Thorns of Chaos

Zeo opened his eyes.

He was still in the center of the crack. But there was no light. No sound. No movement.

The world had frozen again.

Not because it stopped. But because it completed itself without Zeo's permission.

He was not the center. Not the actor. Not the tool.

He was abandoned.

"Rivan..."

"You stole my place..."

He stood up slowly, his body cracking like glass thrown from the inside.

The magic inside him was unstable.

All the symbols he had carved into his body, the ground, the air—all turned to reject his connection.

Zeo screamed. But his voice was not human.

It was the voice of someone who was not recognized even by the destruction he helped give birth to.

"You are all UNWORTHY!"

"This world DESERVES to perish!"

"WHY WON'T YOU SEE?!"

Zeo's hands formed strange symbols, creating magic fractures in the air.

But the fractures did not open a portal.

Just throwing the power back into his body.

Burning his organs. Spitting out blood.

He began to melt from the inside.

But he laughed.

"If I can't open the world from the outside… then I'll tear my own body apart from the inside."

And with that, he ripped open his chest.

Taking every magic symbol he'd ever carved, and swallowed it all.

The air stilled.

The sky turned into a black streak.

Time began to blur in a small radius—a private point of chaos that the world wouldn't allow, but wouldn't destroy either.

Zeo created an independent crack inside himself.

And he swore—

"I won't die."

"I won't be forgotten like a failed hero."

"If the world rejects the door… then I'll be a hole in the wall."

The first week, no one noticed.

Some people started having nightmares.

Dreams they couldn't remember, but they woke up with swollen eyes, unstable hearts, and a sense of loss… that they couldn't explain.

The second week, the kids started drawing strange things:

A circular line like a knot in a rope cut in half.

Their parents' faces—but with mouths where their eyes were.

The third week, a teacher stood in front of the class.

Then stopped teaching.

Silence.

Then said:

"Do you hear voices… in the back of your heads, too?"

The spread was invisible.

Zeo had no body.

But the idea of ​​it—of destruction, of the world's wounds, of "hidden truths"—began to spread.

Not through magic. But through emptiness.

People started losing small chunks of memory.

The time between meals and bedtimes became blurry.

Some began to scribble on the walls without realizing it.

And each drawing… formed the symbol of a broken spiral.

No one knows that it is Zeo's trail.

Because Zeo no longer needs to be known.

"If the world rejects me as a door," whispered a voice that could only be heard in the silence,

"... then I will be a small crack in every head."

"Just small. But enough to make reality... feel like an illusion that is starting to crack."

In a mental hospital in the far east, ten patients who do not know each other say the same sentence in their sleep:

"I don't want to know the truth."

"But he is already sitting in the corner of my mind."

And from behind all that...

Zeo laughed.

Laughter without a body.

Laughter without a sound.

Because for the first time... he did not need the world to open the door.

The world itself began to search for its hole.