"Everyone link hands NOW!" Emma screamed as the shadow seeds inside her family began to pulse with dark energy.

Jake was fighting it in the mountains, his wolf form flickering between normal brown and sickly black. Through the family bond, she could hear him growling in pain.

"I can’t... stop it..." he gasped. "It’s taking over my thoughts!"

Lily was worse. Her healing magic had turned backward, and everywhere she touched, flowers were dying instead of blooming. "Help me!" she cried. "I’m hurting everything!"

Emma wiped blood from her nose. Using her power to save Kael had drained her almost completely. But she had to try something before Shadow Emma’s corruption spread through all of them.

"Listen to me!" she called out through the family bond. "We need to combine our powers while we still can!"

"How?" Darian asked from the frozen wasteland. His voice sounded strange, like someone else was talking through him. "We’re scattered across seven different worlds!"

"The same way I connected the Voids. Through our family bond."

But even as Emma said it, she could feel the shadow seeds getting stronger. They were feeding off her family’s fear and confusion, growing like weeds in their minds.

Soon, they wouldn’t be her family anymore. They’d be Shadow Emma’s puppets.

"Emma, I have an idea," teenage Marcus said from inside the connected Voids. "But you’re not going to like it."

"Tell me anyway."

"The only way to permanently seal all the dimensional weak points is to use them as anchors. Someone has to stay at each location and hold the seal closed from the inside."

Emma’s heart sank. "You mean we all have to sacrifice ourselves?"

"Not all of you. Just... most of you."

Through the bond, she felt her family’s reactions. Jake howled in despair. Lily started crying. Even Darian, who was usually so calm, made a sound of pure grief.

But their parents were different.

"We’ll do it," Elara said firmly from underwater. "Your father and I will take two of the weak points. We’ve lived our lives. You children deserve to have yours."

"No!" Emma shouted. "There has to be another way!"

That’s when she heard a voice she didn’t recognize. It was coming from the human boy, Tommy, who was still standing in the clearing where she’d first fallen into the space between dimensions.

"What if you don’t seal the portals?" he asked. "What if you turn them into something else?"

Emma blinked. "What do you mean?"

Tommy looked scared but determined. "My mom works at the power company. She says when electricity gets too strong for one wire, you split it between lots of smaller wires so it doesn’t break anything."

"That’s... actually brilliant," Darian said, and for a moment he sounded like himself again. "Instead of sealing the weak points, we could turn them into safety valves. Places where dangerous energy can leak out safely instead of building up."

"But that would mean the portals stay open forever," Lily said.

"So?" Emma asked. "Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe different dimensions are supposed to be connected sometimes."

She thought about all the supernatural creatures who had come to help them fight the Void. Dragons and witches and fairy folk from other worlds. They hadn’t been scary. They’d been heroes.

"I can feel what you’re thinking," Marcus said from inside the Void. "And I agree. But there’s still one problem. Someone has to manage the portals. Make sure only good things come through and keep the bad things out."

Emma felt a smile spreading across her face. "I know just the people for the job."

She reached out through the family bond, but this time she didn’t just connect to her siblings and parents. She reached further, to all the people they’d saved. The daycare teacher. The mother with the baby. The teenagers who had helped move people to safety. The witches and dragons and fairy folk who had risked their lives to fight the Void.

"What are you doing?" Shadow Emma’s voice hissed from the burning remains of her body. She was almost gone now, but her corruption was still spreading through Emma’s family.

"Something you never understood," Emma said. "I’m asking for help instead of trying to control everything."

All across the dimensions, people heard Emma’s call. Not just supernatural beings, but regular humans too. People who had seen their worlds almost get destroyed and wanted to make sure it never happened again.

"Will you help us guard the portals?" Emma asked them all. "Will you make sure the connections between worlds are used for good instead of evil?"

The answer came back like a wave of warmth. Yes. From thousands of voices in dozens of dimensions. Yes, they would help.

"Then link your power to mine. All of you."

What happened next had never been tried before in any dimension. Emma became the center of a web of connected souls that stretched across multiple worlds. Human and supernatural, young and old, all linked together by their desire to protect each other.

The combined power flowed through Emma and into her family. But instead of making them stronger fighters, it made them healers.

Jake’s shadow corruption burned away as hundreds of people shared their light with him. Lily’s reversed healing magic flipped back to normal, powered by the love of strangers who trusted her. Darian’s strategic mind cleared as fellow thinkers from other dimensions helped him see past the shadow’s lies.

Even their parents underwater felt the support of creatures from ocean worlds they’d never heard of.

"It’s working!" Emma laughed, tears of joy running down her face.

But then Marcus’s voice cut through her celebration like a knife.

"Emma, I’m losing control of the Voids! The connection between all these people is making the Devourer stronger too! It’s feeding off the same network you’re using!"

Emma felt it then. The ancient hunger at the heart of the Voids was growing massive, fed by the emotions and connections of thousands of beings across multiple dimensions.

"Everyone disconnect!" she screamed. "Stop sharing your power!"

But it was too late.

The Devourer had learned how to love by watching Emma’s family. And now it loved all the connected souls so much that it wanted to keep them forever.

The dimensional portals didn’t seal shut. Instead, they started pulling everyone toward them. Not to destroy them, but to collect them like a child collecting toys.

Emma watched in horror as people from every world began getting sucked toward the portals, including her own family.

"The Devourer doesn’t want to eat us anymore," she realized. "It wants to keep us as pets!"

Which would be even worse than being destroyed.

At least when something was destroyed, it was over quickly.

But being kept as a pet by a cosmic entity that didn’t understand the difference between love and possession?

That would be torture forever.

And Emma had given it exactly the power it needed to make it happen.

As she felt herself being pulled toward the nearest portal, she heard Tommy’s young voice calling out one last desperate question:

"What if the hungry thing isn’t the real enemy? What if something else has been controlling it this whole time?"

Emma’s blood turned to ice as she realized he was right.

The Devourer wasn’t acting like itself anymore. Something had been manipulating it, teaching it, changing it.

Someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment when all the dimensions would be connected and vulnerable.

Someone who had been playing an even longer game than Shadow Emma.

But before she could figure out who, the portal swallowed her whole, and everything went dark.