I had been dressed for the occasion, and while others focused on outward preparation, I turned inward.
I wore heavy robes of black, blue, and white, and carried nothing with me. Nothing I could name, at least.
My hair was braided back, and I had washed myself over and over, chasing a sense of purity I knew I could never truly claim.
The water never felt finished with me. Each time I dried my hands, they felt less mine.
Standing before me, deep in the far reaches of the castle, in a chamber few knew existed and fewer remembered afterward, was an altar.
The room was dark, but not empty. It was filled with a weightless stillness and whispers left behind by those who shared my blood.
They did not speak in words so much as impressions, traces pressed into the air like fingerprints refusing to fade.
They left these murmurs in their death as reminders, and I knew I would do the same. All who entered this trial died.
It was part of why I had avoided it for so long. I did not wish to die, even knowing I would return.
Knowing does not soften the act. It sharpens anticipation.
In this world, death is holy, a grand passage marking one's ascent toward Heaven.
To dismiss it would be a sin in itself.
Not that it mattered. We would sin regardless.
What mattered was redemption, and this was a sin meant to redeem all who came before.
The altar was small. Too small.
It leaked a black water that did not pool properly, emitting a light that refused to illuminate the space it occupied.
Looking directly at it made the corners of the room recede.
It pulsed with a slow, rhythmic beat that settled behind my eyes, masking the rising suspense with a calm I had not earned.
Each pulse felt less like sound and more like a reminder that something waited patiently.
Most of all, the room was vast, impossibly vast, and I felt small.
The distance between my knees and the altar stretched beyond memory.
I knelt.
"O darkness, which has given me light. O darkness which has forsaken me. Grant me your death."
The altar screamed.
It ridiculed me. It spat with an intent so sharp it felt wet.
The sound folded inward on itself, repeating not as echo but as judgment. When its fury finally ceased, the room did not return.
I found myself in another plane.
It was grand, but not orderly, built on complexities beyond mortal comprehension, beyond any structure meant to be understood from a single vantage.
The sky was infinite, littered with stars the size of galaxies, each shimmering with unreachable distance, each subtly misaligned.
As if placed by different hands disputing where infinity should begin.
The land before me stretched endlessly, vast enough to hold an infinite number of swords, each blade masked by the identity it craved.
Some trembled as I passed. Others leaned toward me, impatient.
And there I was, standing in the very center, granted complacency for only a fleeting moment before the summons reached me.
Without allowing myself rest, I began to walk.
One might ask how such a thing is possible. To be clear, it is not.
Something so mighty cannot be contained within normal worlds. But ours was the greatest of them all.
This was the Cradle of Swords.
A domain where all who shared my blood might roam, a sacred expanse forged from death, memory, and ancient purpose.
Purpose so old it no longer remembered why it had been created.
Above, watching me, was a monster.
At first, its body moved like a serpent. Then its eyes glimmered like a wolf. Its legs were the limbs of a lion.
Each detail asserted itself, then withdrew, as though testing what I could endure.
Yet the truth was far stranger.
To me, to my limited perception, Cradella appeared mostly like a goat.
A towering, cosmic mockery of one, its horns spiraling through realities, its hooves pressing into planes I could not name.
But even as I named the shape, I knew I was wrong. I knew this was not what I was seeing, only what I was allowed to survive seeing.
It allowed us the mask it used to speak to mortals without shattering our minds or breaking the world it aimed to descend into.
Even as a goat, it was terrifying beyond belief.
It was a Great Old One.
The term felt immediately inadequate.
A creature without limits, without resolve, unbound by the logic of creation.
Its kind moved beyond this world, regarding us not with hatred but a cold attention that burned because it did not care whom it burned.
And yet this one, fittingly called Cradella, was different.
She served our bloodline. Whether out of loyalty, amusement, or some unfathomable rule written somewhere even she could not read, none of us ever learned.
"Cradella," I said, invoking a sacred name, one which was sacredly unholy.
"Come to me. Give me your accursed knowledge."
"Little goat," she replied, her voice arriving before her meaning, "who wishes not to be slaughtered, lift."
I rose into the sky with violent force.
My eyes bled as madness and peace washed over me in equal measure.
I stared at her shifting form, but even then I could only grasp fragments.
Her true size nearly dwarfed the entire realm. Her breath was this realm, so to speak.
"You reek of time," Cradella said. "You reek of time beyond."
The words lingered. I felt them settle behind my thoughts, where they would remain long after I forgot why they frightened me.
"I need to start the ritual," I managed. "Might you allow it?"
Cradella laughed.
Then she screamed.
The sound bent the horizon and shook the swords around me, though none fell. The world did not allow it.
"Make haste, little child of darkness," she said, suddenly bored. "For He is watching."
I appeared back on the ground, collapsing to my knees. Only when I lifted my head did I truly see myself.
Another me stood before me, carrying a blade that had no name, no form, no life.
Only a hollow, undefined shape, a void disguised as a weapon.
When I fully stood, the same empty blade appeared in my hand.
Then the world blurred, and I flashed backward.
This was the trial. It was to kill myself. This was how I marched toward salvation.
For my ascension must begin with a fall.
He, or maybe I, for the distinction was already dissolving, moved without restraint.
Blades clashed back and forth.
We circled each other like fools reveling in borrowed glory, like fools burning with a heat only mirrored beings could understand.
We struck to kill with every motion. Yet it did not matter who survived.
We were the same, he and I.
The only difference lay in the voice each of us carried, the version of Nicholas we were allowed to embody.
[Nicholas was encountering a paradoxical equation, and this world was more than willing to accept it.]
It was so like this world, bound by the law of non-contradiction, yet permitting its violation when one's will was strong enough.
The world was considerate in that way, a great world, a cruel world, always testing its children.
Yet it was also bound, for it did not formulate such laws, only permitted them, arranging them so far beyond the world that such laws were more absolute than anything else, logic in purest form.
The longer our blades exchanged sparks, the more deeply I felt the connection tighten.
Soon, tears began to fall, mine or his. I could not tell, and it did not matter.
Tears flowed regardless, intermingling with rising laughter and the soft dripping of blood upon the infinite ground.
Everything blurred. Everything softened.
The fight pressed on with relentless rhythm, yet my mind frayed.
I was becoming hollow, and something hollow was becoming me, an echo moving into an echo, a truth dissolving into another truth.
Toward the end, when all was said and done, my blade pierced his chest.
However, this was only the beginning.
The beginning of the end.
As my blood splurged outward from his back, I fell forward, a sharp pain blooming through my chest like a second heartbeat.
My breath thinned.
The realm shook around me.
When I turned, Cradella moved.
She did not approach like a creature should.
Her body did not shift from one place to another.
Instead, the space between us folded, sank as though reality were soft clay, and her presence simply appeared closer with each impossible ripple.
Every motion was silent, yet it left behind an echo, a distortion, as if the air itself had not yet caught up to the fact that she had moved.
Her limbs glided without joints, bending at angles that contradicted themselves.
Her shadow writhed ahead of her, stretching in patterns that did not match the shape of her body.
With each step, the ground bulged inward, as though unwilling to let her touch it, as though it feared contamination.
When she finally reached me, the very sky dipped, dipping low enough that it felt as if the heavens flinched.
She extended a limb toward me with a slowness that mocked my fear. It hovered over my chest like a decree.
"Little goat, you have seen your death. Now you must live it. Now you must breathe it in, and reject its taste."
Her touch slipped into me like cold pressure sliding beneath the skin.
Death poured into my bones, wrapped around my ribs, and seeped into every quiet chamber of my heart.
It forced my eyes open.
It showed me my deaths one by one, spread across branching futures, each one a blade meant for me.
It was brutal.