"There is a difference between a King and a God. A King rules the people. A God writes the laws of physics that allow the King to breathe. They have misunderstood who their God is. So, let us remind them before whom they must prostrate themselves."
The first sensation I experienced was not pain. It was pressure.
In those initial moments, my nerves had not yet formed enough to transmit suffering.
My consciousness felt like an ocean struggling to fit into a thimble.
The crushing weight of absolute limitation.
Walls of reality slammed shut around me, imprisoning my essence in a single point in space.
It is too tight! My mind screamed against the confines. This cage is too small.
Do not push, my logic responded, cold and precise. Pushing breaks the law of probability. Submit to the vessel.
Forcing the cosmos to contract, I submitted.
I accepted the humiliation of having a spatial location.
But before biology could fully claim this new prison, a different sensation intruded.
Heat.
A radiation that made the fine hairs on my neck stand on end.
Even through the muddy confusion of a newborn nervous system, I could feel chaotic entropy
radiating from behind.
A wind smelling of burnt ozone and sulfur washed over my naked skin.
Gravity crashed down on me like a physical blow, a heavy, invisible hand pressing my shoulders to the earth, but necessity forced my neck to turn.
I needed to see the threat.
My eyelids snapped open.
The vision was muddy, a crude and painfully narrow aperture. Peering through these gelatinous
orbs felt like looking through a dirty keyhole.
Yet, the thing standing five feet away required no clarity to be terrifying.
Space itself was torn; a jagged, vertical wound in the air leading straight to the Abyss.
Stepping through it was a demon.
He was about to enter when I stole his entry vector.
A wretched convergence of wet, exposed muscle and weeping sores, the creature looked like a cancer given legs.
It was a chaotic heap of biology that had forgotten how to stop growing.
Too many joints plagued its limbs, and its skin shifted like oil on water, struggling to contain the
boiling entropy underneath.
Against my ribs, a raw, fleshy pump no bigger than a fist hammered with a rhythm like a war drum beating inside my skull.
Deafening. Relentless.
How do mortals think with this constant biological clamor inside them?
Attempting to think here was like trying to compose a symphony inside a running engine.
Yellow, reptilian eyes met my human ones.
Flesh was all the beast saw initially. Pale, naked skin. Wet, dark hair plastered to a skull.
A young human male, weak and soft.
Then, its gaze deepened.
It looked past my iris, straight into the pupils.
No soul greeted the monster. It saw Me.
It witnessed the crushing weight of an ancient consciousness wearing this skin suit.
The demon froze.
Primal instincts of the Abyss—mechanisms polished over millennia of devouring the weak—screamed a single concept in the monster's primitive brain:
Predator.
A sound no throat should be capable of producing tore from the creature; a high-pitched howl of absolute existential terror.
There was no attack. No roar.
Scrambling backward, the beast tripped over its own massive tail, claws digging frantically into the obsidian ground to put distance between itself and me.
Good boy, I thought, cold amusement filtering through the pain. Run back into the fire. It is safer there.
With a soft, final snap, the rift closed.
The tear in reality stitched itself up, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and a heavy, suffocating silence.
Stillness descended upon the basement.
Heavy, thick, and waiting.
It was the genre of silence that reigns before an execution ceremony.
Only then did I allow my attention to shift to the rest of the world.
Blinking cleared the rheum of birth from my eyes.
Disgusting, I thought. I am blind to 180 degrees of my surroundings. Vulnerable from behind. This is not a body; it is a coffin with windows.
I lifted a hand.
Five pale, fleshy fingers and blue veins pulsing beneath the skin greeted me.
Alien.
Beneath my feet lay a circle drawn with chalk, lines glowing with a faint, crimson light.
The metaphysical structure of the spell was visible to my gaze; sloppy, full of holes and leaks.
A fence made of rotten spiderwebs. Walking through it would require no effort.
Cute, I mused. It is like trying to catch a falling star with a paper napkin.
Around the circle stood twelve figures.
Crimson robes clad their forms, though the velvet was worn at the elbows and stained with grey mud.
Chants had died in their throats moments ago.
Now, they stared at the empty space where the demon had been, and then, slowly, twelve pairs of terrified eyes turned inward.
Towards me.
Threads of possibility unraveled in the space of a single heartbeat as I assessed my surroundings.
Concrete walls leaking dampness. Water stains blossoming like dark flowers on the ceiling. The smell of wet earth and wrong decisions.
The fabric of this local reality was firm; it would not crumble under the weight of my presence. Good.
The vessel, however, was disappointing.
Merely standard human stock. Muscle fibers felt dense, perhaps distinct among its kind, but the connection between my will and this meat was sluggish—untamed.
My true authority remained sealed, barred behind the probability barrier.
Naked, shivering slightly from the damp cold, I stood exposed.
If one of these fanatics decided to pull a gun, the bullet would pierce my skin. I would bleed. I might even die.
Dying five minutes after descent would be a humiliating end to my vacation. A cosmic joke that would echo for eternity.
I needed to prove my dominance.
Immediately.