Sarah POV
The mont my human mories fully returned, I lunged at Viktor before anyone could stop . My fist connected with his shocked face, sending him stumbling backward.
"That’s for what you did to my little brother!" I scread, hitting him again. "Tommy was only eight years old!"
Viktor wiped blood from his lip, looking more shocked than hurt. "You rember?"
"I rember everything." Rage burned through like fire. "I rember you tearing open the physical barrier above our town. I rember the void creatures pouring through. I rember watching my family get tainted one by one because you wanted to test your new power!"
The other warped Void Walkers around us shifted nervously. For the first ti since coming, they looked uncertain instead of confident.
"Sarah," Lily said softly, "we need to focus on stopping the Moon Goddess."
"She’s not the real enemy," I said, never taking my eyes off Viktor. "At least, not the only one. These Original Vampires opened the first tears between worlds. Everything that’s happening now started with them."
Elena stepped forward, her face cold as ice. "We were following orders. The Moon Goddess showed us visions of a perfect world where—"
"Where everyone who disagreed with you was dead or corrupted," I interrupted. "I lived through your ’perfect world,’ rember? I was one of your monsters for three years."
The mories hurt to think about. Three years of being trapped inside my own body while sothing else directed my actions. Three years of watching myself hurt harmless people and being unable to stop it.
"You don’t understand," Viktor said, but his voice lacked its previous confidence. "The old reality was broken. Humans were destroying their world, supernatural animals were at war—"
"So you decided to destroy everything and start over?" I laughed bitterly. "Real heroic of you."
Behind Viktor, I noticed sothing strange. The altered Void Walkers weren’t just standing there anymore. They were listening to our talk with growing confusion. So of them were starting to flicker between shadow and solid form, like they were having internal battles.
"They can hear you," Caleb said quietly, noting the sa thing. "Your words are reaching them."
"Of course they can hear ." I turned to face the creatures directly. "I used to be one of them. I know what it’s like to be trapped in the darkness, screaming quietly while soone else uses your body."
One of the Void Walkers stepped closer. When it spoke, I could hear the human voice fighting underneath the corruption. "Help... us..."
Viktor’s eyes went wide. "Impossible. The power is absolute."
"Nothing is absolute," I said strongly. "Lily proved that when she saved . And I can prove it again."
I reached out to the nearest corrupted thing, the sa way Lily had reached out to . The mont our hands touched, pain shot through my arm. But this ti, I was ready for it.
"I know you’re in there, Marcus Chen," I said to the thing. "You were a teacher before this happened. You loved your kids more than anything."
The Void Walker’s form began to harden. "I... I taught third grade," he whispered, his real voice breaking through. "My kids... what happened to my kids?"
"They’re safe," I lied, hoping it was true. "But other children need your help now."
One by one, more warped Void Walkers began to rember. A mother rembered her baby’s first laugh. A man rembered protecting his unit. A grandma thought about teaching her granddaughter to bake cookies.
"Stop this!" the Moon Goddess ordered, her voice shaking with rage. "They belong to !"
"Nobody belongs to you," I shot back. "People aren’t property you can collect and reshape."
But as more creatures began to break free from their corruption, sothing terrible started happening. The spatial tears around us weren’t healing – they were getting bigger. Much bigger.
"Sarah," Lily said quickly, "sothing’s wrong. The tears are spreading faster."
I looked around in growing fear. She was right. Each freed Void Walker was like pulling a support beam from a collapsing building. The barriers between dinsions weren’t just weakening – they were collapsing totally.
"You fools," Viktor laughed, though he sounded scared now too. "The corruption wasn’t just controlling them. It was holding reality together!"
The Moon Goddess smiled coldly. "Finally, you begin to understand. I didn’t ruin these souls to control them. I corrupted them to save life itself."
"That’s impossible," Caleb said.
"Is it?" She pointed to the growing chaos around us. "When the Original Vampires first tore holes between dinsions, they caused wounds that couldn’t heal naturally. The only way to seal them was to use twisted souls as living patches."
My blood turned to ice. "You’re saying the only thing keeping all realities from collapsing is—"
"The suffering of millions," she finished. "Yes. Every corrupted soul you free brings us closer to total dinsional breakdown. Every act of kindness you perform pushes us toward the end of everything."
The freed teacher, Marcus, grabbed my arm with shaking hands. "What have we done? What have I done?"
Around us, the recently freed Void Walkers were starting to panic. They could feel it too – the increasing instability, the sense that reality itself was coming apart at the seams.
"There has to be another way," I said desperately.
"There is," a new voice said behind us.
We all turned to see Dmitri coming from one of the dinsional tears. But he wasn’t alone. With him ca a figure I’d hoped never to see again – the Void Walker Leader, the most corrupted creature of all.
"Hello, sister," the Leader said to , and my heart stopped.
Because underneath all that rot, I recognized the voice.
"Tommy?" I whispered.
The Void Walker Leader nodded. "Hello, Sarah. I’ve been waiting for you to rember ."
My little brother – the eight-year-old boy I’d died trying to protect – stood before as the most powerful corrupted creature in creation. And from the look in his eyes, I could tell his rot went far deeper than the others.
"I know what you’re thinking," Tommy said quietly. "You want to heal like you healed the others. But Sarah, there’s sothing you need to know first."
"What?" I managed to ask through my tears.
"I’m not corrupted," he said with a smile that chilled to the bone. "I picked this. I chose to beco what I am."
The dinsional tears around us suddenly stopped growing. Everything went deadly quiet.
"I’ve been working with the Moon Goddess from the beginning," Tommy added. "And now that you’ve freed enough souls to destabilize reality, it’s ti for the final phase of our plan."
Reality began to crack like broken glass around us.
"Welco to the end of everything, sister."
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