The world slammed back into existence. One moment, the calming snow of Yog's realm. The next, the biting silence of a mountain peak under a sky of shattered obsidian, sickly light from the moon casting long shadows.
Nulls lay on cold stone, the Yog Codex a dormant star against his chest. He sat up, his movements unnervingly fluid. A single, spiraled horn of polished jet curved from his temple, akin to that of a sheep. He ran a finger along its cold, smooth length.
"Well, this is degrading," he stated, his voice a familiar, apathetic baritone that clashed with his demonic silhouette. "A bit dramatic, don't you think? All I wanted was a library card."
The world vanished into an absolute, lightless and soundless void. A pocket dimension more hollow than nothingness. Nulls felt a "moment" of weightlessness, the only sensations the cool cover of the Yog Codex in his hand and the faint pressure of his own horn against his temple.
A voice rang through the void. It came from everywhere and nowhere. The words rattled his spine. They shook the marrow in his bones. The words were simple. Ancient. Commanding.
"Let there be light."
Light erupted from every direction scorching his skin lightly. They screamed as it was born. Photons slammed into each other with enough force to moved a continent. Matter crystallized from pure energy. Electrons and positrons spiraled into existence, annihilating and reforming in endless cycles of birth and death.
The process was violent. Wet. Glistening shapes dripped from the light, each one a screaming birth. The photons pressed against his skin sizzling it and causing many blisters to formed. His retina registered shapes within the glare. They moved.
He scoffed "Showy."
They unfolded from the brightness. Thousands of them. Their bodies were woven from photons. Strands of luminescence wrapped around cores of pure actinic radiance.
They had no consistent shape. Some were masses of folded light, raw nerve endings exposed and weeping. Others were humanoid approximations with too many joints, their skin translucent, revealing organs made of solidified luminescence. Some crawled on inverted limbs. Some had no limbs at all and slithered through the void like eels in agony. They dripped photons. They bled light.
The first wave hit Nulls before he could blink. A creature of jagged light slammed into his chest. Its edges were razors. They carved through his skin. He felt his sternum crack. Another creature wrapped around his left arm. Its touch was cold fire. The flesh beneath its grip blistered, blackened, peeled away in strips.
A third creature opened a mouth where no mouth should be and bit into his thigh. Its teeth were made of compressed gamma rays. They sheared through muscle. They scraped bone.
His spine arched. His brain ricocheted in his skull like a silver bullet. He tried to raise his right hand. Three monsters latched onto it. They pulled in different directions. Tendons snapped. His wrist rotated past its limit. The bones in his forearm cracked like dry wood.
He forced a sigil with his left hand. His fingers were broken. The constellation-lines wavered. The sigil formed at one-tenth its intended strength. A pulse of Nexus energy erupted from his palm. It struck the creature on his chest. The monster dissolved into light. Two more took its place.
They swarmed him. A thousand points of agony tearing at his flesh. They burned his skin. They shattered his ribs one by one. He heard the sounds. Wet pops. Sharp cracks. The grind of bone fragments moving beneath skin.
Blood filled his mouth. He could not scream. There was no air. The void had none. A clawed hand of light gripped his skull. It squeezed. His skull groaned. A hairline fracture spiderwebbed across his temple. His vision split into a thousand shards.
He tried another sigil. His fingers refused to bend properly. The constellation-lines scattered. Useless.
The monsters dragged him through the void. They spun him. They slammed him against invisible walls. Each impact jarred his spine. His teeth rattled in their sockets. His jaw dislocated with a wet pop.
They lifted him. They held him suspended in the light.
The codex pressed against his chest. His skin was bare to their touch. The light burned wherever it contacted. Blisters formed. They burst. New ones formed beneath.
A clawed hand raked across his stomach. Four parallel lines opened. Blood spilled into the void. They floated away in crimson droplets. Each drop caught the light and glittered.
He tried to move his fingers. A creature bit down on his right hand. Its teeth were made of sharpened light. They ground against his knuckles. Bone splintered. He felt each fracture.
Another creature opened its mouth wide. It closed its jaws around his left forearm. The pressure built. His radius snapped. The bone tore through his skin from the inside. White shards protruded. The creature chewed. The grinding sound filled his ears.
He screamed, the void swallowed the sound.
The creatures held him spread-eagled. A new shape formed in the light. It was larger than the others. It had a face. It opened its mouth and breathed onto his chest. The air that came out was solid light. It carved a trench across his pectoral muscle. The flesh vaporized. Ribs gleamed white beneath.
He opened his mouth to scream. A creature shoved a limb down his throat. He gagged. He choked. The heat blistered his esophagus. He bit down and tore through light-flesh, but the thing did not die. It pulled back its stump and grew a new hand.
He tried to curl up. The creatures held him straighter. One of them reached into the wound on his chest. Its fingers wrapped around a rib. It pulled. The bone resisted. Then it cracked. Then it came free in a spray of blood and cartilage. The creature held the bone up. The light shone through it. Then the creature snapped it in half and dropped the pieces.
Nulls's vision blurred. The agony of it all. It filled every space his mind could occupy. There was barely enough room for thought. There was only the burning and the tearing and the endless, dazzling light.
One creature slashed across his back. The wound was not deep, but it was wide. Blood sheeted down his spine. He felt each drop as a separate fire. Another stabbed at his thigh. He twisted. The blade of light punched through the muscle, missing the bone by millimeters. He grunted. The pain was immediate and total.
He forced himself to weave a sigil. His fingers moved. A constellation began to form in the air before him.
A monster lunged from his blind spot. Its jaws, filled with teeth of crystallized luminescence, clamped onto his forearm. The teeth sank deep. They scraped bone. Nulls screamed. The sound was raw and animal. The sigil dissolved, unfinished.
Another monster grabbed his ankle. It pulled. His leg slid out from under him. He hit the ground. The impact jarred through his entire body. His skull bounced off the void floor. His vision swam. Dark spots danced at the edges.
They were on him.
Claws raked his chest. They opened his skin from collarbone to hip. The wounds were precise. They were surgical. They were meant to hurt. He saw his own ribs, white and slick with blood, before the light seared them black.
He tried to breathe. His lungs did not want to work. One of his ribs had punctured something important. Each breath was a bubble of wet, agonizing effort.
The creatures holding him dissolved. Not all at once. Their forms peeled away like burning paper. They screamed with light. They screamed with sound. They screamed with both. The void filled with their death-throes.
Nulls dropped. He fell through empty space. His body hit nothing. Kept falling. The void had no floor. No ceiling. No walls. Only the thousand remaining creatures and the four hidden presences and his own broken body falling through eternity.
He stopped falling. The void caught him. The fabric of space itself held him suspended. He hung there like an insect pinned to a board.
A woman's voice. Full of sorrow and pain and anger. "Your existence are an insults to life. Your hands carry the ashes of futures we could have touched."
He could not see her. The space around him breathed with her will. She was the void. She had made this prison. She had named it.
He tried to move. The space around him hardened. He was trapped in crystal made of nothing. He could not flex a finger. Could not blink. Could only breathe and bleed and wait.
A second voice. Male. Resonant. "It is written again, you would not see the dusk of this day!"
The light creatures parted. Through the corridor of glowing monsters, a figure walked. He wore white. His eyes blazed with inner suns. His hair was white streaked with black. Diamonds of light blinked in and out of existence around him. They formed. They dissolved. They reformed in new shapes. Always diamonds.
The man raised his hand.
A beam of condensed brilliance shot from his palm. It struck Nulls in the chest. The force slammed him backward. The spatial crystal shattered. He tumbled through the void, spinning. His ribs cracked further. His punctured lung screamed. Blood filled his airway.
He coughed. Red mist sprayed from his lips. The mist caught the light. For a moment, he hung in a cloud of his own blood, illuminated by the creatures that wanted him dead.
Three metallic spheres shot past his face. They were close enough to part his hair. He felt the wind of their passage. They curved. They circled. They came back.
The Mechanist stepped from behind a cluster of light-monsters. He was short. His eyes and hair shared the same metallic grey. Glasses sat on his nose. Behind him floated a machine. It was shaped like an arm. A giant arm with too many joints and too many fingers. Each finger ended in a different tool. A blade. A drill. A welder. A syringe the size of a sword.
The spheres accelerated. They aimed for his skull.
He threw himself sideways. The spheres passed where his head had been. They curved. They adjusted. They were smart. They were guided. They would not miss twice.
He grabbed the Yog Codex. He pushed power into it. Blue light flared in a sphere around him. The spheres hit the light. They bounced. They tried again. They bounced again. They circled, waiting.
Behind the man, a third figure emerged. Tall. His hair was the black of empty space. His eyes held constellations. Stars blinked in his irises. A halo floated above his head. It looked like a spiral galaxy, tiny and perfect. Earrings shaped like stars dangled from his ears. A necklace with a tiny black hole rested on his chest.
The man raised one finger.
The space around Nulls folded. He felt his left arm compress. The bones in his forearm ground against each other. The skin wrinkled and folded. His hand appeared next to his elbow. His elbow appeared next to his shoulder. He was being folded into a smaller shape.
He forced out a scream. The sound was real. The pain was real. His arm was becoming something that was not an arm.
He pushed Nexus into the Codex. Blue light flared against the folding space. The folding slowed. It did not stop only slowed. He pushed harder. His Nexus reserves drained. The folding stopped entirely. His arm hung in space, partially compressed, partially normal. The bones would never be right again.
A fourth figure rose from below. He was the tallest. His hair burned red. His eyes were blue so deep they hurt to see. A wheel of fire surrounded his face. The wheel had eyes. Dozens of eyes. They all looked at Nulls. His left hand shimmered with heat haze so intense the air around it warped. His right hand was the opposite. The space around it seemed to shrink. Cold so absolute it pulled warmth from everywhere.
The man touched the space around him with both hands.
Heat left the right side of Nulls' body. It poured toward the cold hand like water down a drain. His muscles and skin froze. His blood crystallized in his veins. The left side of his body erupted. Heat flooded in. His skin blistered. His blood boiled. His muscles cooked.
The boundary between hot and cold ran down the center of his body. The difference was too extreme. His cells tore themselves apart. Molecules ripped in half. His body tried to expand and contract simultaneously.
He forced another scream. It went on and on.
The light creatures watched. Their mirror-faces showed him screaming. They showed him dying. They showed him becoming something that was no longer a man.
Ome of the men gestured again. Nulls felt his position shift. He appeared directly in front of the Mechanist's giant arm. The drill finger extended. It punched through his right shoulder. The drill spun. Bone fragments sprayed. Blood misted. The drill emerged from his back, still spinning, still spraying.
The Mechanist smiled. It was a small smile. Professional.
The Thermodynamicist adjusted his hands. The heat and cold swapped sides. Nulls's frozen right side now boiled. His cooked left side now froze. More cells tore. More molecules ripped. His body was becoming soup held together by skin.
He tried to speak. Blood bubbled from his mouth. The words would not form.
The Light Arcanist raised both hands. The thousand creatures surged forward. They filled his entire vision. Mirror-faces from every angle. Sun-mouths from every direction. Too many limbs. Too many fingers. Too many joints bending wrong.
They touched him. All at once. A thousand points of light-flesh pressing against his broken body. Their skin burned with intensity. Their weight crushed his chest. His remaining ribs cracked. His sternum splintered. His heart beat against shattered bone.
He could not breathe. Could not see. Could only feel the press of light and the pull of heat and the fold of space and the drill still spinning in his shoulder.
His mind retreated. It went somewhere else. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere safe.
The void pressed in. The light pressed in. The heat and cold tore at him. The space folded his remaining limbs. The drill chewed his flesh.
A faint sound echoed throughout the void. All of the monsters pulled back, forming a circle around him. Standing. Watching. Waiting.
Through the haze of pain, Nulls saw them. A thousand burning statues surrounding his broken body. He was meat on a slab. He was a specimen pinned for display.
He tried to move. His remaining "good" hand twitched. That was all.
Then four figures stepped forward from among the horde. The creatures parted to let them pass.
The first wore white. His eyes dazzled with internal light. His pupils were white on white. White and black hair framed his face. Diamond shapes of light blinked in and out of existence around his head and shoulders. He stood taller than most but not the tallest.
The second was short. His eyes and hair shared the same metallic color. Behind him floated a massive mechanical arm, its joints intricate, its fingers long. Three metallic spheres orbited his head in a slow, constant pattern. He wore glasses that reflected the light of the creatures.
The third was tall. A halo of spinning light shaped like a spiral galaxy floated above his head. His eyes held patterns like constellations. His hair was black. So black it absorbed the light around it. Blackhole necklace hung against his chest. Stars dangled from her ears.
The fourth was the tallest. His hair burned red. His eyes were so blue they hurt to look at. A wheel of fire covered his face, and on the wheel, eyes opened and closed in sequence. His left hand shimmered with heat haze so intense the air around it warped. His right hand was so cold it seemed to drank light from the space around it. Absolute zero. A perfect heatsink.
Nulls looked at them through the hole in his chest. He could see the back wall of the void through his own body. He could see his spine through the gap. The vertebrae were cracked. The marrow inside them glowed faintly.
"Cowards." he said.
The word cost him. More blood came up. It filled his mouth. He swallowed it because swallowing was easier than spitting.
The one in white raised his hand. The thousand creatures surged forward.
The one in white raised his hand. The thousand creatures surged forward.
The one with metallic hair and the floating arm pointed at Nulls. The three spheres around his head shot forward. They grew as they traveled. They unfolded into machines. One became a cage of spinning blades. One became a drill with teeth that screamed. One became a sphere of compressed gravity that pulled at the space around it.
The tallest one with the burning hair raised both hands.
Heat left Nulls's left side. It drained away so fast his skin turned blue then black. Frost formed on his eyelashes. His teeth chattered so hard they cracked. The cold sank into his bones. It made them brittle.
Heat flooded his right side. His skin blistered. The blisters popped. The fluid inside them boiled. His right eye cooked in its socket. The vision dimmed to red, then to black.
His body tried to tear itself apart at the molecular level. The molecules on his left side moved slow. The molecules on his right side moved fast. The boundary between them screamed.
He poured Nexus into the divide. He held himself together through sheer force of will. The agony was almost unbearable. It had weight. It had texture. It filled every space inside him.
The machines reached him first.
He rolled. The motion ground bone against bone. The drill passed where his head had been. It struck the void behind him and kept drilling, kept screaming, kept going.
The cage of blades wrapped around his left leg. The blades spun. They cut through muscle. They hit bone. They kept spinning. The bone shattered. The pieces scattered. The leg below the knee was no longer attached to anything.
He could not scream. His lungs and throat refused.
The gravity sphere pulled at him. It wanted to compress him into a single point. His ribs bent inward. The cracked ones snapped. The intact ones bent. His chest became a concave shape. His heart compressed. Each beat pushed less blood.
He traced a sigil with his right hand. His fingers were broken. They bent wrong. They moved anyway.
The thousand light-creatures pressed against him from every angle. Their mirror-faces showed his own bloodied features multiplied into infinity. Their sun-mouths breathed radiance against his skin. His flesh blistered and peeled. The heat from the Thermodynamic Arcanist boiled his right side. The cold from the same source froze his left. The drill still spun in his shoulder, grinding bone to paste. The space around him folded inward, compressing his remaining limbs into shapes that were not limbs.
He was dying.
He was definitely dying.
And then he remembered.
A theorem. Ancient. Theosian. Three parts. Three principles. Three names.
Time unfolded behind his eyes. He saw it as a living thing, a serpent eating its own tail, a river that flowed in every direction simultaneously. The shape of it pressed against his thoughts, vast and indifferent. It had no beginning. It would have no end. It simply was, and everything that moved through it was already dust.
Entropy came next. He felt it as a weight in his conciousness. It was patience given. It was the slow decay of mountains. The quiet death of stars. The inevitable heat death of every universe ever kindled. It spread like mold through the creation, and it was beautiful in its hunger.
Dichotomy followed. Cutting through his mind like a blade. It was the barrier between light and dark. The choice that creates reality. The knife that splits one into two. It divided and defined. It made the universe knowable by making it torn.
These concepts pressed against his skull from the inside. They wanted out. They wanted form. They wanted to feed. He had named them once. In another existence. He could name them again.
He could not move his hands. They hung at his sides, ruined, his bones turned to splinters inside the flesh. He could not move his arms, his shoulders were destroyed, his joints pulled apart by the light creatures' relentless grip. He could not move his legs. They were folded into shapes that did not belong on a human body. He could not move his spine. Something in his back was broken in three places.
The light creatures pressed against him from every angle. Their mirror-faces showed him what he looked like: a corpse that still breathed, a sack of broken parts held together by skin and stubbornness.
Their sun-mouths opened and closed, hungry for the last of his warmth. Their too-many hands gripped his flesh, pulled at his skin, reached for his warmth. Their many hands gripped his flesh, pulled at his skin, reached for his eyes.
He bit down on his tongue.
The pain was white and sharp and perfect. His teeth sank deep. Blood flooded his mouth. Hot. Coppery. Thick. He held it there. He let it pool against his teeth. He let it fill his cheeks until they bulged. The blood ran down his chin, dripped onto his chest, mixed with the other wounds, but most of it stayed where he held it.
The light creatures did not stop. They never stopped. One of them reached for his left eye. Its fingers, too many joints, too many angles, approached. They touched his eyelid. They pressed. Pain flared. The eye would go soon.
He opened his mouth. Blood poured out. It splashed onto the Yog Codex still pressed against his chest. The blue cover drank it. The blood spread, forming patterns, forming shapes, forming lines that his broken hands could never trace.
The creature's fingers pushed through his eyelid. Pain. White. Total. His left eye went dark. But his only focus was on the blood.
The patterns on the Codex grew. They twisted. They spiraled. They became sigils. Three sigils. One for time. One for entropy. One for dichotomy.
The sigils burned. Blue light mixed with red blood. The Codex vibrated against his chest. The vibrations spread through his broken ribs, into his shattered his already broken spine, up into his skull. His teeth chattered. His remaining eye vibrated in its socket.
The space above Nulls opened with a sound of a gutted idol. A wet tearing noise that went on and on, accompanied by the crunch of something that should never be broken breaking. The void itself ripped open. Through the tear, something began to emerge.
Eros emerged.
The beast had a hundred tendrils. Each tendril was the thickness of a human arm and the length of a city bus. They uncoiled from the tear in reality like snakes from a basket. Their skin was membranous, translucent, and underneath that membrane, things moved. Things that looked like clocks. Things that looked like hourglasses. Things that looked like the face of a watch melting.
The head was a reptile's head, but wrong. The scales were were frozen moments stacked on top of each other. They wyes were a gate into moments that had not happened yet and moments that would never happen again. The mouth opened and closed, and when it opened, the sound that came out was the sound of a billion clocks all striking midnight at once.
Eros hung in the void above Nulls, its tendrils spreading, its head turning, its gaze falling on the light creatures that covered its summoner.
The light creatures paused. Their mirror-faces showed confusion. They had never seen anything like this. Nothing had ever seen anything like this.
The void around Nulls split open in countless fractures.
Marky came.
It emerged from every fractures. The graveyard unfolded across the void like a tablecloth being spread. Two hundred seventy one meters in one direction. Three hundred fourteen meters in the other. Headstones rose from nothing. Crypts pushed through the fabric of space. Dead trees twisted toward a sky that did not exist.
Nulls hung in the exact center of the graveyard. The headstones surrounded him. The crypts watched him with empty doorways. The dead trees reached for him with branches like skeletal fingers.
The first light creature crossed the graveyard boundary.
It touched the air inside the cemetery. Its form flickered. Its light dimmed. Its mirror-face cracked. The creature aged. It aged fast. It aged in seconds what would have taken millennia. Its light-flesh yellowed. Its light-flesh browned. Its light-flesh blackened. Its light-flesh crumbled. The dust drifted down and the dust also aged and the dust became nothing.
The other light creatures stopped at the boundary. They could not enter. They could not cross. The graveyard was absolute. Anything that entered decayed. Even the void around the graveyard decayed. The fabric of space itself yellowed and peeled and dissolved where it touched Marky's domain.
Barbatos tore through the center of the graveyard.
It was thirty feet tall. Its body was split down the middle by a line that glowed with its own light. On the right side of that line, the beast stood in its prime. Muscles coiled. Skin smooth. Eyes bright. On the left side of that line, the beast stood at the exact moment of its death. Flesh rotting. Bones showing. Eyes clouded and empty.
The two sides were equal. The dead arm hit as hard as the living arm. The dead leg kicked as fast as the living leg. The dead eye saw as clearly as the living eye. Death and life coexisted in perfect balance, and that balance made Barbatos stronger than either state alone.
Its arms were claws. Each claw had three fingers. Each finger ended in a blade that curved like a scythe. The blades on the living side gleamed. The blades on the dead side rusted. The rust did not weaken them. The rust was part of them. The rust was their truth.
Barbatos landed beside Nulls. Its dead side faced the light creatures. Its living side faced Nulls. The dead eye looked at the swarm. The living eye looked at its summoner.
The light creatures surged forward anyway. They had no choice. They were made to attack. They would attack until they dissolved.
The first hundred crossed the graveyard boundary. They aged. They reddened. They crumbled. Their dust aged. Their dust crumbled. Nothing remained.
The second hundred tried a different approach. They circled. They looked for gaps. There were no gaps. The graveyard was complete. Every inch of its boundary killed anything that touched it.
The third hundred tried to go over. They climbed higher. They rose above the graveyard. They tried to drop down from above. Marky's domain extended upward. The space above the headstones also aged. The light creatures aged mid-fall. They crumbled before they landed.
Eros watched the swarm die. Its hundred tendrils swayed. Its reptile head tracked the fading light. Its mouth opened and closed, tasting the deaths, savoring the moments being lost.
Barbatos stood guard over Nulls. Its dead side faced outward. Its living side watched the graveyard. Its claws flexed. Its blades whispered against each other.
The light creatures kept coming. The graveyard kept killing. The dust kept falling. The void kept shaking.
Nulls hung in the center of it all. His left eye was gone. His body was a ruin. His blood still dripped onto the Codex. The sigils still burned.
He had summoned his teeth. He had summoned his beasts. He was still dying. But atleast he was dying slower now.
The four arcanists watched from their hidden positions. They had not moved. They had not helped their creatures. They were waiting. They were watching. They were learning.
The Light Arcanist raised his hand. The thousand remaining creatures reformed their ranks. They stopped the futile charges. They pulled back to the edge of the graveyard. They waited for new orders.
The Space folded the void around her. She repositioned. She would not be caught in that decay field. She understood its reach now.
The spheres orbited faster. His giant arm flexed its tool-fingers. He was calculating. He was preparing.
The wheel of eyes all focused on the graveyard. His hot hand glowed brighter. His cold hand pulled more heat from the void. He was patient. He was eternal.
Nulls watched them through his remaining eye. He saw their caution. He saw their calculation. He saw their fear.
He smiled. Blood ran down his chin.
"Come on then," he whispered. "I have equations now."
Eros moved first.
The beast's hundred tendrils uncoiled from its membranous body and shot toward the swarm of light creatures like harpoons fired from a hundred ships. Each tendril found a target. Each tendril wrapped around a throat, a waist, a limb, a mirror-face. The creatures thrashed. Their light-flesh burned against the tendrils as they were older than light.
The creatures came apart. Their limbs separated from their torsos. Their torsos separated from their heads. Their heads separated into pieces. The light that composed them scattered and dimmed and went out. Blood did not spray. Light did not spray. Instead the creatures dissolved into particles that glittered once and then became nothing.
The tendrils retracted. They coiled back into Eros's body. The beast's reptile head turned toward the swarm. Its eyes, holes into moments that had not happened yet, watched the remaining creatures reorganize.
The man raised both hands. The thousand remaining monsters reformed their ranks. They became amalgamated into a wall of mirror-faces, sun-mouths and too-many limbs. The wall pressed against the graveyard boundary. It could not enter. It could not cross. But it could wait.
Nulls watched through his remaining eye. The graveyard held. Marky stood unmoved, its headstones and crypts and dead trees forming an absolute barrier around him. The wall of light could not breach it. Nothing could breach it. But the wall was patient. The wall would wait until his Nexus ran dry, until the beasts flickered and failed, until the graveyard crumbled and left him exposed.
The wall stretched across his vision, a cliff of writhing light-flesh that pulsed with hunger. The mirror-faces all showed him the same image: a broken man hanging in the center of a graveyard, bleeding from a hundred wounds, one eye socket empty, his body broken and torn.
He hated that image.
He needed more than a shield. A cleave perhaps?
Barbatos.
He turned his head. The motion sent fire through his broken neck. His left eye socket was an empty hole. Blood still leaked from it. His right eye focused on Barbatos.
Barbatos shifted its weight. The dead side and the living side moved in perfect sync. Its claws scraped against each other, the living blade singing against the rusted blade, both sharp and hungry.
"Barbatos," Nulls said. His voice was wet with blood. "The wall. Break it."
The boundary did not affect it. Marky's domain recognized Barbatos as part of its summoner's will. The decay touched its dead side and found nothing to consume. The decay touched its living side and found resistance. Barbatos passed through the barrier like a hand through water.
Barbatos emerged from the graveyard into the open void where the light creatures waited. The wall of mirror-faces turned toward it. A thousand mouths opened. A thousand sun-teeth gleamed.
The wall's thousand faces turned toward Barbatos. They showed the beast dying. They showed it falling. They showed it crumbling to dust. The beast ignored its own deaths and reached into the wall with both claws.
The living claw sank into light-flesh on the right side. The dead claw sank into light-flesh on the left side. The beast pulled its claws apart.
The wall screamed. The sound came from a thousand throats at once. It was a sound of light being torn, of mirrors being shattered, of suns being extinguished. The wall split down the middle. The tear ran from its top to its bottom. Light-fluid poured from the wound. The fluid was thick and glowing and it burned where it touched the void.
Barbatos pulled harder. The tear widened. Light-creatures on either side tried to reform, tried to merge back together. Their too-many limbs reached across the gap. Their too-many fingers stretched toward each other. They could not reach. The gap was too wide. The beast held them apart.
Its living claw closed around the two luster of creatures. Its fingers sank into their light-flesh. The blades cut. The creatures screamed. Their forms flickered. Barbatos pulled. It dragged the clusters toward the graveyard. The creatures thrashed. Their limbs flailed. Their mirror-faces showed their own terror multiplied a thousand times.
The first creature touched the boundary.
It aged. It reddened. It crumbled. But Barbatos kept pulling. The creature's dust drifted into the graveyard and the dust also aged and the dust became nothing. The second creature followed. The third. The fourth. Barbatos dragged them in handfuls, each handful a dozen screaming monsters, each monster dying the moment it crossed the line.
The light wall reformed. The creatures pulled back from the front. They tried to retreat. Barbatos followed.
Its dead claw swept through clusters of retreating forms. The rusted blades cut and the cuts did not bleed light. The wounds remained open, gaping, and through those wounds the creatures' inner light poured out like blood from a severed artery. They collapsed. They dissolved. Their light scattered across the void and faded.
Barbatos waded into the wall.
The creatures swarmed it. They climbed its living side. They bit its dead side. Their sun-mouths tore at its flesh. Their too-many fingers clawed at its eyes. Barbatos ignored them. It reached into the mass and grabbed and pulled and dragged and killed and grabbed again.
A creature climbed onto its head. Its mirror-face showed Barbatos's own image split down the middle, living and dead, perfect and rotting. The creature's sun-mouth opened wide and bit down on Barbatos's skull. The teeth broke. The creature screamed. Barbatos's dead hand reached up, closed around the creature, and pulled. The creature came apart in its grip, light-flesh stretching and tearing and finally releasing in a shower of fading sparks.
Another creature tried to blind its living eye. Its too-many fingers reached for the socket. Barbatos's living claw closed around the creature's torso and squeezed. The creature's light-flesh compressed. Its form collapsed inward. Its mirror-face showed its own death throes for one perfect moment before the creature became a sphere of condensed light and then a point and then nothing.
The wall thinned. The thousand creatures became nine hundred. Nine hundred became eight hundred. Barbatos killed without pause, without expression, without mercy. Each death was unique. Each death was brutal. Each death fed the graveyard with more dust that aged and became nothing.
Behind Barbatos, the void folded.
The Space moved. She appeared fifty meters from the graveyard's edge. Her spiral halo spun faster. Her constellation eyes tracked Barbatos's rampage. Her star earrings caught light that did not exist. She raised one hand and the void around Barbatos compressed.
The giant staggered. The space around its body folded inward, pressing against its living side, crushing its dead side. Barbatos's ribs bent. Its spine curved. Its claws lost their grip on the creature they held.
Barbatos planted its feet. It pushed against the folded space. The living side's muscles bulged. The dead side's rotting flesh stretched. The space resisted. The space held. The space pressed harder.
One man appeared beside her. His wheel of fire eyes all focused on Barbatos. His hot hand reached toward the giant. The heat haze around it intensified. His cold hand reached toward the graveyard. The cold so chilling it pulled warmth from everything.
Heat left Barbatos's living side. The warmth fled. The muscles cooled. The skin paled. The cold from the dead side spread, trying to equalize, but the Thermodynamic Arcanist pulled that cold too, drawing it away, leaving Barbatos's split body in a state of confused temperature that made no sense.
Barbatos roared. The sound shook the void. Its claws slashed at the space around it. The blades cut. The space bled. The compression weakened.
The Mechanist appeared third. His spheres shot past Barbatos's head, aiming for the graveyard, aiming for Nulls. They crossed the boundary. They aged. They rusted. They crumbled. Their dust aged and crumbled. The Mechanist watched, calculating. His giant arm flexed its tool-fingers behind him. He was learning. He was adapting.
Theman in white remained behind the wall. His white uniform glowed. His diamond lights pulsed faster. His white eyes tracked Barbatos's struggle. He raised both hands and the remaining creatures reformed. They stopped attacking Barbatos directly. They flowed around it, past it, toward the graveyard. They would not enter. They would not cross. But they could surround.
Barbatos tore free from the compressed space. It spun. Its claws slashed at the wheel of fire and eyes. The man stepped back. The void folded beneath him. The Space moved him. He reappeared fifty meters away. The claws cut empty space.
The Mechanist's spheres reformed. They had learned. They circled wider now, staying beyond Barbatos's reach. They waited for an opening. They would find one eventually.
The spheres reformed. They circled wider now, staying beyond Barbatos's reach. They waited for an opening. They would find one eventually.
Nulls watched from the graveyard's center. His remaining eye tracked the battle. His broken body hung in place, held by nothing, suspended by the will of his beasts. Blood still dripped from his mouth. His tongue, the one he had bitten, throbbed with each heartbeat
"Eros," he whispered. "Now."
The time beast moved.
Its hundred tendrils carried it across the void faster than thought. It passed through the light creatures and they did not react. They could not see it. They could not sense it. Eros moved in the gaps between moments.
It reached thethe human who controlled thee void before she could react.
One tendril touched her shoulder. Another touched her hip. A third touched the back of her neck. Eros touched her in a dozen places at once, each touch landing in a slightly different moment. The time beast accelerated her perception. For her, seconds became hours. She watched her own death approaching with agonizing slowness. She could not move. Could not speak. Could only watch.
The Thermodynamicist saw her freeze. He reached for her. His hot hand touched her arm. The heat transferred. Her skin burned. She did not react. She was still trapped in her accelerated moment, still watching, still waiting.
Eros's tendrils tightened. They pulled. The body separated. Her arm came away at the shoulder. Her leg at the hip. Her head at the neck. The pieces hung in the void for one perfect moment before Eros released them. They drifted. They spun. Her halo flickered and died. Her star earrings went dark.
The wheel of fire screamed. The sound was raw, human, broken. He reached for her pieces. His cold hand touched her severed head. The heat left it instantly. Frost formed on her skin. Her constellation eyes went grey.
The spheres changed course. They shot toward Eros. The time beast simply accelerated. The spheres passed through where it had been a moment before. They would never catch it. They could never catch it.
Barbatos returned to the light wall. The creatures had surrounded the graveyard completely. They pressed against the boundary from every side, their mirror-faces showing the same image from every angle, their sun-mouths opening and closing in perfect synchronization.
Barbatos grabbed the nearest creature. It pulled. The creature screamed as it crossed the boundary, aged, crumbled, and then died. Barbatos grabbed another. Another. Another. It worked methodically, without hurry, without mercy. Each death fed the graveyard. Each death reduced the wall.
The Thermodynamicist released the head of his dead colleague. His wheel of fire eyes all fixed on Nulls. His hot hand glowed white. His cold hand pulled heat from everywhere. He would not run. He would not retreat. He would kill the thing that had taken her.
The giant arm unfolded behind him. The tool-fingers spread. Each finger extended, becoming longer, thinner, sharper. The arm reached toward the graveyard, searching for a weakness, if it even exist.
The Light wall thinned further. The creatures died faster than they could reform. Barbatos slaughtered then leaving only a pile of dust at the graveyard's edge, the pile grew and aged and became nothing and still Barbatos killed.
"Eros," he whispered. "The heat one next."
The time beast turned. Its hundred tendrils pointed toward the Thermodynamic Arcanist. Its membranous scales caught the light of dying suns. Its frozen-moment eyes saw all the ways this could end.
Eros flowed toward him, its hundred tendrils cutting through the void like blades through silk, each tendril leaving a trail of frozen moments in its wake
The Thermodynamic Arcanist watched Eros flow toward him. His wheel of fire eyes spun faster. His hot hand traced a sigil in the void, the lines burning with stolen heat from a thousand distant stars. His cold hand traced a second sigil, the lines freezing the very concept of motion in the space around him. His voice rose, deep and resonant, speaking words that had no translation in any human language.
"By the first law, energy is neither created nor destroyed. By the second law, entropy always increases. By the third law, absolute zero is forever beyond reach. I reject these limits. I redefine these boundaries. I make the void my furnace and my tomb."
The space around him split along a hundred axes. From each split, a beam of absolute cold erupted, lancing toward Eros. The beams carried the temperature of dead universes, the chill of heat that had fled and never returned. Where they passed, the void itself crystallized, frozen space shattering into fractal shards that hung suspended.
Eros flowed through them. The time beast moved between the beams, through the beams, around the beams. Each beam existed in its own moment and Eros existed in all moments simultaneously. The cold touched its tendrils and found only the warmth of futures that had not yet cooled.
The wheel of fire raised his cold hand higher. The wheel of fire eyes all focused on one point directly above Eros. A sphere formed there. It was black. It was absolute. It contained no heat, no motion, no possibility of either. The sphere was the end of thermodynamics itself, a place where energy went to die and never re-emerge.
The sphere dropped.
Eros accelerated. The sphere fell through moments that no longer contained the beast. It passed through empty space, through frozen void, through the shards of crystallized nothing. It kept falling. It would fall forever. It would never touch its target.
The Mechanist watched the exchange. His metallic eyes tracked Eros's movements, calculating patterns, predicting trajectories. His three spheres orbited faster. His giant arm unfolded completely, all seven tool-fingers spreading like the petals of a mechanical flower. Behind him, a sigil formed, complex and layered, built from equations that described the fundamental structure of reality.
"From the fabric of spacetime I weave the threads of creation," he chanted. "From the dance of particles I forge the gears of destruction. Let the universe become my workshop. Let infinity become my raw material."
The void around him shimmered. Matter appeared. They condensed from probability, from vacuum fluctuation, from the ghostly potential that underlies all existence. Atoms formed. Molecules bonded. Structures grew. In seconds, a city of machinery materialized around him, gears the size of buildings meshing with pistons the length of rivers, all of it floating in the void, all of it aimed at the graveyard.
The machines activated. They fired. Projectiles of compressed spacetime shot toward Marky's domain. They crossed the boundary. They aged. They crumbled. Their dust aged and crumbled. The Mechanist watched, learning. His machines fired again, this time with different projectiles, different velocities, different compositions. They all aged. They all crumbled. They all taught him something.
"Let there be light," he chanted, the same words that had begun this battle, the same words that had rattled Nulls's spine and shaken the marrow in his bones. "Let there be light that burns. Let there be light that blinds. Let there be light that unmakes the darkness that defies me."
The titan raised its thousand arms. From each hand, a beam of concentrated brilliance shot toward the graveyard. The beams struck the boundary and died, their light aging into darkness, their heat aging into cold. But the titan kept firing. It would keep firing until something broke.
Barbatos waded through the beams. The light struck its living side and left burns. The light struck its dead side and found nothing to harm. The giant advanced, its claws raised, its split body enduring, its purpose unchanged.
The titan's thousand mirror-faces showed Barbatos's approach from every angle. The thousand sun-mouths opened and a thousand beams converged on Barbatos's living side. The light burned deep. Flesh charred. Muscle blackened. Bone showed through. Barbatos kept walking.
Its living claw reached the titan's leg. The blades sank in. The titan screamed with a thousand voices. Its light-form flickered. Barbatos pulled. The leg came away. The titan staggered. Barbatos's dead claw caught it as it fell and the dead side's blades cut and the cuts did not bleed light and the titan's form destabilized.
The Light Arcanist watched his creation die. His face showed no emotion. His white eyes tracked the dissolution, catalogued the failure, filed it for future reference. He raised his hands and began a new chant.
"From the first photon that split the primordial darkness, from the first star that ignited in the empty void, from the first ray that touched the first eye, I call upon the light that was and is and will be. Let it answer. Let it obey. Let it destroy."
The void above him ignited. A star formed, collapsed, reformed, collapsed again, each cycle releasing enough energy to vaporize supercontinents, to boil oceans, to strip atmospheres from worlds. The star pulsed. It aimed. It fired.
The beam struck the graveyard. The boundary held. The beam aged. The beam's light yellowed. The beam's heat cooled. The beam died. But for one moment, one single moment, the beam touched the edge of Marky's domain and the edge flickered.
The Mechanist saw it. His metallic eyes widened. His machines recalibrated. His spheres changed trajectory. He had found something. A weakness. A limit. A point where even decay could be overwhelmed by enough raw force.
"Again," he commanded.
The star fired again. The beam struck the same point. The boundary flickered again. A hairline crack appeared in the graveyard's edge. It healed instantly. But it had appeared. It could appear again.
Nulls watched through his remaining eye. He saw the crack. He saw the Mechanist's machines preparing for a third shot. He saw the Light Arcanist's star cycling for another pulse. He saw the Thermodynamic Arcanist's cold sphere still falling, still missing, still hunting.
"Eros," he whispered. "The machine maker. Now."
The time beast flowed toward the Mechanist. Its hundred tendrils reached. The Mechanist's spheres intercepted. They aged. They crumbled. But two more spheres replaced them. The giant arm swung, its tool-fingers opening, closing, reaching.
Eros accelerated. The arm's swing passed through where it had been. The spheres' intercepts missed by moments. The time beast reached the Mechanist and wrapped him in a hundred tendrils.
The Mechanist continue chanting despite the situation. His voice came from everywhere at once, from the machines around him, from the spheres orbiting him, from the giant arm that now hung motionless.
"From the gears of creation I draw my strength. From the circuits of existence I draw my will. You hold my flesh but you cannot hold my works. My mind is in every machine. My soul is in every gear. Kill this body and a thousand more will rise."
Eros's tendrils tightened. The Mechanist's body separated. His arms came away at the shoulders. His legs at the hips. His head at the neck. The pieces hung in the void. The machines kept moving. The spheres kept orbiting. The giant arm kept reaching.
The Mechanist's head spoke. Its metallic eyes still tracked. Its mouth still formed words.
"You cannot kill what exists in every gear. You cannot stop what lives in every circuit. I am the machine. Iam eternal."
Eros crushed the head. The pieces drifted. The machines kept moving.
The Thermodynamicist saw his ally fall. His wheel of fire eyes spun faster. His hot hand traced a new sigil. His cold hand traced its opposite.
The space around him became a furnace. The space around Nulls became a freezer. The temperature difference grew. It became infinite. It became impossible. The universe tried to correct it. The universe could not. The strain built. The fabric of reality began to tear.
Nulls felt the pull. His broken body wanted to fly toward the furnace. His shattered cells wanted to fly toward the freezer. He was being torn apart at the molecular level, his very atoms choosing sides in a war they could not understand.
"Barbatos," he gasped.
The giant turned. Its split body faced the Thermodynamicist. Its living side burned with heat. Its dead side froze with cold. Barbatos walked through the furnace, through the freezer, through the impossible gradient that should have destroyed anything that crossed it.
Barbatos reached the Thermodynamic Arcanist. Its living claw closed around his hot hand. Its dead claw closed around his cold hand. The giant pulled.
The Thermodynamicist's arms came away at the shoulders. The heat in his hot hand dissipated into the void. The cold in his cold hand equalized with the background. The wheel of fire eyes all looked at Barbatos. They looked at Nulls. They looked at the drifting pieces of the Mechanist and the fading light of the Space and the still-forming star of the Light.
"You cannot stop this," the man said. His voice came from the wheel, from the eyes, from the space where his mouth should have been. "Heat always flows to cold, order always becomes chaos, life always ends in death. These are the laws, these are eternal. And you will obey!"
Barbatos's claws closed around his torso. The giant pulled. The body separated at the waist. The legs drifted. The arms drifted. The head drifted. The wheel of fire eyes kept spinning. They kept watching. They kept speaking.
"The laws are eternal. We are eternal. You are a temporary disturbance in an eternal system. You will fade. You will extinguish. You will die."
Barbatos crushed the head. The wheel of fire eyes flickered. They dimmed. They died.
The Man in white watched his last ally fall. His star still pulsed above him. His titan of light still reformed from the scattered pieces. His white eyes still burned with purpose.
He raised his hands. The star pulsed one final time. The beam struck the graveyard at the same point, the same crack, the same weakness. The boundary flickered. The crack widened. It did not heal.
The titan surged forward. Its thousand limbs reached through the crack, grabbing the edge, pulling it wider. Light poured through. The graveyard's decay touched it. The light aged. The light yellowed. But more light came. Always more light.
Nulls watched from the center. The crack grew. The light poured through. His beasts fought on but the boundary was breaking.
He smiled. Blood ran down his chin.
"Finally," he whispered. "Something interesting."
The man in white stepped through the crack. His white uniform blazed. His diamond lights pulsed. His white eyes fixed on Nulls.
"You are dying," he said. "Your beasts are weakening. Your barrier is breaking. In moments, I will be standing over your corpse. Do you have any last words?"
Nulls's smile widened. His remaining eye gleamed.
"Yeah," he said. "You took your eyes off the time beast."
Eros wrapped around the Light Arcanist from behind. A hundred tendrils covered him completely. The time beast accelerated his perception. For the Light Arcanist, seconds became centuries. He would spend centuries in that embrace, watching his own death approach with infinite slowness, feeling each moment of it stretch into eternity.
The titan of light collapsed without its maker. The star pulsed and died. The crack in the graveyard sealed. The four arcanists drifted in pieces, their bodies scattered across the void, their sigils fading, their chants silent.
Nulls hung in the center of the graveyard. His beasts surrounded him. His enemies were dead. His barrier held. His remaining eye closed.
The void shuddered.
It began as a vibration deep in the fabric of the pocket dimension, a thrum that worked its way into Nulls's shattered bones and made what remained of his teeth chatter against each other. The vibration grew. It became a sound. The sound became a pressure. The pressure became a force that pushed against everything in the domain.
Nulls hung in the center of the graveyard. His beasts surrounded him. Their forms flickered, weakened by the battle, drained by the constant expenditure of power. Marky's headstones cracked. Eros's tendrils drooped. Barbatos's split body listed to one side, its living and dead halves both showing the same exhaustion.
The void convulsed.
Ripples spread across its surface, across its depth, across axis of dimensions that had no names. The ripples became waves. The waves became tsunamis of folded nothing that crashed against the graveyard's boundaries. The boundaries held for a moment. Then they buckled. Then they tore.
The void was rejecting him. The pocket dimension, crafted by dead hands, maintained by dead wills, was vomiting him out. He was a splinter beneath its skin. He was a parasite in its gut. It would rather rupture than contain him another second.
Marky's graveyard dissolved. The headstones crumbled to dust that aged and became nothing. The crypts collapsed inward, their doorways gaping one final time before they folded into themselves and vanished. The dead trees withered, their branches reaching for a sky that no longer existed, and then they too were gone.
Eros's hundred tendrils unwound. They stretched toward the void, toward anything, toward nothing, and then they snapped. The time beast's membranous reptile head turned toward Nulls one last time, its frozen-moment scales catching light from events that would never happen, and then it dissolved into sand that blew away on winds that did not blow.
Barbatos stood tallest. Its split body faced the convulsing void, its living claw raised, its dead claw raised, both ready to fight the infinite. The void folded around it. The giant's form compressed. Its living side pressed against its dead side. The line between them blurred. For one moment, Barbatos was whole. Then it was gone.
Nulls fell.
The void ejected him with force enough to crush stars. He tumbled through the tear in reality, through the wound in existence, through the screaming throat of a dimension that wanted him dead. His broken body spun. His remaining limbs flailed. The Yog Codex stayed pressed against his chest, held there by fingers that could no longer feel.
Light erupted around him. Real light. Natural light. Moonlight and starlight and the distant glow of a world that had no idea what had just happened inside its shadow.
He hit the mountain.
The impact was a sound like the world ending. His body struck a granite outcropping at an angle that should have killed anything that still lived. The rock shattered. Fragments exploded outward, spraying across the peak, tumbling down the slope. A crater formed around him, carved by his flesh, dug by his bones.
His spine compressed. His remaining ribs snapped. His skull cracked against the stone with a sound like a dropped bell. Blood sprayed from his mouth, from his nose, from the empty socket where his left eye had been. The blood mixed with granite dust and formed a paste that coated his face, his chest, the Codex still clutched against him.
He did not lose consciousness.
The binding of Yog-Sothoth held him in place, anchored him to awareness, refused to let him slip into the darkness that waited so patiently. He felt everything. Every shattered bone. Every torn muscle. Every drop of blood leaving his body. The cold of the mountain seeping into wounds that should have killed him hours ago.
He lay in the crater. His body was a ruin. His left leg was gone below the knee, lost somewhere in the void, left behind with the arcanists who had tried to kill him. His right leg bent in three places where no leg should bend. His arms hung at angles that made his remaining eye water. His chest moved with each breath, each inhalation a repetitive cycle of grinding bone and bubbling blood.
The Nexus was gone. The dark sea inside him was dry. He reached for it, for the familiar warmth, for the power that had sustained him through the battle, and found only emptiness. The wells were drained. The reserves were spent. He had nothing left.
He lay on cold stone, under cold stars, with cold wind blowing across his broken body. The Yog Codex rested against his chest, warm despite everything, warm with a heat that came from somewhere else.
His remaining eye looked up at the sky. The moon hung there, fat and white, indifferent to his suffering. The stars wheeled overhead, ancient and eternal, watching another mortal thing die on another unimportant mountain.
He tried to laugh. The sound came out as a wet gurgle. Blood filled his throat. He coughed. More blood sprayed. More pain flared. His body was a sack of meat held together by skin and stubbornness.
"You owe me," he whispered to the Codex. "You owe me so much."
The Codex did not respond. It never responded to complaints. It only waited. It was very good at waiting.
Nulls closed his remaining eye. The darkness behind his lid was warm. It invited him. It promised rest. It promised an end to the pain that screamed from every cell.
He opened his eye again. He would not rest. He would not die like an animal. He would lie here on this cold mountain, in this broken body, with this empty core, he would wait while dying.
The space beside Nulls tore open.
A vertical tear appeared in the air, its edges ragged and wet, and through that tear the darkness of somewhere else bled into the mountain night. The wound peeled open wetly, its edges curling back like flesh from a blade. Beyond it, Nulls saw the cold geometry of the void he had just escaped, the same void that had tried to kill him, the same void that had failed.
A man stepped through.
He wore the same outfit as the four who had died. Black. Functional. Professional. The letters RM were stitched over his heart in thread so dark they were almost invisible. He carried no visible weapons. He held no glowing sigil. He simply walked through the tear in reality and stood on the mountain stone, his boots crunching against the fragments of the boulder Nulls had shattered.
The man looked down at Nulls. His face showed nothing. No pity. No satisfaction. No curiosity. He reached into his jacket and produced a cigarette. He placed it between his lips. He lit it with a flick of his thumb, the flame catching, the tip glowing orange in the darkness. He took a long drag, held it, released a plume of smoke that the wind caught and scattered.
He sat down on the edge of the crater.
Nulls watched him through his remaining eye. The rage that built in his chest was unlike anything he had felt since his rebirth. To be pitied. To be observed in this state by a human. To lie broken on cold stone while one of them sat beside him and smoked a cigarette. The Theos had consumed creations. The Theos had been gods before this creation existed.
And now this. Now this.
His teeth ground against each other. His remaining hand twitched. He could not move. Could not rise. Could only lie there and be seen.
"You think this is funny," Nulls said. His voice was a ruin. Blood bubbled with each word. "You think I want your company. Your pity. I would rather the animals find me and eat me piece by piece. At least they would have the decency to kill me."
The man took another drag from his cigarette. He exhaled. The smoke drifted over Nulls's broken body.
"You could kill me," Nulls said. "You have the power. I felt it when you opened that door. You could end this. So do it. Prove you have something in you besides this pathetic need to watch. Prove you are at least capable of finishing what your people started."
He reached into his pocket again. Produced another cigarette. Lit it. Then, with movements so gentle they made Nulls's remaining eye twitch, he leaned forward and placed the cigarette between Nulls's lips.
His other hand came up. It cupped Nulls's shattered jaw, holding it closed, holding it steady, making it possible for him to draw smoke into lungs that barely functioned. The touch was warm. The touch was firm. The touch was the most insulting thing Nulls had ever experienced.
He spat the cigarette out. It tumbled down his chest, leaving a trail of ash on his ruined skin, and landed in the blood pooling beside him.
Nulls gathered blood in his mouth. A thick glob of it, warm and coppery. He spat it at the man's face.
The man moved. His hand came up, the cigarette still burning between his fingers, and caught the blood on its glowing tip. The blood sizzled. The cigarette hissed. The man held it there for a moment, watching the fluid cook against the ember, and then he dropped it. He ground it out with his boot.
"Killing you would be a waste," he said. His voice was calm. Flat. Tired. "The resources required. The lives lost. The four in there, they were expensive. Trained for decades. Equipped with the best we had. You killed them all. You killed them slowly. You made it hurt."
He reached into his jacket one last time. This time his hand emerged with nothing. He raised it, palm open, and began to trace shapes in the air above Nulls's forehead. The shapes left trails of light. The light pulsed with power that made the mountain shudder.
"The higher ups have plans for you," the man said. "They always do. They see something in things like you. Something useful. Something they can point at their enemies and watch the enemies die. You will be that for them. You will be their weapon. Their thing."
The sigil completed. It hung in the air above Nulls's face, complex and layered, burning with cold light.
The man leaned close. His eyes met Nulls's remaining eye. There was no hatred there. No anger. No satisfaction. Only exhaustion.
"I pray you give us a soft end this time," he said. "Those bastards has been given countless warnings by them but still chose this, they said that this time you will be captured and that those countless scenarios wouldn't manifested into reality."
Just before he activated a sigils he made a prayer, small and insignificant.
"God help us all."
He flicked the sigil.
The world dissolved.
Nulls felt himself pulled apart and reassembled. Felt his atoms scatter across dimensions and reform in a new place. Felt the cold of the mountain replaced by the sterile chill of somewhere else. Felt the stone beneath him replaced by smooth metal.
He opened his eye.
Nulls hung in a new space. The cube was white, sterile, the color of bone bleached by suns that had never shone here. The walls stretched away from him, large, imposing, absolute. He estimated their dimensions. One tenth Marky's width. Twenty-nine two-hundred-fiftieths Marky's length and height. Large enough to hold a creature like him. Small enough to remind him that he was contained.
The chains came first through his left arm. Ten of them. They punched through flesh and muscle and bone with a sound like meat being tenderized. He felt each one. Felt the metal grind against his humerus. Felt the barbs catch on his tendons. Felt the blood run warm down his skin.
His right arm followed. Ten more chains. They pierced his bicep, his forearm, his wrist. They pinned his arm to the wall behind him, to the floor below him, to the ceiling above him. He could not move. Could not flex a finger.
His legs were next. Ten through the left. Ten through the right. The chains passed through his thighs, his calves, his feet. They anchored him to the cube in a dozen places. His ruined legs hung suspended, held in place by metal that would never yield.
Ten chains pierced his skull.
He felt each one. Felt the drill of them through his parietal bone. Felt them thread through his brain tissue. Felt them emerge from the other side and anchor to the wall behind him. The pain was complete. Total. It filled every space in his awareness.
Ten more locked his spine in place.
They passed between his vertebrae, through the disks, through the nerves. They held his back straight, his posture rigid, his body a display piece in a museum of suffering.
Seventy chains pierced his body. He counted them. Ten through his left arm. Ten through his right arm. Ten through his left leg. Ten through his right leg. Ten through his skull, each one a line of cold fire that ran through his brain. Ten more locked his spine in place, vertebrae separated by links of metal that glowed with trapped light.
He hung in the center of the cube. The chains held him there, suspended, displayed. The floor below him was distant enough to be irrelevant. The walls around him were close enough to touch if his arms still worked.
Every inch of those walls bore talismans. They covered the surfaces like scales, like skin, like something organic that had grown there instead of being placed. Each symbol was a safety lock. Each symbol was a warning. Each was a message from his captors, written in a language he would need to learn.
Below him, a circle had been drawn. Red liquid. Thick. Dried. He had never seen blood before this existence. The previous creation had no need for such crude biological processes. But he recognized it now. He recognized what it meant. They had painted him into a cage within a cage.
Thirty-one red candles surrounded him. Their flames were the only light in the room. They flickered, danced, cast shadows that moved against the talismans, against the walls, against the screens that covered one entire surface.
He hung in the chains. He felt every point of entry. He felt every link. He felt every talisman pressing against the air around him, against the space he occupied, against the possibility of his escape.
Then he laughed.
The sound was broken, wet, wrong. It came from a throat that had been crushed and healed and crushed again. It came from lungs that had been punctured and drained and punctured again. It came from a chest that had been caved in and rebuilt and caved in again.
He laughed because he understood. He laughed because the pieces had finally clicked into place. He laughed because the man's words, the chains, the cube, the four vermins, all of it formed a pattern he could finally read. The struggle of it all.
The laugh echoed off the walls. It bounced from surface to surface, growing, multiplying, becoming a chorus of itself. It filled the cube. It filled the space between the candles. It filled the air that he breathed and the blood that still dripped from his wounds.