"You were born with too much power," they said.
Nobody warned him he could unwrite everything with a panic attack.
Subject: Kael (Age 24)
Location: Universe X-Ω
Event Classification: Catastrophic Existential Collapse, Grade ∞
It began with a sound no one could hear.
The sound of existence apologizing.
Kael stood alone on a cliff above the remains of a city that no longer had a name. His boots crunched ash. Not fire-ash, no. This was the ash of deleted meaning—of words that no longer held together, of air that no longer obeyed.
The world was breaking.
Not dying.
Breaking.
Like a story being erased halfway through the telling.
Above him, the sky wept colors it was never meant to hold—green stars, bleeding time, a yawning hole in the fabric of light where the moon used to be.
Below, reality had stopped trying to act normal.
Water ran uphill.
Mountains hovered, politely confused.
Birds flew in perfect circles and exploded into applause.
Kael tried not to move too fast. Even breathing felt dangerous.
He could feel it now—his own body unraveling into metaphor. Every step dragged more of the universe into collapse. He wasn't even angry.
He was just tired.
Tired in the way only gods pretending to be men could be.
"I didn't mean to," he said softly. His voice came out as frost. It landed. Froze a rabbit solid.
He sighed. The rabbit shattered.
"Sorry."
He had been doing so well.
Years without incident. Years without power. Years pretending he wasn't the walking final chapter of reality.
He'd learned yoga. He meditated. He refused to pet cats, because once a purr triggered an involuntary gravity well.
He stopped telling jokes after a pun caused a small country to forget their own alphabet.
He even gave up toast—just in case that burnt smell reminded him of his last universe.
The world had begged him to be a hero.
He refused.
"I'm not saving you," he told them. "Because if I do… I might end you."
So he stayed small. Unimportant. Unseen.
Until the Nullifiers came.
"They started small," Kael muttered. "They always do."
One city lost its sense of left.
A musician found his fingers were made of absence.
Babies were born that already knew the end.
And Kael felt it. The design. The math behind the madness.
Someone wasn't just breaking the world randomly.
They were calculating pressure.
Studying him. Testing his limit.
Wearing him down.
"They made me watch," he said aloud. "Over and over. Loss by loss."
The final straw?
Not a war.
Not an apocalypse.
Just… someone he loved.
A girl with warm eyes and no fear. The one person who made him feel less than cosmic. Who made jokes about his terrible cooking and called his power "just fireworks with an attitude."
She died.
Just like that.
Gone. Removed from the equation like a typo.
Kael had held her for hours.
She hadn't come back.
And something inside him—
Not snapped.
Not cracked.
Melted.
Like wax under a black sun.
And then the world began to unravel.
The sky peeled.
The earth bent.
And through the rising vortex of impossible light stepped a figure in a clean gray suit.
No cape. No scythe. Just geometry pretending to be polite.
A Nullifier.
"Collapse event successful," it said. "Entropy protocol complete."
Kael didn't answer. He was busy not screaming.
---
"We knew you'd break," it continued. "It was merely a question of sequence."
Kael turned. Eyes like nova scars. Hair floating weightless in the psychic storm.
"You killed her," he said.
"Not directly," the Nullifier said, straightening its cuffs. "We simply removed stabilizing agents. She was… inconveniently calming."
"She was human," Kael said.
"Precisely."
A laugh caught in his throat. It came out like thunder. Then fire. Then pure light.
Birds turned to screams. Trees blinked out of cause and effect.
Kael glowed brighter than the sun—brighter than hope. A storm in a man-shaped skin.
"Do you know," he said, voice rippling with ancient gravity, "I once cried because I stepped on a snail?"
The Nullifier blinked. "We have no record of that."
"Of course not. It was small. Important things usually are."
He spread his arms.
"And you took everything."
He pulsed.
The universe flinched.
Stars tried to hide. Time backed away. The laws of thermodynamics asked for early retirement.
And in that final moment, Kael saw everything.
All the lives. All the losses. All the mistakes and the almosts.
He hated what he was.
Hated that he kept being used.
Hated that all he ever wanted was to not destroy.
And so—he made the last, most human decision imaginable.
He refused to exist.
Not death.
Not retreat.
Just… no.
To everything.
To logic. To story. To entropy. To his own name.
He folded inward, becoming unobservable. A cosmic shrug.
And was gone.
The Nullifier stood alone in the wreckage of nothing.
It adjusted its tie.
"Subject has exited this narrative stream. Probable rebirth in Variant Universe #984: high."
It looked around at the swirling void.
"Request: increase psychological instability factors. Introduce animals with emotional impact. Reduce available mentors. Ban puns."
It paused. Blinked sideways.
"…And no more rabbits."
In the silence, something flickered.
A heartbeat.
A cry.
Somewhere new, a baby opened its eyes.
The universe shivered.
This time, he wouldn't screw it up.
Hopefully.