Ziggurat

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part XII: Ziggurat
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, there was everything all the time. And we are here to watch. A water balloon of a new reality, from a center point of impact instantly spread across the vacuum where we once existed, the space our universe used to fill.

Chaos reigns supreme with pure Potential his bride, new physics take shape and variances begin, decisions made for the first time when life springs from a confluence of metallic dust and single-cell bacterium flung together in the cosmic storm.  Divergence is too pale a definition, expanse yet too narrow, for this new universe brimmed with unending possibilities and for a fraction of a second, we thought it would be good.

Before the first supernova, we forget our names. Any memory that we were once something great are slipping away. We have become the epitome of an artifact, a lost piece of a civilization long dead now existing where it doesn’t belong. As life evolves, we lose our sight – all we have left is our connection with the fabric of reality. When the stars begin to settle and planets take shape, the horror sets in and we devolve.

The new structure is change and balance and liberty as foundations instead of precious gifts – verisimilitude is prayer and inclusiveness if inherent. This new mountain (what other word is there…) is a beacon, the breaking dawn of new semantics for consciousness yet to lay claim in this aether swirling and roaring into something that will eventually hold strong. These pages are blank because the story is unwritten.  This is the beginning of time begging to be set free, the start of space racing against itself to find the edge it will never reach.

Their first constellation is named Ziggurat, seven stars that represent the image of a mighty palace in the sky, a heavenly fixture so righteous and pure. To them, it is a hypothetical, immovable, incomprehensibly divine object at the center of all things. And then it became clear, so terrifyingly obvious. We will not find peace. This is survival, but as a blemish on this reality.

We are a flaw in creation, a single imperfection in a perfect new cosmos destined to re-live the worst of our sins through billions of millennia because we no longer have a purpose. We don’t belong here – it doesn’t work. It is not for us because we are a blight, a fragment of corrupt data that threatens the entire system, leftover code exploited as a virus.

I was once a god, an angel on high or serenity personified. And before that, I was a man. Now, we are all less than nothing, merely a piece of an inconceivable insignificance without concept, far buried under delusional hope simply waiting for the end that will never come.

COMING SOON: Empyrean

Super Sampson! (Overture)

Super Sampson! A mighty American hero dedicated to truth, justice, and goodwill amongst all! From humble beginnings as a lowly dock worker, Stan Sampson inherits an ancient and cosmic power! – and with it super-strength and incredible agility! Super Stan Sampson: The Champion of Golden Gate City! Leader of the Mighty Protectors! Shining example for all mankind!

When they come of age, Sampson’s two sons follow in their father’s footsteps! Steve “Sensational” Sampson, and Sal “Stupendous” Sampson! The Super Sampsons: a heroic dynasty in the heart of America! Fighting in the name of all that is good when longstanding ethos and subjective hierarchy come under scrutiny! Founding the first superhero union in the midst of heavy socio-political turmoil! Beacons of justice in an unjust world! 

And lo! Tragedy strikes! The aging Stan Sampson watches his sons fall at the hands of the nefarious Doctor Lawless, whose Mandroid malfunctions and murders the two young heroes! Unhinged in despair, Super Sampson murders Lawless with his bare hands! The Trial of Super Sampson captures a nation as its greatest hero falls further than they ever thought possible! The Super Sampsons are no more – Steve and Sal are dead, Stan is in prison for the murder of their killer, and only one person can save the Sampson name! – Stella Sampson, Stan’s only daughter!

Everyone wants to know what my Dad was like when I was a kid. They don’t want to think about who he really is, just how they remember what it felt like to look up in the sky and see salvation waving back. They want me to tell them he was a perfect dad, the epitome of fatherhood because anything less would sully their fragile nostalgia.

Stan Sampson was never a saint; he was angry, drank too much, and suffered from a depression he could never admit to himself let alone anyone else. My dad never hit us, but there’s more than one way to hurt the ones closest to you, and Stan seemed to find every way possible to make us feel like we didn’t matter. He didn’t have to say it, but I knew he resented us for being his weakness – I don’t think he ever wanted a family.

My mother’s the only reason I don’t hate my father. She truly was a saint, a woman who raised three kids with a husband who wasn’t there even when he was. Yet, she still managed to make us believe she was alright when really, she was dying inside. It took years for her to finally say it out loud and tell me what it was like back then, how she constantly feared my dad wouldn’t get out alive, that one of his enemies would enter our home and kill us all in our sleep, or that he would leave us for something better.

But my mom’s worst fear came true the day Steve and Sal got their powers; they were wrestling and slammed through the walls, destroyed the upstairs bathroom before realizing what they’d done. That afternoon, they were already flying and then sprinting around the block in seconds. I saw the tears in Mom’s eyes when Dad said it was the greatest day of his life; I was only twelve, but even I knew how much that hurt her. Because it was just another example of how much more she loved him than he loved her; she never said anything. Mom started drinking earlier and earlier in the day. I didn’t try and stop her.

I’ll never excuse it, but there was a silver lining to Dad’s shitty behavior – Mom and I grew closer. My brothers went off to fight the good fight with Dad, so it was just me and Mom in the house – the two ordinary members of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family left behind to wait. We spent afternoons watching talk shows, then Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! in the evening before the wine went to her head and she had to lay down. My mom wasn’t an angry drunk like my dad; she melted into the couch and her glass, because the world sometimes felt too heavy. I had to be the voice of optimism, the one who saw the bright side because she couldn’t anymore and my dad and brothers were too busy saving everyone else to recognize that we were losing her. The fleeting moments when I could get her to smile – those are some of the best memories I have.

And here’s the fucking rub – as shitty as Dad could be, but I could never shake this need for him to be proud of me, like his approval would somehow give me the strength to finally admit how I really feel, and at the moment when he loves me the most, tell him I don’t care so the truth will be just that much more devastating. But then I tell myself that’s petty and small, that wanting to kick someone when they’re down is what my Dad does, and I don’t want to be anything like him.

When we were younger, before Steve and Sal got powers, the three of us would dream about who we could be, all the different possibilities that could take us away, out from under his shadow where we could build our own lives that had nothing to do with capes or masks or super powers. But I think the truth was always there, at the back of our minds; knowing that if the day came for any of us, we’d follow him in a heartbeat. And then, they did – just like I knew they would. I could never fault my brothers for wanting Dad to love them, just like I know they didn’t hold it against me when I stopped calling because it hurt too much to hear them say how great things were. They were jerks, but they were still my brothers, and part of why they followed Dad into his world was to prove themselves to him, to show him they weren’t as worthless as we’d spent our childhoods feeling.

They didn’t deserve to die like that. The android was stronger, faster, more cunning; and Doctor Lawless let that mechanical monstrosity rip them apart, limb by limb, until there was nothing left. It took years of therapy to get over watching my brothers die in a gruesome massacre streaming live on every network while I couldn’t say a word to anyone. Dad snapped and nearly gave himself a heart attack tearing the android apart and throwing the pieces into the sun before beating the life out of Lawless. Mom went blank; she didn’t sob or scream or even lose composure. She simply sipped her wine as tears streamed down her cheek and she took a deep breath before finishing the entire glass and pouring another.

I’ve spent the past two years doing everything I can to stay positive, to keep my spirits high even though my father grew increasingly distant and my brothers left to follow in his undeserved footsteps while my mother slipped further into a black hole of despair. And there is no one to talk to, no one I can tell the truth to because no one knows my name is Stella Sampson.

 

Never More

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part XI: Never More
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

We can’t protect them anymore because all that power we used to have turned into all the things we can’t afford. There is no more everything, and what should have grown and expanded forever until the end of time dwindled down to a fraction of a segment of a micron. And when space retracts, time grows long and slows to a crawl hoping to stave off death for just a bit more.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Ten thousand voices speaking as one, choir of judgement filling the last remnants of the universe we called home. Up in what used to be the sky, legion of voices become clearer still unto faces watching. After so long upon immaculate thrones, we were humbled in the presence of what we knew was something even bigger than ourselves, power greater than anything we could possibly know because even breaking through the walls of perception into divine territory did not give clairvoyance to what we couldn’t conceive – we were too ignorant to know just how ignorant we were.

You made so many mistakes.

There are so many, countless ideas and dreams and concepts and truths churning in this ambient void, arguing over what comes next. Goliath is a dynamic duo, innovators through detail and symbolic horror – they are not bound by genre or label or morality because they breed antithesis. There’s a cynical Bastard there too, once a man now a fossil to his own insanity which sometimes blooms creative thunder; he’s one cantankerous fuck. The next one’s head gleams like the mirror upon which he does rails of antimatter and quarks, a mind Manipulator who sets his own rules so others can follow, whose work takes effort because that’s kind of the point. Frustration vexes the Experimentalist, too, a constant nagging to stuff puzzle within puzzle, enigma within metafiction, symbolism within the audience. Existence is the stage for a Multi-Phased Progeny, he who delights in the art of schadenfreude on a multiversal scale, tempting emotions of every kind and stealing the sentiment just as easily. Away from the rest is a Starman defeated, who finds his magnum opus through insecurity in the winter of his tenure – so many love what he creates even though he cannot bring himself to care the same. Some Four-Faced Analog dances around between the others a representation of collaboration, the connections that spark when they create something greater than the sum of its parts. We…I wish I could have kept counting, learning the lessons these architects and designers had to teach from wisdom beyond infinity, but they reached a decision.

This is how it must be.

So, the end is coming, a final goodnight into a sweet abyss of nonexistence. Never more will the throes of this life be known, an entire universe snuffed out and with it unending stories and peoples and things now lost forever.

ZOT OBLIVION comes for one and all.

We were no longer gods and they were no longer human – the final sentence of the last chapter brought everything together as one, not a singular mindscape like before, but a hive of ideas and souls and relationships coalesced into a single bit of matter, just one drop of cosmic material. It felt like a warm bath with a glass of wine, dozens of puppies all sleeping in a pile, a pipe packed with incredible weed, getting to the front row at your favorite band’s show, telling someone “I love you”, reaching the top of a mountain, holding your newborn child for the first time…all of it at once. Through the clutter of faces and voices and ideas and values, the true author comes into light. And he is frustrated.

Never more had we experienced together, never higher did we feel as gods or men or whatever we have become. Because this is who we are now – little more than a figment in the mind of a possibly unhinged, probably obtuse, absolutely eccentric writer attempting to create something, some things…anything worth meaning in this world that might last.

Whoever he is intends for the story to end with our destruction, some wanton dissolution into the recesses of his memory because he never finishes what he starts: he revises and reworks when he can’t find satisfaction then throws the bulging binders into a drawer where incomplete tales go to die. He sees in us an opportunity to say something, a message that brings seemingly disparate ideas together in an effort to make some sort of impression, to divine a meaning that speaks across boundaries and makes sense in a variety of contexts.

He struggles and yearns to find a way to show impressive dimension and universality of interest against a tidal wave of misunderstanding, ill-gotten criticism, and the very conceited nature of his own words to craft a steel-hard frame that lives up to his own standards and inspires those who read it without frustration.

Yes – the shores of our reality rest upon the vocational limits of a college graduate with delusions of grandeur and a directionless path. And here we sit, when he gets writers block at the end of all things; a black hole of creativity swirling at the end of this sentence for months and years.

End and beginning, death and creation…look at what you’ve done.

It’s a metaphor, just a simple device. But the story is bigger, a force against the tides of time that shall forever persist through the new cosmic chain that goes unbroken. The story is abundant, even in the cascading moment of entropy absolute. Even here and now as we stir with the knowledge of our own nonexistence, the story must proceed to the end.

There’s nothing left…

It goes out like a puff of smoke.

 

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part XII: Ziggurat

Advice You Shouldn’t Take

Bootleg movies, cheap smokes, pass the joint.
Make up new rules; the old ones are useless.
Pretend you’re not scared, always.

Destiny’s not a thing; never has been.
No one knows what comes next.
Turn off the bright light, stop the water, smell flowers.

Seek clarity even though you’ll never find it.
Some things are worth dying for;
But we can’t really understand why, until the end.

Dirty sex, casual drugs, make bad choices.
Never see the same thing twice; make it different.
Test what you know, because it’s probably wrong.

Everything lives and everything dies.
Time should mean something, but doesn’t.
Remember it’s a lie; everything.

Biased perception, stuck under doubt.
Because we think we can’t know more than we do.
The greatest lie humanity ever told: we are not good enough.

When good is just a word, and so is bad;
Nothing feels like everything, and the opposite just the same.
Do a line, eat that pill, quantum breakdown.

Separate from life to see if more clearly.
Moderation in everything, even moderation.
Lose control; you never had it anyway.

Original Draft: January 29, 2018

Infinity Dies

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part X: Infinity Dies
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

The sun rose just as it did each morning. Birds woke from their nests as farmhands started daily chores amidst solemn silence soon to be broken. We never saw it coming.

It’s hard to know when life is good, to pause and reflect on the positives instead of what inspires fear or anger or sadness. It’s easy to let go, lean into pessimism and find everything wrong each day. The challenge, then, involves separating the good from the bad, but even more important is recognizing which is what and how each affects the other. Existential dread comes from a struggle between the hope in good and the pragmatism of bad, how trying to be better but failing to succeed is what makes humanity so intriguing and exciting – there is no answer, only informed guesses that are subject to change.

We – the term began to lose its luster in those days, when we lived apart in the world. Our connection was thinning the more we stayed amongst the living instead of keeping to ourselves. Separations lost their exuberance as unity became a reality, actual coherence between mind and body and belief. Sworn enemies laid down their arms so long ago that the idea became a story meant to scare children, a preposterous conceit left to the annals of history. Innovation was the currency of art, the driving force that pushed mankind to be better each day and develop tools to build instead of weapons to destroy. They called it a golden age, their world near perfect that still bore mystery and wonder – utopia adjacent.

Loss often comes when least expected in ways that don’t make sense – emptiness doesn’t have set parameters. Accepting loss is difficult because restraining emotion is unnatural, a societal covenant that becomes personal, purposeful censorship of remorse and resentment because no one wants or needs to hear about that all the time. And loss can feel total, as if the end of the world has truly arrived because there’s no clear direction forward and trying to escape the confusion only leads to more pain.

Omicron’s song was agonizing noise vibrating molecules apart as it passed through space before it brought every living creature to its knees. Such a terrible song, banal and trite and over-produced and fake and everything else that makes music suck. Omicron was born of Averbole now gone, each note of who he was fragmented and puzzled back together in ways that don’t fit so the melodies crack and crumble for lack of structure. The birds fell from the sky in fright, the farmhands hid in their barns – our sins were coming to lay claim upon us, make us stand judgement for what we exiled then forgot.

We lost everything that day.

Omicron’s symphony spread across the globe a cloud of hate threatening deconstruction, total reduction down to what humanity once was, back to when there was nothing but fear and war and pain and anger. Seismic spasms brought mountains crashing to the ground and hungry storms bled crimson into the twilight, like watercolors spilled over. Cities burned in the night from the lowest slums to the highest palaces, for Omicron the Demon Lord’s voice made no distinction between prince or pauper, strength or weakness. Hell broke loose and proclaimed through the unbearable lightness of being that he would come home to embrace us.

Humanity’s screams were knives thrust into our hearts, the jagged bite of a rabid dog who can’t let go. We were not so deluded as to believe there was no fear amongst mankind – fear and hope go hand in hand. But their cries of horror and screams in the night were far worse and more intense than ever before because they knew this was the end.

Final days to final nights, a mad god’s violent delights, driven by darkness to extinguish every light, formed from mistakes and sins and fright, Omicron the Dead Deity is broken wrongs and terrible rights.

Time was short, and our final gift to mankind was spare them bearing witness to what came next, to give them peace and relative contentment in their last moments of existence instead of being made to watch what happened above them.

Humanity did not see Omicron’s army behind him a legion of ghosts, phantoms of every conceivable variety from angels slaughtered in the heavens to the rotted souls of planets the Mad Titan Omicron sacrificed to himself. Endless hordes of souls denied their peace, brainwashed into a spectral mass singing their horrible ballad of hate and hate where love is already dead and the tyranny of doubt reigns supreme.

All mankind would see was a bright flash of light and nothing more. They would not be subject to the horror of our own efforts, to the genocide of lost souls which we felt forced to perform – billions of souls crying out at once, then silenced. Yet, Omicron no longer felt anything but rage and hate, and his losses meant nothing as he crept closer still.

And then we began to understand what was happening.

Our sight was contracting, narrowing as Omicron grew closer – infinity was dying. Where there was once an expanse now existed a void in the wake of Omicron’s wave of nihilism. Omniscience meant less because there was less to see, and enlightenment lacked purpose because potential was already gone. The blithe once known as Averbole sought to tear it all down, to end this existence because it couldn’t give him the answers he wanted. Little by little, piece by piece, Omicron’s very existence made the malleable, quantum, language-defying building blocks of relative time and space slide apart, and when his unrepentant rage was focused, that entropy expanded and evolved exponentially.

Life breeds life, war brings death, and nothing creates nothing.

There was silence in the church as god returned to exact his unholy vengeance, to strike at the center of that which he loved more than anything and hated even more. He raised his sword and struck at us with all his might, every ounce of his compounding hatred funneled into a single blow. We readied our shield, gave everything we had to create a defense against his almighty aggression and planted our feet in the ground in wait. But then, we reconsidered and did something unexpected

We stepped aside and refused to fight.

Instead, we offered love and acceptance even though Omicron wanted to kill us all. For a fleeting moment, the idea of atonement sparkled in his eye, just a flicker of the Averbole he once was, but it was not meant to last. Repentance ceded eons ago, forcibly removed by his own bloody oath, Omicron screamed out in pain from toxic compassion, the fatal sting of hope that poisoned him to the core. He let himself feel something good and it was more than he could possibly bear. Ever the cosmos shrank down to our world, the people in it, and the space around. Omicron we held in our arms as he gasped and begged forgiveness.

Consider the individual given life and eventually some purpose. He is then beat mercilessly based on obscured implications and mostly-neglected consequences by passing lords and man-made theocracies. Some advocate for and protect the man, yet few others listen with true intent. The man lashes out in pain and fear and confusion, for he cannot understand why. Why is he the victim of such unapologetic, violent, deplorable torture? His organs begin to fail, his bones crack from the barrage of brute force, and his sanity dissolves into dust until he is nothing more than a sack of meat feeling only pain beyond measure as he awaits the release of death. The final blow to the head, the one that stings the least after such unfettered and unending suffering, it is mercy…and the last instant becomes the only moment worth anything.

We thought we had saved what little was left, but the death of all things waits for no man or woman or god. As our fallen brother took his last breath, time stopped and the entropy coming to swallow everything suddenly stopped in its tracks.

And that’s where we are.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part XI: Never More

After the War

Inspired by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribić, and Ive Svorcina’s epic 2015 Marvel Comics crossover event, Secret Wars, in which Doctor Victor Von Doom and Doctor Stephen Strange play god, well. Yet, their fall from grace is frustratingly brushed aside once the event ends and reality restarts. Their sins are great and many, yet the metanarrative is never confronted or questioned – this aims to.

Two desperate men, a scientist and a sorcerer, try to avert the end of all things.

When failure is the only option, they break the rules.

Harnessing power beyond reckoning, they save what little they can

One becomes a god, the other his prophet.

There was chaos, then there was order, and it was good.

But that was then…

Before god let petty emotion strangle his pale benevolence.

When his insecurity poisoned all that still was, and fear became law.

Ere god’s greatest enemy returned to end the charade and bring back infinite everything.

And in the twilight of his glory, god wept as something better grew from the ashes.

In the beginning, everything was born anew.

Yet, the scientist remembers, and so does the sorcerer.

They cannot forget what they did when all was lost.

One was corrupted by absolute power, the other murdered for making it plain.

Infinity does not know how close it came to ending.

Only the scientist and the sorcerer know.

And this is now…

When one staves off psychological demons by fighting ones in the flesh.

As the other disconnects from himself, bereft of meaning after losing divinity.

And one struggles to maintain composure, obsessed with how pointless he feels.

While the other falls apart because he cannot comprehend what he has lost.

No one knows what they carry, the pain and anger and overwhelming guilt.

No one can ever know that they did.

Yet, one cannot sleep knowing they will not answer for their sins.

While the other makes a choice: die a man, or rise again.

When they meet again, a strange doom will fall.

The closure necessary to break the cycle of in spite of itself.

A final reconciliation that one will not survive.

Redemption will come, but the cost will be too high.

Fate and destiny will die at their feet.

And their war will decide what everything means.

Omicron (Sepulcrum)

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part IX½: Omicron (Sepulcrum)
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

It sneaks up quiet and unassuming through blank nothingness bleeding out the edges of the cosmos, a silence so deep one wonders if sound ever existed in the first place. It does not know what it seeks through the infinite storm, only that it persists and survives to reach some unknown destination even if it takes until time’s last gasp.

Averbole was high as a fucking kite, brimming with gravitational anomalies and bursting with solar flares, he was exhausted and surging with energy at the same time, a cosmic traveler with limitless potential and even more limitless divinity. He departed his home happier and more alive than he’d ever felt, then became terribly alone because he left it all behind and didn’t look back. When the majesty you expect crumbles and the rose-tinted glasses are wiped clean the wine from last night, what’s left are consequences that offers no divergence from the set path, no leaving the party early for a warm bed because it isn’t there anymore. Those conceits are long gone, idealized relics of the past put to rest and buried. Averbole only had his mistakes left to keep him company.

It takes the plunge, deep down through the sewers of a binary existence into the lowest levels of rotting micro-verses clinging to reality by threads of unraveling fate so very close to snapping and erasing the fragile remnants of trillions of stars and planets and lives. As dark as it is, it shines a light in this most bleak un-place, spinning with purposeful meticulousness so it doesn’t get swallowed into the void.

In the most outer of spaces, Averbole came to know his cosmic theater. He witnessed miracles and travesties, fought the vile armies of entropy as it looked to conquer all it saw and birth kingdoms of decay. He watched empires of infinite lines subjugated to pointillist governances with their objective paradigms pushed down and crumpled up inside a box. He dueled with the living concepts of existence, the behemoths which kept the universe safe through rashes of pure paradox. He saved galaxies from premature death when the notes from a butterfly’s song turns into wind that becomes energy and thunder and wind then gravity and eventually a force so powerful it rips planets from their orbit and sends them hurtling into their suns. Averbole rose high in his journeys, found a new definition for himself far beyond the veil of our mind’s eye. He commanded millions with mere gestures, unquestioned faith in a god of a man who left his home to become something even greater than he imagined.

But he felt nothing.

So, he tried harder.

It fumes with anger and grinds against the dominant ebb and flow, goes against whatever is good – it goes up when there is only down, and when there is red it vomits green. It doesn’t know where to go so it just keeps going, ripping apart atoms in its wake in attempt to feel something again. Ever it creeps closers, sliding between quasars and supernovas and black holes and nebulae, subtly sparking and exploding outside any perception but its own. This moment; it stalks Averbole and watches him from afar wrestling with isolation after separating from collective nirvana, the death throes of a god unbecoming of his title.

Averbole weaved oceans from symphonic contentment past the shining remnants of archangels decimated by a war fought when life and death and love and hate were still real, physical entities, when the sharpest blades were the cutting words that pushed evolution forth or extinguished life at the root. This ancient war of relativity against singularity, between the right now and the infinite forever – which side stood victorious in the end?

No answers.

No solace.

No relent.

Averbole screamed and cried and flailed in his little void of nothingness, for he was lost beyond all hope and even the simplest queries seemed overtly impossible. He was stuck in himself, psychologically unable to break free from his own desperate anger and uncontrollable frustration. The curious little god lingered longer, loitering in the festering cesspool of degenerating existentialism His consciousness caramelized and melted away through the souls of forgotten empires and dirty streets alike. He consumed it all, absorbed meandering fractures and cancer-ridden fears that permeated indefinitely through the underside of the multiverse. He ate everything to learn all that he could never understand.

It is destiny. It is fate.

Averbole the Lackluster Lord looked out into the abyss and cried. The stars were blinding even though he could barely see them through the oily, murky void – infernal cosmic torches like desktop icons for the chaos of everlasting psychosis compressed into something beautiful. There was no truth in those stars, no reference point or base line amongst billions of haphazardly placed heavenly bodies, nary a delusion of order within all that had come to pass, and it angered Averbole. There was a scorched fury buried deep within his soul, an inconceivable pain through a torturous blaze that burned away the tapestry of his former salvation. Fire destroyed him from within and made a hole of nervous destabilization, a paradox of rebirth.

Those discarded feelings of pain and misery and fear and anger rejected and expelled so long ago never died. The darkness from inside those wannabe gods wished away and forgotten survived and persisted through ages, screaming through the endless night as the pieces fused and compressed and hardened into a Massive of darkness denser than ten thousand diamonds. The unbreakable absence of good tore through reality, stripping molecules of meaning and knocking billions of alternate timelines aside. Then, it felt something familiar, an old memory almost lost.

All it took was a single second of absolute doubt, one moment of weakness to expose Averbole, alone in the cold. Just a deity in by name alone who lost his way to never find it back. In that empty moment, the terrified god felt a blade sink into his heart, the Massive above him come to carve away everything Averbole had learned and become and taken for granted. One moment became a leviathan of maddening pain and suffering borne of immature divinity extrapolated through interstellar chaos and darkness. At the center of a smaller black hole within another, Averbole was bled away by the Massive in the night.

Become something else; survival of the fittest.

Averbole unhinged, digitized into cubic microcosms of perpetually pending potential that will never find direction. Everything was within his grasp and the truth he sought was there behind so much that rang false, but he couldn’t see through blackened eyes and thick clouds of moldy doubt. There was no light for Averbole, only a never-ending ocean of platitudes meant to deconstruct everything he ever loved.

Then the moment passed, and Averbole was no more.

Each part of the young godhead was scrubbed from existence, every fragment picked apart into smaller shards of what were once building blocks for physical objects. Cancerous notions unloaded pain and hurt and misery into fair Averbole the host, the hollow figure home to the irreversible rage we so ignorantly believed we could erase like a sentence in a story. All that remained of a fledgling god that left home was a crumbled shell with the same face. Behind his million teeth a tempest was born of a new truth this monster would represent:

They will fall. All of it will die.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part X: Infinity Dies