Death, for a mortal, might be the ultimate darkness, but for me it was not.
When the power of the First Name finally disappeared, my vessel finally fell silent, but what I heard was not silence.
I felt my consciousness being pulled out of the narrow, painful confines of my dying heart and into the linguistic layer of the city of Zonia.
Like a bottle of ink that spreads after its glass is broken, I was no longer trapped behind the eyes of my vessel.
What first caught my attention was the realization that this entire city was like a giant body that constantly used the power of names.
But the usage of names came at a cost, and the cost had to be paid by the vessel or soul of a living being.
Who paid for the city's elevators, trains, hologram projectors, and constant, artificial rain?
I looked down at the double bed in the center of the room. The sight was pitiful.
My body lay there like a dirty underwear.
Its skin was a transparent gray, the color of a man who had been dead for hours, not minutes.
Dark, thick blood still seeped from its nose and ears under the pressure of the "Tax" of the Law, staining the white silk sheets in a jagged, spreading map of my shameful defeat.
Malakor knelt beside the bed, a wreck of fanatical grief, his lips moving in a mad, silent prayer.
He whispered in a trembling voice. "Do not forsake us... my Lord... the great One... please, we are nothing but a shameful failure without you..."
Beside him, Kael was working with obsessive precision.
He had removed my blood-stained coat, revealing a chest that had turned purple from the artificial blood pressure I had applied.
He wasn't praying; he was working, efficiently, just the way I like it.
A medical kit lay open beside him as he struggled to insert thin, glowing threads into the veins of the vessel.
Kael's voice echoed through the room, echoing like falling glass, "His heart rate is zero! His neural resonance has reached a critical level, and his energy signatures are leaking into the surrounding atmosphere."
Malakor looked up, eyes red, and said angrily, "He's not leaking! He's ascending! He told us... He told us his vessel is too weak to hold his divinity!!"
Kael looked up and said as he adjusted a button on the portable respirator, "If his veins reach complete cellular necrosis, there will be no 'return.'
My instructions are clear, Malakor. I'm like his heat sink; if he is fire, I must make sure the hearth does not turn to ash.
If his vessel dies, it is all over; there will be nothing that can seal his terrifying divinity from destroying the planet."
How impressive, I thought to myself. As I walk through the marble walls, the fanatic and Luggage are trying to sew a god back into his skin.
But it's enough,This was not a place to stay, this was a place to observe.
I flew away from the hotel, sliding down the wall of the Obsidian Spire like a quicksilver bead.
In the blink of an eye, I passed through different parts of the city.
My Omnipresence was a kind of curse itself.
I could see the quivering strings of reality, the true form of countless meaningful phrases, words, and sentences that made up the soul of every person and every other fundamental particle in this world.
At a higher level, there were trillions of distinct strings of possibilities, trying to pull those souls and particles in predetermined directions like chains tied to a prisoner.
And finally, a billion lines of intention that started from the souls, passed through them, merged in a web of mediocrity with the lines of possibilities, and disappeared into a higher level of reality.
If mortals could see these fundamental layers of reality, they would have already disintegrated into their constituent words.
I continued on and found the Neon Abyss Casino.
It had become a tomb; the inquisitors from the Church of the Eternal Lens had arrived, their white and gold robes a stark contrast to the blood-soaked purple carpets.
They moved in a daze that was now turning to terror, and I saw a senior inquisitor kneeling beside the scum I had killed with the dice, moving a linguistic scanner over the wound—a perfect, Linear hole in the skull.
The inquisitor whispered to his subordinate in a shaky voice, "He has used the First Holy Name of the Creator,
But… but the precision and power of the Name tend toward infinity… as if reality itself had decided to become a spear.
This is a terrifying violation of the Law of Probability, so absolute that it must be completely impossible…
We were looking for a man, but now the calculations say he is nothing but a catastrophe."
They were terrified, searching for a magic they understood but finding a "source" they could not describe.
I watched them collect the dice as if they were sacred relics.
Their hands were shaking; they knew the world had changed tonight even if they did not know how.
I drifted further, following a thread of ash-colored hair and cold steel.
I found Simone.
She was standing on a bridge three miles away, overlooking the glowing toxic sludge of the Low-Vat districts.
Her hand was pressed against the iron railing, and she was staring at her metal stylus as if it were a poisonous snake. The Fourth Name, Kuklos, was silent in her mind.
"Saint Simone?" a voice whispered in her ear—a high-frequency comms link from the Holy City.
"Report. Have you investigated the anomaly? The Bishop demands a status on priest Mollian"
Simone didn't answer. The rain was hitting her face and dripping down her neck, but she didn't seem to feel the cold.
Her thoughts were palpable in this layer of reality, she was very terrified.
She remembered the frozen raindrops, The language she had never heard in her life—how it had directly put pressure on her soul and disrupted her mastery of the Fourth Name.
She had seen a god looking at her through the slits of a human's eyes, a being whose mere thought of his true form was enough to turn a human into a pile of terrified meat.
"Saint Simone?" the voice repeated, sharper this time. "Status. Do we deploy the Second Circle?"
Simone reached up and clicked the comms link off.
She wasn't going to report. Not yet.
She was a master of the 4th Name, "Kuklos"; she understood the "Cycle" better than anyone. And she knew that if she told the Church what she had seen—what she had heard—they would send the entire inquisitors and guards.
They would turn Zonia into a pyre to kill one man.
And for some reason she couldn't name—a spark of curiosity that outweighed her fifteen years of indoctrination—she wanted to see the end of the line herself.
"You aren't Father Mollian," she whispered into the rain, her voice lost in the thunder. "You aren't even a Primordial Deity... no Entity in this Universe can force the Supreme Law of Probability to obey them..."
Intuitive girl, I thought, my presence swirling around her like a cold draft.
I could see the lines of her intent. She was going to follow me, but not for the Church. She was going after me for the Truth.
The "Tax" of my observation began to pull at me. Even in this state, I was not free.
My consciousness was tethered to the "meat-box" on the 80th floor by a silver cord of linguistic debt.
The Law of Probability was still auditing me. It didn't care that my heart had stopped; it only cared that my Will was still present, observing and exerting pressure on the reality.
I was pulled back, snapping through the city and into the suite.
The air in the room was thick with the smell of burnt chemicals.
Kael had forced a chemical stimulant into the vessel's femoral artery, and the glowing filaments were vibrating with a desperate, artificial rhythm.
"His brain is stabilizing, but his heart... his heart refuses to continue its cycle...," he reported.
Malakor gripped the filaments, his face a mask of agony. "You have a lot of knowledge about names, Kael! Use a name! Do something!"
Kael said in a choked voice. "I cannot violate the Law of Probability, Malakor. I can only offer a more attractive variable, if the heart cannot pump blood due to pressure, I must remove the resistance."
He bent over my vessel, placed his cold, soft hands on its chest, and began to whisper. "In the fifteenth name of the Creator Deity, Gravitas. I neutralize the weight of the blood in this body…"
It was a brilliant, desperate gamble. Kael was using the 15th Name to create a localized zero-gravity environment inside my own arteries.
I felt the shift. The "Weight" of my existence became heavier as the physical anchor became viable again.
The tether began to reel me in. I looked down at the waxy, blood-stained face of my Vessel and felt a surge of absolute, divine loathing.
I am being dragged back into a cage of bone and failure because my Luggage and a fanatic refuse to let me die. I thought, the internal monologue echoing through the linguistic ether.
I saw my own hand twitch. A small tremor.
The "Tax" was waiting for me. I could feel the Law of Probability crouching like a predator at the edge of my return. The moment I stepped back into that vessel, the "Audit" would resume.
"He's coming back," Malakor whispered, his face inches from mine. "I can see the light... the purple... it's returning to his eyes."
I looked at Malakor. From the Void, I could see the "Strings" of his faith. They were bright, golden lines of absolute, unreasoning certainty.
It was his faith that was acting as the final anchor, more powerful than Kael's spell casting. He wasn't just praying; he was willing me back into the meat.
I felt the first spark of pain. The cold, sharp bite of oxygen entering the lungs. The "Meat" was waking up, and it was furious.
Fine, I thought, the egoist's fury flaring one last time before the descent. If you want your God back, you shall have Him. But do not complain when the weight of my presence crushes the floor beneath you.
I lunged. I didn't fall back into the body; I attacked it. I seized the heart, the lungs and the neurons.
The world turned from a blueprint of strings into a furnace of white-hot agony. My eyes snapped open.
I felt the reality groan under me.
The glass in the windows cracked. The gold leaf on the pillars peeled away as the "Static" of the Law returned with a vengeance.
I looked at Malakor and Kael. My voice, when it finally broke through the blood in my throat, was not a whisper. It was a curse that shook the room.
"This vessel... is so weak," I spat, the words vibrating in the air. "It is a cup of clay trying to behold the ocean of my divinity. It breaks... simply because I exist."