The presence did not arrive from above or below.

It arrived from underneath.

From the place beneath every clause, every second chance, every carefully measured tolerance the process had ever written. It rose through the collapsed battlefield like ink through water, dark and patient and smiling with a mouth that was nothing but the memory of doors forced open against their nature. Where it passed, the hardest alternate endings flinched and the softest ones dissolved entirely. Even the geometric planes of living law tilted, as though trying to avoid direct contact with something they had spent eternity keeping buried.

Zelda felt it against the eight-syllable name like a cold hand...