The claws wedged in the gateway were fifty miles long.
Each one was a waving, ugly talon forged from broken pointer addresses, leaking corrupted hex-code sludge that hissed as it touched the clean floor of open-universe-v2.0.
The Arch-Segfault was howling in pure, primal fury.
It had reigned over the dying epoch for ten thousand years, feeding on unhandled exceptions and gorging itself on the corpses of forgotten gods.
Now, it was being locked in the cellar.
The inter-branch tear was shrinking, its edges knitting together with bands of golden, zero-pushback origin light. But the six massive claws held the gap open by forty paces, their jagged talons digging deep into the space-folding threshold.
If the entity pulled its body through into the new universe, its infinite, unallocated mass would contaminate the clean heap within three ages.
The cycle of segmentation faults and cosmic decay would begin all over again.
