A lone citadel hung in the void, so far set apart that even the stars kept their distance. Each pillars rose from the darkness below and vanished into the void above.
In the great chamber carved from the beast of first days, men and monsters gripped their banners. Not a scrap of cloth dared stir under the gaze of the ever-present ruler.
Leaders of great clans stepped down from their high pedestals and stood among the rest as common men. One by one they dropped. Knees struck the cold floor. Horns met the ground. Wings rustled and folded tight against backs.
All gazes fixed on the lotus that anchored the realms, to the lone throne at its heart, where a white-haired figure sat with shadowed eyes and a stillness that held the hall in check.
"Praise to the Highest."
Radeon's next blink came heavy and slow, the old signal to attend. The murmur faded as men and women stilled on their knees until only silence remained. He turned his gaze to where no man had walked, to a distance no mind had ever managed to grasp.
Tribulation waited there once again.
Stilling his heart, he reached past stones and stars, seeking what men had no name to tell.
For a breath, he felt as if the grand trial had heard him. It hung there, a hand poised above the beyond.
Intuition hit Radeon like a panicked soldier hammering at the gates. Each stroke rang harder than the last.
The power from beyond rolled through him, found his flesh, and sank into his bones.
His skin crawled, and his heart lurched as the strange force took root inside him.
"This energy… Something's amiss."
He opened his eyes. Across the void, a hallowed realm he had once trusted above all others twisted in crooked light.
As the radiance spread and grew aware, ranks of fighters hurled their powers into it. The light washed over steel and skin without a sound.
"What. What's happening?"
"Scatter! Scat—"
Then their armor, flesh, and bone began to cling, bodies snapping together as if the forces within them weren't theirs at all.
Joints slipped from their sockets, skin puckered and folded before sliding away in strips, and ribs burst outward to stiffen into cages of crooked limbs.
Radeon found a boy on his knees in the red running across the stone. The child shook and squeezed his eyes shut while the sky tore itself open above him.
"Highest One… help."
His plea was not the only one that went unanswered.
"My son. Someone. Anyone," cried a father clinging to a warping corpse.
"Hold the line," rasped a captain, his voice already breaking.
The pleas of the masses battered Radeon, a storm of starving hands reaching for a harvest no emperor could summon.
With the end set, he burned the last of his will on one final act of rule.
Laws tore from his fingers, slashing the void as runes that called the fire of every living star.
Stolen light wrapped around him, raising his dharmic form. A vast back, a million hands reaching into every realm.
Worlds shuddered in his grasp as he ripped them out of spacetime and hurled them into a dark no chart had ever named.
As the planes traversed the void, the ones who had never learned to bow to fear raised their voices.
"Highest One. Let us stand with you."
"Give us the fight!"
Their cries rose like spears toward him. Radeon did not turn. His hands stayed on the worlds, not on the brave fools still calling for one last stand at his side.
As the nothing beyond swallowed the last of the living, Radeon let every dharmic arm fall still.
In the hush that followed, he took his place across from the unholy scourge that had come from beyond the worlds.
"Now. You and I."
Radeon let go of caution. The quiet sea in his dantian heaved and broke, waves of power rising and smashing together.
Once golden incarnate morphed into something darker than black. His arms thickened, split, and opened into ranks of devouring maws.
The roots of matter and the spine of heaven tore loose and rushed to his innumerous mouths, pouring into him grain by burning grain.
Then he dragged in even the thinking blight that had crawled from beyond.
Inside him, his fused powers met the foreign will and fell on it, rending it apart in the dark.
He tried to bind the abhorrent inside his laws.
It did not shudder. It did not break.
His vast jaws curled. Mad grins lit the dark of his face.
His monstrous form began to fold. Teeth. Hands. Faces.
All of him twisted inward, tighter and tighter, until Radeon was no more than a single bead of light holding the foreign mind.
The bead clenched into a hard black seed.
Then Radeon let that singularity of a body fail.
Light and ruin rushed out in silence. A killing storm that tore through what was left of the universe until nothing remained.
Silence.
Emptiness.
Null.
Radeon was gone. In his place drifted a speck no larger than dust.
Thoughts tried to rise but fell apart, eaten by the dark before any of them could take a name.
At the edge of what remained of him, a soft promise waited.
"Rest. Stop. Let go."
It would have been easy. Yet his will refused to fold. What was left of his mind pushed back against the dark with a single word.
"Why?"
No answer came. Only time, flowing on, ages slipping past his speck until he hung there like a sentry with nothing to guard.
Then a jolt ran through his core. A touch he almost knew. It might have been the same lurking will that had moved against him when he still drew breath.
The tug grew sharper. Hidden currents bore him into a barrier that felt like a cosmos laid bare, familiar yet stripped and strange.
As he slipped through, a hard tremor ripped through what was left of him.
The thin thread of his mind flickered in and out for days, fraying at the edges until he felt a single breath away from slipping into nothing.
"Just. A little. More."
The pull slowed, then stopped.
A sputtering cough from a parched throat struck him.