn't a city anymore. It was a graveyard made of steel and concrete, picked clean by whatever had happened here.
The silence was the worst part. Cities weren't supposed to be silent. Even dead ones should have wind, birds, something. But this place was quiet the way a held breath was quiet — tense, waiting, like the world itself was listening for something.
"Okay," Ethan whispered, and his voice sounded obscenely loud in the stillness. "Okay. You're okay. You're fine. This is fine. You've just been — sucked through a hole in reality and dropped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Totally fine. Happens all the time."
His hands were shaking. He shoved them into the pockets of his pajama bottoms — because of course, of course he'd been snatched from his bedroom in his bloody pajamas, a faded Horde logo t-shirt and flannel bottoms — and tried to take stock.
He was alive. He was uninjured, somehow. He was also very much not in Newcastle anymore.
A sound. Behind him.
Ethan spun around, heart hammering — and froze.
There were people here.
Eight of them. Clustered together about thirty metres away, near the collapsed shell of what might have been a coffee shop. They were standing in a loose, wary circle, and even from this distance, Ethan could see the tension in their postures — the way they held themselves like strangers forced into proximity by circumstance, each one keeping a careful eye on the others.
He took a step forward, squinting. Then another. The dust haze cleared, and—
Ethan's legs stopped working.
He stood there, rooted to the spot, mouth open, brain firing on every cylinder and producing absolutely nothing useful. Because the faces. Their faces.
The man closest to him had turned at the sound of Ethan's footsteps. He was maybe eighteen, with the kind of hair that had been carefully styled at some point but had since been through enough chaos to abandon all pretense of structure. He wore a jacket with a popped collar, carried what appeared to be a baseball bat with nails driven through it, and had the exhausted, thousand-yard expression of someone who'd seen things that no high school babysitter should ever have to see.
He had Ethan's face.
Not similar to Ethan's face. Not "could be related." Identical. The same eyes. The same jaw. The same slightly crooked nose. It was like looking in a mirror, if the mirror had decided to dress him in denim and hand him a melee weapon.
And he wasn't the only one.
Next to him — his face again. On a kid in a red-and-blue suit, the mask pulled up to his forehead, eyes wide. And again — on a man in battered marine armour, scarred and grizzled, stubble thick on his jaw, but the same face, aged and weathered. And again — on a teenager with a green-and-black jacket and something glowing on his wrist. And again — on a young man in golden plate armor with a lion tabard. And again — on a lean figure in dark robes, shadows drifting around him like restless cats. And again, again, on a small boy, twelve at most, with sea-green eyes and a nervous energy that vibrated off him like a tuning fork.
Eight people.
One face.
His face.
"What the hell," Ethan breathed.
The one with the nail bat — Steve, some distant, hysterical part of Ethan's brain supplied, that's Steve Harrington, that's bloody Steve Harrington — had already taken a step forward, bat raised, eyes locked on Ethan with a mix of suspicion and dawning horror.
"Okay, no. No." Steve pointed the bat at Ethan, then swept it across the group, then back at Ethan. "Someone needs to explain what's happening right now, because I have had a very long year and I'm about three seconds from losing it."
"You're going to lose it?" The kid in the Spider-Man suit let out a laugh that was more panic than humour. He was young — sixteen, maybe — and despite the suit, he carried himself like a teenager who'd accidentally wandered into a situation several weight classes above his pay grade. Which, knowing Peter Parker, was basically his default state. "Dude, I literally just fought a guy in a bird suit like two weeks ago and now I'm — I'm standing in a crater looking at — at me. Eight of me. This isn't — this can't — Mr. Stark didn't say anything about—"
"Who's Stark?" The man in the marine armour cut him off. His voice was low, rough, the kind of voice that had been soaked in whiskey and regret for longer than was healthy. Jim Raynor — because that was Jim Raynor, in the flesh, in actual CMC armour — stood with his arms crossed, gauntleted fingers drumming against his bicep, jaw tight. He looked at Peter the way you'd look at a puppy that had wandered onto a firing range. "Kid, sit down before you hyperventilate."
"I'm not hyperventilating, I'm processing. There's a difference. Totally different. I do this all the time. Process things. While standing. In a warzone." Peter paused. Looked down at his hands. Looked at Raynor's face. Looked back at his hands. "Oh, I'm definitely hyperventilating."
"Breathe, young one." The voice came from the figure in golden armour, and it carried a steadiness that didn't quite match the uncertainty in his eyes. Anduin Wrynn — Prince Anduin Wrynn of Stormwind, Ethan's brain was screaming, you literally main a priest because of this guy — stepped forward, one hand raised in a calming gesture. He looked exactly like his in-game model brought to life, but younger, softer around the edges, the weight of a crown he hadn't yet inherited sitting invisibly on his shoulders. "We need to remain calm. Whatever has brought us here, panic will not serve us."
"Easy for you to say, Paladin Boy." Ben Tennyson — and God, it was unmistakably Ben Tennyson, Alien Force-era Ben, with the Omnitrix prototype glowing faintly on his wrist — leaned against a chunk of collapsed wall, arms folded, one eyebrow raised. His tone was casual, almost bored, but his eyes were moving constantly, scanning the group, the rubble, the sky. The posture of someone who'd learned the hard way that relaxed people survived longer. "You've got the whole 'serene leader' thing down. Some of us are still stuck on 'what the actual—'"
"Language," Anduin said mildly.
"—heck is going on," Ben finished, with the exaggerated innocence of someone who'd absolutely been about to say something worse.
The figure in dark robes hadn't spoken yet. He stood slightly apart from the others, and the shadows around him moved in ways that had nothing to do with the light. He was tall — taller than Ethan, which shouldn't have been possible if they shared the same body — but then Ethan realized it was the way he held himself, spine straight, chin slightly raised, the posture of someone who'd learned to take up space because the alternative was being consumed by something inside him. The dark energy that coiled around his fingers was restless, flickering, and his eyes — Ethan's eyes, brown and sharp — had a depth to them that was unsettling.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. Controlled. The voice of someone who had learned very early that control was the only thing standing between himself and catastrophe.
"We share the same face." It wasn't a question. He looked at each of them in turn, his gaze lingering on Peter and the small boy longest, something almost protective flickering across his expression. "That's not coincidence. That's design."
"Cool, great, love that — designed. By whom? For what?" Steve's bat hadn't lowered. "Because last time someone 'designed' something in my life, it was a secret government lab and things went really south."
"You think this is bad?" Mark Grayson — Invincible, Invincible — stepped out from behind a gutted SUV, and the sight of him made Ethan's stomach drop. He looked wrong. Not wrong like the others, who were tense but intact. Wrong like someone who'd been broken and had put himself back together using willpower and spite. His suit was torn in places, hastily repaired, and there was a tightness around his eyes that spoke to things Ethan knew about — Angstrom Levy, the alternate dimensions, getting beaten within an inch of his life in front of his mother. Mark looked at the group with the weary patience of someone who had seen enough impossible things to know that being surprised was a waste of energy. "I got pulled through a portal. Again. Into another dimension. Again. Where everyone has my face. Which is new, I'll give you that, but on the scale of things that have gone wrong in my life recently, this is maybe a six."
"A six?" Peter stared at him. "Parallel universe face clones is a six for you?"
"You'd be surprised." Mark's tone was flat. Tired. "Or maybe you wouldn't. You look like you've got your own stuff."
The small boy — Percy, Ethan realized, Percy Jackson, tiny and wide-eyed and so obviously out of his depth it physically hurt to look at — had been standing at the edge of the group, arms wrapped around himself, sneakers scuffing the broken ground. He looked up at Mark with an expression that was trying very hard to be brave and only partially succeeding.
"Are we... are we dead?" Percy asked, very quietly.
The question landed like a stone in still water. Everyone went silent.
"No." It was the Obscurial who answered, crouching down so he was closer to Percy's eye level. The shadows around him dimmed, pulled in tight, as if he'd commanded them to be less frightening. Up close, the resemblance was jarring — the same face, but on a frame that was sharp and lean, with the particular kind of gauntness that came from a childhood spent surviving rather than living. "You're not dead, mate. None of us are."
"How do you know?" Percy's voice wobbled, just slightly.
"Because I've been close enough to dead to know what it feels like." The Obscurial said it simply, without drama, the way someone might mention they'd once had a bad cold. "This isn't it. This is something else."
"Comforting," Raynor muttered.
Ethan still hadn't moved. His brain — his beautiful, useless, overstuffed-with-fiction brain — was running at approximately ten thousand RPM and producing nothing but smoke.
They're real.
They're all real.
Steve Harrington is standing thirty feet away from you with a nail bat and he has your face.
Jim Raynor is here. In his armour. The same armour from the cinematic you've watched eight hundred times.
Mark Grayson is here and he looks like he's been through a woodchipper and he has YOUR FACE.
That kid is Percy Jackson. He's twelve. He's terrified. He has YOUR FACE.
And the wizard — the Obscurial — you don't know his name but you know what he is, you know the shadows, you know the darkness, and he has your—
"Hey."
Ethan snapped back to reality. Steve was looking at him. The bat was still up, but there was something in his expression that had shifted — suspicion giving way to a reluctant, exhausted curiosity.
"You've been standing there like a mannequin for two minutes." Steve gestured with the bat. "You got a name, or are you just here to stare at us?"
Every eye turned to Ethan.
Eight faces. His face. Staring at him from eight different lives, eight different worlds, eight different versions of a reality that — until approximately seven minutes ago — had existed solely inside his monitors and his bookshelves and his head.
He should say something clever. Something that would establish him as calm, competent, someone who belonged in a gathering of heroes and warriors and demigods.
"I think I'm going to be sick," Ethan said.
And then he did, in fact, lean over and retch into the dust, which was not the introduction he'd been hoping for.
"Alright, easy — easy." A hand on his shoulder. Steve, of all people, had crossed the gap while Ethan was busy losing his dignity and was now standing next to him with the bat tucked under one arm, his free hand gripping Ethan's shoulder with the practiced confidence of someone who'd spent a lot of time around panicking teenagers. "Just breathe, man. In through the nose, out through the mouth. You're good."
"I'm not good," Ethan managed, straightening up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm so far from good that good is a dot on the horizon."
"Yeah, well, welcome to the club." Steve clapped him on the shoulder. "We've got jackets. They suck."
Ethan stared at him. Steve Harrington. Standing in front of him. Touching his shoulder. With the nail bat. And the hair. And his face.
"You're Steve Harrington," Ethan said, because apparently his mouth had decided to skip the part where his brain approved things before he said them.
Steve's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes sharpened. "How do you know my name?"
Oh no.
"Lucky guess?" Ethan tried.
"Try again." Steve's hand tightened on his shoulder. Not painfully, but firmly. "Because nobody here knows each other's names, and you just used mine like you've known me for years."
The group had tightened around him. Mark had drifted closer, feet hovering just slightly above the ground — he could fly, of course he could fly, he was Invincible — arms crossed, eyes watchful. Raynor's hand had moved to the sidearm on his hip. Ben's fingers hovered over the Omnitrix. The Obscurial's shadows had stretched, just a fraction.
Only Anduin and Percy hadn't moved. Anduin was watching Ethan with an expression of careful, priestly patience — the look of someone who listened before judging. Percy was watching everyone else, vibrating with nervous energy, clearly trying to figure out who to hide behind if things went sideways.
"I know your names," Ethan said slowly, "because where I'm from... you're all fictional."
Silence.
"Excuse me?" Mark said.
"You — all of you — in my world, you don't exist. You're stories." Ethan's voice was shaking, but the words were pouring out now, the dam breaking. "Steve, you're from a TV show called Stranger Things. You fought Demogorgons. You babysat a bunch of kids who were way too young to be fighting interdimensional monsters. You got beaten up by Billy Hargrove and you still showed up because that's what you do."
Steve's face had gone pale. The bat lowered an inch.
"Mark — you're from a comic book and a show called Invincible. Your dad is Omni-Man. He — he wasn't what you thought he was. And you've been through hell since then, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, because it doesn't get—" Ethan caught himself. Stopped. Swallowed. "Peter, you're Spider-Man. You live in Queens. You worship Tony Stark. You stopped the Vulture. You're fifteen."
"Sixteen," Peter corrected automatically, then blinked. "Wait. How — how do you—"
"Jim Raynor." Ethan turned to the marine. "Mar Sara. The Sons of Korhal. Arcturus Mengsk left her. Left Kerrigan. On Tarsonis. And you've been carrying that ever since."
Raynor's face didn't change. But his hand moved away from his sidearm, and for a moment — just a moment — the hard, weathered mask cracked, and underneath it was something raw and old and wounded.
"Ben." Ethan's voice was hoarse now. "The Omnitrix chose you when you were ten. You saved the universe from the Highbreed with the help of every alien species you could find, including them. And Anduin — your father is Varian Wrynn. The King of Stormwind. You're his son, and you carry the Light, and you're terrified that you won't be enough."
Anduin's composure fractured, just slightly. A breath drawn too sharply. A hand that pressed flat against his chest, unconsciously, over his heart.
Ethan looked at Percy last. The kid was staring at him with wide green eyes — sea-green, Poseidon's eyes — and Ethan felt his heart crack in half, because Percy Jackson was twelve years old and had no idea what was coming for him.
"And you," Ethan said, gently, so gently. "Percy. You don't know yet. You don't know who your dad is. But he is watching. And you're going to be okay."
Percy's lower lip trembled. He bit it. Hard.
The Obscurial was the last one Ethan looked at, and this was the one that gave him pause, because this one wasn't from a book or a show or a game. This one was new. The darkness around him was thicker now, agitated, responding to the tension in the group.
"I don't know your name," Ethan admitted. "But I know what you are. You're an Obscurial. A living one. And in the world you come from — the wizarding world — that shouldn't be possible."
The Obscurial studied him for a long, unblinking moment. Then, slowly, the shadows settled.
"Caspian," he said. "Caspian Black."
Something clicked in Ethan's brain. Black. Sirius Black. And the darkness, the control, the age—
"Black as in—"
"Yes." Caspian's tone made it clear that this was not a topic open for discussion. Not here. Not now.
Fair enough.
The silence that followed was enormous.
It was Steve who broke it, because of course it was Steve.
"So let me get this straight." He ran a hand through his hair — the hair — and started pacing. "We've all been yanked out of our lives. Dumped in this lovely apocalypse hellscape. We all have the same face for some reason that nobody can explain. And you—" he pointed at Ethan with the bat, "—are from a universe where all of us are made-up stories, and you know literally everything about our lives."
"Not literally everything—"
"Dude. You knew about the Demogorgon. You knew about Billy." Steve's voice cracked slightly on the name. "That's more than enough."
"Okay, but wait." Peter had his hands up, fingers spread, the way he did when his brain was working faster than his mouth could keep up. "If he knows about us — all of us — then does he know where we are? Because I don't know about you guys, but I don't recognize this place, and it's giving me serious 'bad timeline' vibes."
All eyes turned back to Ethan.
And Ethan — who had been trying very hard not to think about where they were, because thinking about it meant acknowledging it, and acknowledging it meant accepting that they were in one of the most dangerous fictional universes he'd ever read about — swallowed hard.
"I'm... not sure yet," he said, which was technically true. "I need to look around."
"Then let's look around." Mark landed — actually landed, feet touching the ground with a soft crunch of broken asphalt — and rolled his shoulders. "Standing still in an unfamiliar warzone is a great way to get killed. Trust me. I've tested the theory."
"He's right," Raynor said, already moving, his marine training clicking into place like a switch being thrown. "We need to establish a perimeter. Figure out what happened here. Find resources." He looked at the group — really looked at them, the tactical assessment of a man who'd commanded armies. "You — bat boy."
"Bat boy?"
"You and the wizard take point. The kid—" he pointed at Peter, "—you got any recon abilities in that getup?"
"I, uh — yeah, actually? I can stick to walls and I've got this kind of... tingle thing. Spider-sense. It warns me when something bad is about to happen."
"Good. You're on overwatch. Climb something tall, keep your eyes open." Raynor looked at Mark. "You can fly?"
"Yeah."
"Air support. Stay within visual range."
"You're assuming command pretty quickly," Ben noted, though his tone was more impressed than annoyed.
"Someone has to." Raynor's gaze was steady. "Unless one of you wants the job."
Nobody volunteered.
"Didn't think so. Move out."
They moved through the ruins like a mismatched platoon in a fever dream.
Ethan stayed near the centre of the group, flanked by Anduin on one side and Percy on the other. The prince had positioned himself there deliberately, Ethan realized — close to the youngest, close to the one who knew the most, acting as a bridge between the two. It was so perfectly Anduin that Ethan almost wanted to cry.
"You carry a great deal of knowledge," Anduin said quietly as they walked, picking their way through a tangle of collapsed scaffolding. "That's a heavy burden for someone who did not choose it."
"I didn't choose any of this," Ethan said.
"Few of us choose our callings." Anduin's voice was warm despite the bleakness around them. "The Light teaches that we are placed where we are needed, not where we wish to be."
"Does the Light say anything about being placed in a dead city with eight copies of your own face?"
Anduin's mouth twitched. "The Light is... occasionally vague on specifics."
Ahead of them, Steve and Caspian walked in a surprisingly comfortable silence. The Obscurial's shadows stretched ahead like scouts, curling around corners and into doorways before they reached them, and Steve — who had spent enough time around the Upside Down to know useful weird when he saw it — had accepted this without comment after the first thirty seconds.
"So the shadow thing," Steve said eventually. "That's magic?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"Cool. I fought a giant monster from another dimension with a baseball bat."
"I can see that."
"We should start a support group."
The faintest ghost of a smile crossed Caspian's face. "For people who fight things they shouldn't be able to?"
"For people who fight things they shouldn't have to."
Somewhere above them, Peter clung to the side of a crumbling office building, moving from handhold to handhold with effortless grace, his mask pulled back down over his face, the white lenses scanning the landscape. Mark circled overhead, a distant figure against the sickly sky.
Ben walked alongside Raynor at the rear, the Omnitrix cycling through holographic displays as he scrolled through available forms. "So you're a space marine," Ben said conversationally.
"Was."
"And she — the person you're looking for — she got turned into an alien queen?"
Raynor's jaw tightened. "The Zerg don't just turn people. They break them down. Rebuild them. Take everything that person was and twist it into something—" He stopped. Exhaled through his nose. "Yeah. She got turned."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Being sorry doesn't fix anything." Raynor's voice was gravel. "Finding her does."
Percy, walking close enough to Ethan to occasionally bump his shoulder, hadn't said much since the initial confrontation. But his eyes were everywhere — on the buildings, on the sky, on the others — absorbing, processing, the way only a kid who'd learned to watch for danger could.
"Ethan?" Percy's voice was small.
"Yeah?"
"You said my dad is watching. Did you mean... do you know who my dad is?"
Ethan looked down at him. Twelve years old. Standing in the ashes of a dead world. Asking the question that would define his entire life.
"I do," Ethan said carefully. "But I think... I think that's something you need to find out on your own. When the time is right."
Percy's face scrunched up — frustrated, scared, hopeful, all at once. "Is he a good person?"
The question hit Ethan somewhere in the chest. Because the answer was complicated. Because Poseidon was a god and gods weren't people and the things he'd done and the things he'd failed to do could fill volumes. But Percy was twelve, and he was scared, and sometimes a kid didn't need the whole truth. Sometimes a kid needed a handhold.
"He loves you," Ethan said. "More than you know."
Percy nodded. Didn't say anything else. But he walked a little closer to Ethan after that.
The sound came from everywhere.
A low, guttural moan that rose into something higher, thinner, more desperate — not quite human, not quite animal, a sound that scraped along the inside of your skull like fingernails on a chalkboard. It multiplied. Doubled. Tripled. Coming from the buildings, from the streets, from beneath them.
Everyone stopped.
Peter dropped from the building he'd been scaling and landed in a crouch beside Steve, every muscle taut. "My spider-sense is going insane. Something's coming. A lot of somethings."
"I hear it too," Caspian said. His shadows had gone rigid, standing straight up around him like hackles on a dog. "There's... hunger in that sound. Something wrong."
Mark descended fast, landing hard enough to crack the pavement. "I did a sweep from above. There's movement. Three, maybe four blocks out. A lot of it. Coming this way."
Raynor already had his weapon up — a C-14 Impaler gauss rifle that was nearly as long as Percy was tall. "Defensive positions. Now."
Ethan's blood had gone cold.
He knew that sound. He'd read about that sound. In a comic book he'd consumed in a single sitting, his heart hammering the entire time, because it was one of the most terrifying things DC had ever published.
"No," he whispered.
"Ethan?" Anduin's hand was on his arm, the prince's face tight with concern. "What is it? What do you know?"
Ethan wasn't listening. He was turning, slowly, looking at the landscape with new eyes — seeing it now, the details he'd missed, the ones his panicked brain had filed away without processing. The architecture. American. The street width. The scale of the buildings. The way the skyline was shaped, or had been before whatever had torn it apart.
His gaze swept across the rubble, searching, searching—
And found it.
Forty metres away. Half-buried in debris and ash, lying on its side like a fallen god.
A globe. Brass-coloured, though the metal was scorched and dented. Massive — ten, twelve feet in diameter at least. And wrapped around it, in letters that were cracked but still legible:
DAILY PLANET
Ethan's knees buckled.
"Oh God," he breathed. "Oh no. No, no, no."
"What?" Steve was beside him again, bat up, eyes wide. "What is it? What did you see?"
Ethan pointed. His hand was shaking so badly it was almost useless, but he pointed, and one by one, they followed his finger to the shattered globe lying in the ruins.
"I know where we are," Ethan said, and his voice didn't sound like his voice anymore. It sounded like someone standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down.
"We're in Metropolis."
A beat. The moaning grew louder. Closer.
"Superman's city," Peter said slowly, and even through the mask, Ethan could hear the dawning comprehension. "But — but it's destroyed. What could destroy Superman's—"
"Not what." Ethan turned to face the sound. The sound of the dead that weren't dead. The sound of billions of people transformed by a techno-organic virus transmitted through the internet, through screens, through the very technology meant to connect the world. The Anti-Life Equation, weaponized. Delivered digitally. The day the world ended not with a bang but with a notification.
"Who," Ethan finished.
The first figure lurched out of the shadows at the end of the street. Then another. Then ten. Then a hundred.
They were wrong in every way a human body could be wrong. Twisted. Broken. Eyes that glowed with a sickly, feverish light. Mouths that gaped and screamed and hungered. They moved in a tide, a wave, a flood of ruined flesh and mindless rage, pouring out of the city's wounds like infection from a cut.
"What are they?!" Ben's hand slammed down on the Omnitrix.
Ethan stared at the horde. At the city. At the broken globe of the Daily Planet lying in the dust.
"This is DCeased," he said.
"This is where the world died."
END OF CHAPTER 1
Next: Chapter 2 — Dead World Walking