"I don't like the atmosphere out there." The being firmly grasped Nulls's forearm. With one step, the barren plain vanished, replaced by the garden's oppressive perfume. He let go. A perfect imprint of his fingers, glowing with a faint, sullen energy, was etched into Nulls's skin. "Much better."
Nulls's gaze went to the eastern wall. Where the gate had been, a wound remained. Not just burned earth, but a void, a patch of non-existence that drank the light around it. Nulls's attention moved onto the Almighty.
The Almighty let out a breath. It was not a sigh of weariness, but a sound of erasure. Where the void had been, a new patch of grass grew, seamless and perfect. A bed of flowers bloomed instantly. One side was a cluster of orchids as blue as the ocean, beside them was a clump of roses as crimson as the blood coursing through one's veins.
The Almighty knelt. With one hand, he plucked a blue orchid. He held it to the light, then tore a single petal. It dissolved into motes of light. He nodded, a sculptor approving a single, minute stroke.
With the other hand, he plucked a red rose. He frowned. The air around the flower chilled. Thorns erupted along its stem, each one swelling with a cyst of venom that shimmered with malevolence. A permanent warning, etched in poison.
The Almighty turned, letting go of both the flowers; two beds of flowers materialized as the flowers fell to the garden, each filled with its respective flower.
His focus fell upon the Tree. It was a pillar of creation so vast its branches penetrated through the foundations of different realities. To any other being, it was the universe. To Him, it was a single thought, a concept He could erase with another.
He walked toward it, and the tree, in all its impossible scale, seemed to shrink in His presence, not in power, but in pretension, like a soldier standing at attention before his king.
Nulls saw that The being beside him went rigid. A low frequency hummed in the air. The veins in his eyes bulged, coursing not with blood, but with a stream of black liquid. The veins in his eyes were torn open, letting the black goo trickle down from his face.
Upon contact with the ground, the liquid left a mark, the mark it left was the same as the void earlier. His eyes were liquified, but he forced them to regenerate; the liquifying and regeneration were forced into a stalemate, leaving both of his eyes in a state of being a liquid and a solid simultaneously.
The path that the previous liquid travelled in was covered in blisters, some even went as far as penetrating through the flesh, through the wounds his silvery-white bone was visible, melting slightly. He forced it to regenerate. All of the damage previously caused by his "Tears" was gone in an instant.
A laugh bubbled in Nulls's throat, a harsh sound. It fought with a wave of biological reaction from his vessel. He was horrified. He was amused. The contradiction was the most interesting thing he'd felt in eternities.
By now, he has seen everything that can happen in this creation: a parasite that can make gods blaze, knowledge that can undo the cosmos, and a torture method so horrifying that it was considered a mercy when thrown into Tartarus.
But this was something else for his vessel, for the first time since eternities ago, Nulls experienced an emotion other than emptiness. And it wasn't pleasant, for him or his vessel. But Nulls can't help but laugh at the thought of him selling the being's bone to a fellow Theos.
The being's silvery-white bone gleamed through the weeping flesh. Nulls's mind, a calculator of cold utility, immediately assessed its composition, density, potential energy output.
In the Theosian markets, I could have traded a sliver of this for a mid-tier god. Four, perhaps five, for the whole skeleton. What would that be worth here? A kingdom? A pantheon? The sheer, degrading absurdity of it was the first thing that felt like home since his rebirth.
The being grabbed Nulls's shoulder and dug its pointy fingers into it stopping when it hit the bone. Blood trickling down Nulls's shoulder, red and thick. Nulls's shoulders stayed relaxed, his facial expression didn't change one bit. With his free arm, the being points a finger at the Almighty. Nulls redirected his focus on the Almighty again.
The Almighty reached the book. His fingers brushed the chains, and they shattered into golden dust. The tree itself let out a silent scream that vibrated in Nulls's teeth. Visible marks were left on the tree's roots.
"No one will hurt you again," the Almighty said. A stream of liquid light, thicker and brighter than the fruit's sap, flowed from his fingertips, healing the scars on the roots. "No one is capable of it."
His hands closed around the book. It fluxed, a being of impossible beauty, a serpent of primordial scale, and finally, a human form of perfect, androgynous features. It was a conscious, geometric shape pretending to be mortal.
As Yog's glacier eyes were brought to life, they were immediately harassed by the light of the garden's sun. He got up from his lying position and, standing as tall as the Almighty, as he took his first breath, a burst of air swept in between his white wool-like hair. He was created only tens of seconds ago, but his memories are filled with the prior events, from the creation of this universe until now.
"Yog-Sothoth." The voice was the sound of a universe being sentenced. "For the corruption your existence has sown, you will walk the dust of the earth for as long as the children of Adam draw breath. Only when the last of their line returns to the soil will you be permitted to look upon my garden again."
The form pulsed with a cold light. "I am to atone? They read the words. They broke the command. I am merely a tool. Shall the sword be jailed for the murderer's stroke?"
Yog said, clutching his hands into a fist, his knuckles became white, and the same black goo trickled from his palm from the wound his nails made in his palm, the blood softly trickled onto the ground. It didn't melt. Not yet.
"The tool that tempts the hand is guilty. Your very nature is the sin." The Almighty responded, pointing his index finger at Yog, not to blame but to shame him for what he had not done.
"Your logic sickens me." The voice was the sound of grinding tectonic plates. "You, who see all threads of time, could not stop two vermin from reading your book? You set the trap and punish the bait." Yog grabbed nearby rocks, it was sharp enough to kill a human, but him?
Yog charged full speed at the Almighty, the speed was comparable, if not greater than that of the angel, at a time shorter than an instant. He was in front of the Almighty, and he swung the rock as hard as he could at his face. A perfect hemisphere of Aetheric energy formed around the Almighty.
Nulls looked at Yog beside him, his body and face returned to normal, he retracted his fingers from Nulls's shoulder, and it regenerated as fast as he retracted his fingers. Yog walked into the Almighty, and the young version of him was standing beside his young version. Nulls followed Yog standing beside him.
The Almighty did not speak. He lifted a single finger. An immense force was focused on Yog's body; The focused might of heaven's legion, a force that could unspin galaxies, slammed into a single point on Yog's chest. The garden shrieked, not unmade, but disturbed by the concentration of its own defensive power.
Unable to deflect the attack, Yog's body was thrown out of the realm of heaven. The space that his body occupies worked together to reject him, increasing his fall speed even further.
Thus began the fall.
Yog beside Nulls let out a simple chant. "Witness." The word was not a sound but a law. Reality rewrote itself, tethering their perception to the trajectory of his younger self's body, an unbreakable anchor in the river of time.
They float beside the young Yog's body, following him no matter how fast his speed is. Yog sits beside Nulls, crossing his leg as he does so. Although there was nothing to sit on, the effect of his previous chant made it possible. "Your body would rot by the time I penetrated the first realm, " Yog raised his arm into snapping position.
"Allow me to help." A blinding light comes from his fingers, and they were beside the young Yog's body a century later. The young yog's body can be seen smashed through the crystalline spheres of the omnigenesis realm. The lights from the barrier became distorted but were shortly rebalanced. A gods tried to stop his fall but a hole tore through its hand.
One of the goddesses tried sooting an arrow on him, hoping that it could stops his falls or atleast slows it down. The goddess unleashed the arrow, it illuminated the entire realm, even reaching the surface of the garden. Nulls raised his hands preparing for the collision.
The arrow phases throught Nulls and Yog leaving them unharm, the arrow continues its trajectory to the body of young Yog's body. The arrow, upon contact, released an energy equivalent to countless supernovae.
The shockwave traveled throught the spaces between galaxies, traversing the vast distance within seconds, destroying anything that comes in contact with it: galaxies, stars, even cluster of them were wiped from history, as if they were never existed.
To the gods surprise, it didn't even left a single mark on the book, and his speed was reduced by a quantum fraction, a change so small only the Almighty could measure it. The gods gather their own legion, commanding them to slows down Yog. Their mage's spell was broken down in an instant. The sheer speed of Yog making casting spell on him nigh-impossible.
Out of millions spells that were chant on Yog, only a thousands succesfully landed, and only ten make an impact on him, and only one does the most impact. Half what the arrow did.
From the young Yog mouth one word can be heard. "Thank you."
Nulls looked at the Yog standing beside him, his face is akin to that of a child dissapointed of his own father. Yog's hand grabbed Nulls's shoulder while still maintaining his gaze at his younger self.
He curled every fingers of his free hand except his index, with it he drew sigils in the air, leaving a liquid made out of constelation as his fingers traced the sigils. With a snap a similar blinding light was expelled from his finger.
Nulls awoke five centuries later, at this time the realms Yog reach were darker, denser, and more dangerous than before, predator from a higher dimension can strike at any moment.
Young Yog still flew, his speed undiminished. Then, an idea, a spark in the void. If the Almighty had cursed him with knowledge, he would weaponize it.
"Cease momentum. Dismantle velocity." It was the only echoes in the infinite void of the realm. He slowed down by a small margin, it was smaller than the laws of physics fragileness. It was small, but at least it slows him down.
The edges of Yog's mouth curled up, for the first time in centuries, he finally felt something other than hatred. An amalgamation of a higher dimensional monster opened its mouth to swallows Yog, an inviting lights were illuminating from it. Its size were greater than the previous realms entire diameter.
The roof the of creature's mouth were penetrated, a mouth that can devour galaxies were torn by him. It lets out a horrifying screech, one that can be heard throught the entire realm.
A swarm of eldritch abominations, each a different geometry of madness, converged. A tentacle, covered in screaming mouths, lashed not at the younger Yog, but through the space where Nulls and the older Yog floated. Yog yanked Nulls backward. "They cannot see us," he hissed, "but they feel the wake of our passage. We are a ghost in their current, and they are hungry."
Each a different dimensionality but aware of eachother, they fights eachother for the right to devour yog, one of the eldritch creature tried to catch Yog's body with its tentacle. They were vaporized within an instant, the other abomination tries to do the same this time they use their hands, the result was the same.
The older Yog watched the creatures tear at each other, a faint, nostalgic smile on his lips. "They tried so hard," he mused, as a fractal beast with a galaxy for a heart passed through his torso like smoke. "They could taste the power, but they could never catch the source. It was... amusing."
A tentacle, slick with a fluid that wept miniature black holes, lashed out. It passed through Nulls's torso. For a nanosecond, he felt the phantom gravitational pull of a thousand singularities before his mind canceled the sensation as impossible feeling.
The older Yog watched, amused. "Look at them," he said, as a being composed of shifting geometric proofs tried to solve Yog's body as an equation and short-circuited into a shower of burning symbols. "So hungry. They can taste the power I carried, a morsel from the Garden itself. It drives them insane."
Another abomination, a thing of inverted physics that cast shadows of light, opened a mouth that was a gateway to a negative dimension. It tried to swallow the younger Yog whole. For a moment, the younger Yog vanished into its throat, and Nulls saw a universe where time flowed backwards inside the creature's gullet. Then, the younger Yog tore out through its spine, the creature dissolving into a cloud of paradoxical dust.
"The strong prey on the weak," Yog continued, as a fractal spider the size of a galaxy tried to ensnare the younger Yog in a web of causality. Each strand was a timeline, and the spider was trying to prune the one where Yog survived. The younger Yog's mere passage snapped the threads, unraveling potential futures like old string. "But here, everything is weak compared to what we fled."
The swarm intensified. They were no longer just attacking the younger Yog; they were attacking the space he occupied. Reality itself began to fray. The void around them shimmered with colors that didn't exist, and the sound of a billion minds shattering into gibbering nonsense was a constant, silent pressure in their intangible state.
One of the abominations, a towering idol of writhing, worm-like appendages, fixed the spot where the older Yog and Nulls floated. It had no eyes, but it perceived the disturbance their passage left in the metaphysical wake of the younger Yog. It let out a psychic shriek that turned the void around them into solid terror.
It passed through them.
The abomination froze, its form shuddering in confusion. It scanned the void, trying to find the ghost it had just felt. It lashed out again, its limbs phasing through the older Yog's face. Yog didn't even blink.
"You see?" the older Yog said, his voice almost a whisper. "You can be the most terrifying thing in all of creation. You can be hunger incarnate. But you cannot catch a memory. You cannot hurt a ghost."
Frustrated, the abomination turned its rage on a nearby competitor, and the two horrors began to tear each other apart in a spectacle of gore and unreal geometry.
"Weird," Nulls muttered. "The internal dimensionality is non-Euclidean, yet the external is hyperbolic."
Yog didn't hear him. His eyes were wide, fixed on the memory of his own body contorting against geometries that should not exist.
Nulls glanced at him, then back at the carnage. He understood, intellectually, that this was a trauma. But to his senses, honed on the screams of dying multiverses and the silent death of absolute zero, this was a minor phenomenon. It was the cosmic equivalent of a mildly interesting stain on the wallpaper.
For Yog, it was the scar that never faded. For Nulls, it was Tuesday. "The memory must be overloading your body's primitive neurons, let me help."
Yog drew the same sigils in the air.
Nulls was once again awaken three centuries later. A star cluster bloomed before them, a nebula of brilliant pinks and blues. Yog tore through its heart. extinguishing a thousand suns in his wake, their light dying in the vacuum of his speed. "Stop. Stop. STOP." The young yog's spells were becoming prayers. He was now slowing by a mountain.
Nulls awoke a century later. A hair-thin, perfectly straight line of nothingness was etched across Nulls's chest. It didn't bleed; it was a void, a miniature replica of the wound left by the being's tears. It stung with the cold of non-existence before his vessel's regeneration forcefully stitched reality back together.
He looked at Yog, who sat cross-legged, a fresh, hair-thin scar visible on his own cheek. "Spatial shear from a realm boundary," Yog said, not opening his eyes. "It gets worse the deeper we fall."
"younger me chant the spell non-stop for a century," Yog said, his voice as slightly interrupted by the sheer speed. "it should be reduced to infinitesimal fraction of the initial velocity." He said, whispering something within his breath, Nulls doesn't know what he said but he particularly hearing the word "Force of impact."
"It shouldn't be capable of shattering a planet," Yog muttered, placing his hand below his younger self's head. "at least not with a single touch." Yog smirked to himself, letting out a small chuckle as he does so.
Yog drew the same sigils in the air. Half way he was interrupted by Nulls. "You gonna do that again didn't you?" Nulls muttered. "Yes." Yog responded.
Nulls awoke in a green planets filled with living creature. Green stretch as far as their eyes can see. Herbivore eating grass in the distance, an enourmous fourth legged insectoid creature, observing the herbivores from afar, the creature steps into the daylight revealing its armored exoskeletons and sharp mandibles, the creature leaped onto the prey, traversing the great distance in a short time.
It became tearing the flesh and eating the herbivore's bone, the creature as well as the herbivores all looked up into the sky, a ball of flame illuminated the land below in blinding red light. Nulls and Yog looked into it too.
"My second sin." Yog uttered, before the vibration of the air travelled into Nulls air, it was intercepted by the sound of the impact.
The impact released millions times more energy than the total energy that the planet has received from its lifetime. The blast wave incinerated everything within millions of miles. The superheated winds shredded every vegetation on the surface of the planet.
A powerful shockwave generated from the impact radiated across the globe, generating hypersonic winds that leveled forests and other obstacles on every continent of the planet.
With the last of his strength, Yog did not reach out to save the world. He drew in. A colossal, dark hemisphere of Aetheric energy erupted around the crater of his landing, sealing him within.
"I'm sorry." Yog weakly muttered, curling himself into a fetal position. It was not a shield to protect the world from the aftermath, but a wall to protect the world from him. The dying screams of the planet were cut off from entering his ears.
The dome snapped shut, plunging the younger Yog into silent, self-imposed exile. In the sudden quiet of the memory, the older Yog turned to Nulls. His eyes were ancient, holding the weight of the eons of hatred that were about to unfold. "This," he said, his voice the first sound in the new silence, "was just the beginning."