CHAPTER 5: OCEAN OF BLOOD1
The crimson beast's retreat had left behind a silence that was somehow more terrifying than its roar had been. Three bodies moved through the churning fog with the desperate speed of creatures who had just been reminded that death was not only possible but imminent, that this realm that had seemed like an abstract nightmare was very real and very hungry. Torren Grave led them, his limp more pronounced now, his face pale beneath the grime and dried blood that mapped his recent violence like war paint. Bobby followed, theScrolls' knowledge burning behind his eyes in patterns that made sense and hurt to understand simultaneously. Woody brought up the rear, his usual swagger replaced by the wide-eyed terror of someone who had just watched something that shouldn't exist try very hard to kill them, then succeed in nearly killing the one person who might keep them alive.
They ran through landscapes that made Bobby's mind ache with the wrongness of it all, through ruins that defied architectural understanding, through the skeletal remains of civilizations that had died screaming into the purple void. Enormous metal towers twisted like broken bones, their surfaces scarred with symbols in languages that had never been spoken by human tongues. The ground beneath their feet shifted between crystalline structures that chimed when stepped on and soil that seemed to breathe, to pulse with some slow, terrible rhythm. This wasn't a world—it was a graveyard of worlds, each failure, each mistake, each cosmic error dumped here to fester and rot in perpetual twilight.
"The first thing you need to understand about Epimethius," Torren gasped, his voice strained from the running and from whatever internal damage the beast's assault had inflicted, "is that he doesn't see himself as evil. That's the mistake everyone makes." He veered left, leading them through the collapsed archway of what might have once been a temple or a government building or something entirely different, something for which human language had no name. "He believes in the supremacy of the original creation, the first reality before the Light fractured everything into infinite imperfect copies. In his mind, he's not destroying—he's purifying, restoring everything to how it should have been."
Woody stumbled over a piece of rubble that looked disturbingly like a human femur, catching himself with a grunt. "So he's like, cosmic Hitler with daddy issues?" he asked, and the question was so absurd, so perfectly Woody, that Bobby almost laughed despite the terror clawing at his throat.
"Worse," Torren said, glancing back with something that might have been approval in his pale eyes. "Hitler wanted to remake one world. Epimethius wants to unmake all of them except one. He won't stop until every universe that branched from the original has been consumed, until every reality that isn't his has been returned to the nothingness from which it never should have emerged." He paused, leaning against a wall that seemed to be made of fused metal and bone, his chest heaving. "But there's something that stands in his way. Something that has existed as long as reality itself."
The boys gathered close, the fog swirling around them like curious fingers, the air thick with the scent of rust and something that reminded Bobby of the incense his mother burned when she was trying to cleanse their apartment of bad vibes. "The Watcher," Torren continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that seemed to carry weight in the charged atmosphere. "An ancient being that exists outside normal time and space, that guards the dimensional barriers, that keeps Epimethius contained in his prison of endings. For eons, the Watcher has maintained the balance, has ensured that the doors between worlds remain closed except under controlled circumstances."
"But something's changed," Bobby said, and it wasn't a question. The Scrolls were showing him images now, feelings, impressions of cosmic scales tipping, of delicate balances being disrupted by forces too vast to comprehend.
Torren nodded grimly, pressing his hand against his side where blood still seeped through the makeshift bandages. "The Watcher is getting old. Withered. Everything that has a beginning has an end, even entities that exist outside normal time. His power is fading, and as it weakens, Epimethius's essence rises. I can feel it stirring even now, growing stronger with each universe that collapses, with each reality that dies its natural death. The cultists in your world, the ones who think they're serving some noble cause—they have no idea they're not restoring anything. They're just weakening the Watcher's defenses, making it easier for the ancient dark to break through and consume everything."
A sound carried through the fog then—not a roar this time, but something worse. The sound of marching. Hundreds of feet, thousands of them, moving in lockstep rhythm, accompanied by the clank of metal and the guttural chanting of voices that sounded like rocks grinding together. Torren's eyes widened with genuine fear, not the controlled anxiety he'd shown before, but the raw panic of prey that had just heard predators approaching.
"Move," he snapped, grabbing Bobby's arm and pulling him forward. "Those are the Void Legion, Epimethius's ground troops. Not as powerful as the beasts, but there are more of them than there are stars in your sky. They patrol these ruins looking for intruders, looking for souls to feed to their master's growing hunger."
They broke into a run again, faster this time, desperation overriding exhaustion and pain. The landscape blurred around them, twisted structures and impossible architecture passing in a sickening kaleidoscope of decay and corruption. Bobby felt the Scrolls stirring in his mind, felt knowledge unfolding that he didn't want but desperately needed—battle formations, tactical assessments, weak points in the Void Legion's anatomy that could be exploited if you had the right weapons and the willingness to use them.
"This way," Torren yelled, veering toward a massive structure that rose from the fog like the world's ugliest tombstone. It was a bunker, but not like any military installation Bobby had ever seen. The walls were made of black metal that seemed to absorb light, covered in the same symbols that decorated everything in this realm, but here they were arranged in patterns that felt defensive, protective. "My place. My sanctuary. And hopefully, our armory."
The bunker door was massive, carved with intricate reliefs showing beings that might have been gods or monsters or both, engaged in what looked like eternal combat. Torren pressed his hand against a panel in the center, and the door groaned open with a sound like a tomb being unsealed after millennia of silence. Inside, the air was different—cooler, cleaner, charged with the same energy Bobby felt from the Scrolls but focused, controlled, weaponized.
The interior was a single large room, but it was packed with things that made Bobby's head spin. Racks of weapons that looked like they had been designed by engineers who had never seen a gun but understood violence on a molecular level. Armor that seemed to flow like liquid metal, pieces that resembled ancient Greek breastplates but were made of materials that shimmered and shifted when you looked directly at them. And walls covered in maps—hundreds of maps, some showing territories that Bobby recognized from the Scrolls, others displaying realms that existed in colors and dimensions his mind couldn't quite process.
"Your size, mostly," Torren said, already moving toward the armor racks. "These were collected from failed Realmers over the past twenty years. People like you who stumbled through doors they shouldn't have opened, people who thought they could be heroes in a place that chews heroes up and spits out their bones." He pulled out a breastplate that seemed to be made of interlocking scales, each one the color of a storm cloud, each one shifting and rearranging itself as if it were alive. "This should fit you, Bobby. And something more... practical for you, Woody."
The armor was impossibly light when Bobby put it on, the metal somehow warm against his skin, molding to his body shape as if it had been custom-made for him. Woody ended up with something more angular, more aggressive, plates of black metal that interlocked like the carapace of some predatory insect, complete with a helmet that had three optical lenses that glowed with faint red light. The weapons were equally strange—pistols that didn't appear to have ammunition clips but hummed with contained energy, rifles that looked like they had been assembled from alien technology and medieval siege equipment both.
"The corruption out there," Torren said, handing Bobby what looked like a Greek shortsword except the blade was made of some crystalline material that caught the dim light and refracted it into rainbows of pure energy, "it's not just random. Epimethius doesn't just destroy—he perverts. Every realm that falls here, every civilization that gets consumed, it doesn't just die. It gets twisted, remade in his image. What you're seeing out there are the remnants of kingdoms that were once beautiful, once noble, now corrupted into parodies of themselves, their leaders transformed into tyrants who serve the hunger with religious devotion."
They emerged from the bunker transformed, no longer frightened boys and their wounded mentor but something else entirely—a hunting party, a strike force, three beings armed with the tools of cosmic warfare and driven by the desperate urgency of beings who understood that the clock was ticking not just for their survival but for the survival of everything. The landscape seemed different now seen through the optical enhancements of their armor. Details emerged from the fog—the ruined watchtowers weren't just crumbling, they were weeping black tears that sizzled when they hit the ground. The distant mountains weren't just rock formations, they were the fossilized remains of creatures so vast they had once served as living geography for civilizations that had died before humans learned to walk upright.
They moved with purpose now, with the confidence that came from being heavily armed and moderately prepared for whatever horrors this realm could throw at them. Torren led them through valleys filled with the petrified remains of armies that had fought battles so ancient they predated the concept of recorded history, past cities that had been built on the backs of dead gods and now served as feeding grounds for things that had evolved in the absence of light or mercy. Everywhere they looked, there was evidence of Epimethius's handiwork—corruption that went beyond simple destruction, that spoke to a philosophy of ultimate perversion, of taking everything that was good and noble and beautiful and twisting it into something that served the endless hunger.
"Most of the beings here came from other realms originally," Torren explained as they navigated through what might have once been a marketplace but now served as a gathering place for things that traded in secrets and souls. "They were the failures, the mistakes, the ones too powerful or too different for their home realities. But some of them thrived here, adapted to the environment. Their bodies can sustain themselves in ways that normal beings can't, which makes them valuable to the various powers that contest this place."
That's when they saw it. Through a break in the fog and ruins, a structure that looked so utterly out of place that Bobby's mind refused to process it at first. It was a diner. Not a ruined diner, not a corrupted diner, but a perfectly preserved, brightly-lit establishment that looked like it had been transplanted directly from 1950s America, complete with neon signs, chrome exterior, and big picture windows showing patrons seated at counter stools. The sign above the door read "Cosmic Cantina" in letters that glowed with a friendly pink light that seemed actively wrong in this landscape of perpetual twilight and despair.
"What the hell is that?" Woody asked, his three-lensed helmet zooming in on the scene inside. "Are those... aliens having milkshakes?"
Torren's expression was grimly amused. "The Cantina. Neutral ground, supposedly. A place where beings from different realms can meet, trade information, conduct business without the usual violence that governs most interactions out here. The owner made a deal with something older than Epimethius, something that guarantees the Cantina's safety as long as certain rules are followed." He paused, studying the scene with the tactical intensity of a planning military operation. "But rules can be broken. And there's someone inside who has something I need."
Through the windows, they could see the patrons clearly, and the sight made Bobby's stomach twist with a mixture of terror and utterly inappropriate humor. The beings inside were exactly what Woody had said—aliens, but not the kind from movies. These were grotesque, terrifying creatures that defied easy description: things that looked like ancient Vikings had been crossed with trolls from horror comedies, beings with too many eyes and too many limbs, entities that seemed to be made of liquid shadow held together by malice and what looked like really bad attitude. And they were having the time of their lives, laughing, drinking what looked like glowing beverages from strange glasses, playing some kind of game that involved throwing knives at a dartboard covered in screaming faces.
"The big one at the bar," Torren said, his voice low and dangerous. "The one that looks like a Viking who spent too much time hanging around trolls. That's Bloopy. From the Third Realm, where they evolved along lines that combined medieval warrior culture with... well, whatever the hell those things are." He adjusted his weapon, the energy humming increasing in pitch. "He's an information broker, and he's carrying a map. The map. The one that shows the safe paths through the Ocean of Blood to the Castle of Endings."
"Ocean of Blood?" Bobby repeated, and the phrase alone was enough to make something cold and dreadful crawl up his spine.
But Torren wasn't listening anymore. He was already moving, already planning. "The Cantina's basement connects to the old tunnel systems. If we can get to the map without causing too much of a scene, we might be able to get out before anyone realizes what's happened. But we need to be fast, and we need to be quiet." He looked at both of them, his pale eyes burning with the intensity of someone who had been waiting twenty years for this moment. "Whatever happens, stay focused. Whatever you see, whatever you hear, remember why we're here. We get the map, we get out, we get to the Castle. That's all that matters."
2
The Cantina's bell chimed when they entered, a sound so cheerful and normal that it seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room. Every creature in the place turned to look, their multiple eyes fixing on the three armored beings standing in the doorway like they had just walked out of a prophecy nobody wanted to see fulfilled. The air inside was thick with smells Bobby couldn't identify—spices that made his eyes water, alcohol that smelled like it could strip paint, something underlying that reminded him of blood and ozone and bad decisions made in places that didn't follow normal rules of cause and effect.
"Act natural," Torren muttered, though "natural" wasn't really in the playbook for three heavily armed beings walking into a diner filled with grotesque aliens who were all now staring at them like they were the dinner special. "We're just here for a drink. Nothing threatening about that."
They approached the bar, every step feeling like they were walking through a minefield of potential violence. The patrons watched them, their expressions ranging from curious to hostile to hungry, but nobody made a move. The Cantina's neutrality was apparently a serious business, a rule that even these terrible creatures respected, at least as long as nobody broke it first.
Bloopy was even more impressive up close. He stood at least eight feet tall, with arms like tree trunks and a face that looked like it had been carved from granite and then beaten with a hammer for good measure. He wore what appeared to be leather armor decorated with bones and teeth, and he was drinking something that glowed blue from a tankard that would have served as a bathtub for normal humans. When he saw them approaching, he set his drink down with a thud that made the bar vibrate.
"Realmers," he said, and his voice sounded like rocks grinding together, exactly as Bobby had imagined. "Haven't seen your kind around here in years. Thought you lot had learned your lesson about wandering into places you don't belong."
Torren stepped forward, his posture casual but his hand resting near his weapon. "We're just passing through. Looking for information." He slid onto the stool next to Bloopy, while Bobby and Woody took up positions that gave them clear lines of sight to the room's entrances and exits. "We hear you're the being to talk to about navigation issues."
Bloopy laughed, a sound like an avalanche starting somewhere far away. "Navigation issues? Sure. I know the ways between the horrors, the paths that avoid the worst of the nightmares. But information like that costs little Realmer. And I'm guessing you don't have the kind of currency I deal in."
Then something strange happened. Torren began speaking in a language that Bobby had never heard before, a tongue that sounded like it was made of clicks and whistles and tones that hurt to hear, that seemed to bend the air around the words themselves. Bobby couldn't understand the actual language, but somehow, beneath it, he could feel the meaning, the intent, the emotional truth of what was being communicated. It was like hearing two conversations at once—one in an alien tongue he couldn't comprehend, another in pure emotional concept that translated directly to understanding.
"...map of the blood ocean, safe passage to the castle, the Watcher fades and the hunger rises, time grows short, the marked one travels..."
Bobby realized with a jolt that he could understand it. Not the words themselves, but the meaning behind them, the intent that flowed beneath the language like water beneath ice. And from the way Woody's helmet was turning slowly toward the conversation, the way his body language shifted from casual guard to focused attention, he understood it too. The Scrolls, the realm-mark, whatever made them different—it was letting them comprehend things that should have been beyond their reach, letting them understand not just languages but the fundamental concepts that underlay all communication.
Bloopy's reaction was immediate and hostile. The giant Viking-troll straightened up, his hand closing around what looked like a battle axe that had been leaning against the bar. His friendly demeanor vanished, replaced by the cold, dangerous stillness of a predator that had just been challenged in its own territory.
"You speak the old tongue, little man," he growled, and the meaning carried through even to those who couldn't understand the language he was actually speaking. "But you speak it poorly. Like someone who learned it from books rather than blood. And you come into my place asking for things that don't belong to you, making demands that could get us all killed."
"I'm not demanding," Torren said, his voice still casual, still relaxed, but Bobby could feel the tension coiling in him like a snake ready to strike. "I'm offering a trade. Information for information. Safe passage for safe passage."
"I don't trade with Realmers," Bloopy spat. "Your kind brings nothing but trouble. Every time one of you shows up, the balance shifts, the hunger wakes, things start happening that are bad for business. You're bad luck, little man. And I don't allow bad luck in my establishment."
The Cantina had grown quiet now, all conversation ceasing as the other patrons realized something serious was happening. The atmosphere changed from relaxed neutrality to the kind of tension that precedes violence, the kind of silence that falls right before someone does something everyone will regret.
Torren sighed, a sound of profound weariness that carried the weight of twenty years of disappointment and compromise. "I didn't want it to come to this," he said, and then he moved.
Not with the speed of a normal human, but with something else—the fluid grace of a being who had spent two decades learning to fight in dimensions where the rules of physics were more like suggestions. His blade seemed to appear in his hand from nowhere, the crystalline material singing through the air as it arced toward Bloopy's neck.
The Viking-troll was fast, incredibly fast for something so large, but he wasn't fast enough. The blade connected with a sound like crystal striking glass, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then Bloopy's head slid clean off his shoulders, tumbling to the floor with a wet thud that sprayed black blood across the bar and nearby patrons. The body remained standing for a heartbeat, seemingly confused about its new condition, then crashed forward with enough force to crack the bar's surface.
The Cantina exploded into chaos. Screams, roars, the sound of weapons being drawn, the crash of tables being overturned as patrons scrambled for cover or prepared to fight. But Torren was already moving, already reaching into the carnage, his hand digging into the pouches on Bloopy's belt, emerging with a rolled piece of what looked like skin covered in writhing symbols.
"GO!" he yelled, already backing toward the door, firing his energy pistol into the ceiling to discourage pursuit. The shot blew a hole through the roof, revealing the churning purple sky and the twisted ruins beyond.
Bobby and Woody moved without thinking, without hesitation, their training and the adrenaline of survival taking over. They backed out of the Cantina, weapons raised, covering Torren's retreat as more and more of the patrons realized what was happening and decided that neutrality was less important than revenge.
Outside, the realm seemed to have sensed the violence. The fog churned more aggressively, the shadows deepened, and in the distance, something that might have been thunder rolled across the twisted landscape. Torren was already running, already leading them away from the Cantina and toward something that only he could see.
"They'll follow us," he gasped, clutching the bloody map in one hand and his weapon in the other. "But they won't follow too far. Nobody follows into the Ocean of Blood unless they have a death wish or a very, very good reason."
They ran until the Cantina's lights were distant specks behind them, until their lungs burned and their muscles screamed. The landscape ahead was different now—flatter, more open, ending in a horizon that shouldn't exist. Because there, spread out before them like the world's greatest nightmare, was the Ocean of Blood.
It wasn't a metaphor. It wasn't a name. It was literally an ocean of blood, stretching from horizon to horizon, a nearly black dark red liquid that moved with the slow, heavy rhythm of something alive. The surface was covered in waves that crested with foam the color of old bruises, and beneath those waves, Bobby could see shapes moving, things vast and terrible that swam in depths too dark to comprehend. The air above the ocean was thick with the smell of copper and decay, with something that reminded Bobby of the aftermath of violence, of the moment after blood has been spilled and before reality has quite processed the horror of what just happened.
At the far edge of the ocean, so distant it was barely visible through the haze, stood a castle. But it wasn't like any castle from storybooks or history lessons. This fortress seemed to be carved from the same black material as the bunker, from something that drank light rather than reflecting it. Its towers reached toward the purple sky like claws, like accusations, like the broken fingers of a god trying to claw its way out of a tomb. The architecture was wrong, the angles violent, the entire structure radiating an aura of ancient evil so profound that it made Bobby's teeth ache and his soul want to crawl out of his body and flee in any direction that wasn't toward that nightmare made stone.
"That's it," Torren said, his voice filled with something that might have been triumph or might have been terror. "The Castle of Endings. Epimethius's prison, and soon, his throne. I can feel him stirring, boys. I can feel him waking in ways I haven't felt in twenty years. The Watcher is fading faster than we thought, and the ancient dark is rising to claim what belongs to it."
He unrolled the map he had taken from Bloopy's body, and Bobby saw that it wasn't paper or parchment but skin, still warm and flexing with faint movements. The symbols on it writhed and shifted, rearranging themselves into patterns that showed paths through the blood ocean, routes that avoided the worst of the horrors swimming in those depths.
"We don't have time for conventional travel," Torren said, his eyes scanning the horizon with the urgency of someone who could see things the others couldn't. "The castle is only about fifty miles from here, but walking those fifty miles would take us through territories that even I don't want to enter. And every moment we waste, every hour we spend traveling, Epimethius grows stronger. The connection between him and that castle is like an anchor chain, and he's almost reached the end of it."
Woody stared at the ocean of blood, at the things moving beneath its surface, at the distant castle that seemed to radiate pure evil. "So what's the plan, Toren? You got a boat hidden somewhere? Or are we supposed to swim and hope whatever's down there isn't hungry?"
Torren's grim expression actually softened into something that might have been a smile. "Better. We're going to gioloop." When both boys just stared at him, he explained, "Giolooping is... difficult to describe. It's like teleportation, but more dangerous, more unpredictable. You tear a hole in reality and step through it, hoping you come out in one piece on the other side. Most Realmers who try it end up scattered across a dozen different dimensions, or worse, merged with whatever they were trying to pass through. But..." He looked directly at Bobby, his pale eyes burning with intensity. "But you're not most Realmers, are you, Bobby? I felt it back in the bunker, felt it when you were practicing with the Scrolls. You have a connection to something else, something that might just be strong enough to guide a gioloop through this hell without tearing us apart."
Bobby looked at the ocean, at the castle, at the desperate hope in Torren's eyes. He thought about his mother waiting for him, about the comic book they'd never finish, about the normal life that seemed so distant now it might have belonged to someone else entirely. Then he thought about the things in this realm, about the beast that had nearly killed them, about the army that was probably still hunting them, about the entity that wanted to consume everything and everyone they had ever known.
"What do I need to do?" he asked, and his voice didn't even shake.
"Focus," Torren said, already moving to position them in a triangle formation, the map spread between them. "Focus on the castle, on the ground just beyond the ocean's edge. Let the Scrolls guide you, let your connection to whatever power you serve be the beacon that keeps us together. It's going to hurt like nothing you've ever experienced. It's going to feel like your entire body is being turned inside out and shoved through a needle. But if you can hold it together, if you can keep us focused on the destination, we might just survive this."
Bobby closed his eyes, took a deep breath of the blood-scented air, and reached for the power inside him. The Scrolls flared to life behind his eyes, showing him patterns, showing him the way to tear reality just enough to pass through without destroying everything in the process. He could feel Woody and Torren on either side of him, could feel their fear and their determination, could feel their trust in him to do something that should have been impossible.
And then he pulled.
The universe tore open with a sound that wasn't a sound but the absence of sound, a vacuum that tried to suck everything into nothing. Light exploded around them—not normal light but something purer, something ancient and powerful that seemed to come from Bobby himself, from the connection he had to whatever the Scrolls had been teaching him to access. They were thrown forward, not through space but through the spaces between spaces, through a vortex of screaming color and impossible geometry that tried to pull them apart, that tested every bond holding their bodies and souls together.
Bobby held on with everything he had, focusing on the image of the ground beyond the ocean, on the thought of solid earth beneath his feet, on the desperate need to not die in this place between places. The light around them intensified, becoming a beacon, a shield, a declaration that they would not be unmade, that they would not be consumed, that they would reach their destination no matter what horrors tried to claim them along the way.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.
They landed hard, tumbling across ground that was solid and real and blessedly normal compared to what they had just passed through. Bobby's head spun, his vision swam, and every cell in his body screamed in protest at what he had just forced them through. But they were alive. They were all alive, and they were here.
Here, being the edge of the Ocean of Blood. Up close, it was even more terrifying than it had been from a distance. The blood was thick and viscous, moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm that suggested consciousness rather than tide. The shapes swimming beneath the surface were clearer now—things vast and ancient and hungry, things that had been evolving in this darkness since before humanity had learned to fear the dark.
Nearby, as if placed there by some ironic cosmic force, sat a raft. It was made of dark, rusted metal that looked like it had been scavenged from the wreckage of some terrible machine, and it came equipped with two crude paddles that seemed inadequate to the task of navigating an ocean of blood filled with monsters that predated creation.
As the three of them stood there, catching their breath, trying to process what they had just survived, Woody broke the silence with a question that was so perfectly normal, so completely out of place, that it actually helped ground Bobby in reality.
"We're gonna finish Buck Cassidy when we're back right?"
Bobby looked at his friend, at the ridiculous armor he was wearing, at the terrifying ocean behind him and the evil castle ahead of them, and he actually smiled. "You know it."
Because somehow, in this moment of absolute horror and cosmic stakes, that simple promise felt like the most important thing in the world. The promise of normalcy, of return, of finishing a stupid comic book about a cowboy with a revolver. It was the anchor that would keep them human, that would remind them what they were fighting for when everything else tried to tear them apart. Bobby thought again of his love for Bobby and how he hoped they would make it, as they stepped into the raft and sailed away into the deep sea of blood.