CHAPTER 6: THE LAST FACE
1
The raft scraped against the shore of the Ocean of Blood with a sound like metal tearing flesh, each vibration traveling up Bobby's arms like a warning. The air that rolled off the black water was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature—a spiritual chill that seemed to emanate from the very concept of so much death concentrated in one place. This wasn't just water stained with blood; this was the accumulated essence of every being that had ever died violently across the infinite realms, a liquid graveyard that moved with the slow, deliberate purpose of something that had achieved a terrible form of consciousness.
Torren guided them away from the shore with practiced movements of the crude paddles, his face set in the grim mask of someone who had made this journey before and knew exactly what horrors awaited them. The raft floated low in the viscous liquid, the dark red surface coming within inches of the metal decking, as if the ocean itself was trying to claim them, to pull them down into its depths where ancient things dreamed of hunger and awakening.
The farther they traveled from shore, the more the ocean revealed its secrets. At first, it was just shapes in the distance—vast dark forms moving beneath the surface with the deliberate grace of leviathans that had evolved in absolute darkness, creatures so ancient they had forgotten what light felt like. But as they pushed deeper, the ocean began showing them what it truly held, what it had been collecting since before the first world had split from the original.
Bodies. Everywhere they looked, bodies. Floating on the surface, drifting just beneath, caught in currents that moved like slow rivers through the blood sea. Some were recent enough to be recognizable—beings that might have come from worlds similar to their own, their faces frozen in expressions of terror or surprise or the profound resignation of those who had finally understood the true nature of their end. Others were ancient, things that had been preserved by the blood's unique properties, mummified remains that had been floating here for millennia, their bodies arranged in strange patterns as if they were still performing the rituals that had brought them to this place.
The horror wasn't just in the sheer quantity of death, but in its variety. There were things that might have once been human, things that had definitely never been human, things that defied easy classification as either alive or dead, as either biological or something else entirely. Bobby saw a creature that seemed to be made of tangled vines and bone fragments, its multiple eyes still watching them with empty intelligence. He saw what looked like a child from some realm, small and delicate, floating face down but moving with a slow, rhythmic pulse that suggested it wasn't entirely dead, that it had adapted to this environment in ways that would drive mortal minds insane.
"How many?" Woody asked, his voice barely audible above the gentle lapping of blood against the raft. "How many people are in here?"
"More than have ever been born in your reality," Torren said, his voice flat with the weight of terrible knowledge. "Every world that falls, every realm that Epimethius consumes, every being that dies in the spaces between—they all end up here eventually. This ocean is the end of all stories, the final destination for everything that fails to survive the multiverse's endless cycles of consumption and renewal."
They paddled in silence for a while, the only sounds the dip of paddles in blood, the distant cries of things hunting in the depths, and the occasional soft splash as something broke the surface nearby. The sky above remained that perpetual purple-gray, the churning fog doing little to hide the true scope of the nightmare they were navigating. The Castle of Endings grew gradually larger ahead of them, its black towers seeming to actively drink the light around them, creating pockets of absolute darkness that hurt to look at directly.
It was Woody who broke the silence, his voice softer than Bobby had ever heard it, stripped of its usual bravado and defensive humor. "You know," he said, staring at his reflection in the blood water, "I don't think my family even knows I'm gone. Or if they do know, I don't think they care."
Bobby turned to look at his friend, really look at him, and saw something beneath the armor and the tough guy act that Woody had spent years perfecting. There was a wound there, not physical but emotional, something that had been festering since the night his father had shattered his teeth and his mother had taken that father back, had chosen her abuser over her son's safety.
"My dad probably thinks I finally ran off for good," Woody continued, his voice distant, as if he were speaking to someone else entirely. "He's probably relieved, you know? One less thing to worry about, one less reminder of what he did. And my mom..." He trailed off, shaking his head slowly. "She's probably drinking somewhere, telling herself that I deserved it, that I was a troublemaker who finally got what was coming to me. She always found ways to justify what he did. Why would my death be any different?"
The words hung in the cold air between them, more devastating than any monster, more heartbreaking than any cosmic horror. Because this was real, this was the kind of pain that couldn't be solved with swords or dimensional abilities, the kind of wound that never truly healed.
"They do care, Woody," Bobby said, but even he could hear the lie in his voice. They both knew it wasn't true. The Callahans weren't sitting at home worrying, weren't organizing search parties, weren't desperately hoping for their son's return. They were probably watching television, drinking, going about their lives as if Woody had never existed, as if his disappearance had solved more problems than it had created.
Woody gave a sad smile that didn't reach his eyes. "You're a good friend, Bobby. But you don't have to lie to make me feel better. I've known the truth for a long time. That's part of why I was always so angry, always getting into fights, always trying to prove something. If your own parents don't give a shit if you live or die, you start thinking that nobody else does either. Except you." He looked at Bobby then, and his eyes were clear, vulnerable in a way that Bobby had rarely seen. "You always gave a shit. That's why you're my best friend, man. That's why you've always been my brother."
The moment was so raw, so honest, that it felt completely out of place here, surrounded by death and ancient horrors. But it also felt incredibly important, like something that needed to be said before whatever came next arrived.
Torren watched them with an expression that was hard to read—part pity, part recognition, part the weary resignation of someone who had seen too many friendships torn apart by this place. He reached into one of the pouches on his armor and pulled out a slightly crushed pack of cigarettes and a cheap plastic lighter. "I picked these up a few realms back," he said, offering the pack to the boys. "They taste like shit, but they help sometimes."
Woody took one, Bobby took another, and Torren kept one for himself. The lighter flickered three times before catching, creating a tiny flame that seemed impossibly fragile in the vast darkness surrounding them. They smoked in silence, the cigarette smoke mingling with the coppery scent of the ocean, creating a moment of something almost like peace. The nicotine hit their systems, calming their nerves, smoothing the edges of fear that had been grinding at them for what felt like years.
For a few minutes, they were just three people smoking cigarettes on a raft in the middle of a nightmare ocean. The monsters in the distance seemed less threatening, the bodies floating around them less significant, the evil castle ahead less immediate. It was a false peace, Bobby knew that, a temporary truce with reality that would end the moment they finished their cigarettes and had to start paddling again. But it felt real, it felt important, it felt like a memory he would treasure even if he lived to be a thousand years old.
"You know," Woody said, blowing a smoke ring that dissolved immediately in the thick air, "if we get out of this, if we actually make it home, I think I'm gonna tell my dad exactly what I think of him. And my mom too. I'm done letting them pretend like what happened was okay, like me being broken was something I deserved." He looked at Bobby, his eyes serious despite the faint haze of nicotine. "People shouldn't get to treat you like garbage and then expect you to pretend it's perfume."
Bobby nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He could see the shore now—a skeleton-ridden beach where skulls outnumbered pebbles by what looked like a hundred to one, where bones from countless species formed a strange, macabre sand that crunched underfoot. They were getting close to the halfway point, close to the place where Torren had said the current would be strongest, where the things in the depths would be most active.
They finished their cigarettes, crushing the butts on the metal decking of the raft. Woody was about to say something else, something about maybe finally getting to finish their comic book after all this was over, when the water beside the raft erupted.
It happened so fast that Bobby's mind struggled to process the sequence of events, to arrange them in a way that made sense. One moment, Woody was sitting there, his armor glinting in the dim light, his face set in determination. The next moment, something had grabbed him.
The creature that emerged from the blood ocean was the stuff of nightmares made real, the kind of thing that existed to prove that some horrors were too vast for the human mind to truly comprehend. It had been floating just beneath the surface, disguised as another body, another piece of the ocean's endless collection of death. But it wasn't dead. It was waiting.
What reached for Woody looked like it might have once been human, or at least humanoid. Now it was a thing of rot and decay, of corruption that had evolved into something predatory. Its skin was the color of old bruises and gangrene, hanging in tatters from a frame that was mostly bone and what looked like twisted metal. One of its arms was nothing but exposed muscle and tendon, ending in claws that were made of what looked like sharpened human fingerbones, each one wrapped in rusted wire. But it was the face that broke something inside Bobby—what remained of it was caught in an eternal scream, the jaw hanging open too wide, the eyes somehow still aware and filled with a hunger that went beyond simple physical need.
The hand—those bone-fingers wrapped in wire—closed around Woody's ankle with impossible speed, with strength that should have belonged to something much larger than the emaciated frame suggested. Woody didn't even have time to scream before he was being pulled, before the raft was tilting dangerously, before the laws of physics and balance were being violated by something that didn't acknowledge such limitations.
"WOODY!" Bobby screamed, reaching for his friend, his fingers closing around Woody's armored wrist just as the creature pulled with impossible strength. For a moment, there was a tug-of-war, three beings connected in a chain of desperation—Woody caught between his friend's grip and the monster's hunger, the raft groaning beneath them, the ocean churning with awakened interest.
Then the raft flipped.
It wasn't a gentle tipping, not the kind of thing you see in movies where people end up wet but mostly okay. This was a violent, catastrophic inversion, the metal decking striking the blood water with a sound like thunder, with force that sent shockwaves through the liquid, that disturbed things sleeping in depths that hadn't been disturbed in centuries.
Bobby was thrown into the ocean, into the blood, into the accumulated essence of every death that had ever occurred across infinite realities. The cold was immediate and absolute, a cold that went beyond physical sensation, that seemed to penetrate directly to his soul, to the core of his being. The liquid was thick, viscous, clinging to him like a living thing, trying to pull him down, trying to claim him as another addition to its endless collection.
He surfaced sputtering, gasping for air that tasted like copper and rot, wiping blood from his eyes so he could see, so he could find Woody, so he could help.
And then he saw him.
Woody was fighting, thrashing in the grasp of the emaciated creature that had pulled him from the raft. But he wasn't alone. The surface of the ocean around them was boiling now, churning with the arrival of things that had been drawn by the disturbance, by the scent of fresh violence, by the promise of new souls to add to their collection.
Small creatures were emerging from the depths, things that looked like snakes except they weren't, not really. They had too many eyes, too many teeth, their bodies covered in what looked like tiny grasping hands rather than scales. They swarmed toward Woody, toward the creature holding him, toward the violence that called to them like a dinner bell.
"BOBBY!" Woody screamed, and there was real terror in his voice now, the kind that came from understanding that this was it, that this was how it ended. "HELP ME!"
Bobby tried to swim toward him, tried to fight through the thick liquid that seemed to actively resist his movements, that clung to him like a thousand grasping hands. But he was too slow, too far away, and there were too many of them.
The snakes reached Woody first. They swarmed over his body, over the armor that had been supposed to protect him, covering him in a writhing blanket of teeth and eyes and terrible hunger. Bobby heard the sound of metal being pierced, of armored plates being torn away like tissue paper, of teeth finding flesh beneath.
Woody's screams changed, became something higher, more desperate, the sounds of someone being eaten alive piece by piece. He fought, God how he fought, punching and kicking and trying to throw the things off him, but there were too many, each one biting, each one tearing, each one consuming.
Then something worse happened. A larger shape moved beneath the struggling forms beneath, something vast enough to create its own currents, to disturb the very foundations of the ocean. The water around Woody began to swirl, to circle, to form a vortex that pulled him and his attackers downward.
The Mother. Bobby didn't know how he knew, didn't understand the source of the knowledge, but he knew it with the certainty of someone who had just witnessed the opening act of something truly terrible. The mother of all these smaller horrors, the queen of this particular nest of death, the thing that had birthed the nightmare that was consuming his best friend.
It rose slowly, majestically, a creature so vast it defied easy description. It looked like a snake in the way that a hurricane looks like wind—technically true but utterly inadequate to convey the scale, the power, the absolute terror of what they were witnessing. Its body was covered in scales that were black as midnight, each one the size of a dinner plate, each one engraved with symbols that seemed to shift and rearrange themselves as if they were alive. Its head was large enough to swallow a horse whole, its eyes burning with ancient intelligence, with a hunger that had been accumulating for millennia.
Woody was being pulled toward it, caught in the current, still covered in the smaller snakes that continued their feast even as they carried him to their mother. He saw it coming, Bobby could see in his friend's eyes that he saw what was about to happen, and in that moment, Woody did something that broke what was left of Bobby's heart.
He stopped fighting. He stopped struggling. He looked directly at Bobby, through the blood water, through the swarm of snakes, through the tears that were streaming down Bobby's face, and he nodded. Just a small nod, but it contained everything—acceptance, forgiveness, love, the acknowledgment that this was how it ended but they had still had each other, that their friendship had been real and important and worth something even if it was ending now.
Then the Mother's jaws opened, and there was nothing but darkness inside, nothing but the promise of absolute consumption, of being reduced to nothing more than fuel for something ancient and terrible. Woody disappeared into that darkness, and for a moment, there was silence.
Bobby was screaming now, screaming words that made no sense, screaming profanity that did nothing to change reality, screaming his friend's name over and over as if the sound alone could somehow undo what had just happened. He was swimming toward where Woody had vanished, toward the place where his best friend had just been swallowed whole, trying to reach him, trying to save him, trying to do something other than watch this horror unfold.
Torren grabbed him, wrapping strong arms around Bobby's chest, pulling him back. "No," the older man yelled, his voice rough with emotion that Bobby had never heard before. "There's nothing you can do! He's gone, Bobby! We have to go before they come for us too!"
Bobby fought him, thrashing, hitting, clawing, doing everything he could to break free, to get back to Woody, to somehow reverse the irreversible. "LET ME GO! WOODY! WOODY!" he screamed, but the only answer was the churning of the blood ocean, the satisfied retreat of the Mother back into its depths, the endless floating of bodies that had just been joined by one more.
Torren held him tight, pulling him toward the overturned raft, toward the relative safety of something solid in this liquid nightmare. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and the words were inadequate, meaningless, but they were all he had. "I'm so sorry, Bobby."
They made it to the shore eventually, Bobby's body going limp with exhaustion and grief, Torren practically carrying him through the shallow blood water that lapped at the skeleton-strewn beach. Bobby collapsed on the shore, on the carpet of bones and death that formed this realm's coastline, and he wept. Not the quiet tears of mourning, but the raw, animal screams of someone whose soul had just been torn apart, who had watched helplessly as the person who mattered most in his world had been consumed by things that had no right to exist.
Torren held him through it, letting the grief run its course, letting the screams echo across the blood ocean and up toward the castle that waited like a promise of more death to come. There was nothing to say, nothing that could possibly make this better, nothing that could undo the horror of what they had just witnessed.
Woody Callahan was gone. Eaten by monsters in an ocean of blood in a realm that shouldn't exist, far from the family that probably didn't even notice he was missing, far from the world that had never really appreciated him, far from everything except the one friend who had truly loved him.
That was the last time he ever saw the face of Woody Callahan.