As reality itself began to fray and unravel around the nexus of the swirling vortex, Emily knew they were rapidly approaching the point of no return. She had to make a decisive move – either to fully embrace the oblivion beckoning from the other side or to take drastic action to reseal the rupture, no matter the personal cost.
Her mind raced as she watched the nightmarish forms continuing to pour forth from the rift. These were not the wandering spirits of the dead, but something far more primordial and malignant. Ancient, outer forces that had existed for eons before the first spark of life, patiently biding their time to seize an opportunity to reconquer the material realm.
And in her team’s arrogant quest to shatter the cosmic veil between worlds, they had thrown open the gates and welcomed these bringers of entropic oblivion.
Sarah’s voice still echoed in Emily’s mind, crying out for her mother’s help amidst the eldritch chaos. Maybe if she fully surrendered to the vortex, subsumed herself within its cosmic maelstrom, she could find her lost daughter’s soul on the other side?
Her agonizing indecision was shattered by the sound of a tremendous roar followed by a tremor that nearly knocked her off her feet. One of the larger shambling monstrosities had smashed through the lab’s exterior wall and was bearing down on them, a glistening mass of rancid flesh continuously splitting and reknitting into different extremities.
In that visceral moment of face-to-face confrontation with one of the vortex’s hellish harbingers, Emily knew what she had to do. No matter the consequences, no matter how slender the odds, she had to find a way to shut it all down – to create a metaphysical tourniquet around the runaway surge of cosmic forces.
If the vortex was allowed to grow any larger, it could rip apart the very fabric of reality itself, potentially snuffing out all semblance of life and existence for eternity. She had gambled everything on unveiling the truth beyond the mortal veil, and now the stakes were the continuation of all creation as they knew it.
“Everybody, fall back to the auxiliary control room!” she barked at her remaining staff. “We’re going to try to reverse the polarity and create a contained implosion within the central core!”
Her voice was nearly drowned out by another unholy bellow as more twisted forms emerged around the periphery of the widening rift. Clutching the device that could theoretically detonate the core implosion, Emily issued one final order.
“No matter what happens…don’t let anything through that doorway.”
With those grim words lingering in the air, she sprinted towards the control hub, dodging a viscous spray of ichor as another abomination exploded through the debris…
Here’s a continuation of “The Turning Point”:
Emily raced through the shattered hallways, her mind laser-focused on reaching the auxiliary control room while chaos reigned behind her. Grotesque shapes slithered and oozed forth from the ever-widening vortex, their unearthly shrieks and roars echoing through the facility.
She chanced a glance over her shoulder and immediately regretted it. One of the monstrosities, a shifting amalgam of dripping flesh and bonelike protrusions, had cornered two of her lab assistants. The abomination reared up, membranous appendages unfurling as it prepared to strike.
“Don’t look back! Just run!” Emily screamed at the paralyzed researchers.
Her words broke their trance and they scrambled away, the creature’s desiccated limbs smashing down where they’d been standing mere moments before. Emily pumped her legs harder, finally bursting through the reinforced door to the control room.
She slammed her hand onto the activation panel, and banks of monitors flickered to life displaying the cascading diagrams of energy flows and ionic charge vectors. If her hasty calculations were correct, reversing the polarization of the central quantum reactor could theoretically create an implosion event – a runaway entropic force that would act as a cosmic zipper, drawing the rift closed from the inside.
But like everything else that had spiraled out of control, the risks were catastrophic if she made even a miniscule miscalculation. The implosion could just as easily detonate in an apocalyptic blast of exotic particles, further destabilizing the boundaries between dimensions.
Her fingers flew across the holographic controls, adjusting parameters and reconfiguring safeguards to allow an overload of the reactor’s containment field. All the while, the inhuman din of the facility being overrun heightened around her – shrieks, roars, the thunderous impacts of falling debris and rending metal.
With a deep breath, Emily initiated the overload sequence and braced herself. A rising hum quickly crescendoed into a deafening whine as the reactor core strained against its newly configured limitations. Then, with a bone-rattling quake, the implosion was triggered.
Emily’s world became a blinding kaleidoscope as waves of exotic energies detonated throughout the facility, all converging towards the yawning rift in reality. She watched in awe and terror as gravitational lensing distorted light and matter, bending the laws of physics like so much putty caught in the cosmic vortex.
In that searing moment of reality-shattering forces, Emily’s thoughts turned to her daughter one last time. She realized with clarity that even if Sarah’s spirit had called out, even if some part of her had been trapped amid the chaos, there was no way she could ever be reunited with her little girl now.
No, this was the only path – to sacrifice that fragile hope in order to prevent the total annihilation of all existence. She only prayed that wherever Sarah’s soul resided, she could understand and somehow forgive her mother for the agonizing choice she had to make.
With that fleeting acceptance, a brilliant all-consuming whitelight blotted out Emily’s senses…and then there was only oblivion.
When she finally regained consciousness, her first auditory input was one of eerie silence.
Life's Adventure 