The manifestation of the Three Pillars, beings that stood above ordinary Old Ones, threw the physical constants of this vast starfield into chaos.
Distant starlight twisted, and space itself rippled visibly.
From their eternal, ageless perspective, the star-forged dragon before them possessed a respectable level of power, but it was still a creation within the universe. An aberration meant to be erased with ease, no different in essence from the countless existences they had casually wiped away over immeasurable ages.
From the boundary between darkness and the gate came the mental fluctuations of Nug and Yeb.
Those waves were filled with wild elation.
In their view, with Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth acting together, the fate of this arrogant Star Dragon was already sealed.
He was not even worthy of becoming a nursery for the Mother Goddess to nurture new life. He would simply be erased completely from time and space by the Lord of the Gate.
Faced with this dual divine pressure, enough to drive any Old One into ultimate madness, Lo Quen, the Starforger Dragon, remained as steady as an ancient, unmoving mountain.
His magnificent body, forged from stellar cores and cosmic dust, stood firm and unshaken.
Within his dragon eyes, the burning starlight was calm and still, as though the two supreme cosmic beings before him were nothing more than scenery.
There was only absolute rationality in his mind, and absolute confidence in his own power.
"Nursery?"
Lo Quen's thought echoed directly within the perceptions of the two ancient existences.
"Since when has the order of the universe been yours to decide?"
His words caused even Yog-Sothoth's eternally revolving logical core to stall for a brief instant.
Before the thought had fully settled, the attack was already upon him.
Shub-Niggurath's boundless darkness surged and boiled.
Thousands upon thousands of slick tentacles, each as massive as a mountain range, burst forth from the black void.
These tentacles were not merely physical weapons. They were infused with laws that forced all things to return to the origin of life. Any matter or energy they touched would be forcibly broken down and absorbed, reduced to the most basic reproductive substance, and merged back into that eternal darkness.
They coiled in from all directions, seeking to drag Lo Quen into the abyss that birthed all things and devoured all things alike.
At the same time, from Yog-Sothoth's gate of luminous bubbles, countless rays burst forth. Their colors defied description, as if composed of pure information itself, the light of spacetime deconstruction.
These beams ignored conventional defenses entirely. They locked directly onto Lo Quen's timeline and spatial coordinates, aiming to erase him from every moment of the past and every possibility of the future, making it as though he had never existed at all.
This was erasure rooted in the deepest rules of the universe.
Before the attacks even arrived, the intertwined pressure of life and spacetime laws had already driven Nug and Yeb, watching from afar, into near-trembling excitement.
They seemed to already see the Star Dragon melting into primordial soup beneath the Mother Goddess's tentacles, or dissolving into meaningless data within the radiance of the Lord of the Gate.
Yet in the face of this twin annihilation, enough to obliterate entire star systems, Lo Quen moved.
He did not evade. He did not defend.
He simply raised his right foreclaw, condensed from dense stellar cores, and gently closed it toward the onrushing tentacles and light.
Stellar Radiance converged.
In the void before his claw, a dark sphere with a radius of only one hundred million light-years abruptly formed.
The instant it appeared, all surrounding light was seized by an invisible force. Shub-Niggurath's darkness itself and Yog-Sothoth's radiance twisted and were dragged toward its surface, unable to escape.
Even the very concept of space caved inward around it, forming a gravitational abyss visible to the naked eye.
This was an artificial singularity, created by Lo Quen through the power of the Starforger Dragon.
And its terror did not end there.
Shub-Niggurath's law-infused tentacles, upon nearing the black hole's event horizon, did not absorb or assimilate it as they normally would. Instead, they encountered an unprecedented repulsive force.
The primordial darkness representing the origin of life on the tentacles' surface, the moment it touched the singularity's gravitational field, seemed to strike a wall of absolute zero. The very laws sustaining its existence cried out under unbearable strain.
The darkness faded as if bleached away, while the tentacles' terrifying regenerative and devouring properties were forcibly suppressed and stripped by a power even more fundamental.
"What?!"
For the first time, Shub-Niggurath's consciousness, woven from the echoes of countless lives, surged with violent turbulence.
It was shock born of a shattered understanding.
He could clearly sense it. His authority over the laws of reality, drawn from the very source of the universe, was being repelled and rejected by this insignificant black hole.
That defied everything he understood as the fundamental rules of existence.
The gravity emanating from the black hole was not merely physical attraction. It was closer to a compulsory force acting upon specific concepts of existence, driving them apart and breaking them down.
Yog-Sothoth's "Light of Spacetime Deconstruction" fared no better.
Those streams of information, meant to ignore all defenses and act directly upon the foundation of being itself, were thrown into chaos the instant they entered the singularity's gravitational domain. The internal data structures that represented spacetime coordinates and causal logic were violently twisted and disrupted by a crude, overpowering force.
The light slowed to a crawl. The annihilating intent within it fractured into disarray, and some of the rays even collided with one another amid the distortions, vanishing without a trace.
For the first time, a trace of astonishment surfaced within Yog-Sothoth's eternally cold awareness.
His all-knowing gate, his vision that could see through past and future alike, could not comprehend the nature of this black hole.
Was this not supposed to be an ordinary black hole, something found everywhere in the universe?
Why did it feel as though it had been grafted directly from an entirely different system of cosmic laws, its core flowing with a power utterly distinct from this universe's ultimate principles, a power completely outside Yog-Sothoth's understanding?
For one who knew all, the unknown was the most terrifying beginning of all.
And this was far from over.
The anomalous black hole did not merely defy reason by resisting and unraveling the attacks of the two Pillar Gods. Its gravity began to exert a true siphoning effect.
This pull did not act on matter. It acted directly upon Shub-Niggurath's manifested darkness itself, and upon the very spacetime gate structure constructed by Yog-Sothoth.
Shub-Niggurath felt it keenly. The outer edges of his boundless domain of darkness were curling inward uncontrollably, collapsing and being forcibly devoured by the black hole.
It was like an ink painting thrown into water, the ink dissolving and thinning as it spread.
The immutable foundation of his ancient existence was beginning to shake.
Yog-Sothoth's light-bubble gate twisted violently as well.
Those light bubbles representing different spacetime paths and units of knowledge flickered erratically.
The entire gate was being dragged by an invisible, overwhelming force, tilting toward the black hole as the computational power sustaining its structure drained away at a terrifying rate.
"This thing… it can actually erode my very essence?!"
Within Shub-Niggurath's awareness, the initial shock rapidly deepened into true horror, tinged with a trace of panic, an emotion that should have been impossible for him.
He could sense it. If he were completely drawn into that black hole, the loss would not be limited to this projection alone. It could even affect his incarnations in other dimensions.
Yog-Sothoth grew frantic.
Fear, an erroneous emotion he had always excluded through absolute rationality, invaded the core of his will for the first time.
At this moment, escape was the only option left.