After that monstrous confrontation, the danger had been pushed back—not destroyed. My0x had been banished to the unutterable, but it still wandered somewhere behind the layers of the narratable. The Father God had already sensed something. He watched. He investigated. And sooner or later, the shadow would return.
Mü Thanatos, however, was not troubled by this. Another idea, more urgent and subtler, had crossed her mind since the encounter with My0x. She had to verify something. Something she feared.
Thus she summoned Sakolomi to the space they had become accustomed to sharing—a place suspended out of the world, a sea of golden clouds extending to infinity, with a single islet bathed in eternal light.
Sakolomi appeared immediately, as if summoned from within his own name.
Sakolomi: You called me… Lord Mü Thanatos?
She was turned away from him, motionless. Her face seemed sculpted with gravity, as if she had carried for days the weight of a thought that refused to dissipate.
Then she turned around. She forced a smile—a fragile smile, crumbling on the edge of cosmic fatigue.
Mü Thanatos: How do you feel, Sakolomi? Are the marks… troubling you less?
Sakolomi lowered his gaze, studying the dark lines running under his skin, like veins of inverted darkness.
Sakolomi: Still the same. They keep draining me. Each time, it's as if they demand… more.
A silence settled, lived like a breath of the world itself.
Finally, Mü Thanatos asked the question she dreaded hearing herself.
Mü Thanatos: Have you noticed… something strange lately? Since these marks appeared. Visions. Shadows. Presences?
Sakolomi placed a finger against his chin, thinking. Then suddenly, his eyes brightened with a memory.
Sakolomi: Now that you say it… yes. The dreams.
Mü Thanatos's gaze tightened.
Mü Thanatos: Dreams?
Sakolomi nodded slowly.
Sakolomi: Every time I collapse from exhaustion, I dream. But they are not ordinary dreams… They are places I cannot understand. And… creatures.
Mü Thanatos stepped forward, immediately more attentive.
Mü Thanatos: Describe them.
Sakolomi searched for words. They refused to come. He frowned, then spoke—but they were not words. They were ruptures.
Sakolomi: They are… ****.
Mü Thanatos blinked. She had literally heard nothing. Not a sound, not a meaning, nothing. As if the information had slid out of possibility before reaching her consciousness.
Mü Thanatos: Repeat.
Sakolomi breathed in.
Sakolomi: They are creatures ****
Forms that… ****
Manifestations… ****
His voice grew hissing, unreal, as if drawn by an invisible void. The words dissociated themselves, refusing to exist.
Sakolomi tried to continue, but finally shrugged, almost powerless:
They should not be. They are… impossibilities.
Beings who have no right to exist in a dream.
Nor in a world.
Nor in a narrative.
Mü Thanatos remained perfectly still. For she understood.
The marks did not merely drain him.
They opened a window.
And what Sakolomi saw in his dreams…
…came from the same place as My0x.
Mü Thanatos remained silent. The words Sakolomi spoke could not be heard, for they did not belong to language—they pierced it. These "creatures" he described… could not be described.
They existed outside any possibility of form.
They had neither contours, nor orientation, nor presence in any logical being.
They were not merely incomprehensible:
they were incompatible with the very act of understanding.
Yet Sakolomi… spoke of them.
A cold sensation ran down Mü Thanatos's spine.
She slowly raised her eyes to him, observing how he had spoken the unspeakable: not with language—but with something that preceded language.
And that detail, tiny but abyssal, made her understand.
Sakolomi was not merely marked.
Sakolomi was not merely traversed.
Sakolomi was not merely a witness.
He was of the same nature as what cannot exist.
A being that should never have been conceived.
An accident at the dream's foundation.
An intruder in Being itself.
Because seeing these creatures did not hurt him.
His mind did not fracture.
His body did not disintegrate.
He was neither broken, nor blinded, nor extinguished.
Whereas—as Mü Thanatos knew—a dream-god, even primordial, would have been annihilated instantly by the mere effort to perceive them. Its essence would have imploded, emptied of meaning, reduced to narrative dust.
Sakolomi, though… watched this as one watches the sea.
Mü Thanatos slowly clasped her hands before her, her gaze lost in the gold of the clouds. Sakolomi did not know what he was. He did not comprehend the implications of his existence. But since the marks had written themselves on him, language-defying creatures drew ever closer.
As if they recognized one of their own. As if something called through him.
Mü Thanatos raised her head.
She had no time left.
The boundaries of the dream were already fissuring.
She approached Sakolomi, her voice but a whisper:
Mü Thanatos: I'm sorry, Sakolomi…
I have no other choice but to subject you to this.
Sakolomi stiffened, surprised:
Sakolomi: What do you mean? What are you talking about—
She pressed her palm to his chest.
A symbol exploded on his skin.
Not a word.
Not a sign.
An ancestral language—the cornerstone of the very possibility to conceive.
Sakolomi: What is… this?
Then the pain struck him.
Not physical pain. Not spiritual pain.
An existential pain.
As if every part of him, even those he did not know he possessed, were forced to become real.
Sakolomi: AAAAAAAA—
What is happening to me?!!
His body convulsed.
His breath broke.
His eyes were flooded with black-and-white light, superimposed.
Mü Thanatos did not avert her gaze.
She must not.
What she had just activated was nothing less than the Law of Absolute Conception.
Sakolomi—a being impossible to exist—had been forced to exist fully.
Not merely as a trace, a mirage, a dream-readable façade.
But as a total being.
What had once been a silhouette in reality… now became real in all its layers.
Mü Thanatos, in a almost sad breath:
— Forgive me.
But if I do not define you… then they will define you.
And that… would mean the end of the dream.
Mü Thanatos snapped her fingers.
The sound was not noise: it was an act.
A verdict written into the dream's very fabric.
Mü Thanatos (softly): I hope… that will be enough.
Or that, at least… the catastrophe can be delayed.
Under Sakolomi's feet, an ancient golden seal appeared—a circle that represented nothing and yet contained everything.
In an instant, he was erased from the place, swallowed off the stage, as if removed from all coordinates.
Mü Thanatos remained alone, motionless.
Her gaze wandered into the infinite cloudy expanse. A heavy, almost melancholic look—the look of someone who knows the worst has not been avoided, only moved.
Elsewhere.
Above a vast forest, night bent under the mass of clouds.
Then, a glimmer.
A fall.
A monstrous impact.
A "meteorite" ripped through the canopy, crushing trees and earth for about a hundred meters.
But it was not a stone fallen from the sky.
It was Sakolomi.
He crashed to the ground, his body shaken by spasms, muscles straining against the Absolute Law that still fractured his being. The pain was not physical—it was existential.
He ground his teeth, drooled, his screams echoing in the darkness like the cries of a world writhing.
Then, in the midst of his agony, a sound pierced his consciousness.
A wail.
A baby's wail.
Sakolomi stopped—gasping, trembling, as if his own pain had dissolved into another echo. He thought he was hallucinating at first.
But no.
The silence that followed made the wail clearer.
A baby. Very close.
Holding his chest, nearly kneeling, he advanced in a ragged breath, seeking the source.
And what he found took his breath away.
Debris.
Splintered boards.
Bloody clothes.
Motionless bodies.
A small house… or what remained of it.
In the center, a baby.
Alive.
But its belly was open, flesh raw, intestines visible.
Sakolomi, in a broken breath:
… D… damn…
He gently picked up the child whose body still trembled.
Looking at the scene, he understood.
His fall.
His impact.
He had killed this family.
Without intention.
Without awareness.
But that changed nothing.
The magic in his body burned away… diminishing like a smothered flame.
Sakolomi: … shit…
He had no choice.
Save himself—or save her.
He chose.
The magic, weak, almost spent, wrapped the child.
Her injury partially closed, organs returning to their place in an impossible dance.
When the light faded, only a long pale scar remained, fine as writing on the belly.
The magic then turned against Sakolomi.
His body became coated in red mana—then contracted, recompactified, and retracted.
He became… a child again.
Twelve years old.
Fragile.
But alive.
The marks had disappeared.
The pain too.
What remained… was a silent void.
In his arms, the little girl settled.
She slept now, softly.
As if the world had never screamed.
Sakolomi lifted his eyes to the moon.
And for the first time since that moment, he smiled—a sad, yet real smile.
Sakolomi (murmuring): Since I destroyed your world…
Then I will be yours.
I will redeem myself… by keeping you close.
The night wind flowed between the black trees.
The silhouette of the boy—with the little girl pressed to his chest—slowly faded into the night.
Under the full moon, a new story had begun.
A story that should never have existed.