Chapter 87: Subsistence
Noxarion had been erased once.
A sealed paradox.
A trapped moment.
A cage of time.
But because I went back, because I tore open the boundary between worlds just by existing…
He returned.
That truth hit me like a blade to the spine as I faced him again — not in visions, not through whispers in my head, but here, in flesh and impossible shadow.
He mocked everything.
“You rewound the world to save it,” he purred, voice dripping like tar into my thoughts.
“And in doing so… you freed me. I was trapped where time could not flow.
You let me out.”
My stomach twisted.
My hands trembled.
He laughed, voice sharp like broken glass.
“Time is a cruel thing, little Hopper. You cannot erase me without erasing the reason I returned. Unless—”
His smile cut through the
