[Nicholas Anstalionah]
"You're a lost cause!" Destrarossa screamed, he words cutting through me like a serrated blade.
I had fought that verdict for so long, biting down until my teeth ached, refusing to let it be true.
"Don't tell me what I already know," I rasped, my voice low and raw. "Just let me go save her. Can't you at least let me die?"
The world stilled. Then, like a corrupted reel of film, it lurched, snapped, and reversed. The scene rewound again and again, caught in a loop that mocked the concept of time.
Her death replayed endlessly, each iteration sharper than the last, carving through whatever numbness I had built to survive.
And then, the loop shifted, compressing, condensing reality itself, until she was there, impossibly near.
I could see the wet shimmer on her lashes, the faint bruise blooming at her throat. My body moved before thought caught up. I stumbled forward, lungs burning, hands trembling.
My fingers brushed her skin. It was cold, slick with blood.
The moment my palm touched her collarbone, a sound tore free from me, not human, not language, just raw agony made audible.
It was the scream of something ancient and dying, of a soul forced to witness the extinction of its final light.
And behind that sound, Griffin smiled. A perfect, merciless curve of lips that turned the air to glass.
"Why?" I screamed into the frozen space between heartbeats. "Why did you let this happen? Why did you—"
My words fractured, swallowed by silence, as the vision shattered and reset.
The white forest folded back over me. The loop began anew. The same twig. The same wind. The same unbearable stillness.
Each restart was a wound reopening. The ache didn't fade, it erupted, detonating in my chest, scattering thought and form like ash.
Her empty eyes. The smell of copper and dirt. Griffin's unreachable calm. Layer upon layer of memory pressed down, thickening the darkness until it consumed everything.
Once, I told myself I had been lazy. That I wanted release more than redemption.
Now, I see that for the lie it was, a lullaby I whispered to keep from falling apart.
This coffin of memory is no mercy. It is my punishment. I am kept alive to witness my failure without end.
If there is a truth left to hold, it is the outline of absence, the negative space where meaning once lived.
Each small, human act I remember feels like a candle I light, only to watch the flame gutter and die.
Fear should have clawed me. Shame should have been my rope.
But there was nothing.
Not even silence. Just the absence of myself, a hollow in the center of being.
I think. I breathe. I act. I love. I hate. I endure.
Do I hate the truth of myself? Do I love the mystery of my end?
The pause before the final halt, the stillness before the last breath, it will consume me, as it consumes all things.
And yet, I do not crave it. I accept it. I become it.
I can see how far out I am, and how close it waits.
The end is the resolution of my thought, the cessation of my being.
I should be afraid. I should tremble.
But all I feel is a cold, empty gravity, a black hole where meaning collapses into one singular pull.
A voice without sound whispers through it. In that nothingness, life begins to echo again.
Do I love it? Do I hate it? Do I envy the stillness?
No. I understand now. My self-actuality is both cause and curse, a mirror of my self-loathing.
This is the event. My event. The moment of total collapse.
Yes. It's clear now. The event ends with me.
***
[Griffin]
My perfect world could not be complete with the masses wandering like beasts who mistook their chains for freedom.
That foolish one had traded her sanity for a momentary swell of strength, a flicker that meant nothing in the vast scale of my design.
She screamed. She struck. She defied the inevitable. Her fists struck air, her fury burned futile against the stone of my will.
How long, I wondered, could wrath outlast despair?
Her fists moved again, and the air itself quivered beneath the weight of her power.
I exhaled. One slow, measured breath, and she faltered, crumbling back to her knees.
"Is this what the Red Giant of Wrath amounts to?" I asked, drawing my blade, its edge gleaming like frozen moonlight.
She coughed blood, trembling as she stared at her own hands.
Her crimson hair dulled to ash. "Impossible… this is all I could muster?"
I studied the scarlet stains in the sand. "Mirabel," I murmured, "I did not foresee this. I am… impressed."
I stepped forward, releasing a pulse of divinity that warped the ground and air alike. It was the kind of pressure that should have crushed everything beneath it.
Yet in that perfect paradise, my paradise, where I foresaw every thread of possibility and outcome…
I saw nothing.
Then the void took form.
He appeared not as light or shadow, but as their absence made flesh.
Long black hair, streaked with white, like cracks in a painted abyss. Eyes that saw everything and cared for nothing.
A scarf stitched with the stars of dead constellations, trailing behind black armor that drank the light.
His sword hung in his hand, gleaming faintly, as though memory itself feared to forget it.
He stood as if the world no longer applied to him.
And when I looked at him, I saw not darkness.
I saw the end, a finality that devoured even the concept of nothingness.
"Nicholas…" I said, the name escaping me like a confession. "What have you done? Is this your plan? To die for this farce?"
He raised his right arm slowly, his fingers curling as if gripping the throat of reality.
"Falter," he whispered.
The word was quiet, but the world obeyed.
Instinct drove me forward, but my body disobeyed. My knees buckled. The air left me. I fell to the ground, not from force, but from the sheer authority of his existence.
"I am the end," he said. His voice was hollow, yet infinite. "I am nowhere. I am final. For you… nothing more need be said."
And I understood, this vessel, fragile and human, contained a law that predated creation itself.
Mirabel reached for him, trembling. "Nick? I can't feel your presence… I feel only an endless, endless embrace."
He looked up toward the Heavens, indifferent.
"On your feet, lone god," he said softly. "I will show you the force that ends all forces."
I laughed, out of disbelief, out of fear, out of the sheer absurdity of it. It was like staring into the face of extinction itself.
Nicholas handed Mirabel his sword, the air trembling as he did. "Sleep," he said gently, "and awaken to the pale and dark truth of eternity."
She collapsed, serene, her head resting in his lap. He wrapped her in his scarf and placed her on the sand.
Then, he turned to me. Each step he took dissolved the barriers I had forged, the layers of divinity, the architecture of perfection.
"Was that your attempt to continue the farce of life?" he asked quietly.
Blood rose in my throat. He spoke again, each word heavy as gravity. "Decay. Age. Ponder the complexities of your final moment."
I felt it, the impossible sensation of time reclaiming me. My immortal shell began to rot from within. My breath came in gasps, my hands trembling.
"Griffin," he said, his voice echoing in the marrow of my soul. "This is the Law of the End. All that rejects me, will reach me."
My vision darkened. His hand pressed against my chest. When I opened my eyes, he was there, looming, absolute.
"Never forget," he whispered. "I am the end to the oasis you built around this world."
"No!" I roared, choking on my own refusal.
He smiled, a calm, divine smile that belonged to no living thing. "Then fall once more. And when you rise again… let devastation follow you."
And as the world fractured around his words, I understood, Nicholas Anstalionah was not man, nor god, nor sin.
He was the event itself. The end written into the marrow of reality.
The darkness that even creation must eventually face.