"I have no control left over this world, not over the earth nor over men, not over their bodies nor their souls. I am nothing more than a memory. A god who has been forgotten. And yet…"
What still resembled a silhouette sat upon the void, eyes turned toward the horizon. Its eyes, as clear and empty as the night itself, sought nothing. Around it radiated a halo of light both black and white, as though two absences were fighting over the space it occupied. Its body was fading in places, slipping away, dissolving in silence, a flame the world had stopped feeding.
It extended a finger toward the horizon. A nearly transparent finger, shot through with particles like dying stars.
"And yet… In another world, perhaps. Perhaps only there… will I find that hope."
With a slow, almost ceremonial gesture, it traced an invisible line through the air, sweeping upward from bottom to top. A few meters ahead, space shattered softly, like cold glass under pressure held too long, and a rift opened in the night. A blue of almost unreal clarity burst forth, casting a magnificent and silent light upon the nothingness surrounding it.
"I have no choice left but to place my hopes upon a human from elsewhere."
Its voice still resonated, but barely. It was no longer truly a voice. It was the echo of a voice. Something dying within the frequencies.
Behind it, a silhouette appeared.
Human, whole, hesitant. It glowed faintly, a bluish tint that clashed with the dying phosphorescence of the seated figure. For a moment, it did not move. Then it opened its eyes, or whatever served as eyes, and the world suddenly felt too real.
"Where… Where am I?!"
The voice was that of a young man, bewildered, balanced on the edge between fear and disbelief. He stepped back, looked left, then right, trying to absorb the structured void around him. Before him, the rift was slowly closing. Behind him, nothing. And at the center, that seated silhouette facing away, not seeming to notice him.
"Who are you?!"
"A young man… What a curious choice from chance. After all… perhaps he will know how to tip the scales."
It did not turn around.
"Hey!! You're the one who brought me here?! I have to be dreaming, this can't be…"
A nervous laugh escaped him, his hand rising instinctively to his face. He laughed because he didn't know what else to do. Perhaps also because a part of him, the most lucid part, already knew it wasn't a dream.
"How would this be a dream, Kanuri?"
The laughter stopped dead.
"What?!"
It had just spoken his name. His first name. With a quiet precision, effortless, as though that name had always belonged to it as much as to him.
"This is not a dream. You feel it, don't you? It's too dense, too cold, too present to be one. Isn't it, Kanuri?"
Each time it spoke that name, it was like an anchor thrown into reality.
"But… why am I here?!"
Kanuri tried to move forward. One step, two, and something invisible and freezing stopped him cold, like a glass wall placed between them. Strangely, he felt the cold. A cold that had no source.
"I called you because I had nothing else left. I no longer have any hold on this world. I am going to fade."
"What the hell does that have to do with me?!"
He struck the wall. Transparent vibrations rippled outward in silent circles before vanishing.
"It is a choice of chance, true. But it was the only one I had left."
The being stretched its right arm to the side and opened its palm, a simple gesture, strangely elegant, almost funereal.
"I find myself obliged to offer you recompense. Please, understand me."
Kanuri's face was undone. He understood nothing, not the why, not the how, but something in his soul had already grasped what he still refused to formulate: he was never going home.
"Wait! Why me? What exactly do you want from me?!"
"The Goddess's Purple Necrosis… It disrupts the foundations of the world. It gnaws at the invisible structures that maintain the order of all things. And if it continues to grow, it will spread far beyond what anyone can still imagine."
"The Goddess's Purple Necrosis?!" he repeated, as if repeating the words could dull their absurdity.
"I no longer have much time. Receive my highest blessing, Kanuri."
Its hand lit up with a golden halo, deep, vibrant, and the same light appeared on Kanuri's chest with the same intensity, as though it came from within. A heat flooded his body, scorching yet strangely gentle, almost benevolent, and he lacked the strength to reject it.
A symbol etched itself into his chest, not on the skin, but deeper. In something more profound.
Three interlocking circles, sliding beneath one another, above one another, inseparable to the point where one no longer knew where each began or ended. A soft light, almost alive.
"What is this?! What are you doing to me?!"
"You are not asking the right questions."
There was a silence of incomprehension. Then Kanuri lowered his eyes to his left hand.
It was turning purple.
Growths sprouted from his skin, fine, sharp, shaped like four-pointed stars, like crystals cut from something between blood and night. The Goddess's Purple Necrosis spread quickly, climbing his arm with an almost organic fluidity, leaving in its wake a dark and sickly glow that pulsed faintly, the silent signature of a divine power in the process of consuming him.
"What is this?! Is this the Goddess's Purple Necrosis?!"
"It is not the Necrosis. It is a transit pathway. You are going to be teleported to a place of power."
Kanuri's gaze tinged with raw fear.
"What do you mean, 'place of power'?!… Answer me, dammit!! What's been happening to me this whole time?!"
His voice was veering toward despair. He struck the invisible wall, shards of purple crystals flew in every direction before dissolving into the air like dead embers. He tried to tear them off with his right hand, but they immediately spread to his fingers, voracious, methodical, irreversible.
"Help me!! This is terrifying!!"
The answer came, dry and devoid of all warmth.
"I have done everything that remained in my power. The rest belongs to you."
"You've got to be kidding me!! Bastard!! You're the one who brought me here, dammit!!… Mhhm…"
Anger and despair collided in his throat, but the purple crystals had already covered his face. His jaw. His eyes. His voice drowned. He could no longer see. He could no longer speak.
When they had covered the entirety of his spectral form, the mass disintegrated into a smoke of deep and muted purple, leaving behind nothing but a perfect void.
"Forgive me. It was all I had left. Do not hold it against me."
---
Elsewhere.
The crystals reformed elsewhere, in another setting, another light. They gathered into a male human silhouette that sharpened, took on density, weight, flesh, then vanished to give way to a human being, real, alive, who collapsed like dead weight onto the grass and earth.
He remained motionless for a long moment.
Then he inhaled, violently, deeply, like someone just pulled from drowning. Like an astral projection abruptly cancelled, called back into its vessel by a force it had not chosen.
That was exactly what it was.
He wore a slightly faded sky-blue shirt, black linen pants, shoes of the same shade. His kinky hair, too long to be orderly, fell in disarray across his forehead tilted toward the ground, as if looking down was the only way to accept what was above. His ebony skin and light brown eyes gave him an austere presence that his square face and sharp features only reinforced.
He tried to stand. And that's when he saw.
A sword.
Two swords.
Three, ten, a hundred, there was no limit. Swords of every size, every shape, planted in the ground across a gigantic silent plain, like the tombstones of a forgotten army. Some were broken. Others rusted to the hilt. But all pointed toward a sky that was bleeding.
He lifted his eyes.
The sky was carmine. Not the red of a sunset, something deeper, more sickly. An insolent carmine light drowned everything, and the moon itself was the source. A moon that did not reflect light, but produced it, that sickly carmine clarity that gave the blades reflections of viscera and stained the horizon a color that had no business existing.
Kanuri narrowed his brown eyes in that hostile clarity, adapted to it slowly, and stood, reflexively grabbing the hilt of a nearby sword.
"Where have I landed…"
His voice, softly deep, naturally low, came out almost in spite of himself, as if his body had instinctively understood that here, speaking loudly was a mistake.
He swept his gaze across the plain. Nothing. Only swords, only the carmine light, only silence.
Except.
At the center of the plain, or what seemed to be its center, something was moving.
A mass of metal. Imposing, heavy, almost geological in its presence. It caught the carmine light differently from the other blades, as if it absorbed it rather than reflected it.
And it was rising.
"I'm dreaming. Tell me this is a nightmare."
It was not a mass. It was armor.
It was rising slowly, with the monstrous patience of something that had never needed to hurry. The plates overlapped like scales of an abyssal fish, serrated at their edges, forged to tear rather than protect. The metal was a nearly black carmine in the hollows, but where the moon touched it, it bled vivid carmine, pulsing faintly, like an ember that nothing could ever fully extinguish.
The helm was broad, angular, with two protrusions that evoked horns something had interrupted before they could finish growing. Where the eyes should be: two narrow slits. And behind those slits, a purple glow. Not the moon's reflection. Something more inward. More ancient. The unmistakable mark of the Goddess's Purple Necrosis, nestled there like a consciousness.
In its hand, an enormous sword, as wide as a forearm, with purple veins running along the blade like veins beneath dead skin. It raised it with one hand, and the silence of the plain seemed to physically tighten.
The breastplate was broken. Through the breach, something pulsed, a black flesh shot through with purple filaments, engorged with a life that had no business being. A heart consumed by the Goddess's Necrosis, beating within armor that should have been empty for centuries.
"This isn't possible. This isn't possible. This isn't possible."
Kanuri turned and ran.
Behind him, the mask of the helm shattered at the jaw, revealing teeth soaked in a dark, viscous blood, and the creature screamed.
It wasn't a scream. It was a wave. A sonic violence that tore through the air, made every blade planted in the earth vibrate, made the carmine clouds above tremble, and nailed Kanuri in place as if gravity had doubled in an instant. He fell to his knees, hands clamped against his ears with desperate force.
"Argh!! Argh!! Bastard!!"
The pain was physical, total, a knife driven straight into his eardrums. He held on until the howl finally faded, leaving in its wake a silence even heavier than before.
By reflex, he looked back.
The Carmine Knight was bending its legs, fast, almost mechanical, in a clatter of metal plates, and jumped. Phenomenal. A vertical trajectory that carried it several meters into the air, its sword pointed downward, toward Kanuri, with the cold precision of an execution.
He had no time to think. Only to move.
He rolled aside at the last moment. The blade sank into the earth a few centimeters from him with an impact so violent that the ground itself seemed to flinch. The shockwave lifted him and hurled him backward, and he landed several meters away, dazed, his limbs temporarily numb.
The knight, meanwhile, was growling, pulling at its sword buried to the hilt in the earth, unable to free it immediately. It screamed again, in frustration this time, with the same devastating intensity.
Kanuri struggled to his feet, tore a random sword from the earth, and took a guard stance.
"Come on! Bring it, you bastard!!"
The knight turned toward him.
And Kanuri immediately felt it was a mistake.
"Actually… you know what, we can settle this calmly. By talking. Like two civilized adults."
He dropped the sword. Raised both hands, palms open, in the universal gesture of temporary surrender.
The knight did not slow by a single step.
It arrived, swung its sword in a horizontal arc of obscene power. The surrounding blades were torn from the earth and hurled like shell fragments in every direction. Kanuri had time neither to dodge nor to throw himself to the ground.
A blade pierced through him.
It planted itself in his abdomen, clean and deep, and the blood that gushed from it was dark red, nearly black beneath the carmine moon.
"Ssss… aaah…"
He grabbed the blade with both hands, tried to pull it out. The pain was a living thing. It thought. It insisted. Every movement amplified it to the unbearable.
"Pfff… ghh…"
He was on his knees. Pinned to the ground. And the Carmine Knight advanced toward him, slowly this time, with the patience of a predator who knows the prey can no longer flee. The purple filaments running across its armor pulsed faster, as if the Goddess's Purple Necrosis itself was feeding on this moment.