The battlefield was chaos given form—yet to Leo, it arrived in silence.
Gods roared as mountains split beneath their footsteps; demons unspooled shadows that devoured entire cities; humans marched with trembling defiance, their armor cracked but their spirits unyielding. And then, further still, there were entities that could not be named in any tongue, older than even the pantheon, crawling out of the folds of forgotten realities.
To any mortal eye, this war was apocalypse incarnate, the undoing of the last threads binding existence. To Leo, floating above it all, jaw slightly parted, eyes glazed in a half-dream, the spectacle unfolded as though slowed to an eternal crawl.
Time fractured.Every clash of blade against bone, every scream of a soul torn apart, every divine hymn hurled across the void—all of it became elongated into echoes that barely reached him. The war had become a theater submerged underwater.
Leo drifted, body suspended, unclaimed by gravity. He did not fall, nor did he ascend. He merely existed, untethered, as if the universe itself could not decide whether to reject or embrace him.
At first, he was in orbit above Earth. The planet below was no longer blue; it bled crimson clouds, oceans boiling into ash. Yet the armies still fought, ants locked in eternal struggle, oblivious to the collapse of their world. Leo turned slowly, as if a lazy thought had guided his motion, and suddenly he was elsewhere—
A desert of the afterlife stretched beneath him, filled with pilgrims of the dead. Souls in millions walked in circles, never reaching their destination, their faces blurred like smudged paint. Their wails rose in unison but never reached crescendo; the sound stretched and cracked, a broken record in the void.
Leo blinked.Now he floated through corridors that should not exist—walls yellowed with mold, endless fluorescent lights flickering with a rhythm too slow to be natural. The air reeked of damp paper, of things forgotten. He named it in his mind, not The Backrooms, but The Endless Corridors—a labyrinth built from the discarded architecture of abandoned realities. Here, too, figures fought: not demons, not gods, but things stitched from shadows and memory, their limbs too long, their heads too narrow. The sight should have horrified him. Instead, Leo only parted his lips further, an absent exhale leaving him as though he were sighing at the inevitability of it all.
Everywhere he went, the war followed him.Everywhere he drifted, slaughter reappeared, reshaped, redefined.
And yet—it all remained so slow.
Leo's thoughts began to split. His mind was no longer a single voice but a parliament of whispers arguing in the caverns of his skull.
"Why do they fight?" one voice murmured."Because they must," another replied."But mustness is meaningless in the end. All collapse. All rot. All silence.""Then why do you watch?""Because watching is the only act left."
His body spun slowly, end over end, until the battlefield beneath became abstract lines of color, smears of red, gold, black, and white. From this vantage, gods and demons lost their forms; humans and nameless entities were only brushstrokes on a vast unfinished painting.
Was this war a creation or a destruction? He could not tell. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.
For a moment, Leo blinked and saw again the Earth's cities, but they were hollow. Towers stretched upward like fingers grasping at nothing. Streets were empty, battles frozen mid-motion: a soldier eternally raising his spear, a demon's claw forever hovering above its victim. Time had not slowed here—it had stopped.
Leo drifted between them, the only moving thing, weaving among statues of chaos. His fingers brushed against a god's blade frozen mid-arc, and it dissolved into ash at his touch. He did not feel powerful. He did not feel chosen. He felt like a ghost whose breath was enough to crumble history.
The whispers in his head grew louder. They were no longer distinct voices but a tide of echoes. He could no longer tell which were his own thoughts and which belonged to the battlefield itself, leaking into him.
"You are not a man.""You are not a god.""You are not a demon.""You are the pause between them all."
The words repeated until they lost sense, until they became like the flicker of the Endless Corridor's lights—background, inevitable, eternal.
Leo let his arms fall outward. His body no longer obeyed laws of space. With one breath he floated in the void between galaxies, stars dimming like dying embers; with the next, he hovered above a pit where titans strangled each other, their veins sprouting rivers across mountains. Each place bled into the next, indistinguishable, inseparable.
It was all war.It was all death.It was all meaningless.
And yet, Leo remained.
At last, the background shifted to pure black. No stars, no planets, no souls. A void so complete it erased even the memory of color. Here, time had no pulse. Here, sound was a lie. Here, there was only him.
Leo's lips trembled as he finally spoke aloud, voice breaking against the endless hush.
"I am… floating."
His words vanished as soon as they were born.No echo, no reply, no witness.
He let his mouth remain open, his breath ragged.
"I am nothing, watching nothing. Yet still I watch. Why?"
No answer came.There never would be.
And so Leo continued to drift, eyes half-closed, caught between wakefulness and dream, a being untethered to either side of existence. The battlefield still raged somewhere beyond, but he no longer sought it. He had found something colder, quieter, darker than war:
The stillness between all wars.