"Patience," he murmured to Codex. "All good things."
With a flick, he deactivated Eros. Time snapped back into its ordinary, tedious flow. Sound rushed in, the blaring alarm, the groaning station, the hyperventilating gasp of the researcher as she found herself free. She saw him, saw the blood dripping from his body, and her survival instinct overrode her terror. She scrambled backwards, then turned and ran down the corridor, her boots slapping the polished floor.
Nulls watched her go for ten full seconds, appreciating the mammalian panic of it. Then he raised a hand, extended a single index finger, and made a gentle, pulling motion.
Sixty meters down the hall, a barbed claw of solidified entropy erupted from the researcher's shadow, punching up through her ribcage with a wet, crackling thump. She stumbled, looked down at the glistening black spike protruding from her sternum, and made a small, confused sound, like a child dropped by a parent. The claw retracted, dissolving into smoke. She collapsed, a marionette with cut strings. The coppery smell of fresh blood joined the ozone and smoke.
"Catalyst," Nulls said.
Eros, the clockwork behemoth, unfolded a crystalline limb. At its tip, a sphere of warped light coalesced. Inside, the very fabric of duration were in chaos like the eye of a tempest. Nulls tossed the cold, azure Codex lightly into the sphere.
The contact were short but ancient. Outside the sphere, one second passed. Inside, the Codex's entropy were forced to be at the brink of criticality, forcing Increase in disorder and randomness.
Within the inside the sphere, energy is constantly fluctuating at the quantum level. Causing microscopic fluctuations caused by pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles that spontaneously manifested into existence that immediately annihilate each other.
The second. In this three point one four meter diameter sphere, spread-out particles and radiation, individual particles: protons, electrons, photons, and other things. Would randomly drift and occasionally collided. However, by sheer statistical luck, some particles would spontaneously gathered and clumped together.
Loose hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and other atoms amalgamated and bonded perfectly. A complete, wet, gray-and-pink neurological structure. A human brain quickly took shape beside the Codex, looking exactly like one just removed from a skull. It appears solid, functional, and deeply out of place in the sphere.
For a microscopic instant, the intricate electrochemical processes fired, creating a single burst of self-awareness. Immediately after, without a body to sustain it, the forces of entropy take over. The delicate structure rapidly loses stability, freezing, crumbling, and dissipating back into the same random, cold dust from which it briefly emerged.
The brain might exist for only a microscopic fraction of an instant from outside observer's perspective, but during that infinitesimal moment, its internal processes ran so fast that it subjectively experienced days, years, and even an entire lifetime. Nulls can't help but chuckled lightly at the sight of that.
The third. By statistical chance over this immense timescale, atoms within the space spontaneously moved toward a central location. This movement constituted a highly improbable decrease in local entropy.
The atoms bonded chemically and physically, forming a complex object. A functional, metallic pocket watch. The watch was fully assembled, featuring a casing, internal gears, hands, and a face.
Immediately following its formation, the object interacted with the surrounding environment. Lacking an external energy source to maintain its ordered state, the forces of thermodynamics initiated rapid decomposition.
The chemical bonds of the metal and other materials began breaking down. The watch rapidly destabilized, corroded, and melted. The material converted into a low-density plume of individual atoms and simple molecules. This debris dispersed and mixed with the rest of the sphere's contents, returning the entire system to a state of perfect, uniform maximum entropy.
Four...
Five...
Nulls retrieved the Codex. It was no longer cold. It was warm, almost feverish. The bruised azure leather was now cracked and brittle, like a ground in a long drought. The metal pages within hummed a thin, strained note, the sound of a bell with a fatal crack, its cover scorched by accelerated eons of contemplating its own isolation.
Perfect.
He dismissed Eros with a flick of his wrist. The beast of time folded in on itself and vanished with a sigh of grinding gears.
Now, for the audience.
He walked to the researcher's body, dragged it by the ankle through the smear of her own blood, and used the gore to paint a pentagram on the floor. He placed his and the temporal Codex in the center, the corpse draped over it like a morbid offering.
He knelt infront of the corpse, the sticky blood soaking into the knees of his trousers, and chanted, his voice flat and clear in the cacophony of the station.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge of the Gate."
"The All-in-One."
"The One-in-All."
His Codex drank the last of the researcher's life-force with a final, thirsty pull. The world inverted.
He was standing in an endless desert. The air was not hot, but dry. A desiccating dryness that pulled at the moisture in his eyes and the back of his throat. The sky was not blue, but a bleached, pale grey, and from it fell a silent, eternal rain of fine, white sand. It hissed as it landed, piling into dunes that shifted and reformed even as he watched, the sound a constant, whispering static. The scent was of dust, emptiness, and the faint, alkaline tang of dead stone.
A hundred paces away, a simple wooden table and two chairs stood, immune to the dunes that should have buried them. In one chair sat a figure.
She appeared as a human female, but the image was unstable. One second she was a girl on the cusp of adulthood, skin flawless, eyes wide. The next, she was ancient, her face an angel of timeless sorrow, her gaze holding the weight of extinct suns. She wore flowing garments of no discernible era or culture, and upon her brow rested a crown fashioned from the shed skin of a serpent, the ouroboros motif complete, the head forever consuming the tail.
Her serene expression shattered the moment her eyes, ancient, then young, then ancient again focused on him.
Her form solidified into that of a terrified young woman. She shot to her feet, the chair scraping against nothingness.
Huh? How? There is not a single branch, not one leaf on the tree of possibility, where this permutation manifests! This scenario has a zero-weight probability! It is an impossibility! How? How did he force an impossible branch?
Nulls walked forward, the sand whispering around his boots. He didn't answer. Instead, as he walked, he began to weave. Not with his hands, but with his impossibly quiet whispers.
Micro-sigils, each smaller than a quark, spun into existence in the quantum foam around the woman. They were not attacks. They were conditional triggers. If she gathers energy to strike, divert it. If she attempts temporal flight, lock the axis. If she manifests a weapon, transmute it to dust. He was programming the local possibility-space against her, a silent, invisible minefield.
He reached the table and sat, the old wood creaking under him. A grain of sand struck his temple with a faint tik. He brushed it away.
"Val told me a lot about you," he said, his tone conversational. "And about our… relationship. What a shame. From my perspective, none of it happened. Must be terribly annoying for you to have traversed the infinite 'what-ifs,' watched me win in so many of them, only for me to sit here, in your one impossible branch, completely aware of your history."
"Go to hell!" Her voice was a crack of thunder in the silence, young and raw and brimbling with a pain so vast it felt childish. "You have no idea… the loops, the cycles… watching you scorch them away, over and over… and I can't… we can't...!"
Nulls watched a grain of sand trace a path up past his eye. "Scorch what away?"
"Everything!" The word was a sob of fury. "The cities. The faces. The humans laughing in world that don't exist anymore because you turned them into plague carrier or screaming sludge or an abomintation! I have watched a version of you burned all of biological life on Gaia!"
"That sounds like a comprehensive experiment," Nulls said. "Their ash... What color was it?"
She stared at him, her form flickering between ancient tome and horrified girl.
"You murder!"
The silence after her scream was eaten by the falling sand. Nulls watched a grain strike the wooden table between them and vanish into the air above.
He let the echo of her pain hang for a moment, then brushed a fleck of grey dust from his sleeve. "You're taking this personally," he said, his tone conversational, almost concerned. "It's just work."
"Work?" Her voice broke again, the ancient crown on her brow looking absurd atop her tear-streaked, youthful face. "You call genocide work? You burn worlds slaughtered billions and infected all of them all within the span of a single midnight."
"That sounds unpleasant," Nulls said, brushing sand from his shoulder. "Have you considered stop watching?"
"Stop? They're people!" she shrieked, the words tearing out of her. "They have lives! They have children who wait for them to come home! They have dreams! You burn it all down and you don't even remorsed!" She swiped a hand across her eyes, her fingers coming away wet. "You're a disease."
"I've been called worse by better," he replied. He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on the rough wood of the table. "But let's say you're right. Let's say I'm the worst thing to ever happen. You've seen it happen, what, a thousand times? A million? A billion?"
"More," she whispered, the fury dying into exhausted horror. "So many more."
"And in all those times, did you ever see a version where your crying, or your screaming, or your magnificent little crown there," he nodded at the serpent crown, "made me stop? Did you ever see a version where your outrage changed the outcome by even one single death?"
She was silent. The sand fell upwards around them.
"No," Nulls answered for her. "You didn't. Because it doesn't work. Your method is broken. You're like a child who keeps touching a hot stove and is somehow surprised it keeps burning you."
"So I should just do nothing?" she spat, fresh anger surging. "I should just sit here in the sand and watch you murder Gaia?"
"You could," he shrugged. "It would be more honest. Or you could try something new. But you won't. You'd rather lose beautifully than win ugly. It's a common flaw in sentimental people."
"I'm not sentimental! I have a conscience! Something you clearly lost in a gutter somewhere!"
"Probably," Nulls agreed amiably. "But a conscience is just an internal voice that complains about things you're going to do anyway. It seems like a lot of extra noise. You must get terrible headaches."
She stared at him, her breath coming in short, ragged pants. "I hate you. I hate everything about you. Your voice, your face, your… your calm. I hate that you're sitting here talking to me like we're having tea after what you've done."
"And I've done what?" he prompted, genuinely curious. "Give me an example. From one of your fiasco."
She flinched as if struck. Her eyes lost focus, seeing a memory. Her vocal trembling. "The entire world... was infected by one of your plague. I've seen people mutated... to something even the Morbus feared. My wielder at that loop was..."
She looked down. She sobbed as a golden tear ran down her cheeks, and finally collided with the sand below. She cleared her throat before continuing.
"At the last second, he managed to sent me back in time. They all at the brink of death but you prolonged it, one second felt like a millenia, millenia felt like eternity. And you were silent. You could've made an antidote, a cure, you said it yourself. But you didn't. And you... and you vanished."
Nulls thought for a moment. If what she said was true, and there are a cure to the disease then he must find it to ensure his and Yog's safety, but she didn't mention anything about him getting infected, so he must've found it.
He tilted his head. "Oh. Yes. The antithesis plague. That was a clean one. Minimal lingering suffering. You should be pleased."
"P-pleased?" The word was a sob.
"Well, compared to some of the other methods. The Morbus farm, for instance. Now that was messy. Took eternities. Lots of screaming that time. Very loud. So, relative to that, the plague was practically a mercy. You see? It's all about perspective."
She put her head in her hands. "You're not even trying to justify it. You're just… describing it."
"Justifying it implies I think I did something wrong," Nulls said. "I don't. I needed to met my obligation. Unfortunate for them, useful for me. That's all."
"That's all?" she repeated, her voice hollow. "Billions of lives. That's all."
"Correct." He watched her for a moment. "You know, for a being who can see infinity, you have a remarkably small imagination. You only ever see one side of the coin. The 'tragedy'. You never flip it over."
"What," she snarled, looking up, her face streaked with sand and golden tears, "is on the other side of that coin? Enlighten me."
"The fact that it doesn't matter," he said, his cheerful tone finally dropping into something flat and simple. "In a hundred years, they'd all be dead anyway. In a thousand, no one would remember their names. In a million, the continent they lived on will be seabed. You're weeping over a pattern in the rain that's already vanished. You're not mourning their lives. You're mourning your own inability to accept that things end."
"It wasn't their time to end! You don't get to decide that!"
"Somebody has to," he replied. "Nature does it randomly, with plagues and asteroids. I just do it with purpose. My purpose. It's really not so different."
"It is everything different! You choose!"
"And your problem is with the choice, not the result," he concluded, as if solving a simple equation. "Fascinating. You'd be more at peace if a rock from space did it, because then you'd have no one to blame. That's not morality. That's just… laziness."
She had no words left. She just stared at him with a look of utter, hatred.
"See?" Nulls said, his pleasant smile returning. "We've had a conversation. It didn't change anything. I didn't have a sudden change of heart. You didn't talk me down from the ledge. We just… talked. And now you understand me a little better, and I understand that you're a broken record. Everyone loses. But at least we passed the time."
She buried her face in her hands, the serpent crown gleaming. "They feel it. They know fear. They know pain."
"I know that," Nulls said, nodding. "Fear is a chemical cascade. Pain is an electrical signal. Both are the result of evolution, its not my fault that nature shaped their biology like that."
She looked up, her eyes full of a hatred so pure it was almost clean. "One of these times, in one of these branches, you will feel it. You will be trapped, and you will be scared, and it will hurt, and you will finally understand."
She was silent for a long moment, the falling sand is the only movement. The fury drained from her face, leaving behind a hollow, exhausted despair. "You're broken," she whispered. "There's something missing in you. Something that is fundamental to every creature."
"I get that a lot," Nulls said, the cheerful mask sliding back into place. He shrugged. "But the broken clock is right twice a day."
She was silent for a long time. The desert of possibilities seemed to hold its breath.
"Is that all we are to you?" she finally asked, her voice small in the vastness. "Lab rats? Tools? Experiment and result?"
Nulls looked at her, his head tilted, his pleasant smile still in place. It was a smile that admitted nothing and promised less.
"What else would you be?"
"Something that matters," she said, the words barely more than a breath against the falling sand.
"Matter is just condensed energy," Nulls replied, not unkindly. "And energy can be used. That's all 'mattering' is, in the end. Usefulness."
"Love isn't useful," she shot back, a spark of her defiance returning. "Beauty isn't useful. A sunset doesn't do anything."
"Correct," he nodded, as if she'd passed a test. "They're inefficient. Wasted photons. Wasted neurochemicals. If I could harvest the collective emotional output of a species watching a sunset, now that would be useful. The sunset itself is just the catalyst. You're getting attached to the catalyst."
"You're making my point for me, you freak! You see a sunset and your first thought is how to strip-mine the feeling it causes!"
"My first thought," Nulls said, his smile finally fading into something more neutral, more clinical, "is to calculate the spectrum of light, the atmospheric refraction, the orbital mechanics that produced the viewing angle. The feeling is a byproduct. A predictable, chemical byproduct. You worship the byproduct. I understand the process. We are not having the same conversation."
She leaned back in her chair, the ancient weariness seeping back into her youthful frame. "You're lonely."
He blinked. It was the first reaction that seemed genuinely unscripted. Not anger, not offense. Pure confusion.
"Lonely is an emotional state predicated on the desire for companionship," he stated. "I have no such desire. Therefore, I cannot be lonely. That's like saying a rock is thirsty."
"You have that... thing" She said pointing her finger at the codex suspended in mid air beside him. "You talk to it."
"A tool talks to its user. An abomination in a sealed box will exist in two state simultaneously when nothing is observing, it collapsed to either of those state only when the wavefunction talked with an observer. It's not companionship. It's systems check."
"And before that?" she pressed, a cruel, knowing look in her eye. The kind of look that comes from having watched someone's life on repeat. "Before the the Codex? Who did you talk to then?"
Nulls looked at her. The pleasant facade was gone. Not replaced by anger, but by a blank, polished wall. A perfect, emotionless empty-set.
"They," he said, his voice clean and quiet as a scalpel, "doesn't exist anymore. I unmake them and everything else." he shrugged a single shoulder, a small motion.
The emptiness in his voice was a report. A geological survey stating there was no water here. Never had been.
She had nothing left to throw at him. No insult could touch a being who had audited his own being and found it lacking. Her hatred turned inwards, into a cold, heavy pity that was somehow worse.
"Judging from this conversation, even after countless encounter. You still don't seem to know much about me." he stated, a simple declaration.
"I know!" she shrieked, the sound tearing at her throat. "Every sin! Every soul! Every secret—!"
Secret.
The word hung in the air. To Nulls, wrapped in the lingering temporal residue of Eros, its echo stretched. One second of external time became a subjective hour of contemplation within his mind. She knows secrets. His secrets. The past. The Theos. The Omnia Mortis. Polaris and Dawn.
That was all the confirmation he needed.
In the space between one grain of sand falling and the next, Nulls summoned Marky. The true Beast of Entropy. It erupted from the shadow beneath his chair, a house-sized jumble of impossible angles and void-black fur, moving with the silent, gut-churning speed of a thing that bypassed physics. It lunged, claws of un-light reaching for her throat.
She flinched, not in fear, but in focus. A sphere of warped time, identical to the one Eros had crafted, shimmered into existence around Marky. Inside the sphere, the beast's lunge slowed to a glacial crawl. Trillions of years would pass for it before it crossed the final inch.
Nulls didn't hesitate. He channeled a torrent of raw Nexus, fifteen percent of his vast, dark lake directly into the trapped beast. He didn't try to break the sphere. He gave Marky a simple, command: Cease.
The Beast of Entropy, supercharged with power that denied its very nature, detonated. The sphere, containing a void that suddenly needed to be filled by something, shattered with a sound like reality itself being gutted. The concussion was a negation of stability.
Nulls was flung backwards, the sand acting like water, swallowing him in a cold, gritty wave. The woman was thrown clear, a ragdoll against the bleached sky.
He hit the ground, the breath driven from him. He pushed himself up, sand cascading from his shoulders. His mind was already working, an equation of transcendent mathematics composing itself.
He raised a hand, and a sigil burned in the air before him a complex, rotating knot of non-Euclidean geometry. It was an axiom of Temporal Negativity. He set the variable t to a negative value. The desert around him blurred as the sigil scanned backwards through the local causality, not through time, but through the collapsed probability-wave of the last few moments.
He found her in less than an attosecond. She lay on her back in a shallow dune, half-buried. Her form flickered wildly, girl, ancient woman, a blur of light, a crumbling statue. Her borrowed flesh was heavily damaged; the feedback from the sphere's destruction had ravaged her. She was dying, and her death would trap her secrets in a dissolving timeline.
He couldn't talk to a corpse.
Nulls dismissed the sigil and strode over. He knelt beside her, the sand cold and clingy. He placed his own Codex, the leather-bound Yog-Sothoth, directly onto her shuddering chest.
"YOG!" he shouted, not with his mouth, but with a lance of pure will through the book.
The desert did not react. The sand kept falling.
Then, a black fog began to seep from the cover of his Codex. It was not smoke. It was the absence of light given texture, cold and smelling of ozone and forgotten words. From the fog emerged countless conglomerations of iridescent spheres, bubbles of trapped knowledge and madness, swirling and clicking like a cosmic insect swarm. They descended upon Nulls and the dying Codex-woman, not attacking, but enveloping. The spheres pressed in, a tactile, chilling sensation, and then.
They were eaten.
The desert vanished. The whispering static of sand was replaced by a profound, physical silence so complete it pressed on Nulls's eardrums. The air was no longer dry, but cold. An intense, penetrating cold that seeped through his clothes and skin, threatening to flash-freeze the marrow in his bones. Only the steady thrum of power from his own Codex, pressed between him and the woman, generated a thin bubble of warmth.
They were in a library.
But to call it a library was to call a galaxy a pebble. It was Vastness. Shelves of dark, unidentifiable wood stretched upwards, vanishing into a gloom that might have been a ceiling or a sky. They stretched left and right to a non-existent horizon. The air was thick with the scent of old paper, decaying leather, and the cold, mineral smell of endless stone. A faint, sourceless light, the colour of weak moonlight on dust, illuminated endless rows of spines, books of stone, metal, flesh, light, and knowledge bound in chains.
In front of them, a more human-scale scene. A large, worn armchair of cracked leather sat before a grand fireplace. The fire within burned not with warmth, but with a chilling, absolute black flame that seemed to suck the feeble light from the room. A figure sat in the chair, reading a book bound in what looked like tarnished silver.
Yog.
His form was the one from their first meeting. A tall, slender humanoid shape wrought from shifting darkness and motes of star-stuff, vaguely aristocratic and impossibly ancient.
Nulls stood, dragging the limp, flickering form of the Codex-woman by her arm. He glanced to his left, and another identical armchair had simply appeared beside Yog's. Nulls dropped the woman's body on the dense, intricate carpet before the chairs, where only he could see her, and sank into the offered chair. The leather was icy to the touch.
"Yog?" Nulls said.
Yog did not look up. He turned a page with a long, grey finger. The paper crinkled with a sound like winters forming.
He sighed. A heavy, long-suffering exhalation that seemed to lower the temperature in the infinite room by another degree. "What is it this time?"
"Wait here," Nulls responded, staring at the woman.
He got up, grabbed her ankle again, and dragged her closer, so her head was almost in the hearth. The black flames licked hungrily at the air near her silver hair.
Yog closed his silver-bound book with a, soft sound. His gaze, a constellation of cold lights in the shadow of his face settled on the flickering woman. For a long moment, he was still. The only sound was the silent roar of the black fire.
"Who is she?" Yog's voice was calm, devoid of curiosity, only a demand for data.
"Long story," Nulls said, settling back into the cold chair.
"Tell me."
"As I said, it's a long—"
"Tell. Me."
The command was not loud. It did not echo. It simply was, layered with an authority that was the bedrock of this realm. The very air solidified around the words, making them inarguable law.
Nulls felt the compulsion settle over him like a weight. He met Yog's starry gaze. "She is a Codex. One that maps scenario. She has lived through countless timelines, variations of my… activities here. She knows me. Or versions of me. She was just complaining about it."
Yog stared. The information was processed in the silence. He stood, a motion smooth and unsettling, like a shadow detaching itself from a wall. He walked to the woman, his steps making no sound on the carpet.
He leaned down, tangled his long fingers in her hair, and yanked her head up. Her eyes fluttered open, glazed with pain and disorientation. Without a word, without ceremony, Yog thrust her face into the black fire of the hearth.
The reaction was not combustion. Her skin did not char. It blistered, as if frozen and burned simultaneously, rising in weeping, clear pustules that crackled with a sound like breaking glass. A scream was torn from her, not a human sound, but the shriek of a structured concept being violated. The smell was not of burning flesh, but of melting wax and overcharged ozone.
Yog held her there for a count of five, then pulled her back.
In the Library of Babel, physical injury was a temporary dialect. The horrific blisters receded, the skin knitting itself back to flawless perfection. But the woman's eyes were wide, unfocused, her breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps. The memory of the pain, the Library's true currency, remained etched into her consciousness.
She gasped, coherence returning, and a spark of defiance lit in her eyes. A shimmer began to form around her hand the beginnings of her temporal sphere.
Yog watched, his head tilting slightly. Then, with the bored efficiency of a librarian reshelving a misbehaving book, he put her face back into the fire.
This time, the scream was silent, a full-body convulsion. When he pulled her out, the left side of her face was a ruin of frozen, blackened tissue and weeping plasma. Again, it healed, seamless and perfect seconds later. She lay on the carpet, trembling uncontrollably, all defiance scorched away, replaced by raw, animal terror.
Yog knelt, bringing his featureless face level with hers. He reached out and cupped her chin, his touch as cold as the void between stars.
"You will answer," he said, his voice a soft, terrifying contrast to the violence. "You will answer every question my partner and I ask. You will answer with nothing but the truth, as you perceive it. You will not omit, you will not dissemble, you will not attempt cleverness." He leaned closer, the cold radiating from him.
"If you utter a single lie, or if your answers displease me, I will not burn your face. I will immerse your entire being in that flame. Not for a second. Not for a year. For a length of time that will make the eons you spent watching him feel like a flicker. Your consciousness will know nothing but that cold, devouring fire. Do you understand the grammar of this place?"
She tried to speak, but only a whimper emerged. She managed a frantic, jerking nod. Yog released her chin and stood. He looked at Nulls, then gestured gracefully to the trembling form on the floor.
"The interview," Yog said, returning to his chair and picking up his book, though he did not open it, "may now begin."
The silence in the Library was not empty. It was thick with cold and unspoken histories. The woman on the floor trembled, the memory of the black fire dancing behind her eyes like a trapped insect.
Nulls did not look at her. He stared into the cold flames, his mind a churning engine of calculation. This was a critical data leak. The probability of exposure had just shifted from infinitesimal to a finite, non-zero value. He ran the permutations. If she knew the full history, then the information existed as a retrievable pattern within her. That pattern could be extracted by others with the right tools, tools the Rapax might possess, tools a rival Codex or a bored god might one day stumble upon. Each possibility branched into a tree of catastrophic outcomes: containment, dissection, interrogation by powers that could actually threaten him, the unraveling of his entire purpose before it began.
He needed to know the exact vector and depth of the breach.
He spoke, his voice flat, stripped of its usual false warmth. "In all those timelines you claim to have witnessed. All those countless branches. Did any of them contain the impossible event where I voluntarily shared my point of origin with you? Not inferences. Not your observations. A direct, deliberate transmission of information from me to you."
The woman flinched. She hugged her knees to her chest, trying to make herself small. Her eyes darted from his cold face to the black flames. She pressed her lips together, a thin, defiant line.
Yog did not look up from his closed book. A shadow detached from the leg of his chair. It was not a shadow cast by light, but a tendril of solidified silence. It moved with lazy, inevitable grace, wrapped around the woman's head, and yanked her forward. Her face plunged into the black fire.
This time, the sound was a muffled, wet shriek against the impossible flames. Yog held her there for three full seconds, then pulled her back.
She collapsed onto her side, retching, clawing at her perfectly healed face as if to tear the memory of the sensation out by the roots. The smell of terror-sweat, sharp and acrid, cut through the ozone and dust.
"Answer the question," Yog said, his tone one of mild academic correction.
She sobbed, and curling herself. "No! No, you never told me! You never tell anyone! You just... you just do things! You burn and break and leave! I never hear it from you!"
Nulls processed this. A primary vector was closed. Good. But observation was a vector too. "What did you see, then? What flickers did you catch when my guard was down?"
She shook her head again, tears cutting clean lines through the dust on her cheeks. "Nothing. Flickers. Lights. Shapes that hurt to think about. Sounds that aren't sounds. Just... impressions. The feeling of being enormous and then so, so small. The taste of silence after a very loud noise."
Nulls leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His posture was relaxed, but his eyes were scanners, measuring her pulse in her throat, the dilation of her pupils, the micro-twitches in her fingers. "Names," he said. "Impressions can have labels. Did any of those flickers have a name?"
She flinched as if struck. Her eyes darted to the side, then to the floor. A classic tell. Information retrieval. She was accessing the memory.
She whispered it, so quiet it was almost lost in the silent roar of the fire. "...Polaris."
Nulls moved.
There was no rage in his motion. It was pure, filled to the brim with eradication intent. He crossed the space between them in a blur, his hand closing in her hair. He was going to put her in the fire and hold her there until even the Codex were scorched clean.
He never made it.
A hundred constelation sigils, burning with a harsh white light, flashed into existence around him, thirty six in his north side, fifty two in his southern side, and twelve forming a halo above his head, completely negating his movement even at the smallest scale.
At the same moment, four more shadowy tendrils from Yog wrapped around his torso and shoulders, not hurting him, but arresting his momentum with immovable force.
Yog had not moved from his chair. His head was still tilted toward his book.
"Stop," Yog's voice cut through the struggle, calm and absolute. "You are disregarding the hierarchy of information. We have a source of information. You wish to destroy the book because one letter is inconvenient. This is emotional. This is wasteful. You, of all creatures, should understand that raw information takes precedence over your discomfort. We need what she knows. All of it. Then you may turn her to cinders."
Nulls's hand, still clenched in her hair, trembled with the strain of opposing Yog's will. Yog was enforcing the rule of this place: the pursuit of knowledge was paramount. Nulls's desire to scorch the information at its root was a violation of the library's prime function.
Slowly, muscle by muscle, Nulls released his grip. He stood, pulling his hand back from Yog's tendril. He took a single, deliberate step back. His breathing was even, but his eyes were chips of frozen calculus, running scenario after catastrophic scenario. Polaris. Heard. In a delirium.
A compromised state. What else was said? What other names? What connections were made?
He looked down at the woman. She was curled on the floor, sobbing silently, holding her head.
"Polaris," he repeated, tasting the word. It was just a sound here. It meant nothing to this world. But it was a key. "What context? Was it a title? A location? A curse?"
The woman looked from Nulls's cold face to Yog's impassive shadow-form. She was an animal in a trap, understanding that the hunters were debating not whether to kill her, but in what order to take her apart. Her fear was a palpable thing, a sour odor in the air, a vibration in the floor.
"He said it... in a moment of fatigue," she whispered, each word dragged out of her. "In a timeline where you fought for three hundred years without rest. You were leaning against a broken tower, looking at a red sky. You weren't talking to anyone. You just... said it. To the air. 'Polaris would have hated this color.' That was all. Just a name and a preference."
Nulls leaned back on the shelves. The stress, the furious calculation, settled into a new, cold certainty. Good. He had not failed. The secret was intact. Her knowledge was inferential, circumstantial. Contaminating, but not definitive. It changed the threat profile, but it did not constitute a critical breach.
"Our light talk ends now," Yog stated. It was not a threat, but a fact. "You will describe every major permutation. You will outline every significant power, faction, or individual who presented a meaningful obstacle in more than ten percent of observed branches. You will detail their methods, their resources, and their points of failure. You will begin with the one called Vale."
Yog glanced at Nulls. "You may wish to take notes."
Yog opened his silver-bound book. A quill of solidified shadow appeared in his hand, poised over a blank page that seemed hungry for ink. He looked at the woman, his starry gaze devoid of mercy.
"Speak," Nulls said. "We are listening."
The woman sat curled against the leg of Yog's chair, a child seeking shelter from a storm that lived in the room. The cold of the library seeped into her, deeper than the fire's memory. She spoke, her voice a monotone of defeat, each fact a stone dropped into a well.
"The world is managed by three pillars," she began, her eyes fixed on the intricate, meaningless patterns of the carpet. "Not one. You have seen only the jailers. Rapax Morsatra. The hunters. They are the fist. They find threats, they cage them, they kill them. They took you because you were a threat that walked in. They are strong, blunt, and scared of what they don't understand. Like you."
She took a shuddering breath. "But they are not the brain. That is Solomon University. They are the law. The archive. Every arcanist who ever pointed a spell at you was stamped with their seal. They decide what magic is, who can use it, and what truth is allowed. Their power is paper and precedent. A word from them can unmade a Rapax general's career. You could break every bone in every Rapax soldier, and Solomon would just write a new thesis about you. They are the cage you don't see."
Nulls listened, cataloging. A bureaucratic enemy. Indirect. Potentially more tedious to dismantle.
"And the third?" he asked.
"Methuselah Genesis." The name left her lips like a curse. "They are the surgeon. The ones who look at the monster and think, 'What can I make from its parts?' Rapax contains. Solomon studies. Methuselah… takes apart. They are the reason some Morbus are in cells instead of ash. They experiment. If Rapax is the hand that holds the leash, Methuselah is the scientist who wants to dissect the dog. They would want you on a table. More than Rapax ever did."
She fell silent for a moment, gathering the fragments of her knowledge. "The Morbus you saw. The painter. It was a Calamity-class. There are worse. Asfalis. Logos. Phobos. They are not beasts. They are concepts given hunger. They emerge from places where reality is sick. The Rapax fight a war on a thousand fronts, and they are losing. The Morbus adapt. They learn. And there are… others. Not Morbus. Independent horrors. Things that remember older worlds."
Her eyes flickered up to Nulls, then away. "And there are Codexes. Not just yours. Not just me. Hundreds, scattered, hidden, bound. Some wielded by fools. Some by monsters. Some sleeping. The Rapax have files on all they know. Solomon has theories on the rest."
Yog's shadow-quill scratched across the page, recording without sound.
"Names," Nulls said. "Give me the names of the problems."
She swallowed. "Among the humans… there is one. The Rapax call him an irregular. A rogue element. Solomon calls him a 'theoretical breach.' Methuselah has a standing order to acquire him, alive, for study. His name is Wolfgang Yama Morta."
Nulls said nothing. He waited.
"He is an arcanist without a license. A ghost in their systems. He wields a Codex they cannot categorize. A single book with two souls. Demonology and Angelology. It allows him to call forth… beings. From stories. From faiths. But only the old ones. Only the gods and devils that have been prayed to for more than twenty-three centuries."
Yog's quill paused. "A summoner. Trivial."
"He is not trivial," the woman insisted, a spark of old frustration breaking through her fear. "He does not call imps. He calls the principals. The oldest, strongest archetypes. There is a pantheon… the Holos Rayos. Ten angels of perfect virtue. Ten demons of perfect sin. They are his preferred instruments. Their power is… absolute within their domain. An angel of fortitude cannot be moved. A demon of wrath cannot be reasoned with."
Nulls tilted his head. "And the man himself?"
"Without the Codex, he is still the most dangerous human you will meet." Her voice dropped. "He has mastered arts of killing throughout history. Ars Siwang, the art of a thousand corpses. Letum Jiva, the fist of alpha and omega. And lastly, Dauthr Pali, the Angel's death rattle. They are not for combat. They are for deletion. He moves, and things cease."
She looked directly at Nulls now, her gaze hollow. "In one strand of time. One path in fractals of timelines. You fought him. He was stronger then. He had reached what the Second Echelon. In that fight, he severed both your arms at the shoulder. You regenerated them. You won. But it was close. It was the closest any mortal ever came to ending you before the end of everything."
The library seemed to grow colder. Nulls did not react outwardly. Internally, he cross-referenced. Echelon 2. Physical augmentation superior to base Theosian resilience in this mortal frame. Martial art bypasses complex sigils. Target prioritization: tertiary.
"He is only at the Fifth Echelon now," she whispered. "A fraction of that potential. But if he reaches the Second again… or the First… or the Zero…"
She didn't need to finish. The implication was clear. A mortal, with the right knowledge and the right power, could be a genuine threat. Not a cosmic one. A surgical one.
Nulls leaned back. The stress was gone, replaced by a cold, clean list of objectives. The Rapax were a immediate impediment. Solomon was a systemic obstacle. Methuselah was a lurking parasite. Yama Morta was a potential weapon that could, if left unchecked, become a problem.
The woman fell silent. She had poured out the contents of her being. There was nothing left to say. He looked at her, not with malice, but with the dispassion of a curator assessing a damaged specimen.
"You have fulfilled your function," Yog said.
He raised a hand. The shadows of the library detached themselves from the shelves and flowed toward the woman. They did not attack her. They wrapped around her, layer upon layer, akin to a spider encasing a moth in its web. She did not scream. She stiffened, her eyes wide, as the shadows compressed.
They shrank, and she shrank with them. Her form distorted, flattened, solidified. The process was silent and swift. In moments, where a trembling woman had knelt, there lay a small, thin book. Its cover was a dull, mottled grey, like old ash. It was pitifully plain.
Yog flicked a finger. The ash-grey book tumbled through the air and landed in the black fire of the hearth.
The black flames licked over it, and the book dissolved into strands of fleeting light that were then swallowed by the darkness. It was not a destruction. It was an erasure.
Nulls watched it vanish. "Why not keep it?" he asked. His tone was not questioning the action, but the reasoning. "You collect knowledge. This feel like a waste of knowledge."
Yog looked into the fire where the book had been. "Every volume you see on these shelves," he said, gesturing to the infinite darkness around them, "contains the true and perfect blueprint of a thing that exists in the physical worlds. The formula for a galaxy. The true form of sorrow. The law of causality in a dying universe. They are the originals. The manuscripts of creation."
He turned his starry gaze to Nulls. "That was a copy of a copy. A transcript of shadows and echoes. It was noise. It held no truth, only reports. It does not deserve a place here. It would degrade the collection."
Nulls considered the infinite shelves. The weight of what Yog claimed sat in the cold air. "Where did you get these books? These... originals."
Yog was silent for a long moment. The black fire crackled silently.
"When I fell," he said, the words slow, as if pulled from a deep well, "I did not fall through space. I fell through layers of... substance. Through countless realms of unformed potential. One of those realms, the highest one. There is a place of pure, undifferentiated concept, I named the Bosonic-Yog Manifold.."
He looked at his own hands, made of shifting void and memory. "The shadow of that manifold is cast across all lower realities. It is the light by which all things are formed. The physical planes are its silhouettes. These books..."
He reached out, and a random volume from a nearby shelf slid silently into his grip. It was bound in something that looked like living crystal.
"...are my journals. My observations of the light. Not the light itself. But the closest record possible for something like me to keep."
He placed the crystal book back on the shelf. The act was one of profound reverence.
"The woman's knowledge was a shadow of a shadow. A rumor of a silhouette. It had no value. Only utility. Its utility is now spent."
Nulls looked from the fire to the shelves, understanding dawning. This was not just a library. It was a forensic report on all of existence, written by the only being who had seen the crime scene from the outside.
He stood up. The interview was over. The immediate threat was assessed. He had a new target: Wolfgang Yama Morta. And he had a clearer picture of the prison he was in, and its three paranoid wardens.
"Then our work here is done," Nulls said, his cheerful mask sliding back into place, now more terrifying than ever. "Let's go introduce ourselves to the neighbors."