Rotten. Boiling. Rage.
That is what the Mist has turned into, and it is what receives me the moment I leave Lilith in the Vault. She must be confused... and scared. But what I must do, I must do now.
It is fascinating. The Mist at the summit is physical, an adamant force that pushes everything down toward the bottom of the mountain with a crushing weight. But it ends abruptly at the frontier of his domain. Here, it loses its strength and becomes subject to the solid laws of nature. I hurt his power badly by taking his women and killing his children, but without the noise of battle, I can appreciate his song better. I know what he truly is.
Have you ever wondered what reality is? Perhaps you have. All of us must, at some point. In the end, reality just is, regardless of us and our endless constructs.
"Uhmm... Mmmm... Uhhmmhumm..."
I try to hum the melody. Immediately, my power reacts. My reason drops, and my violence boils. The predator in me has heard the call. I chuckle, bitterly. The Hollow crowd is there, answering his summons. They are here with weapons. They are here to kill me.
"You won," I tell them, my voice carrying over the mindless shuffling. "I only wanted the woman you took. She is mine. Was. You won."
The crowd keeps moving. Men and women—empty bodies. The first arrows zoom toward me, missing because I dodge them effortlessly, a blur of kinetic instinct.
"It is... magnificent, what you have built here," I add, projecting my thoughts into the psychic soup of the mountain. "An army that will never betray you. A mist that gives you every advantage. Children to spread it in all directions. Why?"
"I told you why already. You were not listening," a woman in the crowd replies. Finally.
"To recreate the song of your father. I was listening. But why?" I insist. "Why do you feel compelled to recreate it?"
"I must!"
This time, the answer comes from a bald old man at the front of the line.
"You don't even know the true notes," I add.
The Hollow crowd surrounds me. Like ants—no, like wolves. It is a hypnotic display of coordination and order, a hive mind tightening its grip.
"True notes?"
The voices of all of them ask the question in a singular, stopping echo. I smirk. His physical form flashes in my mind. Even without seeing him, I can feel his confusion. He is shocked. He is analyzing my words, and then—Silence.
I let it sink in. What follows is his inevitable conclusion.
"What do you mean by true notes?"
"Allow me to return to you so we may talk properly," I ask. "You know I cannot defeat you."
"No more tricks," the crowd replies.
"No more," I agree. "I will even return your women, except for the one that was mine. I think it is a fair deal."
Silence. I can wait here as long as he wants. I start humming again. This time, I do not hum his melody. I hum the one stored in the deep architecture of my mind, a melody I haven't realized is a part of what I am.
The result is barely a distorted echo—ugly, offensive, and it hurts me physically to produce it in this world. But it doesn't hurt him. It bewitches him.
"W-What is—t-that?" the crowd stammers, the voices overlapping in awe. "Don't! Don't stop!"
I focus my will, and the portal appears once again. I cross. I meet him. We are face to face. He stays silent, his inhuman eyes burning with a new fire—an expression of pure, desperate hope.
I know what he is. I know what he craves.
"In my beginning, there was only darkness," I begin, my voice resonant in the heavy, green mist. "And in that place, only darkness can be. It was the first thing I perceived, even before I understood what I was."
"Do you miss it?" he asks. He sounds like an addict asking about a drug he hasn't tasted in a lifetime.
"Do I miss it?" I repeat. I don't miss it, because I can return to that void whenever I choose. But would I? The ache in my throat, the echo of the pain I felt when I tried to hum the Lullaby in this world, gives me the answer.
"You don't?" Disappointment flickers across his human-like face.
"What do you think?" I counter.
"You would rather die than live without it," he answers with absolute certainty.
"You're right."
He chuckles, a dry, raspy sound. "True notes..." He laughs again, his jaw-tentacles fluttering. "Then that was the reason! I never knew the true notes. What a fool I've been, don't you think?"
"Did your father sing this melody to you?" I ask.
"No. No, he didn't. He said if he did, everything would end." He answers, and then chuckles again. "I guess he—"
"The melody from him would have ended everything," I confirm. It's a lie. I have no idea if his father was that powerful, but he was clearly far beyond the creature standing before me. "How did you get to hear it?"
"My seventy-two brothers and I came to the bedchambers," he says, his voice drifting into a distant, ancient memory. "We heard it—a hum from my father in his sleep. Just a hum. It ended our empire, sank our continent, erased our culture and every memory of us from the world. Ah... it has been thousands of years since I heard it. But this time, it didn't reshape this world. Neither did it end his endless dream."
"Because it wasn't the true song yet," I add.
His eyes widen, becoming shocked and visibly insane. "Show me! Show me the true song!"
"Release my woman," I counter.
"Of course!"
He begins to trace patterns in the air—runes and characters that shift into endless, impossible shapes as I read them. They feel and taste like a distorted echo of the Abyss, an unnatural corruption of this world's logic. I can see how they hurt reality just by being forced to exist here.
Pity. I know what he is from the moment I heard his melody. He is just a child.
He is the abandoned, the forgotten, desperately trying to return to a home he will never see again. The hope in his eyes screams with the desperation of a lover who fell for a dream and was deceived by his own mind. He believes what he sees in me is that dream made flesh; he is the singer who sang in his sleep and forgot the lyrics, now trembling with joy because he thinks I will help him remember.
He is nothing but the ordinary trapped in a delusion—the ordinary man who witnessed the miracle of a genius and was bewitched, branded for life by an obsession that has no cure.
He can never reach his goal, any more than a character can reach out and touch their author. He can never even truly listen to the song, for his very being was not designed to contain it. He is but the echo of an echo, distorted by the weight of infinity. He is the spark who thinks it is a lightning bolt and begs for the storm to fall upon it. He craves something he has never seen and never will—he just doesn't know it yet.
I know what he is. He is just another prey.
He is weak. And... all that is weak shall be devoured.
"It is done," the Elder rasps, the runes in the air dissolving into a faint, metallic mist. "The vessel is yours. The bond is severed. Now... give me the Truth."
"Not here," I reply.
"What? If this is another trick—"
"Do you think it's possible?" I interrupt him. "The truth is vast, endless. It is... alive. Are you so foolish to think it could fit in this reality?"
"Oh!" He gasps, his eyes gaining a fanatic fire. "No! Of course not!"
I nod. "I intended to send you there during our fight. It's ironic that you'll step into that realm on your own."
He hesitates, remembering how my portals have been used mainly to sever his limbs.
"Don't worry. I'll go first," I calm him.
"What—what should I expect?" he asks. I smile at him.
"Everything."
I focus my will and open the portal. Beyond this threshold lies the truth. The only truth. All that is weak shall be devoured.
I cross the portal. The endless darkness receives me with its silent and screaming melody. I turn and shield the rift, manifesting a [Conceptual Barrier], a final protection for the dreamer.
His tentacles come in first—exploring, testing the ground—then he follows. There he is. Finally.
"Yes! Thank you! Thank you!" He is crying in devotion, touched by what for him is a religious act.
But enough is enough.
The moment I drop the barrier, the Abyss floods him. It is a tidal wave of reality hitting a vessel made of glass.
"Arghhhhhh! No—what! This! Arrghhhhh!"
He shrieks, a powerful psychic release that would have shattered a weaker mind. The "Truth" is too much for his being; his mind fractures into ten thousand pieces, and his body mirrors the shattering of his psyche. He begins to shriek and laugh simultaneously—a singular, violent vibration of joy and agony that will never end.
His body twists and turns, mutating into a nightmare of living flesh. He elongates and expands, fighting to eat himself while simultaneously trying to spread his presence across the infinite dark. He is a grotesque, self-cannibalizing god of meat, experiencing the vastness he craved as a perpetual, agonizing bloom.
I watch, hypnotized. Through the filter of my Perception, it is like an abstract painting unfolding—a spectacular failure of geometry. It is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. The wet, erratic motion of bones cracking and skin and muscle growing and shattering to allow the impossible and endless growth... would he expand forever? Who knows.
I wonder if this is what the believers are supposed to have waiting for them in their paradise: a perpetual state of bliss they can't escape from.
My eyes widen. Danger.
Immense danger materializes. I never see it coming. It just appears. A predator. A bigger one. The biggest I've ever met.
It is the very blackness itself, or at least one of its avatars. It is a Fact. A Void Orca—not that this being needs a name. It is a titanic creature of four wings and countless, lashing tails. It has no eyes, for sight is a lie in the Abyss. It moves without direction, a blind, decisive hunger that simply is.
The titanic jaws close over the screaming, laughing mess of the Elder.
I receive one last horrible psychic shriek as the morbid scene unfolds. The two jaws crush what remains between them. I can almost feel the pain myself, amplified a billion times. This being is final. The Elder is gone. His "invincible" body of mist didn't matter. His power didn't matter. Just one bite of this creature, and he was nothing.
The psychic shockwave hits me like a physical hammer, sending me flying back. My consciousness flickers, the world spinning into a blur of black and violet. The last thing I perceive is the sight of those countless tails escaping my range, drifting back into the dark. The creature doesn't even notice me.
I think of the Elder one last time. He found the dream he was looking for. He found the song, but the song was too real...
Too hungry...