The Shape of a Forbidden Wish

The world was burning.

Not with fire, but with remorse.

Skyscrapers wept molten glass. Trains folded like paper cranes, vanishing between seconds. Entire oceans rippled up into the sky, suspended mid-collapse as gravity wept and forgot itself.

And then —

It emerged.

From the wound in the Veil came something that should not have had a shape. It didn’t step through reality — it peeled it. One limb, the length of a continent, stretched downward, dragging a smear of galaxies across the sky.

The creature that was once Aiko had grown too large for this dimension. It oozed through the breach like ink under pressure, screaming silently with every inch of its grotesque, eternal birth.

Its form was a contradiction.

A headless torso formed from melted bodies — faces half-swallowed by flesh, arms reaching from its stomach as if they’d tried to claw their way out but had been caught mid-scream. Its spine was exposed, twisted like barbed wire, supporting ribcages stacked like books, each one opening and closing in sync with a phantom breath.

Where its eyes should have been, writhing mouths blinked open — filled with teeth made of nails, whispering prayers in a language no human throat could form. Its arms were both too many and too few — flickering between one massive claw and a thousand spiderlike filaments, dragging tendrils of memory and time behind it, trailing laughter that wasn’t laughter.

Its lower half dragged behind like a bridal train made of rotting umbilical cords, each one connecting to nothing and everything. And atop its “shoulders” bloomed a halo of inverted time — memories of Aiko repeating backwards in an endless loop: her smiling, crying, screaming — all stitched together by shadows, all dead.

It was not Aiko.

And yet, somehow… it was.

Asahi fell to his knees.

“Aiko…?”

His voice was small. Fragile. The sound of a man already halfway erased.

He stepped forward, blood smeared on his lips, his eyes wide — drunk on the shape of his own delusion. “You’re here,” he whispered. “You came back to me…”

Behind him, the world crumbled.

People turned to static. Buildings folded into seeds. Sound unravelled into threads of colour, painting the sky with screams no one could interpret. And still, Asahi worshipped the thing that descended like a god carved from the ruin of his wish.

He smiled.

The creature did not move. It did not blink. It only watched. It only breathed — and with each breath, the clouds darkened, the stars vanished, the ground bent inward.

But Asahi didn’t care.

Even now — even as the world melted — he saw her. He saw his wife, her smile in the silhouette of this beast, her voice in the static song that poured from its throat. His lips trembled. “You came back. You came back. I knew it. I knew if I just—if I gave everything—”

Haruto, collapsed nearby, tried to scream. Tried to warn him.

But no voice rose.

And Asahi reached out.

“Aiko. It’s me. It’s Asahi. I did this for you. All of it. I found you. I brought you back.”

Tears streamed down Asahi’s cheeks as he stumbled forward like a madman, his face alight with deranged hope. “Please tell me it’s you… Aiko… my love…”

The creature tilted its head.

And then —

It consumed him.

No ceremony. No final words. Just a single gulp — a snap of existence folding inward — and Asahi was gone.

The man who tore the world apart for love had been nothing more than a step in the creature’s birth.

And now there was no stopping it.

The sky collapsed inward.

Colours peeled from light. The moon split open like an egg, and from within spilled bones and memories of things no one had lived. Cities flattened into two-dimensional diagrams, then reformed as monuments to regret — buildings shaped like apologies, towers made of severed hands.

Children laughed and aged and died all within a second.

The stars fell.

And the Veil screamed.

Haruto stood at the edge of it all, his skin flickering, shedding fragments of his past with each second.

He didn’t cry.

Didn’t scream.

He simply watched.

The sky bled down his face.

His voice — when it came — was small, raw, and real.

“If you’re still out there… I hope it was worth it.”

And then he disintegrated.

Bit by bit.

His hands first, curling into fists that vanished. Then his chest — the heartbeat that had carried a thousand regrets, finally gone. His eyes blinked — once, twice — then dissolved into static.

“Akane.”

At the heart of the breach, Ren hovered.

No longer a boy. No longer anything.

His body was woven into the roots of the Veil now, tendrils of ink branching from his spine into the sky. His hands trembled not with fear, but with unbearable, immortal awareness.

He saw everything. He felt everything.

But inside him, where grief had once burned — there was nothing now.

Just silence.

And nothing else…

Asahi.

He floated in the black.

Inside the Veil, time bled sideways. Memory pulsed like blood. And here — finally — the mask cracked.

He was a man who had lost the only thing that made him feel human.

He had loved her more than his life. More than the world itself.

Aiko.

The memory of her name carved into his chest like a wound that never healed. She had been his wife. His sun. His answer to every question that ever clawed at his soul.

But he wasn’t the only one who loved her.

Haruto had loved her too. Quietly. Desperately. A raw, unspoken hunger that throbbed in every glance he stole, every word he didn’t say. Asahi had noticed, of course — how could he not? That simmering tension, that brittle edge beneath their friendship. They had once been brothers in all but blood — soldiers of the same battle, survivors of the same fall.

But love had drawn a line between them.

And Aiko had chosen.

She had chosen him.

They married under a sky painted with autumn leaves, just before the world began to fracture. Haruto had been there, offering his hand with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. The kind of smile that hides knives.

Afterward, the friendship between the two men had thinned like breath on glass — not shattered, but never the same. They worked together, still, spoke often, even fought side by side. But something between them had gone quiet. Cold. Like a piano missing its highest note.

Asahi never truly hated Haruto. Not even when suspicion grew. Not even when the rituals began, and blood stained their path. But he knew — he knew — Haruto had always blamed him.

Then came the day the sky cracked.

They’d been walking together, he remembered, laughing about something mundane. Aiko had been behind them, her hand brushing Asahi’s. There had been warmth in that moment, a warmth he’d give anything to feel again.

And then—

Something happened from which the world had never healed.

Neither had he.