For a long time there was only silence accompanied with the sound of blood trickling into the metalic floor.
Then the silence was broken by a soft, electronic hum. The massive screen on the wall glowed to life, revealing a woman with her white hair in a bun. and a high-collared uniform. Her expression was one of detached, clinical assessment.
"Subject RM-BV-001," she began, her voice flat. "I am Warden Valerius. You are contained. Do you understand this?"
Nulls hung in his chains, a ruined thing. A bubble of blood formed on his lips and popped. He managed a wet, gurgling sound that might have been a laugh. "Oh... I'm... I'm contained, alright." He coughed, a harsh, rattling noise that shook his broken frame. "The... interior decorating... is a bit... minimalist for my tastes."
Valerius's eyes remained impassive. "The text beside you. Its origin."
"Book... club," Nulls wheezed, his head lolling. "We're... reading about... gardening." A trickle of blood ran from his nose down to his chin.
"Who gave it to you?"
"A... friend." He coughed again, spattering the front of his straitjacket with crimson. "A bit... clingy. You know the type."
"The energy it emits. It is not Aetherion. What is it?"
Nulls let out a pained, shuddering sigh. "It's... a proprietary blend." He tried to shift his weight and gasped as the chains ground against bone. "Trade secret... I'm afraid."
"The creatures you manifested. Define them."
"Helpers," he slurred, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment before forcing them open. "For... heavy lifting." He gave a weak, trembling jerk of his chin towards the chains. "Could... use them now, honestly."
Warden Valerius watched him dispassionately. She made a small note on a datapad just out of view. "Your methodology violates established laws of reality."
"The... laws..." Nulls repeated, his voice fading to a whisper. He seemed to be struggling to focus. "Their... Sole purpose... is... to... be violated." His body went slack for a second, held upright only by the chains piercing his flesh, before he jolted back to a semblance of awareness with a pained groan.
Valerius placed her datapad down. The sound was final. "Your lack of substantive response is noted. This communication is terminated. You will remain here until your constituent atoms cease their vibration."
The screen went black. The only light was the single, naked bulb above him. The only sound was the ragged, bubbling struggle of his own breath and the steady drip-drip-drip of his life onto the cold, clean floor.
The screen hummed back to life. Warden Valerius's face was there, her composure slightly fractured, a faint line of tension around her mouth.
"Do you know why you are here?"
A wet, rattling sound came from Nulls. It took a moment to resolve into words. "I'm the reason... your Temporal Codex users... commit suicide. Isn't it?"
Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. "How did you even—"
"Simple," he gurgled, blood trickling from the corner of his smile. "Your men... don't seem to have the capability. Not on their own." He coughed, a jarring, full-body spasm. "In my experience... a being who can manipulate time... has seen every choice. Even this... I assume... is just one among many they experienced."
He took a ragged, shallow breath, the chains clinking softly.
"Additionally... such creatures... can't usually be killed by an external factor. So it would be logical... for them to do it themselves. Since. You know."
"Furthermore," he continued, his voice gaining a thread of grim amusement despite his state, "this place is too flawless... for me to be a first-timer. If I had to guess... this is the... gigasth iteration. If you—"
"I get it," she cut him off, her voice sharp. "All you need to know is that every Temporal Codex user found a way to permanently contain you."
Nulls's bloody smile vanished. His voice, though weak, lost all its feigned pleasantry and became a cold, sharp whisper, each word a shard of ice.
"It's... only a matter... of time... before I concocted a plan to... escape this prison... I have been contained.... in something... indescribably worse than this."
"It is not going to happen," she stated, her own voice flat and absolute. "The Temporal Codex users have traversed infinity to find this solution. They wrote down every single scenario. Even this one."
Nulls's eyes, gleaming with a dark light, locked onto the screen. "Is there a scenario... where this happens?" He convulsed, and a spray of dark blood left his lips, splattering across the pristine screen.
Valerius did not flinch. "As much as I hate to admit it, yes. There are. Right now we are on scenario Ω-Mortem/Gaia."
"Didn't you feel," he rasped, "they overthought this too much? I only wanted a library card."
"First, no. It was necessary to keep my species from extinction. Second," she said, reasserting control, "I am going to be the one who asks the questions."
She leaned forward, her image dominating his world. "While that is one reason, there are others. Can you guess what they are?"
"I suppose... not yet."
"The Codex. Its author. Give me her or his name."
"Out of print," Nulls wheezed, the cheerful, dying madman persona sliding back into place. "The publisher went bankrupt. Tragic." He let his head loll. "Is this... an interview... or a book club? I'm... a paying member... you know."
The screen went black.
For three days, by the slow drip of his blood, there was only silence and the oppressive hum of the machinery holding him. Then, the chime sounded again. Valerius looked tired.
"You killed seventeen of our best in the void. Their Codexes shattered. Unreadable. But one, a Spatial Echelon, had a dampener. We recovered a fragment of his final sensorium."
Nulls said nothing. He was conserving energy, his body a numb, distant agony.
"It showed you, at the end, looking at the Codex on a soldier's hip. You had an idea. What was it?"
Nulls remained silent for a full minute, the only sound his ragged breathing. Finally, he spoke, his voice a dry rustle. "I was admiring... the chain. Good craftsmanship."
"We know you are not of this reality. Your energy signature is alien. Your very biology defies classification. The horn is not a mutation. It is an... appendage. What are you?"
"A tourist," he whispered. "With... regrettable luggage."
"The beasts you summoned. They were not summoned. They were written. Their forms were equations. Who taught you to use mathematics as a weapon?"
"A little bird," he coughed. "Or was it... a tree? My memory... is a library after a fire."
The screen darkened.
Another span of silence. This time, when it lit, Valerius looked different. The professional mask was gone, replaced by a raw, haunted exhaustion.
"Scenario Ω-Vita/Gaia has a footnote," she said, her voice hollow. "It is the only one where I have this conversation. In all others, you are silent, or you lie, or you break within the first week. Here, you talk. The footnote says this is the most dangerous iteration. Why?"
Nulls slowly lifted his head, a gesture that cost him dearly. A fresh trickle of blood ran from his nose.
"Because in this one," he rasped, "I learn. I learn about the Temporal Codex users. Their sacrifice. Their... limitations. I learn about you. Your voice. Your tells. I learn that this perfect prison... has a warden. And a warden... is a variable."
He gave a final, bloody smile.
"And I am very, very good with variables."
The screen went black, and this time, he knew it would not light again. The interview was over. The real work had begun.
Six days later the screen hummed to life. Warden Valerius looked more severe than ever, her face etched with a cold, knowing superiority.
"You have no idea where you are right now, do you?"
Nulls, hanging limply in his chains, gave a weak, barely perceptible nod. The motion sent a fresh spike of pain through the chain piercing his cervical vertebrae.
"Let me educate you," she said, her voice a clinical instrument. "You are currently two hundred million kilometers deep. The pressure outside this cube is thirty-five million kilograms per cubic meter."
As she spoke, the cube emitted a low, constant groan, the sound of an entire ocean patiently waiting to crush them into a singularity. A fine mist of condensation, born of impossible pressure against perfect insulation, beaded on the cold metal walls.
Nulls let out a wet, gurgling sound. "Cozy."
"The entire trench gravity field is calibrated to one billion times than that of the sun," Valerius continued, as if discussing the weather. "It is the only reason your body hasn't already been smeared into a thin paste across the floor."
To emphasize her point, Nulls felt a sudden, violent lurch in his gut, as if an invisible giant had stepped on the prison. The chains holding him screamed in protest, and for a terrifying second, he felt his bones bow under the strain.
"And your neighbors," she said, a flicker of something dark in her eyes. "One thousand starved Calamity-Class Morbus patrol the water outside. They are the first line of defense."
A high-pitched, chittering screech, distant but piercing, filtered through the walls, the sound of a swarm so vast it could strip a planet to its core in hours.
"But they are merely the hounds," Valerius whispered, leaning closer to the screen. "The real deterrent is in the three cells adjacent to yours. Each containing an Archon-Class Morbus."
Nulls let out a wet, gurgling sound. "Charming... neighborhood."
"Now," Valerius continued, leaning forward. "The Codex. Its language. We've isolated phonemes that predate this universe. Explain."
Before he could form a wheezing reply, a sudden deep, resonant thump echoed through the very metal of the cube, a sound so low and powerful it was felt more than heard. The screen flickered. Valerius's head snapped to the side, her eyes wide for a fraction of a second before her composure slammed back into place.
Nulls's bloody smile returned. "Sounds like... the neighbors are... having a party."
Another impact, closer this time. A high-pitched, psychic screech tore through the null-field of his straitjacket, a sound of pure, ancient hunger that promised an end to all things. A third impact, directly overhead, dented the seamless ceiling of the cube with a shriek of tortured metal.
Valerius was on her feet, her image flickering with data-streams. "Containment breach in sectors Gamma through Epsilon. All three Archons are free. They're... converging. Here."
"They're not... converging on here," Nulls rasped, his voice barely audible over the alarms now blaring from the screen. "They're converging... on me. My body... is a feast. And you... locked them in the pantry... with the main course."
The cube shuddered violently. A long, hairline crack appeared in the wall to his left. Through it, Nulls could hear it, not a sound, but a sensation of reality being unwoven. The three Archons had formed a temporary, instinctual alliance, a trifecta of consumption focused on a single, tantalizing source of power trapped within the planet's heart.
Valerius stared at him, her face pale. The perfect prison was being torn apart from the inside by its own safeguards.
"Tell me," Nulls whispered, his eyes gleaming with a dark, triumphant fire despite his broken body. "Was this... one of your scenarios?"
The cube screamed. Not with sound, but with the shriek of reality being dismantled. The hairline crack in the wall split open, revealing a swirling, non-Euclidian darkness. From it poured a psychic stench of such profound hunger that Nulls's mind, even shielded, felt it like a physical blow.
The air itself began to curdle. One of the Argus-class chains, the one piercing his right thigh, groaned and then snapped. The broken end whipped into the dissolving wall and was consumed without a sound.
Valerius's image on the screen was frantic, her shouts silent. It didn't matter. The Archons were here. He could feel them, three vast, ancient appetites seeping into the cell, turning the very light into a liquid, hungry shadow that licked at his feet. This was erasure.
No.
The thought was a final, desperate signal fired into the void.
YOG!
The world unstitched.
The transition was not gentle. It was the violent cessation of one state and the imposition of another. The crushing pressure, the screaming metal, the gnawing hunger, gone.
He was sitting in a chair of a material he did not recognize, neither wood nor stone. Across from him, in an identical chair, sat Yog. They were in an expanse of pure blackness so deep it felt like a physical weight against his eyes. The silence was absolute, a void where even the memory of sound had died.
Nulls stared at his hands. They were whole. Unbroken. He flexed his fingers, the ghost of shattered bones was a fading echo. The relief was a cold, sharp thing, devoid of warmth. It was merely the absence of a specific, overwhelming agony.
Yog observed him, his expression as unreadable as the void around them. The silence stretched, measured not in time, but in the slow, deliberate beat of Nulls's reconstituted heart.
"You called," Yog stated. It was not a question.
"They are breaking through," Nulls said, his voice flat, the words hanging in the sterile air between them. "She said something about Archon-class Morbus, I've felt their power and I confess, I cannot stop them."
A flicker of something ancient moved in the depths of Yog's eyes. "I am aware of the circumstances."
Nulls met his gaze, the last dregs of his defiance a bitter taste in his mouth. "I am out of options."
"You have one option remaining," Yog replied, his voice a low, resonant hum that seemed to vibrate in the marrow of Nulls's bones. "The only one you have ever had. The one you were too proud to take."
"The terms," Nulls said, the two words a capitulation.
Yog leaned forward slightly, a minimal movement that nonetheless seemed to shift the balance of the entire void.
"Your body becomes my vessel. Your will, a branch of my own. You will become my Hound. Your soul will burn like a beacon, and the hunt for you will be eternal." He paused, letting the absolute nature of the cage settle. "In return, you will wield the power to turn that hunt back upon them. You will not be prey. You will be the extinction that answers their call."
Outside, in the frozen moment of his reality, Nulls felt the first Archon begin to slithered towards his location. A wave of primordial cold, a sensation of being un-written, washed over his spirit, a final warning even in this detached space.
He looked into Yog's eyes, two pools of infinite, patient darkness. He ran the calculation one last time. Survival versus sovereignty. The variables were clear. The path was a single, stark line.
The last vestige of his pride was a cold, dead weight in his chest. There was no struggle. No grand internal battle. Only the stark, humiliating acknowledgement of a truth he could no longer avoid.
He gave a single, slow nod. The movement felt like the sealing of a tomb.
"Do it."
Yog did not smile. He did not gloat. He simply reached out. His finger, sharp as a stylus, penetrated Nulls's forehead and injecting strange liquid into his brain, it was a precise, painless cut that began disolving his old self.
He was no longer hanging. He was standing.
The change was so instantaneous it took a moment to comprehend. The chains were not broken; they were gone, replaced by plumes of incandescent dust hanging in the air where they had been severed from the walls by the sheer violence of his presence.
His perspective was wrong. The ceiling, once distant, now felt oppressively close. His head now crowned with membranous, jagged antlers. He looked down at his body. The shredded straitjacket fell away from skin the color of fresh blood, unblemished and whole. He raised a hand, and obsidian claws, each longer than a man's hand, slid from his fingertips with a sound like grinding stone.
He reached up and dragged the claws across his own face. Flakes of dried blood and scab fell away. Beneath them, the skin was seamless, as if the wounds had never been. He could feel the new power in him, not as a surge, but as a fundamental truth, a deep, silent ocean where before there had been a thimbleful.
The air around him tore. Not with a sound, but with a visible, silent rip in the fabric of the cell. Where he moved, reality itself flaked away like old paint, leaving behind a bleeding, shimmering wound of raw potential. The very concept of the prison, walls, barriers, containment, began to unravel in his wake.
The cube did not open. It ceased to be.
One moment, there was the shrieking metal and the bleeding scars in reality. The next, a silent, catastrophic failure of its structural integrity. The Argus-class walls dissolved into a cloud of metallic particles, and the entire, crushing cold weight of the ocean descended.
It was a pressure that had been engineered to compress battle cruisers into singularity. It hit Nulls, and he felt it, a faint, distant pressure, like a man standing in a gentle tide. The gravity of a billion sun clawed at him, managing only to make the white wool of his fleece sway gently, as if in a soft breeze.
Silence. Absolute, lightless, crushing silence.
Then, movement.
The first Morbus he saw was a Calamity class Morbus, the size of a large ground vehicle, all segmented legs and a circular mouth of grinding teeth. It moved with a predator's jerky intelligence, circling for a half-second before lunging not for his torso, but for the vulnerable-looking joint of his knee. Its teeth were a blur of vibration, attempting to shred tendon and bone.
Nulls's arm moved, a blur of crimson. His claws didn't slash. They simply closed around the creature's upper and lower jaw. With a wet, tearing crunch that was swallowed by the immense pressure, he ripped the Morbus in two, from mouth to tail. Ichor, black even in the darkness, clouded the water.
He held one half of the twitching corpse in his hand. He raised it, and a single, guttural word left his lips, a syllable that should not have been possible to speak underwater.
"Burn."
The Morbus-flesh in his grip ignited. Not with fire, but with a cold, white, furious light. It blazed like a miniature star, pushing back the absolute blackness for kilometers.
The abyss was illuminated.
Before him, arrayed in a nightmarish legion, were the remaining Calamity-Class Morbus, their chittering forms a seething, endless swarm. And behind them, dwarfing the swarm, were the three Archons.
They were not idle..
Behind them, the three Archons focused their presence on him. The crushing pressure tripled, then quadrupled. The water around Nulls began to boil without heat, reality itself straining under their collective will.
They were vast. Kilometers long, their forms were shifting, mountainous outlines of scale and shadow and impossible biology, their true shape a torment to the mind that tried to comprehend it.
Their presence was a physical wrongness, a cancer in the deep. The water vibrated with their collective sound, a symphony of madness that was a roar, a screech, a chitter, and a silent, psychic scream all at once.
Nulls stood alone in the light of his macabre torch, the two halves of the dead Morbus drifting from his grasp. He raised the ripped-out, still-blazing eye of the creature, holding it aloft like a gruesome lantern.
The first archon, a leviathan of interlocking black chitin and spear-like limbs, moved. A single, whip-like tentacle, thin as a cable and longer than a continent, snapped through the abyss. It didn't aim for Nulls, but for the glowing corpse in his hand. It was a dismissive, precise strike to extinguish his light and gauge his reaction.
Nulls didn't weave a single sigils. His new body was a crimson blur. He threw the corpse to the side. He didn't block the limb; he twisted around it, his obsidian claws leaving five deep, smoking gashes along the chitin as he used the limb's own momentum to launch himself towards the creature's main body.
The second Archon, a coiling beast of pale, fleshy rings, reacted. The water around Nulls thickened into a syrupy, acidic gel, seeking to trap and digest him. At the same time, it vomited a cloud of parasitic spores, each one a wriggling, needle-toothed worm that swarmed towards him.
Nulls calculated the threat before uttering the word. "Purge," the acidic gel within ten meters of him instantly became clear, fresh water. The spores shriveled and died. This was a specific, targeted counter to a specific, environmental attack.
The black chitin creature unleashed a barrage of tentacles, its tentacle outnumbered the calamity by a hundred to one, and they aimed at a single point, Yog's codex dangling from his hip.
Nulls saw the trajectory, a calculation completed in an instant. He began to weave a sigil, a complex equation of spatial exclusion. The glyph flared in the water and then, sputtered. It didn't fail from pressure. It was un-written, its conceptual framework dismantled before it could form. The Archons understood more than force; they understood the laws he operated on.
The tentacles struck. One ripped the Yog Codex from its moorings. The others did not touch him. Instead, they pierced the space he occupied. The water where he stood, the very reality of it, was disassembled.
His body underwent a forced, instantaneous particulate analysis, reduced not to atoms, but to the underlying mathematical constants that defined his existence. For a timeless instant, Nulls was not a being, but scattered, nonexistent dust.
From the void within, a cold, familiar presence answered.
The terms of their pact were absolute. His body was the vessel; his will, the branch. The power flooded back into him, not as a gift, but as a reclamation. It was agonizing, like molten lead poured into his veins, scouring away the Archons' nullifying frequency.
His body knitted itself back from the void. Muscle fibers snaked from the stump of his arm, weaving over a skeleton of solidified shadow. The white wool of his fleece regrew, but it was now stained a permanent, bloody crimson. The cost was a tangible drain; the deep, silent ocean of power within him had receded. He was not infinite.
The Codex, now scarred with a hairline crack of null-energy, rematerialized in his newly formed hand.
"You tried to seal me in a plane in which im the apex predator of," he said, his voice no longer a wave of force, but a needle of pure intent that pierced the water and drilled directly into the creature's core. "your intellect disgust me."
One of the archons manifested itself below him, from the darkness below, a deeper shadow stirred. One of the Archons had changed its appearance, a mountain of scale and nightmare, began to move. It didn't swim. It unspooled. A single eye, larger than a city block, slid open. It held no pupil, only a swirling ocean of cold, dead sea. The eye fixed on Nulls.
It did not roar. The water in front of its form compressed into a solid wall of light and shot towards him. The pressure wave hit with the force of a continental plate shift, carrying with it the psychic scream of a billion consumed souls. It was a greeting, and a test.
Nulls stood firm, the white wool of his fleece swaying gently. The wave parted around him, annihilating a handful of the frenzied Calamity-Class Morbus in its path, their eldritch bodies popping like overripe fruit.
He didn't weave a sigil. He remembered an axiom. A single, perfect Klein bottle, a shape that contained itself. It twisted in a non-Euclidian nightmare, its inside becoming its outside. The Archon's own corrosive lattice collapsed inward, trapping it in a prison of its own making. It thrashed, its fleshy rings slamming against the unbreakable, self-contained geometry.
The effort exacted a price. A shudder ran through Nulls. The crimson of his fleece deepened towards black. He had not used raw power; he had imposed a geometric paradox, and the strain of forcing it upon reality was a tax on his stolen divinity.
"You broke my toy," Nulls said, looking at his codex like a person would look their best friend's grave. "Let's see how you like having yours taken away."
A thought resolved in his mind: their flawless coordination since the first attack, a synchronicity that defied chance. They weren't three creatures; they were a single will in three bodies. A hivemind.
In the span of a picosecond, he forged a legion of spear. Not once, but a dozen times. He forged these spears not in the water, but in the Noosphere, the layer of pure information beneath reality. He then flung them, not at the Archon's body, but at the psychic line between the three levyathan.
"You communicate with a mind-link," Nulls observed, his voice cold. "A hell of a way to avoid a conversation."
The spears intersected. They didn't explode. They merged, their Aleph-fields amplifying into a dead zone of absolute conceptual static. The psychic link that had allowed the three Archons to coordinate their attacks was instantly and permanently severed.
The effect was instantaneous. The chitinous Archon recoiled as if physically struck, its limbs flailing in uncoordinated confusion. The largest of the leviathans thrashed, its scales shifting in a nauseating, impossible pattern. For the first time, their hunger was eclipsed by a more primal signal: fear.
The swarm of Calamity-Class Morbus, sensing the sudden disarray in their masters, descended into a renewed, mindless frenzy, but now they were as likely to attack the confused Archons as they were to attack him.
The third Archon, the mountain of bones and jagged scale, had seen enough. It unspooled, a single eye the size of a city block sliding open to fix on him. It did not roar. The water in front of its form did not merely compress; it was forged into a solid wall of degenerate matter and shot forward, a projectile the mass of a continent moving at impossible speed.
Nulls stood firm.
With a flick of his wrist, he inscribed a new gravitational constant in the water directly in front of the projectile. The wall of matter veered sharply upward, carving a canyon through the swarm of Morbus before slamming into the trapped, ringed Archon. The Klein bottle shattered, and the two behemoths were sent tumbling away into the abyss in a cataclysm of colliding flesh and broken physics.
A single Morbus, driven mad by the scent of its dead kin and Nulls's power, broke from the swarm and shot directly for his face, maw gaping. Nulls's arm moved, a blur of crimson. Using the creature's own velocity, Nulls simply ducked under and raised his claws, slicing the creature's body in two identical segments.
He grabbed the corpse and uttered the same guttural command. The Morbus-flesh ignited, but this time the light was a sickly, diminished glow, a guttering candle that barely illuminated the three leviathans.
"Your presence is an obscenity to my sight" his voice was a wave of force that silenced the chittering swarm. "Your scale an insult."
He crushed one of the eye. The light did not die; it flashed outwards in a final, blinding pulse, illuminating the leviathan forms of the Archons in stark, terrifying relief for a single, horrifying second.
The roar echoed throughout the battlefield, collapsing ravines and instantly killing any non-Morbus lifeforms caught in its wake.
The light quickly faded. Nulls stood in the sudden quiet, the chaos already beginning to settle. He crushed the remaining dead Morbus eye in his hand, plunging them back into near-darkness, save for the faint, malevolent glow from the crack in his Codex.
"You sit in the dark, believing yourselves apex," he whispered into the sudden quiet, the command a promise and a curse. "You are mistaken. Acknowledge your predator. Bow before Omnia-Mortis!"