Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 138: Daughter of Chaos

The first reality anchor died with a sound like screaming mathematics.

Vexara stood in the quantum foam between dimensions, her child’s form wreathed in impossible geometries as she reached into the fundamental structure of existence itself. The anchor—a crystalline construct the size of a moon that kept the local cluster of realities from bleeding into each other—cracked along lines that hurt to perceive.

"There," she whispered, her voice carrying harmonics that made causality hiccup. "One less rule to follow."

The Rift Walker had been born from the ashes of Reed Thorne’s little girl. Where once there had been a child who had nightmares, now there was something that made nightmares seem reasonable by comparison. Vexara had stopped trying to control her nature—instead, she had embraced it with the terrifying logic that only children possessed.

If the current order of reality was broken, if it created paradoxes like her and Kaedon, if it forced impossible choices and generated endless suffering—then perhaps chaos was preferable.

The destruction of the first anchor sent ripples through seventy-three adjacent realities. Physical laws began to blur at the edges. On the world of Penance, gravity suddenly flowed upward for seventeen minutes, while on Haven’s Reach, cause and effect reversed themselves, leaving philosophers trying to explain how conclusions had preceded premises.

But Vexara wasn’t finished. She had identified forty-seven reality anchors within her expanding sphere of influence, and she intended to destroy them all.

The Dimensional Cascade began in earnest as the second anchor fell.

This one had been hidden within the core of a collapsed star, its gravitational field so intense that only beings of cosmic power could approach it. Vexara walked through the event horizon like stepping through a curtain, her nightmare-court following in perfect formation. The creatures that had once been chaotic manifestations of her sleeping mind were now ordered, purposeful—dreams given direction by a dreamer who had learned to lucid-walk through existence itself.

"The mathematics are screaming," observed the Butterfly of Bleeding Equations, one of Vexara’s more aesthetically pleasing horrors. Its wings were covered in formulae that rewrote themselves with each flutter, solving and creating paradoxes in equal measure. "Reality is beginning to notice what we’re doing."

"Good," Vexara replied, her small hands crackling with power that made neutron stars look stable. "It’s about time reality learned some humility."

The second anchor’s destruction was more surgical than the first—instead of simply shattering it, Vexara inverted its function. Where once it had maintained the barriers between realities, now it actively dissolved them. The results were immediate and catastrophic.

Three reality layers collapsed into each other like a house of cards in a hurricane. The world of Sanctified Grief—where the Order of Final Sorrows maintained eternal vigil over the multiverse’s accumulated tragedies—suddenly found itself occupying the same space as the Brass Concordat’s war-dimension and the Singing Gardens of Eternal Joy. The resulting hybrid reality defied description.

Mourning warriors found themselves dancing while they wept. Battle-hymns became lullabies for the dying. Flowers bloomed from the barrels of guns, their roots growing through the hearts of soldiers who couldn’t decide if they were celebrating or grieving. Physics gave up trying to make sense of the situation and simply stopped working in several key areas.

It was in this chaos-realm that Reed and Lyralei found each other again.

She materialized out of dimensional foam, her form flickering between states of existence. Krex’s attempted theft of her power had left her fundamentally damaged—where once she had commanded reality with absolute authority, now she could barely maintain coherent form. Parts of her kept dissolving into quantum probability, only to reassemble with pieces missing or in the wrong places.

"Reed," her voice was a whisper across seventeen octaves, harmonics scattered through dimensions that had no names. "Our daughter... what has she become?"

Reed’s storm-form had dimmed since his encounter with Kaedon’s echo. The weight of understanding—that his children were living paradoxes, poison pills embedded in reality’s code—had drained the fury that had sustained his transformation. He was still the Sovereign of Storms, but now he was a tired storm, one that had raged too long and seen too much.

"She’s become what we made her," Reed replied, his voice carrying the exhaustion of a man who had finally understood the scope of his failures. "A weapon designed to destroy the very concept of order."

Around them, the hybrid reality continued its impossible existence. Vexara’s third target had been the Nexus of Acceptable Paradoxes—a construct designed to manage the small contradictions that kept existence flexible. Its destruction had created zones where being dead didn’t preclude being alive, where winning and losing were the same outcome, where questions answered themselves before being asked.

In one such zone, they encountered the remnants of Admiral Voss’s message. Not the Admiral herself—she existed in coordinates that had no fixed location—but the echo of her words, made manifest as a landscape of crystallized information.

The War of Impossible Things was already underway when they arrived.

The battlefield stretched across seven dimensions, fought between armies that couldn’t quite exist and objectives that changed definition every time someone achieved them. Reed watched soldiers charge into battle while simultaneously retreating, their victory conditions rewriting themselves with each step. Commanders issued orders that unordered themselves, creating strategies that were simultaneously brilliant and nonsensical.

"We have to stop her," Lyralei said, her fractured form stabilizing momentarily as she focused on their daughter’s distant presence. "Before she destroys the last stable foundations."

"Stop her?" Reed laughed, the sound carrying notes of hysteria. "We created her, Lyra. She’s doing exactly what her nature demands. How do you stop a force of nature from acting according to its nature?"

Their answer came from an unexpected source—the Arbiters of Peace, the ancient order of mediators who had spent eons resolving conflicts between realities. They materialized around Reed and Lyralei not as individuals, but as a collective consciousness wearing ten thousand different faces.

"We have been observing," they spoke in perfect unison, their voices creating harmonies that temporarily stabilized the chaotic reality around them. "The child’s actions threaten not just individual realities, but the concept of reality itself. She must be contained."

"She’s our daughter," Reed snarled, some of his old fury returning. "We won’t let you—"

"You misunderstand," the Arbiters interrupted. "We do not seek to harm the child. We seek to stabilize existence around her chaos. But the cost..."

They gestured, and Reed saw what they intended. The Arbiters had developed a technique called the Ultimate Mediation—a process that would temporarily restore order to reality’s foundations, but it required them to sacrifice their existence as the stabilizing medium. Ten thousand beings who had devoted their lives to preserving peace would cease to exist, their essence becoming the glue that held reality together long enough for a more permanent solution to be found.

"You’re talking about mass suicide," Lyralei whispered, her form flickering with horror.

"We are talking about mass sacrifice," the Arbiters corrected. "There is a difference. Suicide is the ending of hope. Sacrifice is the preservation of possibility."

Around them, Vexara’s assault on reality’s foundations continued. The fourth anchor fell, then the fifth. With each destruction, the hybrid realities became more chaotic, more impossible. Reed watched a squadron of fighter craft engage in aerial combat with their own shadows, while ground forces fought battles that had already been lost in wars that hadn’t started yet.

"She’s creating a cascade effect," Reed realized, his cosmic awareness finally grasping the scope of his daughter’s plan. "Each anchor she destroys makes the next one more unstable. By the time she reaches the final anchor..."

"Reality will collapse into pure chaos," the Arbiters confirmed. "Order and disorder will become meaningless distinctions. Existence will become a fever dream with no dreamer to wake up."

Reed felt the old tactical mind awakening, analyzing the situation with cold precision. "How long do we have?"

"Seven anchors remain," the Arbiters replied. "At her current rate of acceleration, perhaps six hours before the cascade becomes irreversible."

Six hours to save existence itself. Reed had fought longer battles with lower stakes, but never with the knowledge that his enemy was his own child—a child whose very existence was his responsibility, his failure, his greatest shame.

"The Ultimate Mediation," he said finally. "What do you need from us?"

"Your consent," the Arbiters replied. "And your commitment to ensure our sacrifice has meaning. We can stabilize reality temporarily, but the permanent solution must come from you and your family. You created this chaos—intentionally or not. You must be the ones to resolve it."

Reed looked at Lyralei, saw his own desperate hope reflected in her fragmented features. Around them, the War of Impossible Things raged on, soldiers fighting and dying for causes that contradicted themselves with each heartbeat.

"Do it," Reed said.

The transformation began immediately. Ten thousand Arbiters raised their voices in a harmony that had never been heard before—the sound of willing extinction in service of continued existence. Their forms began to dissolve, not into energy or matter, but into pure concept—the idea of stability made manifest.

Reed felt reality solidify around them, the chaos-realms snapping back into more comprehensible forms. The hybrid worlds separated, their impossible physics resolving into merely improbable ones. For the first time in hours, cause preceded effect, gravity pointed consistently downward, and death and life resumed their traditional opposition.

But the effect was temporary—Reed could feel it already beginning to fade. The Arbiters’ sacrifice had bought them time, nothing more.

"Six hours," Lyralei whispered, her form more stable now within the temporarily ordered reality. "Six hours to stop our daughter from unmaking everything."

Reed nodded, his storm-powers beginning to flicker back to life as order reasserted itself. "Then we’d better—"

He never finished the sentence. Through the stabilized reality, a new presence made itself known—vast, patient, and utterly alien. The entities from beyond the Screaming Nexus had been watching the Arbiters’ sacrifice with what could only be described as professional interest.

When they spoke, their voice came from directions that didn’t exist, in languages that predated the concept of communication:

"Interesting. You sacrifice the mediators to preserve the conflict. But you have not asked the correct question: what happens when the game board itself becomes a player?"

And with those words, Reed realized that everything—the Arbiters’ sacrifice, Vexara’s chaos, his own desperate choices—had been exactly what these entities wanted all along.

They hadn’t been playing the game.

They had been teaching reality how to play itself.

This content is taken from (f)reewe(b)novel.𝗰𝗼𝐦