The Nothing King

“MAREN!” The holy relic spear once again shot through the air to chase after the walking behemoth, and again that indestructible weapon buried itself in the pure white flesh of its head… only to stop there and then slowly sink in as it was absorbed.

Laksha recalled it to her hand with growing frustration. The Warden of the Spear now stood on the tip of the eastern wing of the Brighton Manor, or what remained of it. Down below in the courtyard, outside of the broken stones where a gargantuan footprint had been laid, **** Knights, the few the two exhausted Brightons could save before barely escaping themselves, were being tended to by the only Hospitaler both conscious and not apparently consumed by the walking Outsider. Nearby, **** paratroopers slowly, and by some miracle safely, landed on the streets and courtyards nearby.

Overall, the Order’s present forces had been routed before the nightmarish titan walked the Earth. But Laksha continued her ranged attacks with all her might, even though they seemed without effect. Earlier, she had seen the pale flesh reach for her before she barely got out of its range; only the Rose kept her mind intact after that experience, let alone continue to try and engage it.

Moira looked at the back of the giant Tricia with a muted confusion. John… was dead. She could not muster any prayers to continue waking her men. The young Warden had never felt a burden… a failure to protect what she cared for… such as this. She struggled to accept that failure as the Lady in her soul screamed: to stop this horror, to end its march, and to do so before all of Gaia’s creation was destroyed. It gave her no guidance on how. It only demanded—begged—for intervention.

Moira tried to stand from where she kneeled by an **** Knight… but her legs were so much jelly as she tried to fathom something, anything, that she could do.

It flashed in her mind again: the two Knights in her grip as she leapt away, her mind barely intact as she stood so close to this wound of insanity that now strolled through Springfield… and a **** look back at the men and women still webbed to the floor and to Rave, Travolta, and Galley… and behind them, forgotten for a moment, for an instant, for so bare an instant... Moira’s odd, adopted sister. Deanna had run in, perhaps hoping to stop the mad melee somehow, perhaps to protect her sister, perhaps to run after her wounded father who had so boldly charged without the benefit of his hands… but Deanna wasn’t moving then. She had feet, but she had not the Rose, nor did those circumstantial enemies of the Order. None retreated from the massive foot that blotted out the midday sun. All of them had stood, wide-eyed and paralyzed, each one perhaps driven mad staring at a reaching, quivering mass the length of an eighteen-wheeler… in the instant before the same crushed them all.

No blood or bodies remained, nor could Moira sense them, not truly; in a way, she sensed everyone that vanished into the Outsider’s body… and yet they were all well and truly gone. The Lady declared them dead; Moira had nothing to show for an alternative. It simply followed that John was also…

Moira’s shield slid from her arm and clattered on the ground.

---

The city of Springfield had mostly stopped in its tracks. Whether indoors or outside, asleep or awake, at its heart or on its outermost edges: every man, woman, and child capable of sensing danger, of having enough life to have their hairs stand on end, ceased whatever they were doing to look towards the Brighton Manor… and those who could see, those whose eyes were not shielded by bricks or steel or luck, beheld a skyscraper of flesh unfurling to stand erect… and stumbling towards Ashcroft Academy.

Wentworth and Magoi both watched with rapt interest... and, secretly, reacted by triggering whatever destructive forces they could bring to bear in the bare minute or two they had until the monster could reach its target: a different kind of wound in the space above the school, something imperceptible save for a feeling of dread vulnerability that afflicted all living things in within a few miles of it.

If these elder mages had a day... an hour... even a handful more of minutes... but they didn’t, and so they couldn’t know their struggle was in vain, except for the foreboding of a mass suicide of oracles to warn them.

Magoi’s mask jittered as he struggled to maintain his composure beneath it. His hypothesis was proven valid... and now that theoretical underpinning of everything was to be molested by what he had not accounted for: Tricia Gorbachev, a youth under his watchful eye, harboring an Outsider more than fully grown and bearing strength beyond the means of flesh. This kind of horror normally took centuries to brew; it had appeared, now, in an instant. If reality had more than a few more breaths to exist, Magoi would love to study how such a thing occurred; all he could do now was try and make that future happen. He opened portals to such barriers as could bear monsters to rain down upon the beast, giving each only the most token protection from being erased for the crime of appearing on Earth. He cried underneath the mask as he worked.

Wentworth grimaced at the sight all the while; the hopes she had in using John, in finally bringing peace and totality to her centuries of planning, were snuffed out along with the future. She had faced Outsiders before—never by choice and never so grown—but it was more accurate to say that she had survived Outsiders before. She called tendrils of shadows and acid from instant barriers to try and slow the horror her mind struggled to accept, but the thing’s flesh ignored her efforts. Unseen trap barriers sprung and shattered as they tried to contain the giant. Nothing, it seemed, could give the monster pause. Her attacks were joined by a few other regulars in the Abyss, remote and near, as they rained destructive magicks upon the enemy wherever they realized the doom that neared... but whereas Wentworth barely slowed the monster, those less powerful efforts were entirely wasted.

No mage was truly prepared to fight such madness on such short notice... but either of the two elders present held their wills better than the crying, vomiting, and screaming people that now filled the streets.

Wentworth shook her head. Her voice barely trembled as she asked, "You had her for months... so how? How didn’t you detect this?”

"I thought I would know of such a possibility," the old mage sighed, "and sensed nothing like this… nothing at all. So... hubris, I suppose.”

Wentworth sipped from her coffee as the skies blackened with ash and poison. "I suppose so."

The Truth marched on…

---

The cleric spirits were languid in their flights and in their work; the stone chips they ate up fell faster than they bothered to gather and annihilate them.

The groan of stone dragging on stone echoed in the Temple. Her wings were heavy. Her joints cracked and chipped as she crawled. Her mouth cracked and groaned as she broke apart her lips... but even in this aching waking, she persisted. Slowly, the servant inched towards two slabs of marble opposite of the Temple foray… the “doors” that kept the Temple from its Master.

The door had never been noticed by anyone else… not even John. Especially not John. Fairy kept it that way. Even now, she was disobeying her orders to ignore this door, to avoid bringing any attention to it... but this was an exception. This had to be done, no matter the risk.

The glass ceiling groaned as oppressive shadows pressed from the inky hate above. The First Truth was closer to finding this place. Had her Master foreseen this, too? Did he let her suffer in ignorance just to sustain this moment?

He would not be ready to wake, not yet. John wasn’t ready... but she could sense what was happening, and the other worthless mages, the whole rest of Gaia’s pitiful creations, couldn’t stop the apocalypse in time.

So it fell to her Master. So Fairy prayed he could be moved to care.

---

My form marches forward as I behold the true, tiny existence beyond this illusion of atoms and energy. Is this how she survives, then? Is this why her identities, those long, tormenting shadows cast from her seat, exist only in the Dream? Every question is born from learning; every learning is a loss of Truth.

I cannot ask any longer; I have lost too much already.

Now I must end this charade before I lose everything, before Gaia’s spawn find some means to stall my victory without their precious Champion. The Gorbachev flesh teaches me more of human matter; I consume more of the same with my precious journey. I find all manner of flavors—souls closer to the Dream than others, souls marred by curses, and even one “soul” devoid of the Dream altogether, such curious specimens!—and do my best to not contemplate them, to not let human curiosity, human ignorance infect me from my vessel. My feet crush more homes, roads, lives as I march towards the Academy—towards Gaia.

A proper instrument, Tricia is: an heir of my heirs, a prisoner of the prisoner of the cell within cells. Proper, too, were her compatriots, now all parts of me. But I will tolerate this no longer; such devices are no longer necessary. I am here. The humans for miles around wail and scream as their minds break upon seeing me; the fleeting illusions of their existences are made apparent with my visage, and no such falsehood can survive contact with the First Truth.

Additional blasts of radiance, fire, lightning, frozen air and acidic clouds all attempt to bar my way. Fonts of boiling liquids, explosions of shadows, even monsters, whose flesh could only exist now as I violated reality, whose flesh boiled as it touched the uncensored, unwarded airs of Earth, rain upon me and do their best to eat my limbs. Illusory barriers—such mockery, such jest!—shatter upon my being.

My flesh boils, cracks, and reforms as I march on, more inevitable than Time itself. This was the Truth. I would prove it to this fleeting eternity once and for all.

---

Fairy’s stone-encrusted fingers gently brushed the door, and the seam sighed open... to Nothing. A black void waited beyond, a yawning hole of vacuum that nature did not abhor but embrace... and though the Nothing slept, to rest, to bide its time, it could no longer afford the luxury. Did Fairy fail? No... the Master did, or perhaps the Master always knew this would happen. Her fear of such a mad conspiracy ate at her, but she could not abandon him, not now. Not now.

Fairy whispered to her Master as gravel mixed in her throat, “Save us... an Outsider... is too...”

The dark did not move. It continued to rest in an inexorable peace. It could not perceive anything but Fairy's voice... and she did not dare mislead it, to suggest that now was the time. So it seemed it was not the appointed time… so there was no reason to care. The dark continued to abide the passing of events without it, whatever they could be.

---

The leylines stretch out from their shared joint, and there I see her: resting upon some mockery of a throne, her dozing expression beyond description or understanding. Confounding Gaia! This is not her, but it is as close as I can interpret her. Fine. I will **** her lies upon her seat, I will tear apart this tortured metaphor, and so my will shall finally be done!

As I step onto the field of the Academy, as my hands stretched out to reach through the veil of this world, I cannot help but wonder: poisoned as I am, driven so mad by this universe as to perceive it, becoming so dangerously real that I could soon be subsumed by this wretched Dream… should I not perish too? Will my escape... hurt that from which I came? It is possible; it is unknown, but it is too dangerous to ponder. So, I decide, I must perish too... but only after I finally destroy this blasphemous trap, this terrible universe, forged by her.

My fingers tease the film between Gaia’s universe and Gaia’s ****. Freedom, at last, is mine.

---

Fairy’s body began to crack from the strain. John Newman was nearly gone... and the First Truth, this unfathomable horror, twisted his soul into a key... a key to...

Of course... the prize. The entire reason for...

Of course. But her stone form crumbled quicker as she began to run out of time.

“Master... they’re going to...”

Fairy’s wings cracked and fell, and her body began to follow suit.

“… take... your...”

A crack exploded onto a glass panel above.

“… rightful...”

The Nothing was not moved... and the glass continued to crack as it was ready to burst.

Fairy’s mouth trembled and chipped apart as she finally managed… “... Throne.”

The groan of the buckling glass abruptly vanished. It unswelled, its cracks receded, and a vacuum of sound followed this effect as the unseen doors smashed open-

---

The way snaps shut. Why-

My Eye of Gaia dims... and stretches... and I can no longer see through it. I open eyes upon my rising hands to look upon it… and there I see, pressing against the iris from inside that milky sea of dimming gray...

... a hand of shadows.

---

I am the First Truth, and this wretched me is... is tearing apart its prison, is pulling up from the depths, is yanking as hard as he can. John Newman. An identity, an ideal, a failure, a husband, a nerd, and a bully. John Newman. It burned like the sigil he had sown onto the flesh of his victims. It angered him as he did himself... but in doing so, he was he, not a part of it, but something apart, something-!

The world was madness to John: in a wide, featureless chasm of white, he fell for an eternity towards a glowing star that never neared. But there, falling alongside him, he saw other forms; other prisoners at varying heights in the drop, though all seemed to fall at the same speed. He saw Deanna… Galley… Knights and Hospitalers, known or briefly met or never met at all. Familiar faces—Rave?—and among them-

Tricia.

Tricia!

She fell alongside them all. Their eyes were all closed... and apparently only he had stirred awake. He reached out to them, to awaken them, to try and caress Tricia's cheek first... and paused as he saw his hand, a blue-white shadow that seemed too unreal to be his. Tricia's body floated away, farther and farther, until she was at the core of the tightening mass of souls. All the shades of people were coalescing and moving away from him… and then John realized that it was actually him that was leaving their proximity as their dozens of naked bodies continued to fall eternally in white. John's mind recoiled as he more and more realized who he was, who he had been. He was fighting Laksha, he was winning, so why was he-?!

John's consciousness smashed through the membrane of The First Truth's control... and fell, smothered and drowned, in a familiar darkness.

No... not a darkness. Darkness, as his old, overwrought writings once repeatedly reminded his smattering of readers, was merely the absence of light... but he couldn't quite place that nebulous black, that void that engulfed him and threatened to take him away yet again, for better or worse-

No!

John dove back towards the tightening sea of bodies... and slammed into the line between this familiar dark and the prison of light he beheld. The dark called to him, to save him… but he couldn’t be saved, not alone. He had to save them, he had to save Tricia-!

With a furious will, John dug his ethereal fingers into the barrier… and tore through, back into the prison as he half-swam, half-fell to reach Tricia.

He did not look back... and he didn’t see the shadow of himself left at the membrane, black upon black, which turned and drifted away.

---

The Eye explodes... and my borrowed mouth screams. The creature that emerges, a wound upon a wound, an outline of the Champion of negative white, of a black upon black, is marked solely by two features beyond his human silhouette: a glowing green left eye and, hissing from his shattered skull like a lit gas leak, a familiar, awful chaos of colors, images, smells and noises, concepts and falsehood, objects and nightmares.

This beast's head is leaking Dream, pure chaos, into the static air... until, with creeping, inky black layers, its head reforms, sealing the Dream inside once more.

Then it is truly the Champion of Gaia... again. What is this, now, that is stealing my prize? Its body stands on the precipice of the exploded iris, doused in my blood after the rest of the eyeball's fluid splattered down my breasts and stomach to drown the fields below. It turns towards my brain matter, as if to address me... as if to mock me as my fury grows.

This isn't the Truth. THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH! I have known the Truth for millennia! I sunk ever so calmly into the detritus of the Dream, wallowed in its hateful content, absorbed its evils, and knew its ways even more! The Champion of Gaia was killed! His soul is mine to use-! This was your fetid reality, Gaia, and your reality, so precious to you, and now my weapon, cannot be undone! Reality is inescapable... and now, I AM REALITY-!

The being of dark taps its foot upon my iris as I struggle to understand what it said... and a nova of green cracks webs across my face and hair before my head explodes.

Viscera paints the Academy and the nearby park in a terrible spray... and from the dismembered gore, a swath of Knights slowly manifest.

---

John continued to tear through the bodies with ease, flinging them away and occasionally through the film of the world outside. “Tricia!” John screamed out as he caught a glimpse of her—a strand of gold, a sleeping, sad eye—and the pressing of bodies upon him exploded outward as he rampaged.

---

No. They were mine. How is this happening-

My head reforms, but the creature now runs down my body, its footsteps leaving similar echoes of emerald ruin as my body rapidly breaks. It plants its foot upon my right breast; my flesh grabs and reaches for it but bursts upon touching its ephemeral form. The other attacks from mages the world over continue; I continue to disregard them. They are reality, my plaything... but this Champion's energy was not of the Dream, was not from Gaia… was not of reality, and yet not of the Truth! Then where is this Champion getting this power-?!

I calm myself. I have truly gone too far into the Dream to be beholden to something so alien, so wrong as emotion. Whatever this trickery, it ends.

My body leaps back as my flesh explodes, releasing yet more of my prisoners to rise from my bloody remains... but now my new body, smaller than before, opens to greet the beast with a sea of my Eyes of Hate. I need no emotion to wield them; I am the Truth, and my eyes see what must be.

They light the shadow beast with destructive waves. Gaia gave it the power to leap through space, and so I expect it to try and evade me. I know John Newman's thoughts; I blast where he will be... and yet, when the Champion vanishes as predicted... it appears in entirely erratic positions. It vanishes to appear by my neck, yet it is there by my ankle; it touches my left nipple, and fifty Eyes appear to greet it only to find, instead, it is at my lower back. How? How can this Champion betray the reality that birthed- fury takes me as my thoughts explode. What difference is it to be a King?! I was a King! A King is nothing but a holder of a title, a beast of reality like any other!

It does not answer... it only stares back with its single green-glowing eye as reality sucks and heaves and warps about us.

The "King" touches the ground... and an illusion barrier-

An illusion barrier?! To capture ME?!

What is reality to a King? I demand: what is a mere King to reality?!

But my anger does not bear fruit. I will away the lie of his illusion. But the illusion remains. More bodies fly from me, and my form continues to shrivel and shrink as the creature pokes and prods my form, touching it with ruinous ****. My blood splatters the barrier’s invisible walls and floors; the same oozes downward and solidifies as I lose more of my fresh victims. The other mages have ceased their barrage, or else cannot reach this place, this prison the Champion has made; the bodies that rise from my blood vanish out of the barrier.

My arms explode as one as he taps them through portals; I continued to annihilate hundreds of cubic feet of land or air wherever he once stood, tracking him with destructive power as he leaps about. I employ other Eyes, every other Eye; I attempt to warp his soul, to draw it back into me, to kill him, to change him, to morph him into so much clay, to drink up the breathable air so that he may struggle with vacuum as he struggles with me... but nothing holds, nothing catches, and nothing kills save his touches upon my borrowed flesh. My spine unravels and breaks apart into links, and the next one forms only to be touched again. Even in my attrition, this Champion does not relent.

Tricia managed to change him the Champion lust; Vincent, with some borrowed, infantile use of my power, blew the Champion’s brains out. So how can I not do the same or greater-?!

---

The bodies continued to press as if to devour Tricia and John independently before they could ever be joined. Crushing **** crunched the ethereal body of John, now barely a glowing sliver of blue, but he pushed against them once more. The Game did not speak to him here: his spells did not work. Only his will could save him... and only the silence of the crushing mob allowed him to hear it, barely a whisper...

“John...?”

Tricia’s voice sounded meek... and was then muffled as bodies pressed upon her.

“AaaaaaAaaaaaAAAAAAAH-!”

---

I am the First Truth... and because all truths are known to me, I do not need to contemplate them. The Truth is the Truth... but here, where something exists that betrays that basic nature, such that it is neither predictable lies nor inevitable veracity, I must engage in blasphemous reasoning... and there is the first and only theory I have as Kim Moon, the Slayer, is torn from my body along with another Knight:

This is not John Newman. This is not the Champion of Gaia.

I am man-sized... and now the illusion barrier shrinks to seem truly inescapable. The Champion's- no, the beast's darkened fingers, like black fire given shape, grip my throat. I am but a pale facsimile of Tricia Gorbachev, now: naked, with a wound of an Eye upon my forehead and green traces appearing around his grip. My vessel cries, an echo of the vessel's original soul. The beast will kill her. The beast will kill me.

“John,” my mouth whispers... but not with my voice.

The shade of power trembles... and threatens to come undone. It is weakening...

... it is running out of time or will, and now, I realize, is when I must strike.

---

The bodies fell away, shoved through the walls of translucent white in droves, until only a dozen or so remained… and none in his way. John nearly cried with joy as he had finally neared a stirring Tricia, still as upside-down as he was, still plummeting infinitely. The rest remained asleep, but John was awake... and, with his glowing hands upon her soft shoulders, he shook Tricia, trying to wake her up as well. Her sleepy muttering turned to a groan of waking. She turned to him, with her eyes still closed...

... and slapped him.

It was... soft, or perhaps she just didn’t have the strength to truly mean it in this bizarre world. John stared, dumbfounded, as he tried to discern her meaning, to figure out if this was all a trap or ruse despite feeling, knowing that he held Tricia in his hands-

“I instructed you to stop,” she whispered, “but you kept going.”

John stared at her as they both descended in infinite white, falling forever, in the bowels of an Outsider horror twisted by the Dream and at the precipice of the world’s end. “Wha... what?”

“When you proceeded with our sexual intercourse during our first interview. You kept going... and you never apologized for ignoring me when I withdrew my consent.”

A beat.

Another beat.

Another.

“Is... IS NOW REALLY THE TIME?!”

---

I clench his hand of shadows... because it is all I can do, withered and beaten as I am. But I see the dark retreating; I see ****, pathetic flesh quivering beneath the indomitable dark. Whatever this beast is... it was losing cohesion. I cannot see where this goes... and a disgusting feeling, a thing from Gaia, fills me: excitement. This unknown future... is exciting. I reach up... and its arms… his arms bend just enough. I grip his throat in turn.

---

Save those who were still falling nearby, the married lovers were alone now, falling eternally into the infinite white of whatever weird Hell they were in... and now, with their souls laid bare and seemingly infinite time, Tricia mustered words she had mulled over for months.

“You... you kept going,” Tricia continued, “and at first I took it as some kind of acceptable deviance; statistically-speaking, your behavior was not exceptionally odd.”

Without flesh, without any barrier between them... her neutral voice had no effect on her meaning. She was disappointed, angry... and yet, after three months without him… in love. John’s heart filled with remorse... and bitter, petty resentment. “Well you tried to mind-control me into loving you.”

Tricia cried. John near-instantly cried with her as he felt her guilt; he muttered his apologies as he regretted his words, "I... it's hard to justify it now that I look back, but... but it made sense at the time."

“Those two events are not equivalent."

"I know that," the Gamer muttered as his ethereal body neared hers.

"But marrying you... it felt right, but John, we have known each other for less than-”

“I know,” he responded in kind. “I just... don’t have any excuse for how I act! I mean, it also doesn’t change how I feel about you, about Moira, about so many people, I... I think this is love, but maybe I’m..." John struggled to consider it. Here, now faced with his lover, his victim in at least some ways, John found himself in a familiar, ugly place, self-made and revolting. "Fuck, I... I can't really fix any of it. Maybe I'm... just fucking broken."

"I don't think so." Tricia's hand touched John's cheek... and the two fluttered their eyes as her fingers sunk slightly into him. She stared, marveling, at the odd connection. "You really love me..."

"I do." There were no Eyes to blame this time; they were raw and uncensored, uncaring for their states... or their shames. "I think I love them all, somehow.”

“That’s... not something I would take as particularly likely, if I didn't know it, now."

"I'm basically a super lover."

"You're a pervert, mostly,” Tricia muttered as she buried her face in the small of his neck, “but I..."

"I know."

She rose from his neck, her face twisted in anger. "But how? I believe I love you in turn, despite barely knowing you, despite you forcing yourself on me and other women, your polygamy, your selfish habits, your... your everything. There was no algorithm I could find, no formula to equate how I felt with what I knew of what you've done... and... and yet I couldn't bring myself to say it, not while we were so compromised, when it might have hurt you, but even if we had gotten away… even if I had a lifetime to mull it over, perhaps I never could tell you-!”

"I'm hardly better... and I don't think I'm even going to change after all this..." John and Tricia shared their moment of tearful, emotional outpouring. Only Tricia was surprised when John’s grip on her lower back drifted down to reach between her legs.

---

He understands my nature.

It is a worrying thing... to be interpreted, understood by one’s enemy. This is part of Gaia’s world: the great unknown in a mortal life and the danger knowing brings. But the creatures of Gaia can never know me… they are lies. Lies cannot know the Truth.

Yet this beast knows me.

His grip does not tighten. The ruinous energy I can feel weeping into my fragile neck does not expand. My grip on his throat is one of flesh; his grasp of mine is of an end... and my hope to counter him by the rules of Gaia’s world are dashed as I realize how powerless I am here. I see the path before me, where I am destroyed... and another hundred years pass before a suitable Vessel is born. I can wait. I do not fear. My destruction will sink me into these known depths of Gaia’s madness; I will survive there as I have before… and wait.

The truth is timeless. Only lies may expire.

But the beast doesn’t send me on my way. He finds a human voice... or something like it.

“YOU,” he crackles like bones stomped under hooves, “WILL RETURN TRICIA.”

---

“J-John,” Tricia stammered as her hair continued to whip from their rapid descent, “here?! Now?!”

“You’re... right about me.” Tricia, with narrowing eyes, met John’s as he continued, “I’m... I’m a perverted mess. I get caught up in the moment, and this Wisdom stat doesn’t seem to help much, and it’s all I can do to keep my libido down virtually all the time to not just... give in to taking what I can... to take everyone for mine. I’m trying to be decent... but maybe...”

John’s fingers sunk into her cleft; her spiritual back arched no different from hers of flesh and bone.

“... maybe I just need to be honest with you... and honest about myself.”

“You’re… insatiable.”

“I love you.”

“I can’t change this about you.” It was almost a question, but Tricia couldn’t fool herself on that, not here.

“You’ve changed plenty about me.” John’s body crossed into hers... and he sunk his glowing meat into her lower stomach, shocking them both as they mixed and melded… and only now did she notice it.

"You're... missing something," Tricia moaned as she felt him move inside her, merge inside her, and yet not quite as himself. John was... pure, here, if perverse, and she couldn't be sure if he was now more or less than the John she loved. "You're here, yet some part of you is miss- ah!"

"Yeah," John agreed as he thrust himself deeper, "... I've been missing you."

---

The creature knows my plan... just as it knows its illusory sun shall rise upon its illusory world unless I intervene. It knows I am immortal; it knows what I am-

Its eye flashes... and my internal organs sink in a human response of abject terror. Even as my form threatens to fall into it, even as I am prepared to return to that horrifying prison... ugly dread fills me.

I look up from where I am pinned to the ground... and I see it, like a crying wound, at the edge of this loathsome barrier:

The Dream.

"GIVE HER BACK."

In the middle of this inescapable illusion… the beast ripped a hole into the Dream... and the hole, somehow, remained static. A trick of his inexplicable powers? I can barely contemplate it as my body locks in fear... and, in some unfamiliar, animal panic, I realize that the Beast is between my legs. He rubs my borrowed labia with an impatient rod. I can scarcely believe-

He enters me... with an inhuman tool, a blade of nether-meat that tears and consumes every hymen I grow in its path. Barrier after barrier my defenses fall... and my whole, whore vessel, my fleshy cage, wails in pleasure. Gaia was never closer a moment ago. Gaia is now farther than ever... but it is hopeless for Gaia still. The beast can drive me into the Dream as it wants... I know its twisting fields and destinies, I will adapt, I will reform.

"YOU MEMORIZED THE DREAM AS FAR AS YOU COULD SEE," the beast whispers as he hoists my limp body up, bouncing my twisted body on its weapon.

That's correct. Upon my fall I had looked upon all the Dream that had been; I learned its winding paths at its outermost edges as they formed, and I kept them, memorized them all, until my final, sunken moments. Only the newest reaches of the Dream are now beyond my knowing; even now, the Dream I see, the crack that fast-approaches as the beast moves beyond my vision, is known to me. It matters not how I am thrown back into that filth; I shall survive contact. I will merge with the Dream… become an undenied part of it… and rise from it again.

He grabs my hips... and pulls me fully on his monstrous length, securely pinning me to him as I sit up and try to strangle it anew. Do not toy with me, you pitiful lie: you may be apart from the Dream, apart from my sight, some horror from beyond my knowledge, from the depths of the Dream that could never reach the foot of Gaia's throne, this horrific plagiarism called Earth... but you are in my domain, now. I will return, no matter-

He marches forward towards the Dream. I look to his baleful green eye; does he intend to launch me safely through the film of reality keeping the Dream at bay? Does he think I will so release him? As long as he remains inside of me, he too will be dragged into the Dream… and I will make sure of it.

My body explodes into thousands of tentacles, a sticky web of flesh that grips and wraps about his every angle. I find orifices unseen on his silhouette; I invade them in an effort to hurt him, but without luck. All the same, I am anchored to him; he will not discard me now... not without destroying himself. I have mastered the Dream; what has he mastered?

"RELEASE TRICIA."

She is my final vessel, and a potent one. Without her, I will be exposed fully to Gaia's wrath, here on Earth, here on the most unhallowed ground she can muster. No, I will not release Tricia, and I certainly will not in this circumstance.

"THEN I WILL DO IT FOR YOU."

The beast's march does not stop. We are nearly there... does he not care-?

"YOU ARE SAFE IN THE DREAM YOU KNOW...”

Yes, you understand now-

“SO I WILL TAKE YOU BEYOND."

I stare at his sickly glowing eye. He… smiles. He can't possibly mean-

"I WILL DRAG YOU ACROSS THE DREAM... UNTIL YOU ARE RIPPED APART."

The creature braces... as if ready to sprint. His grip continues to be unyielding. My tentacles, wrapped so tightly and thoroughly as to nearly drown out his body, still cannot hold his limbs still. This mad beast is going to do it! He is suicidal! More human panic, more human thoughts, poison me, but even still I recognize the range of the Dream... and see, beyond those known shores, the chaos of the unknown, infinite dynamism of the Abyss. Impossible. He couldn't survive such a journey! The distance alone, as immeasurable as “distance” is in pure dynamic energy, would consume him! The Dream would kill us both! THE DREAM IS WRETCHED, INESCAPABLE REALITY ITSELF, INFINITE, HUNGRY REALITY, SO WHY ARE YOU RUSHING INTO IT, WHY ARE YOU RUNNING STRAIGHT INTO THE BREACH, WHY ARE YOU NOT STOPPING-?!

---

John and Tricia continued to spin in half-merging coitus; he fucked her womb, she sucked on his heart, he masturbated her spine, and when the two dared to dream of their nightmarish heights, their brains could be touched to one another and exchange, to either's disbelief, the insane fantasies they harbored. Their bodies spun in that infinite fall between oblivion and absorption...

... just as the Beast and the Truth wrestled, inseparably, as the former continued to **** the latter through the tumultuous forces of the Abyss, the Dream, and all its mesh of Kingdoms near the Earth. The Truth struggled and cried as it tried to fend off its attacker while flying through the dangerous valley of Creation itself; with every twist of its body, every duck and juke as it remained pinned to this uncaring pillar of negative space, the Truth narrowly avoided some tendril of the Dream, some nebulous air that would suffocate, some sensation or odor or thought that would chew a piece off its last vestiges of Truth. The Dream sped by, as much as non-spatial creative **** could...

... and John and Tricia cried out as their minds finally disconnected, and their bodies pulsed and grew together, merging until, with a pleasurable "pop," the two were apart by inches... and then, desperately, miserably, clutched one another as their world began to shrink. The other bodies, still asleep, still falling, began to be pushed inward as the long pipe of their plunge narrowed. The darkness below was closing in...

... and the First Truth mewled and cried as it failed to understand whatever was becoming of it. John Newman, the Champion, the Beast, or whatever it truly was, continued unabated, unphased as it fucked the First Truth through the Dream, holding the First Truth’s ragged form in their mockery of lovemaking.

The First Truth was nipped and hurt by the speed with which this monstrosity ravaged it while flying, floating, fucking through the Dream. How long had they gone? Time came from the Dream, but here it had virtually no meaning within it; years or seconds, it bit away the First Truth's weakest bits of flesh when it allowed the contact, by weakness or madness, and yet the true demise, the awful **** forthcoming, had not quite yet arrived. The First Truth wanted to dissipate, to sink into these local regions of Dream, to hide from this horrific Champion, this unknown creature; it would happily spend the century waiting. It could wait millenia, if only to avoid the doom of unfamiliar Creation.

But the Beast did not let go; his hands kept the First Truth impaled as he continued to buck his hips, as he groaned like a dog chewing rocks, and **** a scream from the borrowed lungs of the Outsider who dared to nearly take the throne of Gaia. Pleasurable waves mixed with existential terror as The First Truth struggled to interpret the forthcoming stretches of the Dream, the alien concepts and outermost madnesses that few men of Earth fathomed... but it rushed by all too fast.

Their journey had come into the unknown. The First Truth howled... and its howl became a butterfly, then a tendril of stars, then a dripping well-wishing for Christmas, and then the honor of a goblin queen. All that was and could ever be began to take from the raw material the Champion had delivered so generously. Every shred of the First Truth melted into the ever-shifting mass of the Dream.

A drop of an enemy’s blood fell into the Abyss... and like the uncaring ocean, nothing took note save that which bled.

The First Truth crumbled, disintegrating in scraps, and those scraps were turned to all manner of reality, obliterated by the advent of infinite possibilities... until only a small spark remained. A central prison… a clutch of souls barely able to survive much longer. The Nothing, the King That Killed the Truth, was nearly done. His green Eye looked upon these faraway stretches of the Abyss... and found the single, dim dot in that ocean of hyperbole. He was running out of time... out of power. He would soon lose his clutch on himself and the precious cargo held to his breast.

As he readied to vanish again behind those slumbering doors, the Nothing King dove into the unknown Kingdom...

... and, with an iridescent smile, a sliver of colors in the black upon black, he had secured his future.

So finished the latest threat to Gaia’s slumber.

So began John Newman’s conquest of the Abyss.