Nulls held Yog's gaze for a long moment, the black fire of the Codex's form still flickering with those impossible colors that had no place in any visible spectrum.
The needles had retracted fully into Yog's back, leaving only the smooth surface of its flame-body, and the Codex's hands had stopped trembling.
But the fear remained in the set of its shoulders, the wariness in its posture, the careful distance it kept from the chair where Nulls sat.
"I would like some time alone," Yog said, its voice steadier now but still carrying an edge that had never been there before their contract began. "No future audiences for a while. I need to process what I saw, what happened, what forced me out of your core."
The Codex turned away from Nulls, walking toward the fireplace, the black fire of its form casting long shadows across the library floor. "You can force an audience at any moment as the others could. I cannot refuse you if you truly wish to speak with me. But I am asking you to respect my request, to give me space, to let me recover from this intrusion."
Nulls rose from the chair, his body still trembling slightly from the vision, his heart still racing from the memory of those impossible eyes looking at him from across dimensions.
He placed the book back on the shelf where he had found it, his claws leaving faint scratches on the leather cover as he slid it into place.
"I understand. You will have your time alone. I will not disturb you unless I have no other choice."
Yog nodded once, the motion small and tight, and the black fire of its form pulsed with something that might have been relief. "Then go. Return to your body. You have been absent for longer than you realize."
Before Nulls could ask how long, the black flame engulfed him.
The warmth was pleasant, soft, almost gentle, a stark contrast to the cold fire that had consumed him during his transformation.
It wrapped around his limbs and chest and face, seeping into his skin, his muscles, his bones, pulling him out of the library and back into the space where his physical body waited.
The transition felt like sinking into a warm bath, like waking from a dream that had been too vivid to be real, like returning home after a long journey through unfamiliar lands.
The black flame receded from his skin, leaving behind a warmth that lingered for a moment before the cold ocean air claimed it. Nulls opened his eyes inside the serpent's mouth, the familiar darkness of the creature's gullet pressing against him from every side.
The tongue beneath his feet pulsed with each heartbeat, slow and steady, the rhythm of something that had been sleeping for centuries and had only recently remembered how to dream.
He did not know how long the audience with Yog had lasted. The library existed outside the crude measurements that governed the physical world. Minutes could have passed, or hours, or days.
The serpent's body felt no different, its scales warm and dry despite the water that surrounded them, its breath still carrying the faint smell of fish and old blood and something deeper, something that belonged to the abyss.
The waves no longer hammered against the serpent's jaws. The wind that had screamed across the poisoned surface had died to a whisper, and the snow that had fallen in thick white curtains had thinned to scattered flakes that melted before they touched the water.
The tremors that had shaken the serpent's body during the worst of the storms had faded entirely, replaced by the gentle rise and fall of calm seas.
He was far from the nuclear detonations, far from the radioactive snow, far from the immediate threat of human retaliation.
The serpent had carried him west while he sat unconscious in its mouth, had swum through waters that had not seen human ships in centuries, had brought him to a place where the only sounds were the calls of distant birds and the sigh of waves against stone.
The serpent stopped moving. Nulls felt the creature's body shift, its massive form turning in the water, its head rising toward the surface.
Light filtered through the gaps in its teeth, pale gold instead of grey, the light of a sun that had broken through the clouds. The serpent's jaws opened, and Nulls looked out at an island.
Green rose from blue, a mountain of vegetation that climbed toward a sky striped with high clouds.
Trees covered every slope, their leaves so dense that he could not see the ground beneath them, their branches heavy with fruit that gleamed red and yellow in the morning light.
A beach of golden sand curved along the island's western edge, and waves rolled onto that sand with a gentleness that seemed almost deliberate.
The island was large, large enough to hold his leviathans with room to spare, a mass of green forest and golden beaches and rocky cliffs that rose from the water like the spine of some ancient beast buried beneath the waves.
Trees covered the interior, their leaves a deep emerald green that shimmered in the sunlight, their trunks thick and gnarled with age.
Birds circled overhead, their calls strange and unfamiliar, and the sound of waves crashing against the shore filled the air with a rhythm that was almost musical.
He leaped from the serpent's mouth. The fall was short, the serpent's head hanging low over the water, and he landed on the beach with both feet planted beneath him.
Sand exploded where he struck, the grains flash-heating into glass that spread outward in a cracked circle.
The heat bled away in seconds, leaving a dark patch on the white beach, a scar that marked where something wrong had touched the earth.
His legs held. His body held. The drained reserves meant nothing when he was not fighting, when he was not casting sigils, when he was simply standing on solid ground for the first time in what felt like years.
He turned to face his leviathans.
Nulls looked at the tower, at the mass of fused bodies that had carried him across the ocean, and gave the creature its name. "Walpurgis. Rest. You have earned it."
The tower's thousand mouths opened and closed in a pattern that might have been acknowledgment, might have been gratitude, might have been the only way a being of its nature could express exhaustion.
The creature flowed backward into the water, its fused bodies sinking beneath the waves, disappearing into the depths with a grace that belied its monstrous form. Walpurgis would slumber below the surface, close enough to rise if needed, deep enough to dream in peace.
The mountain, the creature of eyes and beams and ancient hunger, waited for its own command. "Regie. Rest with your brother."
The mountain's central cluster pulsed with a soft violet light, and the creature sank into the ocean, its massive form descending into the water with a slowness that spoke of exhaustion and relief.
Within moments, only the faint glow of its beams marked its position beneath the waves, a soft illumination that pulsed like a heartbeat in the deep.
The serpent remained on the shore, its massive body rising and falling with each breath, its scales warm against the sand.
The creature's single eye watched Nulls with an expression that might have been contentment, might have been trust, might have been the simple pleasure of finally resting after a long and brutal journey across a poisoned sea.
Nulls walked to the serpent's head and placed his palm against its scales. They were warm, smoother than they looked, and they vibrated faintly with the creature's breathing. "Sleep well. We have far to go when you wake."
The serpent's eye closed, and the creature's breathing deepened, and the island fell silent save for the crash of waves and the call of birds and the slow, steady rhythm of three massive beings finally allowed to rest.
Nulls stood on the beach, the glass still warm beneath his feet, and watched his children sleep.
"All of you did well," he said. "All of you brought me here safely. You kept me alive when I could not. You followed my commands without hesitation, and you will continue to follow them because that is what you were made to do."
The serpent's tail twitched, sending a spray of water into the air.
"But you are not tools. Not anymore. You were once weapons, once monsters, once things that hunted and killed because that was all you knew. Now you are bound to me, and I am bound to you, and we will either rise together or fall together."
He walked toward the serpent, his feet sinking into the sand, his claws leaving deep furrows. The creature's head was larger than a house, its eye larger than a door, its scales larger than his entire body. He placed his hand on the ridge above its eye and felt the warmth of its flesh, the pulse of its blood, the presence of something that had been ancient when this island was still part of the ocean floor.
"I will need you again. Soon. The humans will not leave me alone, and the Morbus will not stop hunting me, there are many things in this world that want to consume me. I will call you when that happens. Until then, sleep. Dream of whatever it is that leviathans dream of."
The serpent's breathing deepened, and a sound emerged from its throat, low and deep, the bloop sound that was its version of a purr. The vibration passed through the sand, through his feet, through his bones, and he felt something that might have been contentment.
He left his hand on the serpent's head for a long moment, then turned and walked toward the forest.
The trees rose above him, their leaves whispering in the wind, their roots tangled beneath the soil. Animals moved in the underbrush, small things that had never seen a creature like him, that would run and hide if he came too close. He would give them that chance. He was not hungry yet. He was not desperate yet.
Faust slept behind him. Walpurgis slept beneath the waves. Regie slept on the ocean floor.
Nulls turned away from the ocean and walked toward the forest, his feet leaving deep prints in the sand, his body still trembling with exhaustion and hunger and the weight of everything he had seen.
The trees rose before him, their trunks thick and ancient, their leaves casting dappled shadows on the ground.
He stepped into their shade and kept walking, deeper into the island, deeper into the unknown, deeper into the silence that had settled over this place like a blessing and a warning.
He needed to perform the Rite of Reclamation before his reserves dropped so low that he could no longer maintain his body.
The forest grew dense around him, the canopy of leaves blocking the sun until only scattered beams of gold light reached the forest floor.
Ferns brushed against his waist as he walked deeper into the forest, his four eyes scanning the shadows between the trees. Birds called from somewhere above him, their songs unfamiliar, their chirping carrying warnings that he could not translate.
Hours passed, or maybe only minutes. Time became blurry without the thumping of the serpent's heart to tell the interval between them.
The island stretched further than he had expected, its interior rising into hills that blocked the view of the sea, valleys sinking into ravines where water trickled over moss-covered stones.
He had seen no sign of human habitation, no smoke rising through the trees, no trails cut through the undergrowth, no structures hidden in the hollows of the ancient trees.
His reserves sat at empty. The last traces of Nexus clung to his cells like morning dew on grass, enough to keep his body functioning, enough to maintain the connection to his leviathans, enough to keep his consciousness anchored to his physical form.
But nothing more. A single sigil would drain him completely. A single summoning would leave him unconscious. A single attack from any creature with aetherion in its veins would subjugated him.
The forest opened into a clearing. Nulls stopped at the tree line and stared at the village that spread before him, his four eyes taking in every detail, his mind recording everything with the precision of a scribe copying sacred texts.
Hundreds of huts formed a rough circle around a central plaza, their walls made from woven reeds and their roofs thatched with palm leaves.
Smoke rose from cooking fires, thin and blue, carrying the smell of fish and bread and something else, something sweet that he could not identify.
People moved between the huts, their skin dark from generations of sun, their hair black and long, their bodies lean from lives spent swimming and climbing and working the land.
Children ran through the dirt paths, their laughter sharp and high, chasing each other around cooking fires and between the legs of adults who shouted warnings that went unheeded.
Women wove baskets from palm fronds, their fingers moving with a speed that spoke of decades of practice. Men repaired fishing nets, their hands dark with tar, their faces relaxed in the easy companionship of shared labor.
Thousands of them. More than enough. More than he needed.
Nulls watched them for a long moment, his four eyes drinking in the scene, his mind memorizing the layout of the village, the positions of the huts and the paths that led into the jungle.
The streams that provided water, the gardens where vegetables grew in neat rows. He watched a mother hand a piece of fruit to her daughter, watched the girl's face light up with joy as her mother smile and ruffle the girl's hair.
He closed his eyes. His claws traced a sigil in the air before him, the lines thin and faint, the purple light barely visible even in the dim light of the forest.
The sigil required almost no power, just the barest whisper of Nexus, just enough to conjure a ball of plasma at the tip of his finger. The plasma formed, white-hot and humming, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand but hot enough to melt stone.
He raised his hand to his face and pressed the plasma against his eyelids.
The flesh melted with a sound like meat dropped into hot oil, hissing and spitting, the smell of burning skin filling the air around him.
The pain was sharp and immediate, a white-hot lance that drove through his skull and into his brain, but he did not scream, nor did he flinch.
He held the plasma against his lids until the flesh fused together, the upper and lower parts of his eyelids became one continuous sheet of scar tissue.
The plasma died in his fingers. He lowered his hand and stood in the darkness, his ears straining to catch every sound from the village, flooding his nose with the smells of cooking food and wood smoke and human sweat.
He has no need for vision. The scream is more than enough to navigate, they would guide him to one human after another.
He stepped into the clearing, basking in the warmth of the sun.
The first person to see him was a young man, perhaps seventeen years old, carrying a bundle of fishing nets over his shoulder.
The man's eyes went wide, his mouth opened, and the bundle of nets fell from his arms and landed on the ground with a soft thump. But before he could conjured up a scream.
Nulls reached out with his right hand, his claws closing around the man's throat, and squeezed until he felt the cartilage collapse, until he felt the blood vessels burst, he felt the last dropped of life leave the man's body.
The man's scream died in his crushed throat. Nulls threw the body aside and walked toward the center of the village.
The second person to see him was an old woman, bent and gray, sitting on a stool outside her hut.
She screamed when she saw him, a high thin sound that cut through the noise of the village like a knife, and other screams joined hers as more eyes saw the ten-foot crimson figure walking toward them with claws dripping blood.
He found a man raising his spear sprinting toward him, the man's face twisted with a courage that would be his last.
Nulls sidestepped the thrust and grabbed the man's wrist, twisting until the bone snapped, the spear fell from nerveless fingers, and the man's scream joined the chorus of terror that now filled the village.
He pulled the man close and drove his claws into the man's chest bursting into the other side, he held the man there while the life drained out of him, the screams turned to gurgles and inevitably the light faded from his eyes.
He let the body fall and moved deeper into the village. A woman tried to run past him, her child clutched to her chest, unfortunately her bare feet slipping on the blood-soaked ground.
Nulls caught her by the hair and pulled her back, their screams guided him to where the others were hiding.
He reached over the woman's shoulder and stripped the child from her arms, the child's screams became high and thin morphing into sounds that would haunt the nightmares of anyone who heard them, it is the sounds that he needed to locate the rest.
He placed the child on the ground and stepped on its chest until he felt the ribs crack, the breath leave its lungs in a wet gasp until the screams stopped due to lack of respiratory and vocal organs.
The mother's screams however did not stop. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the center of the village, dragging her through the mud and the blood and the scattered belongings of her people.
She clawed at his arm, her nails breaking against his skin as she desperately trying to get to the bloody pulp that was once hers, trails of blood flowed from her broken nails that dried almost instantly on his skin. He did not look back, couldn't bring himself to.
He reached the central place and released her, as she fell to the ground she looked up at him with eyes that held hatred and grief all mixed together, she screamed again the scream echoed off the huts, and more screams answered from every direction.
They were everywhere now. Running between the huts, climbing the trees, diving into the streams, hiding in the gardens, crawling under the floors of their homes. Hiding like the vermins that they are.
But the screams turned the village into a hunting ground and the people into prey that announced their own locations.
He walked toward a hut where a family had barricaded themselves inside, their voices raised in prayer as their children cowers behind them in fear. Incapable of chanting prayers anymore, their faith have been rendered thin in the thick of their fear.
He tore the door from its hinges and reached inside, his claws finding the soft and hard places where life pooled and waited to be spilled.
A man charged at him with a machete, the blade gleaming in the light of the cooking fires. Nulls let the blade strike his shoulder, felt it cut through his skin and halted by the dense muscle underneath.
He reached up and took the man's head in both hands, he squeezed lightly on it driving his claws into his head and wiggling them inside, the man screamed. They always were, no matter the species.
Humans, dogs, morbus and gods. All seemed to be conjuring the same reaction before death, perhaps he would be like one of them someday. To be killed by a higher power he couldn't understand, such problems were nonexistent in his previous incarnation. But whatever beings brought him back, he would enjoyed every second of it.
After several agonyzing seconds the skull cracked spewing bodily fluids in all direction, the man's body went limp the machete fell from his hand and landed on the ground with a clatter.
He dropped the body, finished whatever remains in this hut and moved on to the next. A group of young men had formed a crude defensive line, armed with spears and machetes and clubs, their faces pale with fear but their feet planted firmly on the ground.
They charged together, their weapons raised, their shouts joining into a single roar of defiance. Nulls casually walked toward them, when the first spear struck his chest he pulled it from his flesh and used it to impale the man who had thrown it.
The second spear struck his leg he broke it off and used the broken end to stab the man who had thrown it.
Machetes struck him from all angles simultaneously, he ignored them, reaching out with his claws and tearing and ripping and destroying.
The young men fell, their blood mixing with the blood of those who had fallen before them.
Nulls stood in the center of the plaza, surrounded by bodies. He had lost count of how many he had killed, hundreds if not thousands still remained he reckoned. No bother, their screams would guide him to them.
He walked toward the next cluster of screams, and the next, and the next. The screams grew louder attracting predators and prey alike. The animals rejoiced as they and they youngs feast on the corpses of the humans who once hunted them.
The sound of the tearing flesh reached his ears even from far away. He walked to the outer layer of the village and into the source of the sound.
A four legged creatures happily feasting on the corpses with its infants, he Grabbed as much corpses as he could. Before he left he sliced several body parts and left it for the creature.
It, whatever it was. Is the second thing in this world that didn't immediately attacked him, after Yog of course. With that he took his leaving and brought the corpses to the plaza.
Lucikly the humans fled when they first saw him, they were concentrated on the plaza, few were in the outside of it. But a few could be the difference between life and death.
The darkness behind his sealed eyelids grew red with the light of fires that burned through his scarred flesh.
The ritual required fresh corpses, and fresh they would be. The ritual required suffering, and suffering he would give them. The ritual required horror, and it he would provide.
The last scream faded as the sun set, he stood in the center of the village, surrounded by the bodies of thousands, his skin slick with blood and his claws stained with bodily fluids, his sealed eyelids still pressed shut against the darkness that had been his only mercy.
He knelt in the mud and the blood and the ash of the cooking fires, and he began to draw the pentagram, his claws carving deep grooves in the earth, his fingers guiding the flow of crimson into the channels of the ritual, using the blood of the youngest humans he could find.
The darkness behind his sealed eyelids had become a thing with texture as well as a weight that pressed against his scarred flesh from the inside.
Nulls extended his right claws to his face, the tips finding the seam where his melted lids had fused together. The flesh had cooled hours ago, hardening into a permanent seal that should have lasted for the rest of his existence in this body.
The claws parted the scar tissue along the line where his eyelids had once met, the cut clean and precise, initially the flesh resisting for a moment before giving way.
Blood and lymph fluid welled from the wound, warm against his cheeks, light flooded into his eyes for the first time since the slaughter began. The world resolved into shapes and colors and the full horror of what he had created.
The village was a charnel house. Bodies lay in piles around the central plaza, arranged in the circular pattern he had demanded, each corpse placed with the same care that a mason might give to stones in a wall.
Men, women, children, infants still clutched in the arms of mothers who had tried to protect them.
Their blood had pooled in the channels he had carved between the bodies, filling the pentagram he had drawn with his claws, turning the geometric shape from a symbol into a substance.
The smell of death hung over everything, thick and sweet, the smell of bowels voided in terror and blood left to stagnate in the sun.
He viewed his work and found it good. The pentagram was complete, its lines perfect and its proportions exact to the smallest scale.
The corpses surrounded it in a circle that had no beginning and no end, their bodies arranged so that the channels of blood connected each one to the next.
The Codex sat at the center of the pentagram, its cover facing upward, the ancient sigils on its surface pulsing with a hunger that had been waiting to be fed.
Nulls walked to the nearest corpse and knelt beside it. The body was that of a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, her dark hair spread around her head like a halo, her eyes still open and fixed on the sky above.
He had killed her quickly, a mercy that he had not granted to most of the others, and her blood had pooled in the channel that led from her throat to the pentagram's outer ring.
He placed his deep hand on her eye socket and felt the residual warmth of her flesh and retracted it once he felt what he wanted to, the last traces of the life that had left her hours ago.
The ritual required fresh blood. The ritual required a living sacrifice placed at the center of the pentagram, its throat opened, its life poured out onto the Codex and into the channels.
But the slaughter had ended at sunset, and the sun had set hours ago. The corpses were no longer fresh. The blood had begun to cool, to thicken, to lose the vitality that the ritual demanded.
He had known this would happen. He had prepared for it.
Among the bodies arranged around the pentagram, one still breathed.
He had kept it alive through the slaughter, had fed it water and whispered words of reassurance, had promised it that the pain would end soon even as he watched its family die around it.
The child was seven years old, a girl with dark eyes and dark hair and a face that had been beautiful before the screaming had twisted it into something else.
She lay at the outer edge of the circle, bound with ropes made from twisted palm fronds, her chest rising and falling in rapid shallow gasps.
Nulls walked to her and lifted her from the ground.
She did not scream. Her throat couldn't screamed no longer but it was replaced by a silence that was somehow worse, the silence of someone who had given up hope and was simply waiting for the end.
He carried her to the center of the pentagram and placed her on the ground before the Codex, her head directly in front of the book's cover, her throat exposed to the knife of his claw.
"Do not be afraid," he said.
The child said nothing, as she couldn't understand any of the words he said, but even if she did, her mind had retreated somewhere deep inside itself, somewhere that thinking could not reach, somewhere that the memory of her mother's death could not follow.
He drew his claw across her throat. The cut was deep and clean, opening the windpipe and the vessels beneath in a single stroke. Blood sprayed from the wound, hot and bright, splashing across the Codex's cover and into the channels of the pentagram. The child's body convulsed once, twice, three times, and then went still.
The blood began to glow. It started as a faint violet light along the edges of the channels, a shimmer that spread outward from the Codex, from the point where the child's life had poured out onto its cover.
The light grew brighter as it traveled, following the lines of the pentagram, spreading into the outer ring that connected the corpses, flowing into the bodies themselves.
The corpses shuddered, their remaining life force and any stored aetherion drawn out as threads of purple light that converged on the Codex.
Nulls stood at the center of the pentagram, his feet planted on either side of the child's body, his hands clasped behind his back. The Codex pulsed beneath him, its hunger rising, its power building.
He chanted.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
The first line invoked the principle that separated this reality from the void where Nexus pooled. The language was old, older than human civilization, older than the rocks beneath his feet, and the words tasted like ash in his mouth.
"The Tome and the Knowledge of the gate."
The second line called upon the Codex's own nature as a gateway, as a passage between what was and what could be, as a door that opened onto chaos. The Codex pulsed in response, its light growing stronger, its hunger sharpening into something that felt almost like anticipation.
"The All-in-One."
The third line aligned the sacrifice with the unified source, the origin from which all things flowed, the singularity that existed before the first moment of creation. The child's blood flared bright, the violet light becoming almost white, and the channels began to hum with a sound that was felt more than heard.
"The One-in-All."
The fourth line sealed the circuit, drawing the released energy inward, toward the Codex, toward the pentagram, toward Nulls himself. The light converged on him in a torrent, a flood of violet fire that poured into his body through the Codex and filled the vessel that had been empty for so long.
Nexus flowed through his channels, cold and burning, searing his nerves and leaving him gasping even as it restored his power.
The ritual burned, a cold fire that consumed the offerings and transformed them into fuel, and the fuel poured into him until he could hold no more. His reserves filled to the brim, the dark sea rising until it touched the edges of his consciousness, vast and deep and hungry.
The corpses collapsed into grey ash. The pentagram's glow faded, leaving only the scent of ozone and burnt copper and the memory of what had happened here.
The child's body was gone, reduced to the same grey dust that covered the ground around him, indistinguishable from the ashes of her family.
Nulls stood at the center of the circle, his breathing ragged, his Nexus reserves restored, his body whole. The Codex was warm against his chest, its hunger momentarily sated, its power waiting to be unleashed. He could finally continue magnum opus.
The ash settled around him as the wind picked up, carrying the remains of the tribe across the island, scattering them into the jungle and the sea. Nulls watched them go, his four eyes tracking the grey particles until they vanished into the darkness between the trees.
The journey back to the beach took longer than he expected. He could use the time equation setting his distance to places with low aetherion concentration into whatever value he wants, but it would just be a waste of resource. Even if the cost is low, still a waste.
The forest pressing close around him and the darkness between them could not be penetrate by the moonlight.
His four eyes adjusted to the lack of illumination, the pupils widening, the irises taking on a faint glow that let him pick out the shapes of roots and rocks and the occasional animal that froze in his path before scurrying into the undergrowth.
The ash from the village still clung to his skin, grey powder mixed with dried blood, and he smelled of death and ozone and the fading violet light of the ritual.
The trees thinned as he approached the coast, and the sound of waves replaced the calls of nocturnal birds.
The moon hung low over the water, a crescent of silver that painted a path across the dark sea, and the serpent lay where he had left it, its body a black mountain against the white sand.
The creature's eye was open, tracking his approach, the pupil contracting as he drew near. Walpurgis and Regie remained beneath the waves, their presence visible only as disturbances in the moonlight, dark shapes that shifted with each breath.
He walked past the serpent's head and along its flank, his feet sinking into sand that had cooled since midday, the grains shifting beneath his weight.
The scales of the leviathan rose above him like the wall of a fortress, each one larger than his entire body, their edges catching the moonlight and throwing it back in patterns that reminded him of the constellations he had watched in the void.
He placed his hand on the serpent's side and felt the warmth of its flesh, the slow pulse of its blood, the steady rhythm of the thing he entrusted his children's name with, and he would not stripped it from him as long as he was him to command.
He lay down in the sand beside the serpent. The creature shifted, its body rolling slightly, and a section of its flank settled against him like a blanket made of warm stone.
The scales pressed against his back, their edges smooth, their surface rough in a way that caught at his skin but did not tear them.
He felt the serpent's heartbeat through the contact, slow and deep, a rhythm that he has grown intimately close with.
The stars above him were wrong. He had memorized the constellations of this world during his brief time on the surface, had mapped their positions and tracked their movements across the night sky. None of those constellations appeared above this island.
The stars here were different, arranged in patterns that he had never seen, their light tinged with colors that did not match the stars he had catalogued.
A nebula stretched across the eastern horizon, its edges glowing with faint purple and blue, its center dark with the dust of dead suns. Clusters of stars dotted the darkness like scattered diamonds, some so old that their light had been traveling for longer than human civilization had existed.
Billions of years from now, those stars would burn through their fuel and collapse into white dwarfs, or explode into supernovas that would outshine every other light in the sky, or collapse into black holes that would swallow everything within reach.
The nebulae would disperse, their gas and dust scattering across the void, and new stars would form from the remnants, and those new stars would die in their turn, and the cycle would continue until the universe expanded too far for matter to hold itself together.
He would watch it all. The thought settled into his mind like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples spreading outward in concentric circles of awareness. He would watch the stars die and galaxies drift apart.
He would watch the last black hole evaporate into nothing. And through all of it, he would be alone, the last witness to a universe that had forgotten how to sustain itself.
If only they were here.
They should be here, watching the stars with him, tracking the slow death of this universe that had only just begun. They would have understood the beauty of the nebula and the tragedy of the dying stars and the vast indifference of the void.
But they were gone. The Omnia Mortis had taken them, and the Nexus Tree had fallen, and the creation that had been their home had collapsed into nothing. He was the only one left.
The sand shifted beneath him forcing him to adjustt his position, that he did. After some time searching he find a hollow where the grains had settled into a shape that his body could comfortably rest in.
The serpent's heartbeat continued its slow rhythm as the waves washed against the shore, and the wind carried the smell of salt and seaweed as well as the distant promise of radioactive storms. He closed his four eyes, one pair then the other, letting the darkness behind his lids consumed his entire vision.
If only they were here...
If only he had not pressed the button...
If only he had found another way...
But there had been no other way. He had to be the one who pressed the detonation, if killing them once and for all means bearing the immeasuerable weight of guilt and sins, he would willingly to pay the price so that no others should.
He had chosen extinction, and he would live with it until the last particle in the creation flickered into nonexistence and the last of concept morphed into indescribable chaos as time violently stretched beyond the scope of infinities.
At the end he would repaired the creation. Sat on that throne. And oversee all of creation as his predecessors do all those eternities ago. He would not fail as they have, he cannot afford to. He would ensure that no other species would make the same mistake as his species once make.
The sand was soft beneath him, warmer than it should have been at night, heated by the serpent's body and the lingering warmth of the day.
He let his mind drift and his thoughts dissolved, the exhaustion of the ritual and the slaughter and the long journey finally catch up with him. The stars watched him from above, and the moon traced its path across the sky, and the waves sang their endless song.
He took one last looked at them, chant a religious chant he heard from one of the humans he killed. Not for protection, no. He doesn't believed in the higher power as they were themselve an insect to a higher one, he did it to honored the dead.
He knew what lies beyond the planes of the living, it is one of the primary reasons his species advanced so much, they are driven by the fear of what lies on the other side.
"May their souls rest in peace."
He pawed at the warmed sand, glances at the stars for the last time, and took a comfortable position. And at last.
He slept.