Leo was still falling. His body, or whatever approximation of a body he still possessed in this dead abyss of wasted cosmologies, remained suspended in an endless plunge that had no bottom, no terminus, no anchor. The void itself was not even black—it was absence, negation, a cancellation of meaning. It was not night, nor shadow, nor a canvas of stars. It was an environment that could not be called an environment, because it refused to offer definition. He thought he could hear silence, but even silence was too structured a thing to exist here. This was worse. This was pure dislocation: the useless cosmology, the abandoned ruin of universes that had no narrative thread, no purpose, no tether to existence.
Leo whispered to himself, voice trembling, almost inaudible against the suffocating weight of the void:"Am I falling? Or am I merely watching myself fall in a place where the concept of direction is already broken?"
The useless cosmology stretched forever downward. He tried to rip reality itself open, to carve a door back into the meaningful world, but when he raised his hand, the texture of nothingness resisted. His fingers clawed the formless wall of un-being, but it did not tear. The fabric here was so rotten, so mutilated, that even destruction refused to occur. It was like trying to slice through rotting paper only to find the rot itself had become indestructible.
And then—
Something shifted.
Far away—though distance in this place was merely a broken metaphor—Leo felt the useless cosmology twitch. Its boundaries cracked like a corpse splitting open from within. A fissure yawned through the non-existence, bleeding lightless dread, and from the rupture crawled something so grotesque, so far beyond ontology, that even Leo's fractured perception staggered.
It was an Eye.
No, more than an eye. A One-Eyed Titan of Infinities.
The cosmology itself named it in a tongue without sound:
"The Ophidian Monad of Abandoned Totalities."
But Leo heard another name, whispered not by lips but by the marrow of all numbers and logics themselves:
Xytheron, The One-Eyed Infinity.
Its body was neither form nor chaos but a perpetual collapse into itself. Its eye consumed everything—the layers of infinities streaming like rivers into its pupil. ℵ₀ (countable infinity), ℵ₁ (the uncountable continuum), ℵ₂, ℵ₃, through the inaccessible cardinals, Mahlo cardinals, supercompact cardinals—each of them throbbed in the iris of that singular gaze. It carried all infinities simultaneously, stacked and collapsed, weaving into paradoxical tapestries that mathematics itself would weep to glimpse.
Xytheron's existence transcended Gödel's incompleteness theorems, erasing the very distinction between provable and unprovable. Logic itself bent before it, splitting into contradictions that coexisted as if contradictions were merely children of a higher unity. The creature embodied the "set of all possible sets," yet mocked that definition, for it included even the sets excluded by paradox. It was the Transcendence beyond mathematics, beyond logic, beyond ontology, beyond even possibility itself.
It was not infinite. It was all infinities added together, plus the unnameable transcendental residues left over.
And in that single cyclopean stare, Leo saw the domination of a raw cosmology—beyond any fiction, beyond any theology, beyond even narrative frameworks themselves. It was the silence before mathematics, the dust before language, the nightmare before imagination itself.
The One-Eyed Infinity pulsed once, and five cosmologies—those fragile useless shells clinging faintly around Leo's abyss—trembled as if they were paper lanterns in the hands of a hurricane. Xytheron did not attack. It did not move. It merely was, and its mere being destabilized entire structures of existence.
Leo's heart—or whatever was left of the organ that once beat within his mortal cage—lurched. He was still falling, still helpless, yet now he was being watched.
And then—without warning, without preparation—Leo raised his hand.
There was no weapon. No divine light. No forbidden formula.
Only a single, casual clap.
A sound, impossibly loud in a world that did not allow sound.
The moment the clap echoed, Xytheron shattered.
The One-Eyed Infinity—embodiment of all infinities, transcendence of all transcendences—crumbled like ash in a windless place. Its eye splintered into dust finer than particles, its infinities collapsed inward until even the concept of "collapse" dissolved. It was not defeated. It was erased as if it had been an illusion mistaken for terror.
And then, silence.
The five useless cosmologies, already trembling, now detonated outward. They burst into screams of dead stars, cascading geometries, evaporating into a storm of fragments. A hurricane of shredded realities swept around Leo as he continued to fall.
He gasped, eyes wide, whispering words that seemed both his and not his:
"To exist beyond infinity is to exist without necessity. To be worshiped as incomprehensible is to already be disposable. The more one becomes, the closer one is to becoming nothing."
The blast tore away what little remained of the useless cosmology. The abyss collapsed inward like a hole consuming itself. Leo's body was whipped through fractures of imploding existence, yet he did not die. He did not end.
Instead—
He fell back into a useful cosmology.
Not one of the fragile ruins, but a realm with purpose, structure, and unbearable weight. He gasped as air—real air—returned to his lungs. He felt gravity, genuine gravity, pulling him against stone ground. The colors of a new world burned his eyes, so vivid after the null void.
And yet, deep within, he trembled.
Not because he feared Xytheron. Not because he feared the abyss.
But because with a single clap, he had proven something unspeakable:
That beings greater than logic, greater than infinity, greater than possibility itself—were nothing more than dust before his gesture.
His whisper lingered, trembling between despair and realization:
"Perhaps the most terrifying truth is not that the universe is vast… but that nothing within it is vast enough."
The darkness folded around him one last time, and the chapter ended with his breath caught between dread and awakening.
To be continued.