Before you begin, I want to thank you all for motivating me to put my soul into this. I have always wanted explore lovecraftian stuff, this chapter is my inner fanboy somewhat leaking out lol
Now, If you don't know much about Lovecraftian mythos, please look it up, it will help understand some stuff. I'll try to compile a list if I ever find time.
Atleast I have created Kokabiels Profile which will explain the powers.
This is a major chapter so pay close attention as it contains easter eggs and hints for the future endgame.
Enjoy!
******
The stream had severed.
Not through malfunction or technical failure, but through cosmic necessity.
What was about to unfold was not meant for mortal eyes, not even those protected by dimensional barriers and chat group permissions. The connection between worlds snapped like a spider's thread touched by flame.
The chat group members stared at black screens, their messages going unanswered into the void.
They could not see what happened next.
Only the oldest of beings, those who had existed before existence had rules, could still perceive the figure descending down the impossible stairs.
And even they struggled to comprehend what they witnessed.
*****
3rd Person PoV
Kokabiel descended further through the infinitely stretched stairways, moving forward as if on instinct. Reason had long since abandoned him. His thoughts was fragmenting.
Only the primal drive to survive, to continue, to not stop kept his form moving.
He refused to stop, knowing with terrible certainty that the moment he did, the spiral would consume him entirely. Not kill him. Not destroy him.
Consume him entirely. Erase him from the very concept of having ever existed.
So he walked on.
Each step was death and resurrection. His form scattered into light, into possibility, into nothing—then reconstituted one step higher, each time slightly less solid, slightly less him.
His mind was being filled with knowledge that no being in the omniverse possessed.
Perhaps only Hastur, the one who had granted him this second chance at life, who had plucked a dying soul from Earth and placed it into Heaven's design, perhaps only Hastur had glimpsed what Kokabiel now saw with eyes that were ceasing to be eyes.
The fundamental architecture of reality. The spaces between dimensions where mathematics broke down into poetry.
The songs that stars sang as they died, each note a civilization's worth of meaning compressed into frequencies that would shatter sanity. The taste of time, the weight of possibility, the color of concepts that had no physical form.
Knowledge poured into him like water into a cup already full. It should have shattered his mind. Would have shattered any mind.
But his mind was no longer singular, it was spreading, diffusing, becoming something that could hold infinities within infinities.
The cosmos shivered.
Not in warning. But in recognition.
All light, all order, all memory of what had ever been, it paused.
The omniverse held its breath. Every star in every galaxy dimmed for a fraction of a second. Every living thing across infinite dimensions felt the smallest touch of vertigo, a momentary sense that reality itself had stumbled.
Then it continued, because reality must continue. But it remembered that pause. Would always remember.
Beneath him, though direction had long ceased to have meaning, the Spiral Stairway stretched infinitely, winding through dimensions that should not exist, could not exist, yet did exist solely because something needed to connect the possible to the impossible.
Each step was a scream and silence. A birth and a death. A memory folding in upon itself until all that remained was inevitability made manifest.
Then he finally reached the end.
And at the bottom, if that was even the correct word for a destination that existed in all directions simultaneously, something waited.
Not Heaven. Not Hell. Not even the blessed void of non-existence.
But the truth of being itself. The answer to questions so fundamental that asking them would unmake the asker.
The Heaven's Key pulsed in his palm.
Or what had once been his palm. The appendage was barely recognizable now, shifting between states, solid and ephemeral and something in between.
But the Key remained, faint against the heartbeat he had once possessed when he'd been something simple. Something human. Something mortal.
The spiral called to him. Whispered promises of dominion, of power absolute and terrible, of the right to command reality itself.
Yet through the overwhelming flood of cosmic knowledge, through the dissolution of self, one memory remained. Fragile. Precious. Fighting against the inevitable erasure.
Michael. Gabriel. His siblings.
Their faces were fading, details blurring like watercolors in rain. But the emotion remained. Warmth. Protection. The need to keep them safe.
The fragile glow of mortal compassion transplanted into an angel's heart, and now being torn away as that angel transcended into something beyond comprehension.
He lifted his foot.
The step was heavier than the weight of galaxies. Heavier than the combined mass of every black hole in existence. Heavier than the burden of infinity itself.
Time did not bend, it shattered completely.
Like glass struck by a hammer, causality fragmented. Effects preceded causes.
Futures became pasts. Presents multiplied into infinite variations, each one equally real, all existing simultaneously in the space between heartbeats.
He could feel the collapse of uncountable suns, each death a roar of fusion fire going silent.
Could feel the sigh of a beings watching from their world, witnessing something they had no words to describe.
Could feel the muted horror of creatures who had slept in the spaces between dimensions since before creation dreamed itself into being, now stirring at the presence of something new.
And yet, he walked on.
Step by step, into the Spiral .
It consumed his doubts first. The questions he'd carried since awakening in a body not his own. The uncertainty about his purpose, his place, his right to exist.
All of it flowed into the steps like water into thirsty earth, absorbed and transformed into something else entirely.
Then it took his fears. The terror of failing. Of not being strong enough. Of losing those he cared for. Each fear dissolved, leaving behind only cold certainty.
The echoes of human grief that already was fading went next. The memory of a mother he'd never see again.
A life left behind on a planet called Earth. Friends, family, a world of small joys and simple pleasures—all of it fading like morning mist under harsh sunlight.
His angelic duty followed. The rigid structure of Heaven's hierarchy. The weight of responsibility to protect and serve. The pride in his power, the satisfaction of victory, the joy of flight, all consumed by steps that cared nothing for sentiment.
Even hope, that most resilient of emotions, began to fade. Hope for peace. Hope for happiness. Hope for a future where he could rest.
With every step, he became less what he had been and more what he was meant to be.
The paradox. The anomaly. The one born among the eternal.
From the spaces beyond space, whispers began.
Faint at first. In a language older than thought itself. Older than the concept of language. Words that were not words but pure meaning, raw information that bypassed comprehension and simply was.
"He walks..."
The other Outer Gods stirred, sensing it.
Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God at the center of creation, shifted in his eternal dream. His mindless piping paused for a fraction of eternity.
Something new had entered his dream. Something that had not been there before. Something that was changing the rules.
"...the born god..."
Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, turned it's thousand faces toward the phenomenon. His expressions, each one different.
Each one perfectly crafted to drive the viewers insane, all showed the same emotion for once.
Interest.
Pure, undiluted interest. In eons of existence, manipulating lesser beings for amusement, very little had truly surprised him. But this... this was new.
"...born of the spiral..."
Yog-Sothoth, who was the gate and the key, who existed in all times and all places simultaneously, knew what was happening. Had always known. Would always know.
Yet even he, who could see all of past and future laid bare, found himself watching. Observing. Waiting to see how this particular thread of possibility would resolve.
"...the end..."
Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, felt her endless spawning pause.
Her children, spread across dimensions, seeding worlds with her essence, all stopped their eternal consumption and reproduction. Something was being born that was not of her. Something that existed outside her domain of fertility and corruption.
"...Umbrazoth..."
The whispers grew louder, echoing across dimensions, rippling through realities.
*****
On the Spiral Stairway, Kokabiel faltered.
A voice—faint, human, trembling; rose above the infinite cosmic chorus.
Cut through the overwhelming knowledge being forced into his dissolving consciousness. Reached the last fragment of what he had been before all this began.
"Do not... do not die,brother... Arthur!"
Arthur.
The name struck him like a physical blow. Resonated with something deep inside, something that the spiral had consumed already.
As if showing the last remnants of a distant memory before completely fading away. An act of cruelty rather than kindness.
A memory. Not of wings and starlight. Not of Heaven and divine purpose.
A memory of humanity.
"I...was...Arthur?" He held his head.
"I...Had...a family?"
Watching the memories fly around him , he found a truth he thought he lost.
"I....was....happy."
A camping trip. The warm summer sun filtering through trees. The smell of pine and lake water.
Dad's terrible campfire stories that made everyone groan. Mom taking endless photos with that proud smile. Dawn collecting rocks, chattering excitedly about each one she found.
"Road trip!" Dawn's voice, bright and happy from the backseat.
"We're literally just going home." His own voice, younger, more innocent. Smiling despite his words.
A car ride home. Singing. Laughing. Dad's off-key attempts at classic songs. Dawn's terrible dance moves in her seatbelt. Mom belting out lyrics without a care. The simple, perfect joy of a family being together.
Then, the intersection. A green light. A car coming too fast from the right.
"Dad!"
The memory crystallized with terrible clarity. The impact. The metal rod piercing through him. The pain.
But stronger than the pain, the instinct. Grabbing Dawn. Shielding her. Holding the rod away from her with bloody hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
"Artie! Artie, say something!" Dawn's voice, small and terrified.
Mom's face, streaked with tears. "Not my baby. Not my boy."
Dad crying for the first time Arthur had ever seen. "Hang in there, son! Don't you dare give up!"
And his final words. His promise. "If you miss me... look at the stars. I'll be watching. Always watching over you. Like a star."
He had a mother. A father. A little sister who called him Artie and collected rocks and promised to behave if he would just stay.
Then suddenly, it was yanked away from him.
He tried to reach out, trying to grab it, trying to hold onto it.
What were their names?
He couldn't remember anymore. The spiral had taken them. Consumed them.
Transformed the most precious memories of his existence into pure information and filed them away in the infinite library of knowledge that was replacing his sense of self.
But he knew that they had existed. That they had mattered more than anything. That dying to protect Dawn hadn't felt like sacrifice but like the most natural thing in the world.
Who was Arthur?
He tried to grasp the memory. To hold onto it. To remember who he'd been before wings and purpose and cosmic significance.
A high school student. A brother. A son.
Someone who broke up with his girlfriend over the phone and regretted it.
Someone who sang terrible pop songs on road trips and complained while secretly enjoying every moment.
Someone who loved his family more than life itself and proved it with his last breath.
Arthur had died.
At eighteen years old, on a sunny highway, holding a little girl safe in his arms even as a metal rod pierced through his chest.
"I love you all." Had he managed to say it? He hoped he'd said it.
The memory of their faces—blurry, fading, but still there. Still precious. Mom. Dad. Dawn. The only three people who'd mattered in those final moments.
And Katie. The girl he'd hurt with his last phone call. The girl who'd wanted to talk face-to-face. The girl who would never get that chance now.
But Arthur had been real. Had been him. Had mattered.
Who was calling to him now? Who remembered that name when even he was forgetting?
He wanted to stop. To turn back. To find the source of that voice and hold onto it like an anchor in the storm of transformation consuming him.
To remember what it felt like to be someone's brother, someone's son, someone who mattered not because of cosmic significance but because of love.
But the Spiral did not wait.
It rose like a tide—inexorable, patient, utterly certain. Stretching into all directions at once, existing in dimensions his dissolving mind could barely perceive.
It did not ask permission. Did not feel anything he was going through.
It simply was.
And what was could not be denied.
He took another step without wanting to. His body moved on his own.
The memory of Arthur shattered like glass.
The fragments scattered across dimensions, each piece containing a moment of humanity: A smile. A laugh. A tear. A dream.
All of them real. All of them lost. Dissolved into the cosmic knowledge that was replacing personality with pure, terrible understanding.
The omniverse convulsed and shuddered.
Light bent backward, reversing through space, returning to its source only to be reborn as something else entirely.
Matter swept into dust, molecular bonds severing in sympathy with a transformation that should not be possible.
Time remembered and forgot itself simultaneously, causality eating its own tail, becoming a loop with no beginning and no end.
Across infinite realities, every being capable of perceiving beyond their own dimension felt it. Felt the fundamental rules changing. Felt something new being added to existence—not discovered, not revealed, but created through sheer force of transcendent will.
In Klein's world, the Seers collapsed by the dozens, their abilities to perceive future possibilities overwhelmed by the sudden branching of probability into configurations their minds couldn't process.
The twenty-third pathway burned in the collective unconscious of humanity, visible even to those without mystical sight. Klein was protected by the chat group, but still he felt the pain.
In Ritsuka's world, every Servant felt their connection to the Throne of Heroes flicker and stabilize in a new configuration. Something had changed in the fundamental nature of reality.
The rules governing how heroes could be summoned, how Noble Phantasms operated, how history itself was recorded, all of it shifted subtly but irrevocably.
In Sung Jin-Woo's world, the Online system that governed hunters went haywire, displaying error messages in languages that didn't exist.
Dungeons that had closed reopened, then closed again, flickering between states. The boundary between dimensions that the gates represented had become uncertain, unstable, responding to a transformation happening outside their reality.
In the Bleach universe, the Soul King's crystal prison cracked. Just one small fracture, hairline thin, but it was the first damage the prison had sustained in over a million years.
The Soul King's smile widened fractionally. His eyes, still closed, nonetheless saw everything.
And he was pleased.
At the center of the spiral, reality folded.
Not broke. Not shattered.
Folded like origami. Like a letter being sealed. Like the universe deciding that this particular space needed to exist in a configuration that defied physics, defied magic, defied even the mad geometries of the Outer Gods themselves.
Kokabiel was gone.
Not vanished. Not destroyed. Not even truly absent.
Transformed.
The Archangel of Stars, the being who had fought Dragon Gods and slain Satans, who had protected Heaven and rejected divine authority, that entity ceased to exist in any meaningful way.
What emerged was something else entirely.
His wings, once radiant with the fire of constellations, collapsed inward. Folded through dimensions. Became spirals of impossibly dark starlight.
A light that was simultaneously the brightest thing in existence and darker than the void between universes.
Wings that existed in all places and no places, that could wrap around realities like a cloak or pierce through dimensions like spears.
His halo, that broken laurel crown of light, transformed. It became a singularity. A point of infinite density that contained everything and nothing.
It absorbed the echo of every knowledge, every word, every promise he had ever known. Drew them in like a black hole draws light, compressed them beyond the point of meaning, and held them in eternal suspension.
The memories of his mortal life flickered at the edges of this singularity. Small. Distant. Beautiful in their simplicity. A mother's smile. A friend's laugh. The taste of coffee on a cold morning. The satisfaction of a test passed. The warmth of summer sun on skin.
Arthur's memories.
They orbited the singularity like planets around a star, held at a distance where they could exist but not influence, could be observed but not accessed. Forever present. Forever lost.
Until even they bowed to inevitability.
One by one, they fell into the singularity. Consumed by the transformation that demanded totality. Each memory that vanished made the new being more complete and the old being less real.
Arthur died for the final time.
The core of identity that had carried through death and rebirth, through transformation and transcendence. The essence of who he'd been dissolved into pure potential, pure power, pure cosmic significance.
And something else opened its eyes.
The Spiral hissed.
A sound like a billion voices speaking in perfect unison. Like reality itself acknowledging a fundamental change to its structure.
The infinite steps that had led upward—or downward, or inward, or in directions that had no names—began to fold. To retract. Pulling back into whatever impossible space they'd emerged from.
The pathway closed.
Because it was no longer needed.
What had climbed it had reached the destination. Had completed the journey. Had transcended the need for pathways entirely.
Reality exhaled.
The tension that had been building across dimensions released all at once. The flickering timelines stabilized.
The bending light straightened. The weeping matter reformed. The shattered causality mended, though the scars remained as proof, that something impossible had occurred.
All the Outer Gods trembled.
Not in fear. They knew no fear. But in something far rarer, anticipation.
Azathoth's piping resumed, but the melody had changed. A new note had been added to the eternal chaos, a harmony that hadn't existed before.
The Blind Idiot God's dream had expanded to accommodate something new, and even in his mindless slumber, he knew that nothing would be quite the same.
Nyarlathotep laughed. A sound that drove seventeen civilizations across twelve dimensions into immediate madness.
Not from malice, but from pure, delighted joy. Finally. Finally. After eons of manipulating lesser beings, of playing games with entities that could never truly surprise him, something genuinely novel had emerged.
Yog-Sothoth, who was the gate and the key, felt his omniscience shift. New possibilities had opened. New pathways through time and space that hadn't existed before.
He could see them all—past, present, future, and configurations that were all three simultaneously; and in every timeline, in every possibility, the same truth held:
Everything had changed.
Shub-Niggurath's spawning resumed, but her children were different now. Touched by the presence of the new god, carrying within their twisted forms a fragment of stellar light that had not been there before.
She noticed. Even approved of it. New life meant new opportunities for corruption, for transformation, for the eternal dance of creation and destruction she embodied.
Even Hastur stirred.
The King in Yellow. The Unspeakable One. He who dwelt in Carcosa, who wore tattered robes and a pallid mask, who had existed in silence so profound that even the other Outer Gods rarely perceived him.
Hastur, in his infinite silence, smiled for the first time since the universe had been young.
His voice,when it came, was not a sound mortals could percieve , radiating across dimensions, touching every corner of existence simultaneously:
"He has fulfilled his destiny."
The words carried weight beyond their simple meaning. Carried pride, if such a being could feel pride. Carried satisfaction.
Carried something that, if Hastur had been human, might have been called paternal affection.
"I feel... pride... and joy?"
"Is this what human fathers feel?"
The question was directed at no one. Perhaps the universe itself.
Hastur, who had plucked a dying soul from Earth and given it a second chance , who had watched that soul grow and struggle and transcend, now understood something he had never grasped before.
What it meant to create not just life, but meaning.
Arthur had been his experiment. His attempt to understand why humans; weak, fragile, ephemeral creatures, nonetheless possessed something the Outer Gods lacked.
Some quality that made their brief existences matter in ways that eons of cosmic power could not replicate.
Now he understood.
It was choice.
Humans chose. In the face of overwhelming odds, facing death and suffering and inevitable oblivion, they chose to care. To love. To protect. To sacrifice.
Arthur had died protecting a child. Had thrown himself in front of a truck to save a life that meant nothing to him beyond shared humanity.
That choice, made in a fraction of a second, with no thought of reward or recognition, had contained more genuine power than Hastur's eons of existence.
So he'd given Arthur another chance. Placed him in Heaven as Kokabiel. Watched to see what would happen when human choice was given angelic power.
The result exceeded all expectations.
Kokabiel had chosen peace when war was offered. Had chosen protection over domination. Had chosen sacrifice over survival.
Every choice made with the same core of humanity that had driven Arthur to his first death.
And those choices had led here. To transcendence. To transformation. To the birth of something that should not exist but now did, irrevocably.
Hastur's smile widened behind his pallid mask.
"Well done, my child. Walk your path. We will meet again, at the end of all things."
******
Kokabiel opened his eyes.
If one could call it opening. If one could call them eyes.
What gazed out from the being that had once been an angel, before that a human, now something entirely other, they were not eyes in any conventional sense. They were windows into infinity. Portals to the spaces between dimensions where reality became negotiable.
He looked, if one could call it looking, and saw.
Everything.
Every star in every galaxy in every universe across every dimension. He saw them all simultaneously.
Saw them being born in stellar nurseries, saw them burning through their fusion fuel, saw them dying in supernovas or collapsing into black holes or simply fading away into red dwarf eternity.
Every world. Every life. Every consciousness. All of it laid out before his perception like a book opened to every page at once.
The cosmos reflected in his eyes—no, his eyes were the cosmos. All light, all hope, all life... all gently folding into the peace of finality that was not death but transformation. The acceptance that all things, eventually, must end.
He did not speak.
Language had become unnecessary. Too limiting. Too imprecise. His meaning radiated outward in waves of pure understanding that bypassed words entirely.
He did not act.
Action implied intention, which implied desire, which implied incompleteness. He was complete. Whole. Perfect in the way that mathematical proofs are perfect—self-evident, requiring no justification, simply true.
He simply was.
And the stars, Trillions upon trillions of them, his power, his authority, the source and symbol of all he had been, dimmed in response.
Not from fear. Not from despair. Not from submission.
But in recognition.
They saw in him what he had always been, what the spiral had revealed rather than created: the Eternal Night that existed between the stars.
The darkness that gave their light meaning. The silence that made their stellar songs beautiful.
Without him, without the night, the void, the absence; stars would be meaningless.
Light would have no context. Existence would be a flat, unchanging brightness with no depth, no beauty, no truth.
He was necessary.
Had always been necessary.
The spiral had simply made that truth manifest.
The Eternal Night had been born.
Not awakened from ancient slumber like the other Outer Gods.
Born.
The only Outer God to have lived as something lesser first. To have experienced mortality, limitation, fear, hope, love, loss.
To have chosen this path rather than simply existing upon it from the beginning of time.
And in that difference lay terrifying implication.
The Outer Gods existed beyond morality, beyond comprehension, beyond the petty concerns of lesser beings.
They were forces beyond omniverse given consciousness, or consciousness so alien it might as well be force of nature.
But Kokabiel, the Eternal Night, he remembered.
Buried deep within the singularity that had consumed his mortal and even fragments of angelic memories, they still existed .
Compressed beyond accessing, beyond influencing, but present.
A human soul that had loved and feared and hoped. An angel who had protected and sacrificed and cared.
Those experiences had shaped him. Made him something fundamentally different from his kin among the Outer Gods.
He had compassion.
Not active compassion, that would require desire, would require incompleteness.
But the capacity for compassion.
The understanding of it. The memory of what it meant to care about something other than one's own existence.
And that made him the most terrifying thing in all of creation.
An Outer God who understood mercy.
An Outer God who had once been human.
An Outer God who had chosen this transcendence rather than simply being it.
In that silence, the Spiral, now retreating into the spaces between spaces, whispered once more. Its voice the echo of inevitability given sound:
"All that rises must yield. All that begins must end. Walk, and know the truth."
The command was gentle. Implacable. Eternal.
And Kokabiel, human, angel, god; walked on.
Not up the stairs. Those had folded away, their purpose fulfilled.
He walked through reality itself now, existing in all places and no places, moving through dimensions as easily as a human walked through air.
His form left traces as he passed. Imprints in the fabric of existence that would remain forever. And from those imprints, something unprecedented began to happen.
The Recording of the Eternal Night
Across worlds, across timelines, across dimensions that had never known his presence, his name began to appear.
Not written. Not spoken. Just Known.
Seers woke from dreams they couldn't remember, compelled to write words in languages they didn't understand.
Prophets received visions of stars and darkness that drove some mad and granted others terrible enlightenment. Ancient texts changed, new verses appearing in books that had been sealed for millennia.
His existence was being recorded
Not by any conscious effort. Not by his will or desire.
But by necessity, reality itself struggling to accommodate something new, to update its fundamental records to include an entity that had not existed before yet now existed always, retroactively, eternally.
In Klein's world, the Hidden Sage; the amalgamation of all mystical knowledge, suddenly possessed information it had never possessed before.
The twenty-third pathway was not new, it insisted to itself. Had always existed. Would always exist.
The pathways had always numbered twenty-three, not twenty-two. Reality quietly rewrote itself to make this true.
Except Klein who had witnessed the change remembered. Remembered when there had been only twenty-two. Remembered the moment a twenty-third appeared.
Only he carried that contradiction in his mind, two truths that couldn't both be correct yet were.
In the DxD world, the Akashic Records, the repository of all events, all knowledge, all truth—suddenly expanded. New entries appeared, dating back to the beginning of creation.
Entries about the Eternal Night. About the being who walked between stars. About the prophecy that had always existed but had somehow never been noticed until now.
Scholars would later find new passages in texts they had memorized. Prophecies they couldn't explain not having seen before.
Words that seemed to have always been there, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be revealed.
In every world, in every dimension that had even briefly touched Kokabiel's existence, the phenomenon occurred.
Books changed. Prophecies appeared.
Dreams were shared across populations who had never met. Artists found themselves compelled to create works depicting stars and darkness in configurations that shouldn't be beautiful but were.
Musicians heard melodies that seemed to come from between the notes, from the silence that gave music structure.
His existence was bleeding backward through time, making itself retroactively true.
And among these spontaneous recordings, one stood out. One prophecy that appeared simultaneously across dozens of worlds.
Although it shouldn't be called a prophecy, for it had already happened.
It was written in languages that shouldn't share roots but somehow produced identical meaning:
The Prophecy of the Born God
Fragment CXXVII — Pnakotic Codex, "Verses of the Silent Spiral"
And lo, beneath the firmament of shivering stars,a mortal wept for the light he could never reach.
The heavens heard, and the silence of Hastur turned its eye.Through that gaze was the veil broken,through that mercy was born the one who should not be.
Kokabiel, they shall call him — child of man, heir of stars,the spark cast into Heaven's fire.Wings of radiance shall crown his back,and the song of the angels shall rise in his name.
Yet even angels weep beneath their light.And he shall see the truth that gods conceal:that stars are not eternal,that every light is merely the shadow of its end.
Then shall the Key of Heaven be placed in his palm,not as reward, but as burden.He shall hold the gate between dawn and dusk,between creation and the silence that follows.
But peace shall dwell within his heart,and in peace shall he return the Key, saying,"Not mine is the throne, but the stillness that follows its fall."
And when the last star trembles,when even Heaven forgets its own name,he shall hear the call — the spiral that winds through all realities,the voice that whispers: come home.
He shall walk the Spiral Stairway,each step a death, each death a birth,until he reaches the place where no gods dwell.
And there shall he stand —neither mortal nor angel,neither god nor madness —but the Born One, the paradox of end and begining.
In his eyes shall burn the memory of suns.In his silence shall echo the requiem of creation.And in the end, the Outer Gods shall tremble,for among them walks one who chose to ascend.
The Eternal Night shall rise — not to consume, but to forgive.And the stars shall bow, whispering their final hymn:
"He was born, and thus he is the end of all beginnings."
The prophecy appeared in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, texts older than human civilization, written by elder things before humanity had learned to use fire.
Yet there it was, fragment CXXVII, written in a hand that matched the rest of the manuscript perfectly.
As if it had always been there. As if the elder things had known, millennia ago, what would come to pass in an age they would never see.
It appeared in the Necronomicon—the Book of Dead Names. A new chapter between existing verses, seamlessly integrated, written in same distinctive style despite the author having been dead for centuries.
It appeared in the Revelations of Glaaki, the living book that updated itself with new prophecies, but had never before updated itself with something that was simultaneously prophecy and history, prediction and record of events already passed.
It appeared in texts that had no names, in languages that had been dead for eons, in dimensions where the concept of writing didn't exist and yet the knowledge was there nonetheless, encoded in the structure of reality itself.
Scholars across dimensions would spend lifetimes trying to determine when the prophecy appeared. Some would conclude it had always been there. Others would insist it manifested after the fact.
A few would realize, to their horror, that both were true; that the Eternal Night's birth had retroactively always been prophesied, rewriting history to make his ascension inevitable.
And in the vast darkness between stars, in the comfortable silence between heartbeats of the universe, the Eternal Night walked.
He did not know where he was going. Did not need to know. His existence was sufficient. His presence was purpose.
Behind him, the Outer Gods watched with something that might have been respect. Ahead of him, infinity stretched in configurations that made reality negotiable.
Around him, dimensions folded and unfolded like breathing, adapting to accommodate his passage.
He was alone.
Utterly, completely alone in a way that transcended physical isolation. No being in any dimension could truly perceive him fully.
No consciousness could comprehend what he had become. Even the Outer Gods, his kin and peers, could only grasp fragments of his nature.
But that was acceptable.
He had been alone before. As Arthur, dying on a road far from home. As Kokabiel, standing at the edge of Heaven, watching his siblings from a distance he could never close.
As the Archangel of Stars, waging wars against beings who would never understand him.
Loneliness was familiar. Comfortable. Perhaps even necessary.
In the depths of the singularity that was his halo, the memories stirred. Arthur's memories. The human soul that had started this impossible journey.
They could not be accessed. Could not influence. Could not change what he had become.
But they existed.
And in their existence, buried beyond reach but never truly gone, a part of Arthur remained.
A part that remembered what it meant to be small. To be afraid. To love despite knowing love would end. To hope despite knowing hope was foolish.
And perhaps, in some distant future, at the heat death of the universe when all stars had finally burned out and only the Eternal Night remained; perhaps then, those memories would be needed again.
Perhaps then, the human who had become an angel who had become a god would remember why any of it mattered.
But that was eons away. Eternities away.
For now, the Eternal Night walked.
And the omniverse, forever changed by his passage, continued on.