When light dies, it doesn't fade. It convulses.
That's the first thing I learn as the Time Button releases me.
One second I was inside damp stone, the next, plunged into an infinity that doesn't recognize sound, weight, or direction. The act of being here feels wrong—like breathing through the pores of a dream that refuses lungs. There is no air, yet my chest rises. No gravity, yet my body drifts. My senses, built for living worlds, shatter trying to interpret it.
The void dimension isn't darkness. Darkness belongs to light's absence. This place lacks even that definition. It's nothing sculpted into something that pretends to exist.
The color here is not black but uncolored—a shifting silvery tone that bends around itself like liquid glass. Each flicker births horizon lines and then devours them before thought can finish. Even closing my eyes doesn't help. The void sits behind the lids, painted across the inside of my mind.
Occasionally, fragments of existence float by—remnants of forgotten worlds: a staircase spiraling into nowhere, a broken sword turning endlessly, a single raindrop suspended mid‑fall for eternity. I think these are corpses of realities, remnants expelled into this in‑between when creation edits itself.
They drift close, then peel away when I reach for them. The void has rules I don't yet understand. It isn't chaos; it's precision without morality.
Somewhere far—or near, distance is meaningless—a low pulse vibrates through the medium. A heartbeat without heart. It quakes through me, rattling marrow, dragging echoes of memory. My body responds like prey before a predator's gaze.
That's when I sense it.
The Awakening of the Void
Before form, before noise, a pressure gathers. The space ahead condenses, collapsing inward, not as if something appears—but as if nothing becomes aware of being nothing. Every direction warps around that awareness.
When the Demonic Monkey arrives, the void seems to breathe for the first time.
It does not burst into existence; it congeals—mass dripping out of absence in jerky spasms, like reality trying to remember shape. Limbs ossify from fog. Bones sprout before flesh, veins threading themselves with molten crimson where blood should be. The result is grotesquely majestic: a creature tall as a fortress, lean like famine, cords of sinew pulsating with black light.
Its fur—if it can be called that—is more like woven shadows dipped in mercury. Each strand reflects constellations that don't exist anymore. Eyes—three of them—open vertically across its skull. The top one doesn't blink; it only dilates and contracts with the rhythm of my pulse.
When it exhales, the air doesn't move. Instead, the space warps, bowing outward, whistling silently as though the idea of sound itself tries to flee.
I cannot tell if it's alive in the way mortals define life. There's no heat, no smell of fur or blood. Yet every fiber of instinct screams that this being is ancient beyond gods.
Its presence crushes perspective. Staring too long feels like looking at an equation that proves I shouldn't exist.
The Monkey crouches slowly, claws scraping nothing yet producing sparks of negative light—tiny inversions that eat the glow of every drifting fragment nearby. Somewhere within those flickers, faces appear—souls maybe—momentary mosaics of agony dissolving back into air.
The creature studies me. Or rather, it dissects the concept of me. I feel its perception hollow me out, layer by layer—memories peeling backward: the dungeon, Seraphine's eyes, Earth's monsoon rain. Each image splits apart and vanishes into the Monkey's gaze.
It's feeding—not on flesh, but on identity.
Anatomy of a Nightmare
Its musculature moves like thickened smoke; limbs bend at angles deliberately wrong. Chains of bone hang around its neck, each vertebra humming faintly, each perhaps once belonging to those who entered this realm before me. Its mouth remains closed—but every few seconds, the seams between its jaws vibrate and leak whispers in hundreds of voices overlapping: the language of those consumed, replayed imperfectly.
When it finally opens its mouth, there is no tongue, no throat—only a spiral of mirrored teeth revolving endlessly inward. Inside that spiral burns a core of pale fire—the only real light here. The fire hums like a chorus trapped in prayer, extinguished mid‑song.
I thought demons roared. This one doesn't have to. Silence is its roar.
Even standing still, it exerts weight upon meaning. Words tremble before describing it.
I name it silently: Demon of the Void. But meaning slides off it like water over oil; it remains nameless, older than the definitions I cling to.
The Realm It Rules
Around the Monkey, the void organizes. The motionless expanse forms concentric ripples—rings of liquefied night, each orbiting faster toward the center. Fragments of ruined worlds caught within those currents grind together like slow planet gears. Sparks of lost suns ignite and die again. The void remembers everything only to unmake it anew.
Time functions differently here. Each breath drags minutes behind it. My heartbeat slows, then races, uncertain whether to keep rhythm with my body or with the environment's pulse.
Gravity fluctuates gently as if the realm is testing how much I can endure before balance becomes meaningless. I step forward; the surface beneath me behaves like memory—solid when I believe in it, collapsing when doubt leaks in.
Colors fail. Smells evaporate. Even emotion slips sideways. Fear feels delayed, awe dulled into a metallic taste at the back of my tongue.
There is sound, faint and rhythmic—the cadence of dripping thought rather than liquid. Sometimes it mimics whispers; sometimes laughter; sometimes an echo of my own voice calling from behind walls that don't exist.
I realize the void isn't empty at all. It's full of echoes, and each echo desires substance. The Monkey is the governor of those desires—keeper of eternal hunger. Where its shadow falls, faint imprints of other shapes twitch, half‑formed beings crushed between dimensions, souls that almost reconstituted but failed.
They crawl toward it like moths to flame, dissolve against its limbs, and are absorbed soundlessly. It doesn't hunt; existence offers itself.
Contact
Something brushes my ankle—not touch exactly, but a suggestion of texture. A ripple in unreality. The ground beneath me coalesces temporarily into ash‑gray mist, thick enough to give illusion of footing. Every step leaves ripples of blue‑white energy that shoot outward, fracturing the fog like glass before it resets.
The Monkey raises one claw—the claw alone large enough to eclipse me entirely. Lines of void‑light run along its forearm like constellations being rewritten. Then, instead of striking, it taps the air—as if knocking on reality's door.
The realm answers.
The floor drops away. My sense of position burns out. The Monkey's third eye flares, and the colorless world tilts inside that gaze. For a moment, I see hundreds of Monkeys overlapping—the same creature existing across infinite probabilities, each tearing its mirror apart to remain the last.
That is how it survives: by killing its possibilities, devouring versions of itself from other timelines. A god sustained by self‑cannibalism.
And I appear inside its gaze—an anomaly it hasn't yet defined. Hunger translates into interest.
The eye focuses. My veins crystallize. The Button within my hand vibrates so fiercely I fear it might detonate. Lines of light trace out from it, forming symbols that claw across my skin, burning pathways of resistance.
For the first time, the Monkey speaks.
It's not voice. It's pressure shaped into comprehension. The words assemble directly in thought:
"You bring noise into stillness."
Each syllable crushes parts of my identity, scattering them like loose dust. The Button screams—a frequency too high to hear yet sharp enough to bleed thought.
The Monkey leans closer, its breath rewriting air: "Stay… long enough, and you too will forget being."
The eye closes. The whole void exhales. The dimension ripples outward. And I realize—this entire realm is the inside of its body, a pocket stretched by its own existence. The "void" isn't where the Monkey lives; the Monkey is the void.
Perception Fracture
Time dissolves. I don't know whether minutes or millennia pass. My consciousness wavers between waking trance and collapsing dream. Sometimes the Monkey is distant as a mountain. Sometimes its eye sits centimeters from mine, reflecting my face twisting into dozens of unknown versions.
I see myself older, younger, monstrous, divine—all possible futures compressed into flashes. Each one dies when I blink, eaten by the void's static hunger.
Somewhere within the nothing, faint motes flicker—souls maybe, or remnants of emotions left behind by travelers. They orbit the Monkey's aura like drifting stars, patterns forming briefly—a wing here, a human silhouette there—before being swallowed again.
A thought surfaces, thin as silk: Every star ever dead ends here.
The realization fits too perfectly. This realm devours not just worlds, but the idea of persistence. Even gods would drown here, stripped to silence.
My body trembles under sensory overload. Pain arrives late, abstract—as though my nerves must negotiate permission from unreality before delivering the message.
The Stillness Before Catastrophe
Then, nothing moves. The Monkey freezes, mid‑motion, as though time itself hesitates. The void holds its breath.
At the core of my palm, the Button flickers again. Its light feels defiant against this endless entropy. The Monkey notices. The air rings, distance collapsing between thought and action. It opens its mouth wider than geometry allows, a spiral of mirrored fangs revolving faster until the fire inside burns white.
Every part of me screams warning, though no sound escapes. The void hungers to reclaim me—to make noise disappear again.
I don't know what instinct drives me—fear, defiance, or that whisper from the entity. My fingers clutch the Button tighter. The Monkey extends its claw, touching the glow. The instant contact forms, existence splinters—a thousand shards of perception scattering outward.
Light. Silence. Collapse.
And from those collapsing fragments, I hear one sound amid the ruin: the Monkey's whisper, not hateful but almost reverent:
"Little echo... you carry time."
Then reality folds inside out.