There existed a saying that speaking a person's name brought with it dominion over that person. This power extended far beyond the ability to identify. To connect. To evoke a sense of belonging. To speak a person's name once granted the power to control them.
Along the Thornward Path, pain learned Revan's name. In a place far removed from the material world, pain exercised newfound control over Revan's soul. This was a realm where angels held no jurisdiction. Where the God who created earth and all its inhabitants was powerless to intervene. In the Void, there was only one god—Chaos—and he knew Revan Kaiser's name well. And so he spoke it over and over, allowing it to echo throughout the darkness as Netherthorns continued to ensnare Revan's body.
In the Void, a single second felt like an eternity, and an eternity stripped an endurer of their sanity. The Nether poison injected into Revan's body wasn't merely physical—it forced him to relive his worst fears. His failures. His doubts. Revan's limbs felt as though iron rods were driven through them, hanging him upon a post like a scarecrow. But carrion birds did not fear him in this place of eternal darkness. No, they circled overhead, taunting him with shrill laughter. They landed atop him, plucking at his eyes. His lungs. His liver.
His blood ran colder than frozen mercury. The outer bounds of the known cosmos envied the chill in his veins. His heart became the antithesis of the sun's warmth. A black hole of dark matter which manifested whole galaxies inside his body.
Revan's memories fractured and rearranged. There was no way of discerning reality from hallucination. His past, present, and future, were rewritten by a suffering potent enough to make Shakespeare weep without console. It would be impossible to provide an accounting for everything Revan saw. Endured. Overcame within this darkness. At the time of the Apocalypse, there were nine billion people on earth, and Revan absorbed the sins and sufferings of each and every one of them. Not for the purposes of their atonement, but merely because it provided Chaos with a sense of entertainment.
The Nether caused a paradox loop in Revan's thoughts: the more he wanted to escape, the deeper he sank. Every resistance caused the thorns to grow tighter. But by the time he quit his writhing and accepted his fate, it was too late. His body was fully submerged by the darkness; he was a fly wrapped in a webbed cocoon waiting for some cosmic predator to devour him.
The poison doesn't want your death—it wants your surrender, the Recruiter had told him. It felt like it had been eons since the last time she spoke to him.
The only voice which kept him company belonged to Chaos, which manifested in the form of eight spider-like eyes stacked over one another. Like the Void, the eyes were black, though they were somehow several shades darker than the oblivion where Revan resided. Staring at them played tricks on Revan's mind, for in each of the eight eyes dwelt an abyss. Revan gazed into them, and they gazed back into his soul.
Revan, they whispered over and over, each utterance sounding colder and more menacing than the last. Revan. Revan. Revan. The voice was authoritative and ethereal. It was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The voice made Revan's name sound like a cruel joke, provoking him to retaliate. At first, Revan tried to fight back through means of force—ripping the thorns out, screaming, charging forward. But that only made it worse. It was a cyclical lesson he'd already learned and accepted, so he wasn't sure why he continued to forget at his own expense. But still, hearing his name over and over was like the incessant pattering of water—it began as airplane noise but grew slowly into a thing which drove Revan into hysteria.
At some point long after Revan's arrival in the abyss, the Netherthorns lowered him onto some invisible platform where his feet could support his own weight. The thorns didn't detach completely, but instead remained wrapped around his upper torso to prevent him from toppling over. Like a puppet strung to a marionette, the thorns walked Revan forward toward the eight eyes in the distance which embodied doom. Whenever Revan's strength failed him, he let the thorns drag him onward, and whenever that became too painful to bear, he would take as many measured steps as possible before hanging his weight back on the cruel barbs.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," spoke the voice. It was the first thing spoken since Revan's arrival that hadn't been his name, which caused his head to lift toward the eyes. It continued, calm and deliberate, "the earth was without form and Void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."
The words were familiar to Revan, though he wasn't sure where he'd heard them spoken before. Then again, there were moments throughout this torture where he couldn't remember his own name. That was, until Chaos repeated it in a sinister whisper.
"Welcome, Revan Kaiser, to the Void. The heavens and the earth may have pushed back my darkness, but I assure you Chaos is alive and well." The voice was neither male nor female, angelic nor demonic. Although Revan suspected it belonged to the eight, pitch-black eyes on the horizon, he also knew this entity had no true form. Simply put, it was everything and nothing at once. It was the darkness which surrounded him, the thorns which pierced his flesh, the despair he felt.
"I existed long before your Creator arrived, Revan Kaiser, and I will continue to exist long after your world is purged. And yet, this God who created the heavens and earth did so without my permission. And now, he plans to begin anew with a clean slate."
The voice paused, letting the weight of its next words sink into him.
"Do not be mistaken—I am no devil. I am Chaos. I cannot tell you how many millennia I spent alone before earth was created. I cannot tell you what a boring existence it was. And so I welcomed the creation of earth and humanity, because corrupting your world has provided the first real sense of entertainment I've had since the dawn of time."
Revan's head hung low as the voice wrapped around him like smoke.
"But now, your Creator plans on taking this away from me. He plans on pushing me back into solitude and isolation. This is something I won't allow, Revan Kaiser. I have dug my talons into his creation over millions of years, and I will not allow him to take it back. I have shown you the way your world will end…"
The eyes narrowed slightly.
"I offer you something, Revan. A chance to go back. To stand where the Horsemen are born and claim a crown not made for you. The Four you've heard of—Conquest, War, Famine, Death—are not gods. They are crowns. Mantles. Seats at a table older than the world. And every age, someone wears them. Someone like you. But your Creator never made a Fifth Mantle, Revan. No throne exists for what you could become. The Fifth Mantle—something the cycle never accounted for. An anomaly. A disruption. A flaw in God's perfect ending. I have seen this ending over and over again. The cycle is perfect. Too perfect. The same four dancers, the same steps, the same ending. Over and over until I choke on the repetition. I want to see what happens when we… change the music. I am offering you the chance to be what never was: the Fifth Horseman. Not to join the others… to end them. To write your own seal in the Book of Endings."
The words hung between them like a loaded weapon, waiting for him to take it.
Revan swallowed hard, though his throat was as dry as scorched sand. "And what if I refuse?"
The eight eyes blinked out for a heartbeat, replaced by something far worse—laughter. Not warm, not mocking, but the sound of glass splintering in a silent cathedral.
"Then the Four will ride. They will crush your cities, harvest your dead, and gnaw the marrow from your bones before the world burns. You will watch, powerless, as they reduce your kind to ash… and I will watch, bored, until the ashes cool. You are not the first to be recruited for this mission, Revan Kaiser. Many have died hanging from the same thorns you've survived. Many have perished walking the same path I've set before you. I have all of eternity to find my champion, and I will not stop until I've won."
The eyes reappeared, glimmering faintly.
"But if you accept… I will turn the wheel backward for you. Not for the world—only for you. You will walk again in a time before the Apocalypse began, but you will carry the burden of what you have seen here."
Revan's voice was unsteady. "What's the catch?"
"The catch," Chaos said, voice curling like smoke, "is that time demands payment. To emerge unscathed from the Void, the barrier between reality and oblivion must fall. The Void will bleed into your world—creatures that live inside this darkness that feed on human emotion. Sleepwraiths. Morphean Beasts. Oneiric Leeches. Reverie Seraphs. The Sleepless Leviathan. These Voidspawns are nightmares incarnate—an army of loyal but unpredictable monsters that feed on everyone you come in contact with."
Revan's stomach sank, though he couldn't say why.
"And understand this," Chaos continued. "You will not simply stroll back into the past and fall into destiny. If you wish to claim the Fifth Mantle, you must enter Hell of your own will. There, in the Contest of Mantles, every soul who desires the Horseman's thrones will fight, deceive, and devour each other until only the worthy remain."
The thorns tightened around his chest, making him gasp.
"In Hell, strength alone is nothing. You will need cunning. You will need cruelty. You will need to shed the skin of the man you are now. And if you fail… there will be no return to this place. You will be erased—forgotten by the world, forgotten by history, forgotten even by yourself."
The Void seemed to lean in closer, those eight black eyes like doorways to nowhere.
"I ask only one thing of you, Revan Kaiser. Once you begin this path, there is no hesitation. No retreat. Every step forward is stolen from fate itself, and every breath you take is borrowed from my patience. And when the debt comes due…"
The eyes blinked in unison, and for a moment the darkness took the shape of a monstrous grin.
"…I will be the one knocking."
Revan felt the Netherthorns shift beneath his feet. The invisible ground trembled as the eyes widened, and between them a black eclipse began to bloom—an endless circle of absence, a wound in reality that pulled the darkness inward.
"Step through," Chaos whispered, the words like a hook sinking into his mind. "Step through and fall. I will deliver you to your younger self, armed with what you know, cursed with what you've lost. Then… we shall see if you can make the world end differently."
The pull of the eclipse grew stronger, rattling his bones. The thorns around him began to unwind, loosening their hold but never quite letting him go.
Revan's breath quickened. His next step would either damn him… or make him the only man alive with the chance to stop the Apocalypse.
And so, with one final glance into the abyss, Revan stepped into the eclipse—
and fell.