The void whispered again, but this time it was not the same whisper Leo had grown used to. It was fractured, fragmented, an echo that bled into every fragment of reality he had brushed against so far. For a long moment, he only stared forward, his breath heavy though the emptiness gave him no air to breathe. His body was steady, unmoving, yet his mind trembled with each pulse of the abyss that surrounded him.
He saw it—an ocean of narratives. Stories. Names. Endless names that bled through the cracks of nothingness. They did not align, did not connect. They clashed, they disassembled, they warped into one another and then tore themselves apart. What he was perceiving was not creation, not destruction either, but something that was wrong—utterly wrong. These names were alive, yet dead. They meant everything, yet nothing. Each one sang a tone of a forgotten god, or a sealed creature, or a power too large to be confined. And Leo could see them, but not hold them.
Then, it happened. The words before him, the tapestry of this infinite catalogue, began to distort. They bled red, like broken code on parchment, letters collapsing on themselves, shapes screaming against logic.
ERROR.
The void itself declared it. And Leo's chest tightened, the sensation not of fear but of something more visceral—like reality itself was cutting away its ability to comprehend him.
"Error…" he muttered, his voice dry, unsteady. "This story… is not tethered. These names… they do not belong here."
He ran. His feet slammed into the groundless nothing, his motion like fire against a field of ashes. He sprinted as if to escape the corruption of the untethered story. He sprinted because if he stood still, perhaps the collapsing narrative would consume him. Faster, faster—his body became more blur than shape, his eyes burning with the need to move forward.
And then he struck it.
The impact wasn't physical. It wasn't a wall of stone or a curtain of light. It was a boundary that existed between existence and nothingness, a threshold carved not by gods but by what transcended even gods. The Boundary of Cosmology.
Leo staggered, his body nearly breaking apart from the sheer force of stopping. His vision cracked into prisms. He gasped, clutching his chest, trying to understand what he had hit. His eyes lifted—and there it was.
Beyond him lay a sight that shattered what little he understood:An infinite outside.
Cosmologies—plural, endless—each one shaped like vast structures of eternal will. They were not universes, nor multiverses, nor omniverses. They were entire conceptual realities, each ruled by laws that no other could comprehend. They stood apart, like endless towers rising from the same sea, never touching yet forever existing side by side.
Five of them Leo saw clearly before his vision blurred from the overload:
The Tower of Radiant Echoes, shimmering like a choir turned into structure, every hymn a reality unto itself.
The Abyss of Unwritten Verses, dark and liquid, swallowing even the idea of words that could describe it.
The Clockwork Eternity, where infinite gears turned with the rhythm of gods that never began and never ended.
The Sea of False Dawns, where every sunrise bled into another, and light never truly came.
The Crucible of Silence, where even thoughts went to die, leaving only raw being.
And beyond them? Beyond them there were more. Countless. Infinite. An expanse where cosmology was not one, but endless. Each one untouchable, incomprehensible.
Leo whispered their names until his voice grew hoarse, until his throat carried blood in its echoes. He counted them, called them, let them spill from his lips until his mind spun. And still, he knew—there were infinitely more.
The Narrator's voice broke through, calm yet hollow:
"There are countless cosmologies, Leo. Each one is an architecture of its own infinity, boundless in design, endless in execution. Yet none is supreme, none is final. They are separate infinities, a paradox of coexistence, all valid and invalid at once. What you see is only the surface. Beyond even this lies another truth—that Yahweh is not tethered, not imprisoned by any of these structures. He exists outside of cosmology, outside of narrative, outside even of himself. He is not character, not concept, not law. He is unbound. Forever unbound."
Leo trembled. His knees buckled, and he fell. His body drifted downward, but there was no floor, no ceiling, no gravity. He was simply falling.
Falling into emptiness.
And then… there was nothing.
The landscapes, the cosmologies, the vast truths beyond comprehension—all erased. His descent had brought him into a new domain. A hollow expanse where nothing dared exist. No color, no shape, no sound. Not even void. Just absence.
Leo floated alone. His breaths echoed in his own skull. His thoughts rang louder than the reality that no longer held him. He was the only fragment of existence permitted here, the last shadow of something among absolute nothing.
His eyes dimmed. His sword—long gone. His power—meaningless here. He became a man again, fragile, adrift in isolation.
He sat cross-legged in the absence. His hands rested upon his knees. And for the first time since this journey began, Leo did not fight, did not move, did not scream. He only thought.
His mind spiraled. About the infinite corridors. About the errors in the story. About the cosmologies he had glimpsed. About Yahweh, forever outside all things.
Was he still human? Was he still Leo? Or had the story already lost him too?
Silence answered.
He closed his eyes. The void embraced him. The emptiness pressed against him like a mother's hand against a fevered child, but here it was no warmth, only stillness. Only forgetting.
And Leo allowed himself to sink deeper into thought.
To be continued…