As soon as the magical dimension opened, it snapped shut.

Storm's magic flickered. 

The rain stopped. The wind died. His lightning humanoids spluttered before going out of existence entirely, and Lilly took this new freedom to shove her hands into her hair and expell a breath she'd been holding for a long time. She knew she should turn around and run, or use magic, or something remotely warrior-like, but she was so shocked that all she could do was stand there. It was as if Lilly's mind shut off, like she could experience the sensation of the war in Elliott Way behind her, the calmed storm around her, the dangerously still man in front of her, but she couldn't understand why those things were happening anymore. It was a battle between sensation and perception and sensation was winning.

Several feet in front of her, Storm's squared his shoulders. Red crept up his neck. His hands curled in and out of fists as he and Lilly both stared at the normalcy that was before them: air untorn, this dimension perfectly intact. 

All at once, Lilly's synapses fired. 

Storm's back was to her, and there was nothing rooting her to her spot anymore. She spun on her heel and tore up the opposite side of the hill. Her momentum sent her careening to her hands and knees, boots and palms squelching in the mud, and she crawled to the crest of the nearest hill—

A flash of light glittered violently to her right. She jerked hard to the left to dodge it. 

But lightning travels at one-third the speed of light.

The bolt slammed into her shoulder from behind, sending shockwaves up and down her arm. Lilly's synapses were still catching up with the rest of her. The scream of pain went straight from her throat and into her skull. 

The force knocked her face-first into the ground. The pain was excruciating, ruthless, white-hot, wicked-sharp. She couldn't move—she didn't have to. Hands gripped her shoulders and spun her onto her back. Storm loomed over her, pressed a knee to her chest to keep her against the ground. His face was blurry.

"What the hell did you do? Why did it close?" When Lilly didn't answer, Storm slapped her. Lilly didn't feel it. All she felt was that horrible horrible pain and the overwhelming aftershocks of thousands of volts of electricity jarring her system. 

"I made sure not to hit you that hard, so talk." Storm dug his knee harder into her chest. Again, it was a phenomenon that, under normal circumstances, would have made her ribs shriek in protest, but Lilly couldn't feel it. 

Space. That was the only word her mind would form. Space.  

Storm seethed. He was loud, vicious. "You have no idea—I've been planning this for years and you've ruined everything! You want to know why I kept your mother alive? She's the reason the Bloom found out I wasn't a Shifter. They locked me up for years and tortured me, all because of her. They blew up my family and it was her fault. I want her to see what her mistake did. I want her to watch as I kill everyone." His green eyes were wild, his breath hot on her face.

The corners of Lilly's vision darkened.

She could move her fingers, just a little. 

Space. 

She formed another mild, distant, desperate thought: Anything. 

"But if you don't want to tell me how you managed to close the dimension, I'll go ahead and kill you," he went on, voice dropping to a delirious whisper. "Then I'm going to kill your mother. And I'll leave you with this swear: I will not stop until I kill every last Shifter in the world." 

The magical current rushed through her fingers. Or maybe that was wind.  

Storm moved his hand to her throat and leaned in close to whisper, "My magic is extraordinary, my dear." 

But Lilly's magic was also extraordinary—perhaps more so—and she shoved through the slur of pain to focus every ounce of her spirit into bringing down magic from space.

Come—on—

And then hundreds of green-blue butterflies stormed through the sky. 

Whenever they brushed against anything that wasn't Lilly, they set off an explosion. 

They were brilliant tiny monsters. 

Lilly didn't feel it, but she knew she was grinning a bloody smirk before she blacked out. 

*** 

The stars created their most mysterious phenomenon yet, and it was all because a girl stole some explosive butterflies.

It started like this: The stars closest to the blue planet watched a flock of migrating butterflies vanish. The butterflies were birthed from clouds. They migrated nightly from the East to the West and back around again. Their wings were flammable, highly reactive. The butterflies themselves were ticking time bombs. It was never understood...not by the stars, or by trespassers who ventured into this strange planet.

But then they vanished from mid-air and the magical current shot through every star in every world, all at once. It started with a newborn star on the very cold tip of the universe—he was just so scared, he couldn't help himself. He screamed.

And an electrical current shot through every single star in the universe and caused a colossal chain reaction.

Another star is screaming, stars whispered to one another in response to the newborn star's scream. The whispers went round and round space like an entire forest of rustling trees or a spinning hurricane. On and on these whispers went; violently, ferociously. The star is screaming, the star is screaming, the star is screaming. When the other stars saw this wave of ionized gases swirling through the darkness between themselves, planets, and other space-bodies, they got scared and screamed, too.

A thing about star-whispers: They are visible. The stars speak in hydrogen, helium, dust, and ionized gases.

A thing about star-screams: Color explodes into a violent cloud.

I smell catastrophe, I smell catastrophe, I smell catastrophe.

Color burst, an electrifying nebula withering away at the darkness of space.

These screams, this language among the stars, became a colorful nebula so extravagant, so extraordinary, it transcended worlds and could be seen through a hundred thousand different dimensions.

***

Everyone in the Shifter World saw the nebula expand as night closed in.

It was impossible not to notice, this glorious colorful cloud. Even where it was storming, the nebula shone through. It pulled apart clouds like parting a giant curtain. People gasped, whipped out brushes and paints to kidnap the sky forever on canvas. Others got down on their faces and prayed, sure the Great King was coming at long last. Some cities rioted and some cities quieted and everyone was in complete and utter reverence of these stars.

The beasts stopped their killing spree to look.

All the while, the stars screamed, screamed harder, so hard that if they had throats their necks would have turned blue and their vocal cords would have ruptured. Kill the beasts, they screamed, and this was translated in the ever-growing nebula that cloaked the earth like a second sky. Kill the beasts—kill the beasts—

The nebula swelled, growing and glowing, pulsating electrical energy waves that sent every light in the Shifter World winking out of existence. In turn, the beasts roared. The stars roared back—louder, faster, every single one of them in the entirety of space.

What happened next is nearly indescribable; it is a mystery to all, and perhaps this secret is best kept to the Great King and the stars themselves: The nebula broke through the Shifter World's atmosphere, rushed towards the beasts, and began to slaughter them. One by one.

Light exploded in every direction. The nebula filled the beasts and suffocated strange organs, mangled elegantly crafted horns, ripped apart membranes made of breath. The nebula attacked the beasts with violence, with vulgarity, with anger, and it took every ounce of every star in space to do so. The nebula and the beasts attacked each other, and hundreds of thousands of stars died because they screamed so hard.

One by one, the beasts choked on the language of the stars.

The war of elevens had gradually moved outside because of the fairies, who got everyone outside while Elliott Way quickly flooded with water. The child-soldiers, the Bloom Officials, and the fairies had no place to take cover, so they shrank back and away from the monsters.

A thing about star-screams; a thing about nebulas formed from star-screams: They do not take kindly to water.

As a result, Elliott Way exploded.

And six hours later, when the final mutilated carcass of the last standing monster gave a final shuddering breath, the nebula dispersed and create one last mystery: It burst into millions of tiny silver butterflies.