NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 68
Reality didn't just shatter. It went mad. The world detonated into delirium.
Colors bled from the stone walls like arterial spray, twisting into shifting serpents that coiled and snapped at the air, scales pulsing with forbidden hues no mortal eye should witness.
The thrones of the slain councilors melted into grotesque, laughing faces, their charred mouths gapping wide to vomit rivers of liquid profanity that scorched the floor into bubbling voids.
Whispers assaulted him from all sides, echoes of his ancestors' war cries morphing into the dark chants of unholy abominations, promising secrets that clawed at his sanity like talons on fire.
Gravity inverted, yanking him upward while the chamber spun in a vortex of screaming shudders and warbles. Stars exploded in his peripheral vision as if the galaxy itself unraveled thread by thread.
His cybernetic eyes overloaded with static phantoms, projecting visions of the world cracking open like an eggshell, spewing forth legions of hungering Hellspawn that wore the faces of his fallen family, all gnashing teeth and pleading eyes.
A discordance of sensory overload continued, tastes of iron and ash flooding his mouth, scents of burning incense mingled with corrupted rot, his skin crawling as if infested by microscopic horrors burrowing toward his spine.
The chaos began to fracture, echoes fading into a hollow hum as his limbs grew weightless.
Then, abruptly, the madness shattered like stained glass under his fist. Reality's fragments dissolved into a vast, ethereal expanse, pulling his consciousness free from flesh and flinging it into a strange void.
Here, his thoughts seemed to manifest as a bizarre energy, while rivers of raw essence flowed like molten plasma through these voids of infinite black.
Distant echoes of alien thoughts reverberated through his nonexistent form, their presences like colossal shadows woven from threads connecting everything living, observing from the periphery.
Angar floated disembodied, his essence almost nothing, a candle's wavering flame in a gust, in this unimaginable vastness, a vastness so large that it threatened to drown him in his own meaninglessness.
A dull warmth spread through his essence, pulling him from the brink, then a clarity bloomed. His mind expanded, thoughts firing with newfound potency, true lucidity, as the energies weaving through the voids unraveled and reshaped into the oversized heads of ancient and withered Grays.
Whispers invaded his consciousness. "An alien in the Mindscape!" "A Terran achieves this first?" "By what means has it arrived?" "How?" "A Terran first? Not a Pleiadean?"
A barrage of thoughts crashed over him, but he grasped their meaning, relieved he was spared the Grays' true tongue, those rough clicks and squeals like a d'klar mimicking a dolphin's wail.
He had no idea what the Mindscape was, other than it was glorious. He felt reduced to utter insignificance but profoundly alive, linked not only to these Grays but to the entirety of existence and oblivion too.
A metallic scent filled the void, like a gaping wound, as shapes coalesced.
A staircase forged of blood materialized in the emptiness. "Ascend, Terran," commanded an irresistible voice. "Pass through the door, know infinity, know nothing."
Angar complied, moving somehow, and not moving.
The ascent was interminable, besieged by murmurs and the thoughts of others as he climbed. At last, the door emerged. It was the chaotic vortex at the galaxy's heart, a cluster of black holes devouring all in their inescapable grasp.
He was drawn inexorably inward while simultaneously parting the threshold, vanishing into annihilation as a sea of scarlet engulfed the cosmos in hallowed crimson.
The crimson faded to black, a sensation of tumbling through endless night gripping him.
Angar lay sprawled upon the scorched earth, not in the oblivion of true slumber, but ensnared in the haze between vigilance and the abyss, a vigil of the soul, where awareness flickered like a dying light.
Stolen story; please report.
His senses registered a presence, stirring him from this tormented repose. His eyelids creaked open, heavy as leaden shields, revealing a silhouette etched against the yellow-orange, hazy sky of his world's day, with all the thick, darkly swirling clouds, only brightening when lightning flashed or skysparks exploded.
The figure bent low, extending a callused hand, its outline warped by the shimmering heat haze rising from the cracked, obsidian-black ground of Mecia.
Angar grasped it, the grip firm and unyielding, pulling him upright with an unnatural strength.
As his vision cleared, he beheld his father's stern, weathered, and creased face. "As it begins, so it shall end," the apparition intoned, a rough echo in the stillness.
No sooner had the words escaped than the landscape twisted, a mirage unfolding, unraveling.
The flat expanse of Mecia's destruction gave way to whole mountains, familiar crags he'd seen before, those nearest the Steadfast.
His father morphed before his eyes, flesh and form contorting into a stranger. The familiar Sulfuronean features faded into something more frail, like those of ancient Terrans.
The man hunched, but unnaturally, as was the sick pallor of his bronze skin, covered in scars, scabs, and blisters. No longer standing, he perched upon a throne of human skulls, piled high.
A colossal club rested in his fist, its head gouging the sulfurous dirt as he leaned upon it like a regal scepter.
A wild, filth-matted beard of normal Terran hair cascaded down his shirtless chest, wearing only a hide skirt. His body was a forest of coarse hair, unlike any Sulfuronean.
Angar's gaze locked upon the man's eyes, twin furnaces ablaze with the righteous inferno of Holy wrath. Somehow, Angar knew exactly who this was. Elaxada the Mighty.
"My name was Cardo," the apparition rumbled, his voice thundering like the crack of a sulfuric explosion, carrying the weight of ages. "Known as El Llamarada, meaning the Blaze, or the Flame."
With that confirmation, Angar dropped to one knee, bowing his head in reverent supplication to this glorious ancestor through his father's side. Or possible ancestor.
In Mecia and Tormina, everyone claimed descent from Elaxada the Mighty. At least half claimed Mahtma the Conqueror in their lineage too.
Still, glory filled his chest, kneeling before such an illustrious figure.
Realizing Elaxada was a phonetic shift of El Llamarada, his people dubbing their forebearer with dual epithets of 'the Blaze the Mighty,' caused Angar to feel foolish.
Elaxada grunted, a sound like grinding stone, shifting his massive club. "Many falsely claim my blood, but it courses in your veins, beating true in your chest, though through both bloodlines, not only your father's. From him you get Mahtma's blood, and Xon Gheir from your mother. Rise, Angar, grandson of many generations removed."
Angar stood, the scene warped once more, reality bending like overheated metal under a hammer.
Elaxada materialized at his side, the club slung over a shoulder. Before them, a woman writhed in agony upon a cave's floor, her screams echoing through the chamber. Sweat poured from her brow, mingling with the corrosive mist that burned her skin raw, her body convulsing with pain and strain.
A man clutched her hand, his face trying to mask his desperation, shouting encouragements, while another, hands slick with blood and birthing fluids, knelt between her legs, aiding the delivery.
Nearby, a young boy watched with wide eyes, his small frame already hunched by the world's weight, his skin burned and blistered.
"That was my mother," Elaxada intoned, sorrow in his voice. "She perished birthing my sister. Pregnancy and childbirth were rougher in those days.
"The environmental conditions, the lack of nutrition in food, cursed mothers with blood that thickened to clots, violent strokes, and lungs choked with fluid. Wombs prolapsed under strain, pressure spiked to deadly heights, and fluids from the birth sac poisoned their veins."
They stood sentinel as the woman's final cry tapered off, her life ebbing away in a pool of blood and fluid. The father sobbed, cradling her lifeless form, while the newborn weakly whined out, unable to wail.
The boy's gaze hardened, resolve forging in his eyes like steel as he went to comfort his new sister.
The scene blurred, the cries echoing into a distant drip, as the vision shifted again, dissolving into dank chambers, the walls slick with condensing sulfuric acid that dripped like the tears of the damned, corroding the floor into pitted scars.
Miserable and emaciated figures huddled within, their eyes hollow with despair, skins pallid, ulcerated from the radiation, burned and blistered from the fog, wheezing in struggled gasps of air that poisoned them.
Elaxada turned to Angar, glory glinting in his eyes. "I was of the first generation born upon this majestic, cursed world. The women bore the worst of it. But the men...the absence of sunlight sapped their spirit. The vicious beasts and burning fog claimed their manhood. The gravity crushed their pride. The air pressure stole their chests. The heat burned away their faith."
He paused, distant lightning illuminated the crags beyond him, casting elongated shadows. His massive hand clamped onto Angar's shoulder, the grip like a vise, transmitting a fire that coursed through Angar's veins, igniting his blood, the air between them crackling with energy.
"Those east of the Steadfast kept to their own," Elaxada rumbled. "Each denomination claiming their own ranges, huddled in caves like vermin. Within them all, resentment festered, inflicted by the cursed fate that marooned us here, causing the men to do nothing but whine like sick babes."
His digits squeezed harder, and Angar noticed just then that he was bare of armor in this Mindscape, or whatever this was. "They tortured their own minds as much as this world tortured their flesh. What we had lost chained them to the past, while the ceaseless struggles of the present ground them under heel, breath after burning breath."
Holy wrath radiated from Elaxada like heat from a forge, his hairy chest heaving with each word. "But I knew this world was our Divine crucible, a forge testing our faith and resolve. I would not be found wanting. We would not. I'd have to slaughter many to save us all."