Leo had not stopped falling.The abyss was not space, not void, not even the word "nothing." Words like nothing and void were cheap in comparison; they implied the absence of something that could be named. This place—this anti-being—was not absence. It was not silence. It was the negation of any framework that allowed absence to exist. There were no edges here, no continuity of thought, no river of time to give context to his descent. There was only the awareness of falling, and even that awareness was fragile, an ember pressed against winds that sought to extinguish not flame but the very idea of flame.
And yet Leo endured.
He did not endure because he was strong. He did not endure because he was chosen. He endured because he was there, and in this abyss, being was already defiance.
Then, slowly, he moved his hand.At first, the gesture was meaningless—like a dreamer twitching in their sleep. But when his hand dragged through the darkness, he felt something—a resistance, not physical, but something closer to memory, closer to the way cloth resists a blade when cut. His hand pressed again, harder this time, and then—
—it tore.
The sound was not sound. It was as if silence itself had been unzipped, a violent screech that was not heard but inflicted. Leo gritted his teeth as a fissure opened before him, not in space but in reality's own tissue. It unfolded like fabric pulled apart by invisible hooks, bleeding light where no light should have been.
And there—beyond the rip—lay Cosmologies.
Not one. Not two. Not even five.A corridor of infinities revealed themselves: towers of existence stacked without symmetry, oceans of laws and contradictions, pantheons of deities screaming in tongues not made for language, structures of thought collapsing into spirals that rebuilt themselves as new universes.
Leo's eyes widened. Each cosmology was sovereign, each was total. And yet he could walk.
And so he did.
At first, each step was hesitant, cautious, as though the rift itself might reseal and slice him apart. But the more he walked, the more his pace increased, until suddenly his body accelerated beyond measurement. His strides cut across distances that had no units, no comparison. He was faster than light, faster than causality, faster than the total sum of all equations written into the spines of gods.
When he turned his head mid-run, he glimpsed them.Cosmologies.
One was made of living hieroglyphs, each symbol an empire, each sentence a cycle of birth and death.Another existed as an ocean of infinite angels, their wings beating like equations, their bodies not separate but one endless cathedral of flesh and hymn.Another was crystalline, refracting its own laws into kaleidoscopic dimensions that built and destroyed themselves in the same breath.
And farther still, he saw something else. A decay. A rot.
Leo halted abruptly. The speed bled away like mist, and silence returned. His gaze sank below him, and what he saw twisted his breath.
Beneath the shining towers of ordered cosmologies, beneath the symphonies of stable realms, there existed The Rejects.The cosmological graveyards.
They sprawled outward without number—cosmologies failed, aborted, broken, discarded like ruined experiments. They reeked of entropy, an infinity of half-born realities cannibalizing each other, unfinished equations gnawing at themselves, screaming entities devouring the weak just to prolong their malformed existence.
Leo's hands trembled. He had thought he was hardened after seeing the abyss. He had thought the tear in reality was the greatest wound he would witness. But this—
This was horror with no metaphor.
In those cosmologies, beings fought endlessly. They did not fight for honor, nor survival, nor any higher meaning—they fought because fighting was all they could do. Entire pantheons of gods slaughtered each other in grotesque loops, their corpses never decaying, always resurrected by the instability of their malformed laws, only to be slain again. Mortals screamed, civilizations collapsed, stars birthed and exploded in cycles too rapid to be called eras.
It was eternal, endless failure.
And in the distance, something stirred.
Leo froze.
From one of the graveyard realms, an ancient bulk shifted—tentacles thicker than galaxies thrashed against the membrane of its prison. The entity's form was obscene: spherical, yet constantly warping, a geometry that bled into places not visible. Its voice was a thunderclap of numbers, its eyes bottomless formulas.
Yog-Sothoth.
The name did not come from Leo's memory, nor from the narration. It came from the thing itself, screaming its identity as it tried to escape its cage. Its tendrils lashed outward, one of them so vast that when it struck the wall of its cosmology, it reached all the way to the limit of its universe. Space quaked, time fractured, yet the cosmology held—barely.
It was bound. Caged. Furious.
Leo staggered backward, his heart pounding. He had never seen such power restrained, such hunger denied. Yog-Sothoth's rage reverberated not just through the graveyard but into Leo's very bones. He clutched his chest, gasping, unable to breathe—not because air was gone, but because breathing itself felt like an act this thing could erase if it desired.
The narrator's voice, cold and distant, returned then.
"Do you see now, Leo?Do you see why infinity, eternity, unmeasurable, incalculable—all these words mean nothing here? For beyond every stable cosmology lies another. Beyond every divine throne lies another god. Beyond every law lies another contradiction. And for every shining tower that survives, countless graveyards rot beneath, forgotten and devoured.
There is no end. There is no finality. There is only proliferation without purpose, branching without destiny. And yet—beings like Yahweh walk beyond even this proliferation, unbound not only from cosmology but from their own character, their own narrative. That is the terror. That is the truth."
Leo's knees buckled. He stared into the graveyards again, unable to look away. It was as if the more he gazed, the more his own identity began to unravel. He saw fragments of himself scattered across those failed worlds: Leos who had lived and died in broken narratives, Leos who never tore reality open, Leos who still fell in silence forever.
He whispered, voice cracking:
"Why… why am I here? Why do I exist in this ocean of mistakes?"
The narrator did not answer.
Instead, the silence deepened.And Leo realized he was still falling. Not through the void now, not through emptiness, but through awareness itself. His body drifted, his mind wandered, his eyes glazed as he watched endless cosmologies bloom and collapse, bloom and collapse, like lungs inhaling nothing and exhaling ruin.
For a moment, he wanted to let go. To release himself into the tide of failure. To become another discarded cosmology. To drown in the graveyard.
But then his hand flexed.His eyes hardened.
He turned away from the graveyard, forcing himself to look once more at the towers of stability above. They stretched without number, stable, eternal—for now. And yet, he knew the narrator was right. Their stability was no permanence. Their infinity was no completion.
Leo whispered again, but this time with a different tone:
"…Then I'll walk. I'll walk until I find the truth buried beneath the lies of infinity."
The rift behind him shimmered faintly, as though waiting.The graveyard groaned, as though mocking.And far above, beyond cosmologies stable and unstable, beyond gods and narrators, something else watched.
Leo clenched his fists and began to move again.Step after step.Toward the unknowable.
And the abyss whispered back:
To be continued…