They detached from the weeping carpet of souls on the ceiling, dropping like stones. They clawed their way up from the bone-white ground itself.
An army of the dead, and all of them converged on his frantic, spinning soul.
"OH FUCK! OH FUCK!"
"Stop that soul!" one shrieked, its voice like grinding bone. "It disrupts the eternal order!" howled another, a chorus of tormented whispers.
A storm of violence was unleashed.
Scythes, obsidian and wicked, sliced through the air. Chains, glowing with captive heat, launched from skeletal hands. Nets woven from shadow and pure suffering unfolded with a soft, sighing sound.
"I'M SORRY! WHATEVER I DID, I'M SORRY! JUST LET ME GO!"
But he was an impossible target. His soul moved not with grace, but with the wild, unpredictable jerks of a puppet on a string, flung this way and that by an unseen puppeteer. He weaved through the attacks not by skill, but by pure, chaotic chance, a hummingbird in a hurricane of blades.
"I CAN'T CONTROL THIS! IT'S NOT ME!"
Through the dizzying spin, he saw his destination, and a terror deeper and more absolute than anything he had yet experienced seized the last shreds of his awareness.
It was a chasm.
Not simply a gap in the landscape, but a wound in the fabric of reality. it was a fucking chasm, long and big enough to swallow USA. Arental gash so impossibly wide the far side was lost in an ocean of mist and eternal night. He could feel its wrongness from a great distance—a palpable aura of non-existence, a pure, hungry void waiting to consume.
"NO! NOT THERE! ANYWHERE BUT THERE!"
"Sound the alarm!" the lead guard roared, its voice strained with a new kind of fear. "It heads for the Queen's domain!"
"STOP! PLEASE GOD MAKE IT STOP! I DON'T WANT TO GO THERE!"
A chorus of horns joined the first, their dreadful notes cascading through the cavern, a terrifying symphony of alarm.
"TURN AROUND! STOP! STOOOOOP!"
But the force that pulled him was merciless, a hunger with a single purpose. His soul accelerated, rocketing toward the edge of that impossible abyss.
"I'M GOING TO FALL! OH GOD I'M GOING TO FALL FOREVER!"
The edge of the world rushed up to meet him. Pete's screams reached a crescendo of raw, useless sound, a final, desperate plea into the uncaring dark.
"NOOOOOOOO!"
And then, nothing.
For one perfect, terrifying second, his spin stopped. He hung suspended directly over the abyss, a speck of light over an infinity of black. Everything fell silent. The chaos of the chase, the howling of the guards, the screaming rivers—all of it vanished, replaced by a profound and awful stillness.
He looked down.
There was no bottom. Only darkness, and within that darkness, a movement. A slow, colossal stirring of something so ancient and malevolent that his soul instinctively recoiled, wanting nothing more than to shatter into a million pieces and cease to be rather than endure a single moment in its presence.
"Please," Pete whispered, the word a fragile, broken thing. "Please don't let me fall. Please."
Then—
FLASH.
"WHAT—?!"
The universe tore.
One moment, he was on the precipice; the next, he was through it. He had traversed the impossible distance in the blink of an eye, bypassing the ultimate barrier.
"HOW—HOW DID I—"
He saw it then. Standing on the far side of the chasm, rising from a vast field of black roses that drank the diseased light and bloomed in defiance of all that was holy.
A castle.
"Holy... shit."
whisper through his consciousness.
The terror that had propelled him, a shrieking engine of panic, sputtered and died. In its place surged a tidal wave of awe so profound it dwarfed the fear, so immense it was a kind of agony in itself.
This was not a castle. It was a declaration. A monument to a power so absolute it could sculpt splendor from the very bones of despair.
Towers of midnight stone, hewn from a material that drank the cavern's diseased light, speared toward the unseen heights like accusing fingers.
They were not merely stone; they were epic poems carved in bas-relief, each one depicting a final moment—a king's last gasp on a blood-soaked field, a mother's fading gaze fixed on her child, a lover's final, silent scream—all rendered with such heartbreaking, masterful artistry that agony itself was made beautiful.
Connecting these spires were bridges of woven shadow, ethereal and impossible, shouldering the weight of eternity in defiance of all logic. They existed not because they could, but because their creator demanded it.
Below, gardens bloomed from soilless ground, their impossibly perfect petals ranging from the deep red of fresh-spilled blood to a matte, light-devouring black. They were breathtaking, and from them rose a scent that was contradictorily sweet and loathsome, like night-blooming jasmine laced with the perfume of decay.
And through it all flowed rivers of liquid starlight. Not a metaphor, but the captured light of dead suns, channeled through gutters of polished obsidian. Their glow was gentle, ethereal, a soft caress against the suffocating gloom, a promise of creation in a realm of endings.
"This is... this is incredible," Pete breathed, the words a ghost of a sound. For the first time since his fall began, the memory of pain was a distant echo. The horror of the chasm, the monstrous guards, the screaming eternal—it all paled against the impossible majesty of this place. It was an abomination built in the heart of Hell, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
At the center of it all, the Queen's personal sanctum rose like a dark and solitary crown. The architecture was undeniably feminine, but it held no delicate grace. It was the design of a monarch, a lover, a killer—powerful, elegant, and utterly without mercy.