March 19th, 2012, Yomi, Perpetual Night
The absolute blackness of Yomi was not an emptiness, but a suffocating plenum, a solid atmosphere that pressed against the consciousness with the weight of epochs.
In this realm where light was a forgotten heresy, a single anomaly flitted—a black butterfly. It was less a creature and more a hole cut into reality, a stitch of anti-matter sewn through the fabric of this afterlife void.
It was a thought, and the thought was Nyarlathotep's.
He wore this form not for disguise, but for the aesthetic purity of it: a perfect, fragile beauty moving through a landscape of eternal decay.
Its wings, beating a rhythm old as man, were the only punctuation in the sentence of silence that was the underworld. Its journey was a pilgrimage of defilement, its destination the heart of a divine cancer.
Accompanying his flight there was an orchestra of moans, whines and laments. Anguish, despair and sadness.
This was the audience chamber of the damned. Faint, wandering will-o'-the-wisps—the hitodama, souls of the deceased—drifted like forgotten notes from a requiem.
Their voices were not their own, but a chorus forced upon them by the realm's grieving mistress, a litany of despair that was the very catechism of Yomi.
"It is the toxic realm of darkness and power," they whispered, their voices a seamless blend of awe and despair as the butterfly passed.
The entity within the insect drank their words, savored them. This was the terroir of misery, and these souls were its finest fruit, bursting with the tannins of regret.
"It is the hidden place that hates the light," another cluster murmured, their cadence the rustle of a million dead leaves.
The butterfly's flight path quivered, not from disturbance, but from a shudder of exquisite pleasure. Such potent, unadulterated negativity.
"It is the land that devours the sky," a final, more resonant group intoned, their collective anguish so potent it warped the very air, a heat haze of pure sorrow.
The butterfly twisted in ecstasy, a connoisseur inhaling the bouquet of a celestial wine gone irrevocably to bitter vinegar.
Its flight ended upon a splintered branch of a petrified tree, a sentinel long since suffocated by the gloom. Before it laid the abyss, and spanning it, a bridge of polished bone that seemed to gleam with a light it had stolen from the world above.
And beyond that, a grand palace. It was a cathedral to grief, a fortress of anguish constructed from weeping basalt and jagged obsidian, a perverted echo of an ancient Japanese castle. From its countless knife-slit windows bled a sickly, pulsating amethyst light—the only true illumination in all of Yomi, a lighthouse whose beam promised only shipwreck on the shores of madness.
Here, at the precipice, the butterfly underwent its unveiling. It did not morph; it unfolded. Darkness swirled, condensed, and sculpted itself into the shape of a man. He was tall, unnaturally so, his elegance a mockery of human form.
Long, white hair was styled with an anachronistic, fastidious precision, a nobleman's wig from a century of powdered decadence. It framed a face of sharp, pale angles, a mask of civilized intellect. But the eyes were voids, windows into the anticosmos where the things between the stars writhe in silent, ageless hunger.
Over his left eye, a bizarre monocle fashioned like a wristwatch was affixed, its hands forever frozen at the witching hour. He was clad in an immaculate white shirt, fastened with golden buttons that gleamed like small suns, and over it, a long, blood-red coat that seemed to drink the faint violet light, growing darker, richer, more profound.
This was Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the god of a thousand forms, wearing a suit of humanoid charm as the ultimate expression of his contempt.
A smirk, too wide and too knowing, carved its way onto his lips as he began his soundless approach. The symphony of suffering from the lost souls was his processional music. Each wail was a note, each sob a chord, building towards a crescendo he was soon to conduct.
He stepped onto the bone-white bridge, a blasphemous pilgrim crossing into the inner sanctum. And he began to whistle. It was a soft, discordant tune, a melody that seemed to slip between the cracks of reality, both familiar and utterly alien.
It was the tune of "Here's to You," but filtered through a consciousness that found the concept of martyrdom not tragic, but laughably quaint. Music, how much did he love it; no, he didn't love it, it was just a reflection of his beloved Universe.
Nyarlathotep's black eyes, deep and starless, surveyed the magnificent desolation. This was a masterpiece of existential horror, and he was its most appreciative critic, here not to view it, but to add his own signature to the canvas.
The psychic pressure emanating from the castle was a thick, psychic syrup—a swirling vortex of betrayed love, bottomless sadness, jealousy that had curdled into a black, tar-like hatred, and a loneliness so vast it had its own gravity.
It was a narcotic to him. The anticipation was a physical thrill, a sensation he rarely deigned to feel in its pure form.
The whistling ceased. He could no longer contain the poetry of the moment. His voice, a smooth, mocking baritone that cut through the dead air like a scalpel, began to sing, altering the lyrics to suit his divine victim.
"Here's to you, Izanami," he crooned, his voice dripping with a faux sentimentality that was more insulting than any shout.
"Rest forever here in my heart ." He was singing a dirge for her, a eulogy for the god she thought she was, all while celebrating the birth of the monster she was about to become.
The irony was exquisite.
She was the perfect victim because her prison was not Yomi, but the sum total of her own nature—her love, her grief, her vanity. Gods were so brittle; their towering selves cast the longest, darkest shadows, and he was the master of shadows.
"The last and final moment is yours," he sang, placing a pale, languid hand against the colossal, engraved door. The depictions showed Izanami in her prime, a creature of impossible, fertile beauty. The image made him let out a low, dark chuckle that held no mirth, only the cold joy of a mathematician solving a particularly elegant equation.
"Beauty comes from the heart, from the soul," he murmured to the door, to himself, to the uncaring void. "The body is a mere costume, a lie we tell the world. That is why Shadow Selves are the only truth."
Her obsession with a physical ideal, the root of which was a love spurned, was the flaw in the diamond. And he was the pressure that would make it shatter.
With a gentle push that belied infinite strength, the door swung inward with a groaning shriek that echoed through cavernous, empty halls—the death rattle of the old order. The echo faded, leaving only a distant, haunting sound of sobbing.
It was a raw, ragged, and utterly lonely sound. Another vulnerability. Love had bred betrayal, betrayal had bred loneliness, and loneliness had festered into a toxic, all-consuming obsession. His grin widened, a red slash in the pale marble of his face.
He ascended a grand, curving double staircase, drawn unerringly toward the source of the sound like a shark to blood in the water.
"That agony is your triumph," he finished his twisted serenade, his words hanging in the air as he crossed the threshold into the vast throne room.
There, on a dais of obsidian and fused bone, she was hunched. A goddess reduced to a posture of ultimate grief. The wretched cries were now clear, a relentless torrent of sorrow that could erode a mortal mind in seconds. To Nyarlathotep, it was the sound of a lock clicking open.
The moment his presence registered, the crying ceased. The figure on the throne stiffened, her mask of utter grief contorting, cracking, and reforming into one of incandescent, world-ending fury. The transition was instantaneous. Grief was her ocean, but rage was the volcano beneath it.
"IZANAGI! COME BACK!" she shrieked, the name torn from her throat like a piece of her own flesh. Her body contorted, her back bending at a painful, impossible angle with the sound of cracking cartilage and divine bone.
She was a puppet jerked by the strings of her own bottomless madness, screaming her former lover's name not as a plea, but as a curse.
She turned. Her face was a skull barely sheathed in withered, decaying skin, a visage eternally etched with the moment of his betrayal and her death. Her scream dissolved into a feral, territorial howl. An animal. A wounded, cornered beast.
Every piece of data was filed away in Nyarlathotep's boundless mind, each more useful than the last. This broken, delusional wretch was not the true Izanami. She was the cage, the scar tissue over a festering wound. The true self was screaming to be let out, and he was here to hand it the key.
"Intruder!" she rasped, her voice like grinding tombstones. "This is my... this is our heaven! I WILL TEAR YOU APART FOR DARING TO STAIN MY PARADISE!"
Spectral weapons of condensed dark energy—manifestations of her poisoned love—materialized around her and shot toward him with the speed of thought.
Nyarlathotep merely smiled his terrible smile and dissolved back into his butterfly form, the attacks passing through the space he had occupied like shadows through a darker shadow. He flitted to the side of the room as a new figure emerged from the swirling negativity, coalescing from the very anguish the true goddess had just expelled.
"Your heaven?" mocked a voice, cool, intelligent, and dripping with contempt. An identical copy of Izanami stood there, but her eyes glowed with a sickly, intelligent yellow light, the color of a fever dream. She looked around the oppressive chamber not with fear, but with calm, analytical disdain.
"This is not my heaven." The statement was simple, final, and devastating.
"How dare you invade Yomi? I KNOW IT! I KNOW IT! YOU ARE THAT UNGRATEFUL CHILD! THAT'S WHY YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, TRYING TO MIMIC ME! AMATERASU, IT'S YOU!"
The real Izanami's scream of hatred shook the very foundations of the castle, her rage infecting every lost soul in her domain, making them writhe in sympathetic agony. She was trapped in a past moment, seeing her daughter, the usurper of the light, in every challenge to her authority.
"Amaterasu? Me?" the Shadow asked, her head tilting with a feigned, bird-like curiosity. The mockery was exquisite. It refused to engage on the level of her madness, reflecting it back at her with cold clarity.
"YOU ARE MOCKING ME! FIRST YOU STOLE MY REALM! THEN YOU LET YOUR FATHER BE KILLED!" The goddess lunged, a blur of primordial rage, and seized her Shadow by the throat with a skeletal, claw-like hand. But as her eyes, burning with mad fire, focused on the Shadow's face, she paled. She did not see beauty, nor a mocking copy.
She saw a reflection of her own true, hidden decay—the maggots, the rotting flesh, the skull beneath the skin she so desperately clung to. She saw utter, undeniable ugliness.
"You... disgusting child!" she shrieked, hurling the Shadow away as if touched by a cosmic plague and frantically scrubbing her contaminated hand against her robes. "Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting!"
"You shouldn't treat yourself so badly," the Shadow said, rising effortlessly, its voice now a soft, chiding poison. "A goddess unsure of her own beauty. Beauty is meaningless." Each word was a needle driven under a nail.
"BEAUTY IS EVERYTHING! BEAUTY IS WHAT MAKES ME A GODDESS!" the real Izanami screamed, her voice cracking, preparing another annihilating lunge. She was defending the very lie that defined her suffering.
"No, it doesn't. And I know it. Just like I know the love for Izanagi you cling to is a lie. You live inside a fairy tale, following the ghost of a feeling that never existed as you remember it. You and I both know the truth." The Shadow was not arguing; it was stating facts, and each fact was a hammer blow to the fragile scaffold of her sanity.
"DON'T SAY HIS NAME!" The entire palace trembled with her fury. She hovered, the corrupt divine power of Yomi gathering around her to erase this imposter, this truth-teller.
But the Shadow leaned forward, its voice dropping to a venomous, intimate hiss that slithered into the goddess's ears and coiled around her mind. "Mine isn't a desire for love. Mine is a desire for revenge." The word hung in the air, thick and sweet and terrible.
"Revenge against that weak man who dared to leave me. Did I ever truly want the love of a coward? His death... the only regrettable part is that I wasn't the one to inflict it after eons of torture, after I made him watch me destroy his precious children and his sun-lit world. Isn't that right?" The words were no longer needles; they were psychic scalpels, performing open-heart surgery on her soul, revealing the malignant tumor within.
"NO! NO! NO! REVENGE ISN'T A FEELING WORTHY OF A QUEEN!" she protested, but the protest was weak, a reflex. The Shadow was voicing the secret anthem of her heart, the song she had refused to let herself hear.
The Shadow laughed, a cold, cruel sound of absolute victory.
"When I, Izanami-no-Mikoto, look at myself, I see the ugliness he left me with. But it doesn't matter. I am not a queen who needs a king. Izanagi is gone, and I am glad. Now I can focus on vanquishing his brats and taking their kingdoms for my own. I am you, Izanami. You can't hide from me any longer. Look at me. This is your face. This is your body. This is your truth. And all of it… all this pain, this anger, this sadness… is Izanagi's fault."
It was the final, devastating syllogism. You are me. I am revenge. Therefore, you are revenge.
"YOU ARE NOT ME! I AM A QUEEN, NOT A MACHINE FOR REVENGE!" Enraged beyond all reason, betrayed by her own deepest self, Izanami unleashed her full divine power, a blast of absolute negation meant to erase the abomination, to silence the truth. It struck the Shadow head-on, a wave of pure force that broke its form in two.
But the Shadow only began to laugh, a sound of pure, unadulterated triumph that swallowed the sound of the blast.
"YES!" it shrieked, its form dissolving not into nothingness, but into a torrent of black, psychic sludge.
What emerged from the effluvium was the true, unfettered visage of the Shadow. An immense, bloody-red skeleton, a grotesque parody of a divine body, sprouted dozens of thrashing, bone-white arms and legs that danced a macabre, joyous jig, their movements barely contained within the throne room.
A torrent of long, black hair erupted from the skull, floating and writhing in the air like a nest of serpents charged with hatred.
Thousands of thorned, poisonous-purple branches grew from the bones, weaving around the form like vicious ivy, exuding a thick, psychic miasma that smelled of regret and poison. Within the jagged ribcage hung a heart of pale lilac crystal, suspended in a slimy, translucent sac.
Bubbles of vile substance formed and popped on its surface, each eruption releasing a cacophony of tormented screams and maddening whispers—the sum total of Izanami's suppressed self.
"I AM A SHADOW—THE TRUE SELF!" it screamed, its voice the combined shout of every negative thought the goddess had ever suppressed.