The silence was not silence.It was something far older, far denser, far more suffocating than the absence of sound. The void in which Leo floated was a graveyard of concepts, a realm that had already swallowed infinity, already consumed cosmology itself, already reduced multiverses, outverses, and omniverses to static ashes of irrelevance. It was the Blank Expanse, though that word, too, was insufficient. To name it was to give it a contour, a shape, a comprehension, and this place existed precisely because such things had been extinguished.
Yet, within this all-consuming nothingness, there was Him.The so-called God—a figure shimmering with afterlight, that paradoxical radiance which burned without flame, glowed without color, and seared without heat. His mere presence forced the void to betray itself, bleeding pale light into the canvas of blackness, painting it into a new form of existence. The void, under His touch, transmuted into a Pristine White Plain, a surface without surface, stretching endlessly, folding upon itself, an eternal floor and ceiling both. This place had no history, but as soon as His radiance struck it, history pretended to exist here, retroactively claiming that it had always been.
He whispered, voice echoing across the marrow of reality:
"This is Aeternum Alba—the White Everlasting. A prison for you, Leo. A test for your futility."
The words were not sound. They were laws, crystallized commandments etched across the very atoms of what little still endured. Every syllable added weight to Leo's body, chains invisible but undeniable, binding him in layers of spiritual suffocation.
Leo, however, did not collapse. His breathing was ragged, his face cracked with light leaking through the fissures of his skin. He was wounded, broken, his body fracturing as though he was only glass trying to contain the supernova that was his soul. Yet his eyes—those emerald eyes—remained unwavering, glaring not at the deity's brilliance but through it, to something beyond.
And then, suddenly, the void responded.
From the god's outstretched hand, a torrent of Afterlight burst forth. This was no mere beam or spear. It was a storm of annihilation, a cascade of paradoxical brilliance that erased without destroying, burned without heat, dissolved without remainder. The Afterlight cut across the White Everlasting, devouring every phantom law that dared to pretend it could anchor this space.
The storm condensed into a single phenomenon: The Abstraktum Primordialis.It was a horror of geometry and anti-geometry, shapes folding within themselves beyond any dimensional reading, collapsing hierarchies of universes, verses, metaverses, and trans-cosmologies into an indecipherable blur. Numbers—Alpha, Omega, Beta, Epsilon, roots of mathematics itself—were undone. Equations lost meaning. Constants that had once governed probability and time fell silent, drowned in this single construct. It was not a weapon. It was the act of re-writing Existence into Unexistence.
The god's voice followed, a command as heavy as silence:
"Fade. For even before Infinity, I Am."
Leo staggered, weight dragging him down as chains burst into being. They did not merely coil around him; they originated from him, as if his very body was birthing his own prison. They were shimmering, white-silver strands, runes inscribed along them in a language that no creation could ever invent.
The god named them with quiet finality:
"These are the Catenæ Dei Origo—the Chains of Origin. They bind all who oppose Me, for they are born of My first thought."
As the chains coiled tighter, Leo's body cracked further. From beneath his flesh, fissures of luminous emerald light bled out, painting him like a shattered star trying to hold form. His chest heaved, lungs tearing against the weight. He was not merely imprisoned; he was becoming the prison.
And yet, he did not yield.
Leo tilted his head forward. His forehead slammed into the deity's chest. It was not an elegant strike. It was raw, primal, almost animalistic. But it carried with it a force that even the god did not anticipate—a collision not of strength, but of defiance so absolute it disrupted the very presumption of inevitability.
The deity staggered. For the first time, He moved backwards. His expression—calm, immutable, eternal—wavered. Surprise.
It was in that fracture of expectation that Leo's body, though cracking apart, glowed brighter. His retaken breath came out like thunder in a room that should not allow sound.
The god's lips curled, for the first time, into something resembling unease. He raised His hand again.
Another Afterlight emerged, this one sharper, purer, a ray of obliteration so intense it stripped the idea of mathematics itself. This was the Arithmetica Nihil Absoluta—the Afterlight that unmade Alpha, Omega, Beta, Pi, Zero, Infinity. Numbers, sequences, and patterns simply ceased as the light spread. Where once there was measure, now there was unmeasure.
The beam struck Leo.
His body convulsed. His skin shattered further, the cracks spiderwebbing across his frame until he looked less like flesh and more like a vessel of broken crystal. The Chains of Origin coiled tighter, embedding themselves into his core, attempting to extinguish whatever spark dared to remain.
And yet—
The god's eyes widened.
The cracks in Leo's body were not spreading death. They were leaking resistance. The emerald light spilling from him was not dissipating into the void, but pushing back against it. Each fracture became a window into a will that could not be quantified, a defiance beyond definition.
Leo roared, not in language but in refusal. His hands seized the Chains of Origin. The very chains meant to subdue him. His fingers dug into their radiant texture, and though they burned with uncreation, though they were forged from the First Thought itself, Leo tore.
The sound—if it could be called sound—was unbearable. The White Everlasting trembled. The god Himself flinched.
The chains began to crack.
The deity's calm visage fractured. His voice bellowed:
"Impossible. You cannot touch them. They are the Origin. They are Mine!"
But Leo did not stop. His hands bled light. His body was shattering. Yet his roar, guttural and raw, carved into the emptiness. With one last surge, he ripped the chains apart.
And then, with the same defiance, Leo coiled the shattered fragments of those chains around his fists. They were no longer the god's chains. They were his weapons.
The void itself seemed to recoil.
Leo's emerald light flared brighter than the Afterlight. His broken body floated, not with grace, but with inevitability, a refusal incarnate. His fists, wrapped in the very essence of Origin, pointed at the god.
And then—
He struck.
Two fists, both wielding the desecrated remnants of divine authority, launched forward. The god's light braced, Afterlight expanding, Abstraktum twisting, mathematics screaming as it died. Yet Leo's fists broke through, carving paths across the god's radiance, splitting apart the illusions of omnipotence, defiling the White Everlasting itself.
For the first time, the god was forced back not by anomaly, not by paradox, but by another will.
The battle of light against light became unbearable. White seared against emerald, Afterlight clashed against Defiance, and the very skeleton of existence—what was left of it—shivered under the collision.
And in that moment, just as Leo's fists touched the god's chest again, the chapter froze—
To Be Continued.