The world screamed.
Rynn heard it with more than his ears. It resonated in his bones, his blood, the spaces between his thoughts—a sound that wasn't sound but knowing, the universe expressing pain at its own fundamental rearrangement.
He hit the floor without remembering falling.
The light from the shattered panel didn't disperse. It coalesced, swirling around him like liquid starlight, pressing against his skin, seeping into his pores, his eyes, his mouth. He tried to close his lids but the light passed through them. He tried to hold his breath but the light didn't need airways.
It poured into him.
And with it came understanding.
Chaos wasn't destruction. That was his first realization, striking him with the force of physical blow. Chaos was possibility. It was the space between order and entropy, the infinite potential that existed before anything chose to exist. Every choice, every path, every reality that could have been but wasn't—all of it lived in Chaos.
The light showed him things.
A leaf, green and alive. But also the leaf as it could have been—brown, crimson, gold. The leaf that never grew, the seed that never sprouted, the tree that never existed. All of them real, in some sense. All of them possible. All of them Chaos.
He saw a moment from his childhood. His father's hand raised, descending. But also the hand that stayed raised. The hand that never lifted at all. The father who apologized. The father who wept. The father who died before Rynn was born. All of them true, somewhere in the vast landscape of what could have been.
The light burned.
Not painfully—or rather, not only painfully. It burned like knowledge burned, like truth burned, like seeing the universe naked for the first time and realizing you were naked too.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
The text appeared in the same pearlescent white, but now it hung in a space that wasn't quite his apartment, wasn't quite anywhere.
[WISH GRANTED ~ AFFINITY DETECTED: CHAOS (PRIMORDIAL) ▼ CLASSIFICATION: UNIQUE]
[WARNING: CHAOS AFFINITY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH STANDARD MANA CIRCULATION]
[WARNING: CHAOS AFFINITY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH STANDARD ABILITY FRAMEWORKS]
[WARNING: CHAOS AFFINITY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH...]
The warnings continued, scrolling past too fast to read. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one declaring something impossible, something broken, something that didn't fit the system's neat categories.
Rynn didn't care about the warnings.
He was too busy not dying.
The light finished its invasion and retreated, leaving something behind. Something that coiled in his chest like a sleeping serpent, warm and vast and utterly indifferent to his existence. He could feel it there, this new thing that was also him, this connection to every possibility that ever was or could be.
He opened his eyes.
His apartment was on fire.
Not literally—the walls stood, the ceiling remained, the radiator still clanked in its endless death throes. But everything shimmered, overlaid with ghost images of itself. His bed existed, but so did the bed that had collapsed last year, the bed he'd almost bought instead, the bed that would rot in fifty years. All of them visible, all of them real, all of them pressing against his perception until he couldn't tell which version was actually there.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Focus.
The thought came from somewhere deeper than his conscious mind. Focus or you'll drown in it.
He breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way his mother had taught him during the bad nights, when his father's rage had filled their small house and Rynn needed somewhere to hide that wasn't physical. A breathing technique. A meditation. A lifeline.
In. Out. In. Out.
The ghost images faded.
When he opened his eyes again, the apartment was just the apartment. Bare walls, worn furniture, the single window showing a grey morning that refused to decide between rain and sun. Normal. Ordinary. Safe.
[CHAOS MANIPULATION: INITIALIZED]
[CURRENT CHAOS CAPACITY: 1.7 UNITS]
[CURRENT CHAOS CONTROL: 0.3%]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ATTEMPT CHAOS MANIPULATION UNTIL CONTROL EXCEEDS 5%]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ATTEMPT CHAOS MANIPULATION UNTIL CONTROL EXCEEDS 10%]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT—]
"I get it," Rynn muttered, his voice hoarse. "Don't touch the thing I can't control. Message received."
The notifications disappeared.
He pushed himself up from the floor, using the edge of his bed for support. His legs shook. His hands shook. Everything shook, including parts of him he was pretty sure shouldn't be capable of shaking. The serpent in his chest stirred, then settled, apparently satisfied with its new home.
The apartment door burst open.
Rynn's survival instincts, honed by eighteen years of anticipating his father's moods, threw him sideways before his conscious mind registered the threat. He rolled behind his bed, coming up with a broken table leg he kept for emergencies—pathetic weapon, but better than nothing.
A man stood in his doorway.
Big. Broad-shouldered. Dressed in a maintenance uniform with "Carl" stitched over the pocket. Rynn recognized him vaguely—the building's handyman, a quiet guy who fixed leaks and ignored tenants unless they owed rent.
Carl's eyes were wrong.
They glowed faintly orange, like embers before they die. And they weren't looking at Rynn. They were looking through him, past him, at something only Carl could see.
"Could have wished for anything," Carl said. His voice was his own, but also not—layered with something else, something that crackled like burning wood. "Anything in the whole universe. You know what I wished for?"
Rynn stayed very still, table leg ready.
"I wished to be warm." Carl laughed, and the sound broke apart into something wet and terrible. "Just warm. Always warm. I've been cold my whole life, you know? Poor people are always cold. So I wished to be warm."
The orange in his eyes flared.
"Turns out the system's literal."
Fire erupted from Carl's skin.
Not flames—fire itself, raw and primal, pouring from every pore like sweat. It consumed his clothes in an instant, blackened his skin, should have killed him in seconds. But Carl didn't die. Carl stood there, burning, his flesh crackling and sloughing, his bones glowing beneath the melting meat, and he screamed.
Not in pain.
In ecstasy.
"I'M WARM!" he howled, and the sound peeled paint from the walls. "I'M FINALLY WARM!"
The building shook. Somewhere above, another scream answered—different voice, different pain, different wish gone wrong. Then another. Then another. The whole structure trembled with the chorus of humanity discovering that some gifts came with teeth.
Rynn moved.
Not toward Carl—that would be suicide. Not toward the door—Carl blocked it. Toward the window, the only other exit, four floors above a concrete courtyard.
He hit the glass with his shoulder, felt it shatter, felt the cold air rush in. Below him, the courtyard waited. Hard. Unforgiving. Possibly fatal.
Behind him, Carl's burning form turned, those orange eyes finally focusing on something real.
"Don't go," Carl said, and his melting face smiled. "Stay. Be warm with me."
Rynn jumped.
---
The fall lasted exactly 1.7 seconds.
Rynn counted.
He'd always counted—his mind's default response to crisis, cataloging details that might matter later. 1.7 seconds of wind and terror and the serpent in his chest waking, uncoiling, reaching toward something it recognized.
In that 1.7 seconds, Rynn saw possibilities.
The courtyard below—but also the courtyard paved differently, the courtyard filled with water, the courtyard that didn't exist because he'd chosen a different window. Himself falling—but also himself catching the ledge, himself flying, himself simply not falling because gravity was just another possibility and Chaos didn't recognize possibilities as laws.
He couldn't control it. Couldn't shape it. But in that moment of extremity, Chaos responded to his need like a muscle twitching before the brain commands it.
Something shifted.
The air beneath him thickened, just slightly. Just enough. His fall became a drop, his drop became a stumble, his stumble became a roll across the cold concrete that left him bruised but unbroken.
1.7 seconds.
Rynn lay on his back, staring at his apartment window four floors up. Carl stood in the broken frame, burning bright as a fallen star, and for a moment their eyes met.
Then Carl stepped forward into empty air, and the burning man fell.
---
Took me hours to edit... Heheheh! Still new to writing without have another breakdown