The end of Rhys Mallory's world wasn't loud.
There was no epic battle, no final stand against a encroaching darkness he had so often meticulously designed in his notebooks. There was only the slick blackness of asphalt after a surprise evening shower and the squeal of tires that came too late.
He had been fine-tuning the liturgical rites of a sun-worshipping lizardfolk cult in his head, completely lost to the mundane reality of crossing a street. His last thought wasn't of regret or of a life unlived. It was a single, frustrated critique.
Tch. Bad sound design. A real screech would have more of a bass-heavy tear...
Then, silence. A profound, velvety nothingness.
It didn't last.
The new sound was a soft, continuous rush of air. A gentle, endless whisper against his clothes and skin.
Rhys opened his eyes.
Blue. An impossible, seamless ocean of it stretched in every direction. Above, below, to all sides—nothing but an achingly pure cerulean void. There was no sun, yet the light was brilliant and shadowless.
And he was falling.
His body was perfectly relaxed, arrow-straight, descending through the endless sky at a terminal velocity that felt strangely comfortable.
Huh.
That was it. Just, Huh.
There was no panic. No primal scream clawing its way up his throat. His heart wasn't hammering against his ribs. The world-builder in his soul, the part of him that had choreographed the doom of a thousand imaginary civilizations, simply cataloged the experience.
Sensation of falling: 10/10. Realistic wind resistance. Visuals are a bit minimalist, but the skybox resolution is incredible. Is this the afterlife? Kind of an aesthetic choice, if so. A little boring.
He tried to move, to flap his arms like a fool. It did nothing but slightly alter his orientation. He was still very much falling.
A flicker of an old memory surfaced—articles he'd read late at night, forums he'd browsed. Lucid dreaming. The art of becoming aware you were in a dream, and thus seizing control. He'd tried for years with minimal success. A flicker of awareness here, a moment of control there, but never anything... this stable. This vivid.
"Okay," he said aloud. His voice was shockingly clear, not whipped away by the wind. "Dream-test number one: reality check."
He held up his right hand, a trick he'd read about. Count your fingers. He did. One, two, three, four, five. He counted again. Five. Damn. Usually, they were supposed to be distorted.
"Okay, test number two: the classic." He pinched the back of his other hand. He felt the pressure, the slight pull on his skin. It felt completely, utterly real.
This is a ridiculously high-fidelity dream, he thought with a surge of excitement. The kind of tech corporations on Earth would kill for. Next-gen full-dive VR? Did I get hit by the truck and put into a coma with an experimental neural interface?
That sounded way more plausible than the afterlife. And way more fun.
"Alright, dream, or simulation, or whatever you are," he muttered to the wind. "Let's see what your engine can do."
The first rule of lucid dreaming wasn't about power. It was about belief. You couldn't force the dream to obey. You had to know that it would. Forcing it was like trying to punch a wall to go through it. Believing was knowing the wall was never there to begin with.
He closed his eyes, still falling. He didn't fight the sensation. He embraced it. He let the feeling of infinite descent become normal. It was his new state of being. And then, with the casual certainty of someone deciding to stand still, he decided to stop.
WHOOSH.
The rushing air sound vanished.
He opened his eyes.
He was motionless. Suspended in the heart of the great blue nothing.
A slow, delighted grin spread across his face. "Oh, my god," he whispered, the whisper echoing in the sudden silence. "It worked."
The joy that shot through him was pure, unadulterated creative ecstasy. This wasn't just a dream he could watch. It was a world he could build.
His mind, a lifelong repository of forgotten maps, pantheons, and epic histories, roared to life. This was his sandbox.
"Okay, a void is cool for a loading screen, but we need a ground floor."
He focused. He didn't want anything too complex to start. A platform. Solid. Dependable. He imagined rock. Not just any rock. He imagined granite, speckled with quartz that caught the non-existent light. He thought about its texture, cool and slightly rough underfoot. He pictured its weight, its density, its very concept of being a solid, unmoving thing.
FWOOOM.
Beneath his feet, with a sound like a giant's lung exhaling, it materialized. A disc of grey stone, ten meters across, solidified out of the blue nothingness. It was perfect. Moss already grew in imaginary crevices he hadn't even consciously designed. A few stubborn, ethereal wildflowers sprouted near the edge.
He gently lowered himself onto it, his shoes making a soft, satisfying scrape. He stomped. Solid. He knelt and ran his hand over the surface. It was real. More real than the asphalt he'd last felt.
"Incredible," he breathed, laughing. This was everything he'd ever wanted.
He was so absorbed in his new toy that he almost missed it. A tiny black speck, far above him, and falling fast.
Rhys squinted, then simply thought, Better view.
His vision telescoped instantly, the speck rushing towards him in a perfect optical zoom. It wasn't a speck. It was a person. A woman, slender and dressed in tattered white robes. And from her back… wings.
"Is that an angel?" he murmured, intrigued. "Interesting. The dream is already auto-populating with NPCs. Smart."
But as she fell closer, he could see something was wrong. Her wings weren't the proud, feathered appendages of myth. They were... glitching. Corroding in mid-air.
For Liora, there was only the cold, the fall, and the hiss.
The hiss was the sound of the end. The sound of The Great Unraveling. The sound of non-existence chewing at the edges of the world.
She could feel it in her very core. Her name was Liora. She thought. She was an angelkin. Maybe. Her memories were thin, like old parchment turning to dust. The Bleed took everything. It ate concepts, shredded history.
It was eating her wings now.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The sight was a horror she had grown used to. Her once-magnificent wings of swan-white feathers were a disintegrating ruin. The tips were gone, not broken, but simply… erased. The barbs and shafts of her feathers were flaking away, turning into a mist of shimmering grey static that was wicked away by the wind of her descent.
ssss...krrr...
With every piece that vanished, a piece of her went with it. Her sense of self, her will, her very soul. It was a death of a thousand un-makings.
Her god was silent. Her people were gone, faded echoes she could no longer properly recall. There was nothing left but the long fall into the final, merciful oblivion.
A silent prayer formed on her lips, not for salvation—it was far too late for that—but for it to be quick. Let me be undone.
That's when she saw it. Below her, hanging in the absolute nothingness of the Erased Sky, was an island of stone. A blatant, solid impossibility.
And on it, a man.
He was looking up at her, his expression not of horror or pity, but… of calm, analytical curiosity.
Her failing mind couldn't process it. A Creator? Here? At the end of all things? It was a final, cruel mirage.
She fell past his island, her descent accelerating. She closed her eyes, ready for the end.
Rhys watched the angelkin plummet past him. "Okay, her flight physics are disabled. And those wings… the texture decay is a weird visual effect. Is it supposed to be holy power corruption? Or a poison debuff?"
It didn't matter. It was aesthetically displeasing. It was a bug. And bugs needed to be fixed.
He stepped off his platform. He didn't fall. He just floated downwards, an act as simple as walking. He matched her speed, hovering a few feet away to get a better look.
She was beautiful, in a tragic, gothic sort of way. Silver hair fanned out around a pale, sharp-featured face. But the real mess was her wings. The Bleed, or whatever she was suffering from, was awful. It looked like a 3D model with corrupted data, bits of it just blinking out of existence.
"Alright, that's enough of that," Rhys decided. "Let's try a redesign."
He flew closer, drifting until he was right behind her. He reached out and, with a strange sense of creative intimacy, placed his hand on the back of her robes, right between her shoulder blades where the dying wings met her body.
He closed his eyes. Feathers are classic, but they're clearly not working out. We need something more stable. Something with a better visual effect.
His mind, the well-oiled engine of a thousand settings, offered up an immediate idea. An aesthetic he'd always been fond of. Cosmic. Celestial.
Let's scrap the whole organic concept, he thought. Let's go with something... conceptual.
He imagined a new design. Wings not made of flesh and bone, but of pure, solidified essence. The concept of "night sky." The beauty of a distant "nebula." The eternal, unwavering light of a "star."
The touch on Liora's back was not hot, not cold. It was… present. A single point of absolute, undeniable reality in her fading existence.
And then, the hiss stopped.
VMMMMMMMMM…
A low, resonant hum replaced it, vibrating from the point of contact through her entire being. The horrifying feeling of being unmade was halted, then reversed. It was not a healing. It was a re-creation.
Where his hand rested, the grey, static-like corruption of The Bleed was instantly obliterated, consumed by a new, vibrant light. She twisted her head, her eyes widening in disbelief.
From her back, the rotting stumps of her wings were not regrowing. They were being reborn as something new. A torrent of deep, impossible indigo and shimmering violet energy poured forth, swirling like cosmic dust clouds. They coalesced, hardening not into feathers, but into smooth, elegant structures that seemed carved from a captured galaxy.
And within them, tiny points of light began to spark into being.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Each one was a perfect, miniature star, blazing with cold, eternal fire. Constellations she had never known traced themselves across the surfaces of her new wings. They were beautiful. They were impossible. And they were… permanent. She could feel it. They were anchored to the very idea of existence, immune to the Unraveling.
The sheer, overwhelming power emanating from them brought tears to her eyes. The weight was gone. The decay was gone. The despair… was gone.
She twisted in the air, her new, solid wings catching the ethereal wind, stabilizing her fall into a gentle hover. She faced the man, who was now floating in front of her, a pleased, self-satisfied smile on his face, like an artist admiring his latest piece.
He wasn't glowing. He wore no halo. He looked like an ordinary man. But what he had just done… what he had casually, effortlessly wrought… was the work of a god.
Her voice, when it came out, was a broken, reverent whisper.
"Who… what are you?"
She tried to kneel before him, a gesture of absolute, soul-deep submission, even in the weightless air.
Rhys caught her before she could fall again. "Whoa, whoa, easy there. You're stable now. Your flight controls should be rebooted."
He mentally high-fived himself. The redesign was a spectacular success. The cosmic wings looked way cooler than the plain white feathers.
"She talks!" he thought. Full-fledged companion NPC with a dialogue tree. Excellent.
"Me?" he said, trying to think of what a mysterious dream entity should say. He decided on being humble. Bragging to a dream character felt tacky. "Oh, just… someone passing through. Your wings looked like they had a nasty bug, so I patched them up."
Bug? Patched them up? The words were nonsense to Liora, but the tone was one of casual, baffling understatement. It was as if he'd merely brushed some dust from her shoulder, not redefined her existence.
"M-my name is Liora," she stammered, feeling the name solidify in her mind, anchored by his presence.
"Liora. Cool name," Rhys said with a nod. He internally filed it away. Protagonist Companion #1: Liora. Angelkin race. Special ability: Cosmic Wings.
"That… that hiss… The Bleed," Liora said, her eyes wide with lingering terror. "It was unmaking me. You… you stopped it. How?"
Rhys's nerdy enthusiasm kicked in. "The Bleed! That's what you call it? Metal. Good lore. So this whole dreamscape is dealing with, what, an existential entropy-based apocalypse? I love it. Super original."
He wasn't listening to her terror. He was appreciating the world-building.
Liora just stared, lost. This being spoke of the end of all things with the detached appreciation of a scholar examining a curious fossil. The sheer gap in their perspectives was an abyss she couldn't even begin to cross. All she knew was the gratitude that overwhelmed her.
"I owe you my life," she said, her voice firming with newfound conviction. "My soul. My existence. I will serve you."
Rhys blinked. "Oh! Uh, you don't have to do that. This is just a... well, never mind. No strings attached, honest." He was getting flustered. Was this part of her programmed questline? Did saving her automatically recruit her to his "party"? The dream logic was fascinating.
He looked around the endless blue. This little drama was fun, but he was getting tired of the minimalist backdrop. He needed a base of operations. A home.
He looked back at the terrified, reverent angelkin floating before him, her new star-dusted wings pulsing softly in the twilight air. He gave her a reassuring, cheerful grin.
"Well, Liora," he announced, gesturing expansively at the utter void surrounding them. "Welcome to the… uh… start of things."
He paused, stroking his chin. "I think I'm going to build something here. Something big. Floating castles are always a classic."
From Liora's perspective, this strange, kind being who had plucked her from oblivion was now gazing into the empty heart of non-existence. And he wasn't seeing an end. He was seeing a canvas.
This wasn't just a savior.
It was a beginning.
He was The Progenitor.