From the forest floor, a certain tigress witch looked up from where she sat, not at the rapidly-darkening night sky, but something she felt beyond it. A presence that she couldn’t quite describe, growing ever closer to the Earth. She felt it as something repelled it from the Earth, while everything else, including its moon, was swallowed. No, not swallowed - destroyed, wiped cleanly from being, as the foundations of reality itself had been torn out from under them. She slowly stood up, causing her long white hair to rustle, suddenly feeling a presence behind the nothingness, a presence whose attention was focused on very few, and she knew she was one such being under its scrutiny. “What are you?” Ning demanded.


* * * * * *


        A shudder ran up Chester the fox’s spine, interrupting him mid-sentence. His ebony-furred wolf friend, Karina, looked at him with concern. “Are you okay?”
        “I’m okay,” he responded, though he wasn’t. He looked up towards the sky, and saw that the stars were darkening, no, they were disappearing. “Look.”
        “Can you feel that, too?” the wolf asked as she began to become aware of something from which words escaped, save one - hunger. An overpowering, maddening hunger.
        “We should warn the others,” Chester declared. “Something’s coming for all of us.”
        “Then let’s go,” Karina said, leading them both back towards their neighborhood at a run.


* * * * * *


        The entity continued to claw at the protective veil surrounding this last bastion of life, of this reality, of food. It pulled back a little, now completely focused on the veil itself. It wondered how it could breach it, to pour itself inside and consume everything within. Unfortunately for those maintaining the veil, the thing found its source and, directly above that, the strongest point in the veil, which gave it an idea.
        Anyone looking up from certain parts of the world would have seen it, an electric blue streak, cutting across the black, cold void that the sky had become. Finally, the entity found itself above the planet opposite from the veil, over its weakest point. From there, it was quite easy to focus its powers and punch through. The veil’s maintainers at once tried to seal the breach, but the thing had already slipped through and was streaking towards the surface.




* * * * * *


        Chester and Karina, along with their friends, Aileas and Lehua, an arctic fox and a red fox respectively, had almost reached a conclusion as to what was happening, and what to do from there, when they felt the thing, whatever it was, penetrate the veil protecting Earth. Karina’s ears folded back against her head. “Time’s up,” she stated.
        “What do you mean?” Aileas asked. She looked around at her friends nervously. “It didn’t penetrate that veil thing you helped create, did it?”
        “If she says time’s up,” Lehua answered, himself looking quite nervous, “it did.”
        Chester looked up. “Whatever it is, it’s coming down. It’s going to land somewhere close by.”
        Aileas looked out the window just in time to see the blue streak that the entity emitted as it hurtled towards the ground, directly towards the center of the town. “There!” she called out, as the entity hit the ground, sending a beam of bright blue light shining directly into the night sky.


* * * * * *


        As soon as the entity landed and began to coalesce into a solid form, the veil protecting Earth suddenly retracted and attempted to form a bubble around it, as the ones controlling it hoped to use it to isolate the thing and push it out of the universe. However, with the flick of what was beginning to resemble a wrist, the bubble was instantly shattered with the sound of a large pane glass breaking. Once the entity fully formed, it began to look around, observing everything around it. The being had a form strangely similar to that of Chester’s, though it had six tails, each with a pattern of white diamonds forming a line from base to the fully-white area on each tip, and the markings on its face, chest, and back were much more complex. Its eyes retained that same malevolent blue gleam as the streak it had created earlier. And so, it began to walk towards the closest light. When it was directly beneath the source of the light - a streetlamp - Chester and his company, as well as Ning, showed up, though the latter didn’t know the former was there, as she was some distance away, almost equidistant between the group and the intruder.
        As the four crouched behind a tree that had fallen a while ago and still hadn’t been removed, Lehua noticed the resemblance. “Chester,” he whispered, “that thing looks a lot like you.”
        “It does,” Chester whispered back as the thing reached up towards the LEDs in the streetlamp above it, which immediately disappeared, leaving a patch of darkness on the street. Everyone jumped when the thing abruptly turned towards them, revealing the glow of its eyes, a pair of blue lights suspended in the midst of a silhouette. “It’s looking right at me,” Chester realized. Suddenly, however, the thing turned away, towards something across the street. A tigress with long, white hair had suddenly leapt out from behind a tree and fired a stream of some form of magical energy at the entity, hitting it square in the chest. The group could tell from its silhouette that the being looked down at itself, then back at the source.
        Ning fired another attack, which the entity deflected straight up into the air before lunging at her. Before any of them realized it, the wolf and three foxes were leaping over the log, joining the battle. Karina launched her own attack first, striking the entity with a beam of sound. This, however, only served to attract the thing’s ire, so it held her hand out towards her, whereupon she froze. As Aileas and Chester tried to pry Karina out of its grip, and Lehua started throwing increasingly-large fireballs, the thing closed its hand, effortlessly consuming Karina’s life force and turning her body to stone. “Everyone, get back!” Ning shouted over the din, and as the three foxes scurried, the ground around the entity began to churn and shift violently, lurching towards the thing from every direction in an attempt to crush it, to no avail.
        “Now what?” Aileas demanded of the tigress as her attack wore off, leaving the thing unscathed.
        “I don’t know, just run!” She turned away and started to sprint. Not knowing what else to do, the foxes followed. Chester looked back, to find the statue that had once been his best friend crumbling to dust as reality itself around the entity unraveled, all plants just outside a certain distance turning to stone themselves before disintegrating in turn. Lehua threw a long, directed burst of flame behind him at the entity, only for the fire to vanish as soon as it touched the ever-expanding perimeter of the void. Aileas, for her part, started a powerful gust of wind that stopped the entity merely by attracting its curiosity.
        But even that didn’t last long before the entity began to follow them.


* * * * * *


        “Alright, who are you?” Chester demanded.
        “My name is Ning,” the tigress explained, holding her hands up defensively. Off in the distance, more and more of the city and its inhabitants were being consumed by the void, its growth marked by building and vehicle lights as they vanished. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here,” she glared at Chester, “but that thing bore quite the resemblance to you.”
        “But it’s clearly not me, is it?”
        “You two should stop bickering,” Lehua interrupted. “I’m pretty sure that thing is still coming for us.” Sure enough, as if in response, the entity suddenly emerged from its shroud of nothingness, barreling towards them as if the space between it and the group was contracting or, perhaps, collapsing. It was upon them before they could even finish standing up. Again, it was looking directly at Chester.
        “Chester?” Aileas said with worry.
        In response, the entity made a noise that sounded exactly like what Aileas just said, but reversed. It pointed one clawed finger at him. Trying to take advantage of its distraction, Lehua and Aileas got behind it, both hitting it in the back with an extremely powerful blast of lightning - which only succeeded in causing it to turn around and give these two the same fate it had Karina. When it turned back around, starting another void pocket, Ning and Chester were fleeing again, and it pursued. In less than a minute, the entity decided that it was no longer interested in pursuit, and a tendril of nothing shot out from the newest pocket, over the thing’s shoulder, and erased Ning’s legs below the knees. She fell to the ground with a scream.
        “Ning!” Chester said as he stopped, finding the entity very close by, and slowly walking towards them. And then something unexpected as the thing’s visit happened. A voice that Chester had heard only once before - high-pitched, male, filled with confidence and spite, and accompanied by a haze of purple smoke with no visible source.
        “You know I’m the only one who can mess with this reality, right?” came the voice of the extremely powerful demonic duck, Felgar. He appeared between Chester and the entity, the glow from the streetlights shining off of his angled, short horns, thick black hair, and dark blue plumage. The smoke vanished as he finished emerging. With a snap of his fingers, the voids that the thing had created, which by now had started to merge, were gone, leaving enormous scars in the earth, ringed by strips of plants and animals that had been petrified. The entity seemed completely uninterested, and moved to sidestep Felgar. “I’m talking to you!” the demon quipped. With another snap of the fingers, the entity’s form froze up, though it still seemed interested - perhaps obsessed - with Chester. “This reality is my toy, do you understand? Not yours.”
        Without any apparent diversion of its attention, the entity simply reached out and pushed Felgar, the most powerful entity and reality bender this universe had ever seen until now, to the side, expelling him to his home dimension like he was nothing. And, as yet another void was created Chester realized from all that he had seen, this thing was more than a reality bender.
        It was a reality destroyer.
        Another blast of energy from Ning, aimed at the thing’s head, snapped Chester out of his shock. “Go!” she shouted, the spark of life obviously fading from her eyes, and with her telekinesis, she shoved Chester backwards, and everything around him disappeared as the portal Ning had created slammed shut, casting Chester off to a different universe.
        But not before another of the thing’s tendrils of nothingness shot after him through the inter-universal gap, wrapping itself around one of his legs.


* * * * * *


        In another universe, Chester was just starting to take the work gloves off of his hands after a few hours with his wife, tending to her garden. “I’m gonna get some water,” he said as he pulled the gloves off. “What about you, dear?”
        “I’ll do the same,” Ning said. Just as they reached one of her expansive mansion’s back doors, however, there was a dull, hefty thud from behind them, and they both turned around to see another Chester, and he was clearly in bad shape. They ran towards him, only to be repulsed by his condition. His fur was falling out in large patches, all of it having lost his color, the flesh beneath a sickly gray, and he was struggling to breathe. On top of that, one of his legs was gone, and not from any injury that could be discerned; it simply ceased to exist halfway down the thigh, cut off by a patch pitch-black nothingness.
        The Chester of this universe approached, then knelt beside him. “What brings you here?”
        Visitor-Chester wheezed, then said, very weakly, “my universe is gone.” The blackness was slowly creeping up his leg, which was gradually disintegrating to what appeared to be ash.
        “Gone? As in, what, all the matter disintegrated?”
        “It’s been consumed,” the visitor clarified, his voice quickly weakening. “There’s something between realities. I was sent here,” he paused, taking shallow, ragged breaths, “I was sent here to warn you.”
        “Warn us against what? What is this thing?”
        “It- it’s called,” he gasped again, fighting to breathe as the life faded from his eyes, then said something that sounded like Chester’s own name, but backwards.
        “I don’t understand. What’s-” This universe’s chester was cut off by one final, ragged gasp from the visiting Chester as his eyes rolled back into his head, his body suddenly going limp before breaking down all at once into a pile of fine, black ash.