The library was empty. The chairs were overturned, their cushions still warm from the bodies that had occupied them hours ago.
Books lay scattered across the floor where they had been dropped in haste, their pages open to passages that would never be finished.
A coffee cup sat on the circulation desk, its contents cold, a ring of brown staining the wood beneath it.
The humans had evacuated shortly after his sighting, had fled into the streets and the alleys and the roads that led away from the crimson figure on the smoky horse.
Nulls walked through the stacks, his claws trailing along the spines of books, reading titles that meant nothing to him.
He pulled volumes at random, scanned their contents, discarded them on the floor. Geography. History. Cartography.
The accumulated knowledge of a species that had mapped every corner of their world and still had not found a way to stop him.
He found what he needed in a reference section on the second floor, a book bound in leather that had cracked with age, its pages yellow and brittle.
The book contained maps, hundreds of them, each one more detailed than the last, and at the back of the volume, a single page that held the sum total of human understanding of their planet.
Diameter: 1.2528 × 10¹⁷ meters.
Nulls stared at the number, his four eyes tracing the digits, his mind converting the figure into something he could comprehend.
The Zamharir Depth, where he had been imprisoned, had felt vast and eternal, a prison at the bottom of an ocean that stretched forever.
Compared to the scale of this world, the Zamharir Depth was a puddle. The ocean that covered most of the planet was a bathtub. The continents that rose from the water were stepping stones in a garden that had no walls and no end.
Finding the Rapax Morsatra bases would be a pain in the ass.
He looked up at the wall behind the circulation desk. A huge map was hung there, its surface illuminated by the morning sun that streamed through the windows.
The light was bright, almost blinding, and the colors of the map were washed out, the lines faint, the text illegible. He squinted, his four eyes adjusting, and the map resolved itself into something he could read.
Seven continents. Seven seas, and... one country. The humans had united. Every nation, every tribe, every city-state and kingdom and republic that had ever existed on this world had merged into a single governing body.
One government, one currency, one military, one species, standing together against the threats that lurked in the dark.
He was impressed. His own species had taken eons to achieve the same unity, and at that time, they had been a Type Seven civilization, their power so vast that they could reshape creation with a thought.
The humans had done it with sticks and stones and words on paper. They had done it in millions of years, a blink of an eye in the lifespan of the universe.
They were not as barbaric as he had thought. The irony was not lost on him.
He walked outside, summoning Marky as he crossed the threshold, the horse forming beneath him in a swirl of smoke and decay.
The streets were empty, the buildings dark, the only sounds the whisper of the wind and the distant crash of waves against the shore.
He rode to the coast, past the abandoned stalls and the closed shutters and the doors that had been barred from the inside.
Faust waited for him in the water, its body a dark mountain against the blue of the sea. Regie floated beyond it, its thousand eyes closed, its beams dimmed.
Nulls unmanifested Marky and stood on the beach, the sand soft beneath his feet.
"We need to go to the Osiris desert," he said. "On the continent of Psamathe."
The serpent's eye opened and looked at him. Its head tilted, its jaws parted slightly, and a low sound emerged from its throat, a questioning rumble that vibrated through the sand and into his bones.
"Right, you do not know the names," Nulls said. "Only the landscapes."
Faust's eye blinked once, slowly.
"South," Nulls said. "We need to go south. I could use the Time Equation to teleport us all, but the cost would leave me drained, and I do not want to face what waits in the desert without my power."
The serpent's jaws opened wider, and Nulls leaped. His feet left the sand, the impact turning the beach to glass beneath him, and he landed inside Faust's mouth, on the tongue that had become as familiar as his own bed.
The warmth of the creature's flesh surrounded him, and the darkness closed in, and the jaws shut with a click that echoed through the chamber.
"South," he said again.
Faust turned, its body coiling, its tail pushing against the ocean floor, and the leviathan began to swim.
The force of its movement sent waves crashing against the shore, waves that swept over the abandoned city, that filled the streets and flooded the buildings, that turned the place where humans had lived and loved and died into an underwater graveyard.
There was no one to see the catastrophe. The city had been evacuated. The people had fled. And those who had not, those who had been too slow or too stubborn or too sick to leave, their souls had already departed for wherever souls went when bodies failed.
Nulls hoped it was not that place. He did not believe in that place, but he hoped, because the alternative was too cruel even for him.
The two remaining leviathans submerged, their bodies sinking beneath the waves, their forms becoming shadows in the deep.
Faust led the way, its massive body cutting through the water with a speed that belied its size, and Regie followed behind, its thousand eyes watching the darkness for threats that would not come.
Inside the serpent's mouth, Nulls sat with his back against its teeth, his four eyes closed, his mind wandering.
He missed Walpurgis. The tower had been his child, bound to him by sigils and memory, loyal in its own alien way. It had protected him, fought for him, died for him.
And now it was gone, consumed by a black hole that Aaliyah had summoned, its fused bodies scattered across the ocean floor, its thousand mouths silent forever.
He had not known, until now, how much a thing could be missed.
The darkness inside Faust's mouth was absolute, the only sounds the slow pulse of the serpent's heartbeat and the distant rush of water against its scales.
Nulls sat with his back against the creature's teeth, his four eyes closed, his mind drifting through memories that were not his and thoughts that belonged to someone else.
He could have an audience with Yog. The Codex would answer if he called. But after what Yog had seen in the depths of his soul, he did not know if the invitation would be welcome. Poor Yog. Having to witness what would make gods and mortals insane, and having no one to talk to about it afterward.
The truth was, he did not remember most of it. The memories prior to the end of everything he had been, were ash and fire. Foggy at best.
He remembered shapes, impressions, the taste of concepts that no longer existed. He remembered the face of his mother, maybe, or maybe he remembered a painting he had seen once, and the two had merged into something. That was neither true nor false.
He remembered swatting something that evening. He had not thought about it since. Now, with the itch in his brain finally scratched, he felt a small satisfaction. The answer had been there all along, waiting for him to ask the right question.
He was in denial about Walpurgis. He knew this. The ache in his chest when he thought of the tower, the way his claws curled into fists when he remembered the black hole consuming its bodies, the weight that settled in his stomach whenever he looked at the empty space where his child had been.
"Berkeley was right," he said.
The words ricocheted off the serpent's teeth, absorbed by the flesh of its throat, swallowed by the darkness.
Berkeley had argued that physical lifeforms were the only ones capable of feeling emotions.
That they would act as if their feelings were the most important things in the world, as if their desires drove the universe forward. They had given the disease a name. Desiderium. The longing for something lost.
Once, in the time before time, he had lowered himself into the physical plane. He had made himself a flesh vessel, had walked among the vermins, had lived as they lived and loved as they loved.
The flesh had corrupted him. The physicality of existence had seeped into his being like water through cracks in a dam. When one of the things he loved had died, he had felt something he had no name for.
Love was a trap for a higher physicalism beings like him. The state of existing as pure indescribable chaos unbound by flesh, was the natural condition of his species.
To attach oneself to something physical, to care about its existence or non-existence, was the greatest of sins.
All emotions could be traced back to animalistic instinct. The physical beings of this world could deny it, wrapping their feelings in poetry, philosophy and religion, but deep down, it was only evolution.
An adaptive mechanism to enhance survival and reproduction. Oh, how lecherous they were. How desperate to believe that their longing meant something, and that their love was eternal.
The Galos had been a real nuisance. One of the species he had consumed, back when consuming was what he did, back before the end of everything had changed everything.
He had blended into their society, had taken a name and an identity, had built a life among them. He had been happy, for a time. He had felt something that might have been love, or might have been the echo of love, or might have been nothing at all.
When the plagues hit, he had died with his family. His flesh vessel had failed, and he had returned to his original Theos form, and he had looked down at the world where he had lived and loved and died, and he had seen the suffering that awaited them. He consumed their world out of mercy.
Existence was pain. The only escape from pain was non-existence. The only mercy was to be erased. He had given them that mercy, lifted them out of their suffering and into the nothing from which they had crawled, and they had called him a monster.
They had fought him. They clung to their physical existence as if their brief lives and petty concerns were worth the agony that awaited them.
An angel snatching a soul out of hell would be called a savior. His act was the same only that the scale was larger and the method more efficient. But both principle was identical. He had saved them, giving them peace. And they had hated him for it.
No species had ever repelled him. None were able. All of them ended up consumed, basking in the mercy of Nulls. They should have thanked him that their sould was also destroyed with them and did not go to that place.
He was sick with desiderium now. The longing for Walpurgis, for the tower that had died, for the child that had been taken from him. He did not complain. There was no one to complain to, and complaining would not bring the leviathan back.
He sat in the darkness of the serpent's mouth, and the serpent swam south, and the ocean pressed against its scales, and the world continued to turn.
He was sick with desiderium. longing for something he could never have again, he did not complain however.