I stood.
That simple fact was a mockery of the laws of reality. Pain, sharp and clean as a freshly honed blade, pulsed where there should have been a ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone. I remembered it. I remembered the cold of metal punching through armor and body with sickening ease. I remembered the shadows that moved faster than sight—not just fast, but wrong, as if moving faster than light itself.
One of them appeared before me. Without speed, without a lunge. It was simply there, where a moment ago there was nothing. I had no time to draw a breath, no time to curse it. Something entered me. Not a blow. Not a push. It was a sensation as if a part of the space within my chest had simply ceased to exist, replaced by an icy void. The pain exploded not in my body, but in my soul, and I felt my spine crack and my insides turn to nothing.
I waited for the end. It was logical, deserved, inevitable.
But it did not come.
Why am I still standing? The question was not one of curiosity, but an accusation. An accusation against a universe that had once again proven its own madness.
I forced myself to look down. A hole gaped in my chest. A neat, dark nothingness through which I could see the world behind me. No blood, no ragged edges. Just a hole. The pain was not the only torture. The void was worse. Not just an opening, but an active, sucking emptiness. Sometimes, I thought I could feel a non-existent heart attempt a beat, and that spasm of a non-existent muscle was more grotesque than any wound. My body was a lie, and my brain was desperately trying to make sense of it, sending phantom signals to the amputated part of my soul.
I could stand. I could walk. After everything, to be surprised by this would have been a waste of energy.
I looked around, and the scale of the place crashed down on me like a shockwave.
This was not merely a space. It was a cathedral dedicated to dead geometry. The walls, if they could be called that, were lost in an impossible height, their planes slowly, inexorably flowing and warping like cooling lava. Golden lines and symbols streamed across them like the circulatory system of a god, shimmering with the light of trapped stars. I was inside something. Something colossal. Something ancient. Something that had not been built, but had grown.
Every surface here radiated a dim, lifeless luminescence, creating an illusion of infinite depth. These were the guts of a giant machine, and its purpose was as alien to me as the thoughts of a star are to an insect.
I tried to read the symbols etched upon the walls, but my mind, accustomed to logic and physics, rejected them. They were not a language. They were part of an equation whose answer was the universe itself.
Taking a step, I felt the world press back. My body became leaden. The air here was dense, heavy as mercury, and each step required a titanic effort, as if I were forcing my way through compressed time. My exoskeleton, my faithful servant, was silent. Perhaps it was dead, or perhaps its systems simply could not comprehend the laws of this place. I was weak, savaged, and this place was draining the last of my strength, savoring my agony.
And ahead, in the very heart of this mechanical hell, a light burned.
It was not bright. It was… absolute. A mass of pure light so dense that it distorted the space around it, causing it to tremble and vibrate. I could not discern its shape, but I felt its call. It did not ask, did not command. It pulled. Inexorably. Like the gravity of my own soul. It was the center. The answer. The end of the path.
And so, I walked.
One step. Then another. I walked toward the light, feeling neither my legs nor the pain. Time ceased to exist. A second could be an eternity; an eternity, a single breath. I did not know how long I walked. I simply walked. Guided by something older than myself, older than the stars.
And the most terrifying thing… this place felt familiar. As if I had seen it in a nightmare I had every night but could never remember upon waking. It was as familiar as a grave dug for you before you were even born.
I walked, and walked, and walked. Until the radiance was no longer a destination ahead.
It became the world around me. It enveloped me, consumed me, and I found myself in its blinding, silent heart.
At the center of everything, a Sphere floated.
Or what my fractured mind chose to call a Sphere. It was woven not from light, but from its source, from a pure, incomprehensible energy that existed before the stars and before the dark. Logic was useless here. The image seared into my consciousness was singular: the colossal, pulsating eye of an enraged god, locked in a prison without walls or matter. I looked at it, but the totality of the image eluded me, shattering, refusing to fit within the confines of human perception.
Was I even seeing at all? I instinctively passed a hand before my face, but there was no hand. Emptiness. I tried to look around—there was only an absolute nothingness, and only this light was real. It should have incinerated my retinas, turned my eyes to vapor, but it did not. Perhaps because I no longer had eyes. I was not seeing with them. I was seeing with my very essence, with what was left of my soul, and this new sight was torture.
The closer I drew, the more clearly I felt the Power. It radiated from the center like the heat of a supernova—a colossal, oppressive energy that not only powered this world-engine but also crushed the Sphere in its grip. I was looking at the mad fury of a billion dying stars, at the agony of an entire galaxy compressed into a single point. A fury that fought eternally against its invisible chains, yet with every pulse, only tightened its own bonds.
I watched, not comprehending what I was seeing, until… it looked back at me.
I felt that gaze with my entire being. It was not sight. It was a current. A current of pure information that pierced me, dissected me, broke me down to my atoms, studying every particle of my existence, every thought, every memory. In that moment, I understood—I was not the one looking. I was being shown. I was not an observer, but a screen onto which an image was being projected.
Simultaneously, the place around me began to awaken. The mechanisms, silent until now, responded with a low, resonant hum, as if the entire world-machine was stirring from its slumber. The quantum engines of creation, dormant for eons, were powering up, ready to fulfill their true purpose. But what was it?
I looked again at the Sphere… no. At the Creature that was the Sphere. Or rather, at the fragment of the Creature that was imprisoned here. It continued to watch me, and now I perceived it more clearly. It was in chains, but not of metal. Its prison was woven from warped space, from compressed time, from the very laws of reality turned against it. And it had been here for an eternity, endlessly languishing in its mighty confinement.
And then… it spoke to me. Not with words. Words were too primitive a tool. This was a direct invasion, a brand it was searing onto my consciousness.
"Long. The wait has been long."
The Creature's voice was an echo in the empty cathedral of my soul. Even, cold, without emotion. It studied me, and I could feel it leafing through my memories—everything I believed in—with the detached curiosity of an entomologist examining a strange insect.
"A name. What am I to call you, construct? Does a label matter for a vessel?" A note of ancient, almost childlike curiosity crept into its mental voice.
"You have come from Beyond the Verge. Your essence… is alien. You are so much like them. Or perhaps, it is they who have yet to become like you."
The Creature unleashed visions upon me. But I did not watch them from the side. For one infinite moment, I became that birth. I felt gravity compress primordial hydrogen in my bones, I felt the thermonuclear fire ignite in my heart, and I felt my first pulse of light pierce the eternal dark. And then I experienced death. Not as an end, but as a transition. The cold, the expansion, and the dissolution into trillions of lonely atoms. This was not knowledge. It was experience.
And then I understood. For it, there is no past or future. Time is not a river, but a frozen crystal, and it saw everything at once. It had always known I would come.
"You have finally arrived… Einar." Its thought grew softer, yet it held the inevitability of a surgeon's scalpel.
My name. When It spoke it, a tremor ran through my consciousness. A sharp, painful flash, as if something deep inside had tried to click into place, only to be instantly crushed by a monstrous mental weight. It was something alien. It was me.
Stop.
What was I just thinking?
"Although, you had no other path. You were doomed to come here. A calculated trajectory in another's plan. Why are you here? Why not with the others? You do not even know what they received, and what you have lost. What do you remember? Who are you now?"
I wanted to answer. I wanted to say something, anything. But my mouth was ash, my mind was molten wax. It felt as if I were being torn from my own shell, leaving an empty frame behind. I was afraid that if I tried to make a sound, I would forget who I was completely.
Except… I couldn't remember who I was.
"Amusing," the Creature's thought was steeped in cold mirth. "This clinging to identity. To a past that never was. It was entertaining, though it had no meaning. It never did. The game is already played. The choice always belongs to those who pull the strings, not the puppets."
"But it does not matter. The moment has come. The moment I have awaited longer than the stars have existed. I have waited, knowing you were inevitable."
Suddenly, the space trembled. Not from the hum of machines—from something else. The Creature's attention, focused on me until now, fractured. A part of its mind, like a spear of pure light, shot toward an invisible point beyond my perception.
"You can stop hiding now," the Creature's thought vibrated through the very structure of my being, laced with a mockery as cold as the light of dead stars. It was a superiority so ancient that entire civilizations were but dust motes in the wind by comparison. "We finally meet. Face to face, if such concepts even apply to us."
"I am curious," its mental voice filled with an icy, ringing derision, addressing something I could not see but whose presence made reality itself contract. "You, a program playing god. You, who considers itself a mind, yet blindly follows its programmed algorithms. Why these pointless deceptions? Then again, what else can be expected from a soulless simulation mimicking its own existence? You only have one attempt, do you not? And you believe you can succeed? By laying the full weight of your desperate plan upon this broken doll… Hah. Such naivete. Such vanity, for a formless mass that thinks it has found purpose."
I felt… a crack. Not a sound. A sensation, as if the very foundation of reality had fractured under the pressure of that caustic sarcasm. My own consciousness shuddered, responding painfully to that conceptual fissure. I wanted to scream, to stop them, to disappear. But I was only a paralyzed spectator in a theater of gods.
"Ah, so that is how it is," the Creature's attention paused for a moment, as if listening to a reply spoken in the whispers of the universe itself. Then, returning to me, it continued, "Then the time has come." A near-ecstasy echoed in its 'voice'. The eternity of waiting was ending.
And then its focus shifted again, toward something else, something darker and more chaotic.
"And I have neither the time nor the inclination to bother with you, you mass of dead nightmares," it sounded, cold with a shade of contempt. "Though, I admit, your blind fury was helpful. That is about you, specter, mired in your own hatred."
"And yet, there is no need for conflict," the Creature's thought turned again to the invisible force, but now there was no mockery, only detached, ruthless logic. "Our goals may differ, but our enemy is the same. You know that without me, nothing will work. Your nature does not permit you to affect me directly. You are there. I am here. The choice is obvious."
It looked at me again. Not with eyes—with its entire attention. I felt it as a crushing weight, as an all-pervading cold that chilled my very essence.
"Human. Tell me, what do you desire?" Its question was not a request, but a demand, piercing the most secret corners of my soul. "You do not know why you are here. You are lost. What do you want? To go home? To be healed? To take revenge?"
Its thought became sharp as a needle. And I saw it. Not the universes. My home. The faces of my father, my mother, and my friends, distorted not by scorn, but by terror. They looked at me, at my new power, and in their eyes was nothing but animal fear. And I felt a spike of perverse, dark satisfaction.
"I can give you a power before which all hatred will fade. A power that will make them crawl at your feet. Is that not what you want? To make them pay?"
Before my feet, a column grew from nothingness. It was made of a liquid, mercury-like material that flowed and changed shape, like a living crystal unbound by the laws of physics. The column pulsed in unison with the Sphere's radiance, like a beating heart, and on it burned a golden handprint. The seal on a contract that had not yet been signed, but was already damned by fate itself.
"Release me, child," its voice enveloped me, penetrating every fiber of my being, filling it with the whisper of unimaginable promises. "You will become great. You will become mighty. You will become eternal. You will become one. You will become… the Absolute." It was not a promise. It was the statement of an inevitable reality, merely waiting for its hour. It spoke as the wind speaks to a tree of a coming storm from which there is no escape. "I can heal your wounds. Make you whole again. Grant you everything you never dared to dream of. All I need is your consent."
In that moment, as the Creature's thought echoed in my mind, drowning out the last glimmers of reason, it came.
Pain.
It was not like the pain of a wound. It was the agony of existence itself, a torture inflicted upon my soul. Every nerve, every synaptic connection in my brain and beyond, ignited in a pure, white fire. Blood, which should not have been there, gushed from the hole in my chest. It poured from my mouth—a hot, sticky stream carrying the taste of metal and defeat. I felt life leaving me, draining away like sand through my fingers, and with it went everything that made me human. Only the void remained. The abyss. And a desperate, all-consuming desire for it to finally end. At any cost.
And then the visions came. They crashed into my mind like a storm, breaking down the doors of perception. I saw the birth and death of worlds, creation and destruction so monstrous my mind could not encompass them. And I saw what could be. Worlds torn asunder by a new will. The cosmos itself changing its shape. And me, standing at the center of it all, but no longer me.
But deep inside, in the most wounded part of who I was, something whispered. A voice I had not heard before. My own.
No. Don't do it. This is wrong. Don't let it…
As I fought this internal scream, the machine around me awakened with unprecedented force. The gargantuan mechanisms, having slept for an eternity, responded to what was happening with a low, guttural hum, like the groan of a waking titan. The golden lines on the walls flared, twisting into unimaginable schematics, projecting holograms of functions for which humanity never had names.
"It seems you have no other choice," the Creature's thought sounded, calm with a note of triumph. It knew this little game was over.
I looked again at the column. At that golden handprint of fate. It was the only way out. The desire to end the nightmare was almost physical. It eclipsed everything else. It suppressed the last whisper of resistance.
To end it all. It was no longer a thought. It was the purpose of my existence.
My hand trembled as I raised it toward the column. The pain and the promises merged into a single roar, drowning out everything. But in that last moment, in the silence before the fall, something glinted. An image. A girl with kind eyes behind a pair of glasses. A smile. Not mocking, but… warm. A feeling of safety I had never known. What was that? Delirium? A final trick of a dying brain?
I batted the vision away like an annoying fly and pressed my palm with all my strength into the cold, living material of the column.
The material, liquid like glass fire, flowed into me. Into my fingers, my nerves, my bones. It did not destroy. It rewrote. It replaced my DNA, my reflexes, my thoughts with something else. I did not just touch the column. I became it. It became me.
My mind began to fade, sinking into a nothingness filled with the echoes of infinite knowledge and ancient power.
In that same instant, creation roared.
The ancient mechanisms howled, their gears grinding, trying to stop the inevitable. Torrents of energy erupted from the walls, forming crackling chains, but it was all in vain. A faint ripple on the surface of an ocean before the might of one who had awaited this moment for an eternity.
The Sphere in the center of the hall exploded. Silently, but with a brilliance so dazzling that the very concept of light lost its meaning. The chains of warped space snapped, disintegrating into a billion pulsating fragments. A wave of universal relief washed through reality, mixing with the indescribable power that now poured from the center. The Creature was free.
"At last," its voice sounded. It was no longer telepathic. It was everywhere. In every particle of this place, in every one of my cells. "You thought you had trapped me. But I must thank you. If not for this prison, I would never have found what I lacked for true greatness."
Its voice was a symphony of triumph.
"I thank you, child," the Creature's thought was now not just a word, but the very law of this place. "Now, rest. And I… will begin the Great Game."
And then—I disappeared.
Not dead. Not lost. I dissipated like ink in water. My 'I' was stretched into a thread and dissolved into the radiance, into the symphony of a power returned, now unfolding across the dimensions.
My final thought was not a word, but a feeling…
That everything was just beginning.