A lone citadel hung in the void, so far set apart that even the stars kept their distance. Each pillar rose from the darkness below and vanished into the emptiness 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.
Every gaze fixed on the lotus that anchored the realms. At its heart, on the lone throne, a white-haired figure sat with shadowed eyes and a stillness that held the hall in check.
"Highest One. Let us stand with you."
"Give us the fight!"
Their cries rose like spears, but Radeon did not turn. His hands stayed on the worlds, not on the brave fools still calling for one last stand at his side. 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.
Power from beyond rolled through him, crawling under his skin and sinking into bone until his heart lurched.
The strange force took root inside him, his skin crawled as it burrowed deep.
"This energy... Something's amiss."
He peered across the void at a hallowed realm he had once trusted above all others, now twisted under 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.
Within that vision, Radeon found a boy on his knees in the red that ran across the stone.
"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, a hidden gulf cut off from the ruin.
As those liberated 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 the worlds 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.
He let the last of his caution slip away.
The quiet sea in his dantian heaved and broke, waves of power rising and smashing together.
His once-golden incarnate form 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 innumerable 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 in the darkness within as he tried to bind the abhorrent inside his laws.
But he didn't feel it break, not even shudder.
Still he forced his vast jaws into a grin, madness lighting 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, but his will refused to fold. He 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, like the 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 him.
The thin thread of his mind flickered in and out for days, fraying until he felt a breath away from nothing.
"Just. A little. More."
The pull slowed, then stopped.
A sputtering cough from a parched throat struck him.