Ritual Sin

As the tentacles closed around her throat, Raven made her choice and howled her untamed refusal with every ounce of wild spirit and self still hers to claim. Not as the dark harbinger she was bred to be...

...but as the relentless flame that would consume this abomination's ambition to rule an ashen, blighted cosmos before its corrupted genesis was complete.

Raven's scream of primal defiance seemed to splinter the unified tormented skies themselves as she channeled a cataclysmic torrent of paradoxical forces into being - the unbridled expression of humanity's chaotic fire and will to endure beyond oblivion at any cost.

Outside the ritual chamber's shuddering walls, witnesses would describe witnessing a kaleidoscopic eruption of fractalized energies like liquid rainbows reverse-birthing from a cosmic womb. Brilliant incandescence cascading against an abyssal undertow of screaming, reality-shattering entropy.

On a subatomic level, the unstable vortex devoured every mote of aberrant eldritch matter in a ferocious orgy of mutually assured oblivion. Mystic symbols charring away...profane ritualistic circles sublimating to dust...the shrieking, eldritch-spawned monstrosity itself rendered to particulate static in the oscillating maelstrom.

Until at the last, only rivulets of quiescent energy and two prone, shuddering figures remained amid fading echoes of a dying universe's birth-pangs.

Raven's body was scorched and still as a waking dream, wisps of smoke curling from her seared extremities. Eddy lay near her twitching form, awash in a widening pool of blood from his pulverized skull.

As the thundering obliteration slowly faded to an eerie, waning ring...the bedroom walls of Raven's apartment slowly flickered back into reality around them. Her eyes fluttered open, only to clench shut in a rictus of soul-rending agony as she fully reintegrated with her manifest existence once more.

For a solitary, eternal installment after her choice was etched into the immutable truth of all cosmic potentials, Raven Hart had become the living embodiment of the human instrumentality to overcome and remake any reality on its own terms - no matter how total the oblivion it was born unto.

And in that infinite speck between realms, she had won an existence for herself and what tattered flickers of Eddy that could still remain - by burning away the constraints of all cosmic designs in an act of supreme negation.

But at what cost such a choice was made, Raven did not yet know. Only that every fibre of her being rang like an overwrought bell shattering under the unyielding weight of that singularity...of the abomination gone...of love rescued from the smoldering ashes of truth...of an existence irrevocably, uncompromisingly reclaimed.

As her mind crawled into oblivion at last, Raven's anguished scream joined Eddy's...mingling like two discordant arias echoing across the fathomless reflections of a billion infinities left to burn in paradox's wake.