The trees were rocking, or maybe that was just them. Lincoln stumbled over a root, laughing so hard he came close to dropping the bottle. Gasgorin grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back upright, spilling wine down his own tunic.
"Oi—watch it, elf," Gasgorin smiled, teeth flashing in moonlight. "That's good stuff. Cost me two goats and a lie about my mother's honor."
Lincoln wheezed with laughter, resting against him. "You don't have a mother."
"Right," said Gasgorin, and gulped down a mouthful large enough to choke on.
They walked further, yelling at owls, challenging the trees to reply. Lincoln attempted to walk along a downed log, lost his balance, and landed flat on his back, looking up through the trees.
"That's the best that I've felt in years," he exclaimed to the sky.
Gasgorin fell beside him with a deafening thud, releasing steam into the cold air. "That's because we're too drunk to recall we're worse-off scum."
Speak for yourself." Lincoln snarled, but the crooked smile on his face spoiled any pretense of seriousness.
The woods were sharp with pine and damp earth. Their bottle was running dry, and the night sprawled out before them, heavy and endless.
Gasgorin hiccuped, massaging his jaw. "You know… we've had entire crowds of Gaia's children visiting our world lately."
Lincoln leaned forward, his eyes narrowing at him. "And?
"On my travels in the Zero Lands," Gasgorin went on, his words tumbling over the hiccups, "I encountered one. Discussed some… man-woman? What was she called? Sydwey… Wydney… uh—" He pounded a fist into his palm as if the motion might shake the name out. "Sydney Sweeney!" Lincoln arched an eyebrow. "Well, well. Sounds interesting. Who is she? Some men's goddess?"
Gasgorin sat back against the tree, squinting as if he was looking through time.
"He wouldn't quit talking about her," he began, voice heavy with booze. "Told her she was this… vision. Hair spun gold, eyes so bright they envied the sun. The way he described it, she didn't stroll—she glided, as if every step was danced so you'd forget your own name." He waved the bottle loosely, almost spilling.
Lincoln snorted. "Sounds like a barroom story."
"Perhaps," Gasgorin replied, "but he told her she was more than beautiful. Told her that she could quiet a room with nothing more than presence. Not charm, not magic—her. People wanted to be with her the way a moth craves fire, even though it would kill them."
He grinned to himself and then frowned. "But he warned me she was dangerous, too. Not with a knife—worse. With knowing the precise thing you needed to hear. She could give it to you then. withdraw it, so you'd spend the rest of your life searching for that feeling again."
Lincoln took the bottle from Gasgorin, shaking his head with a crooked smile. "So? What is your poet friend doing in the Zero Lands?
Gasgorin shrugged lazily. "Could've gone after her. Could still be going after. Or maybe he's lying in a ditch somewhere." He grinned, the sort that resulted from too much drinking. "Hard to tell."
Lincoln pushed forward, eyes glinting. "What else did he say?"
Silence.
"Gas?"
Nothing.
"Gas!"
Gasgorin's eyes blinked as if he had just been pulled from another universe. "Nothing significant," he snarled. Then his eyes snapped back, now keen. "Although…
He felt in his coat, fingers wrapping around something small. When he drew it out, the fire flared on a ring—shining metal, a crystal at its center pulsing with a faint light. Without a word, he turned it open.
The crystal cleft apart, pouring light in thin, quivering filaments that enveloped them like silk in a tempest. The forest dissolved out of existence, branches and darkness merging into a formless sea. Frosty air yielded to nothing—no wind, no earth—only an empty bubble of light, its surface etched with stars that curved on and on, close enough to brush against yet somehow unattainable.
Lincoln rocked forward and backward on his heels, torn between the vista and the wine. "Gas… why in the world did you open a manifold?
Gasgorin's grin was wiped away. "Memory manifold," he growled. "Not mine—his."
His?
"That adventurer. Called himself… Bijob. He said he came from a place called… Türkiye. Before he crossed over." Gasgorin's voice slowed, as if tugging the words out of somewhere buried deep.
"Told me that a wise man said to him… Not really a tale, just. More of—" Gasgorin's eyes drifted away, unseeing, his voice adopting that half-singing, half-taunting rhythm he fell into when using his bardic voice. "—a beautiful poem on an ugly event."
A ripple tore across the light around them, and something immense rolled into view—hanging in mid-air, its body engulfed in blackness. Billions of red eyes blazed wildly out of time, but no eyelids were there—only ragged, curled horns that scraped along the edge of the sphere.
Lincoln's breath was caught.
Gasgorin did not flinch. "There was a writer," he told me, as if reading me a bedtime tale. "Zhìzūn Xiūzhēn Dàshī. All-powerful. All-knowing. Everywhere present. He dangled in the world of Dao like a star-shaped deity—one of a billion visages of the Dao itself. One among an endless many who wrote."
The beast above them trembled. Its eyes rotated like restless planets.
"Then," declared Gasgorin, "someone arrived. Killed them all. Not dead—worse. Damned." His voice turned sour. "Especially after something Bijob referred to as 'The Battle of Guts & Sorrow.'"
The manifold changed, and a shape took its place: a tall, wide figure, a solid black with only the red blazing in its eyes. Zhìzūn Xiūzhēn Dàshī fled," Gasgorin spoke softly, "in order to preserve his eternal flesh. Because of that thing. When I said infinity can die, what I meant was true. And it did—again and again. Every writer who stood against him was slain, taking their armies into hell with them. Soldiers, artists… all devoured."
"Raktanetrah," spat Gasgorin, as though spitting ash from her mouth.
Lincoln gazed, his inebriated daze disappearing as the figure in the manifold shifted.
The man marched over a battlefield that wasn't land so much as a lurching sea of corpses—armies of every size and form, from silver-clad giants to insectoid hordes, all twitching in silent torment. The shadow didn't wield a sword or fling magic; it merely existed, and where it walked, men fell into nothing—armor collapsing inward, flesh unspooling like yarn, and screams being consumed by nothing.
Gasgorin's voice was low and steady. "Bijob said that name meant 'the blood-eyed one.' He didn't fight. He judged. Every blow against him was swallowed before it landed. Every soul he touched was pulled past the edge of the world, and not even the Dao could call them back."
Lincoln swallowed hard, eyes fixed on the silhouette. "And you've… seen him?"
Gasgorin did not respond. The scarlet eyes in the vision moved—just so, in their direction.
"The Battle of Guts & Sorrow was only the beginning," Gasgorin drawled, in a flat tone, eyes set on the manifold. "Raktanetrah did not rest after that. He pursued every cultivator in the world. Mortals do not know—the church does not speak of it, keeping the faith pure—but Bijob, he knew.
The vision changed: cities veiled in smoke, temples atop mountains blazing, and disciples dispersing like insects as the red-eyed shadow hunted them.
Gasgorin continued. "The road didn't kill them—it damned them. Eternal suffering, so exact you'd think he was born solely to master cruelty. And he was more skilled at it than any other cultivator alive." He looked at Lincoln, lips curling into something between a scowl and a sneer. "Makes you ask yourself who the actual good guy was.
In the manifold, Raktanetrah grasped for a kneeling farmer. The instant his hand touched the man's shoulder, the body jerked—light ripped from his eyes, his soul torn asunder and yanked shrieking into some hidden hell.