God of Destruction: Living Among Mortals

A drape hit Nova's solar plexus, as if throwing a jab, knocking him out cold. All the accumulated pain that he had ignored from the holes created in his body by the drapes seeped through like venom.

He went unconscious for a brief second. His eyes were slowly closing, and a smile crept on his face as he faded into oblivion.

As the darkness pressed in, heavy and suffocating, as if drowning, Nova's body refused to respond. His chest barely rose; every breath he took was fragile, as if it might be his last.

He could still hear the goblin's snarls, the wings of the drapes beating the air like an excellent pancake batter mix. But all those noises started to sound distant, fading into the void that cuddled with him.

His fingers twitched weakly around the dagger's hilt, though it no longer felt like his own.

Somewhere, beyond the agony, something stirred. A voice cutting through the silence, colder than death yet warmer than life. His vision was black, but within that blackness, a faint light shimmered, growing brighter.

The void itself was strange. It was not emptiness, not truly. It was more than silence, deeper than frost. He floated, or perhaps he didn't. There was no "floor," no "sky," no "walls," to orient himself by.

Yet he knew, without reason, that he was suspended inside something vast.

It wasn't space. Space had dimensions, distance, and order. And there were infinite dimensions in the universe, creatures ascending through them; that's why the Ladder of Infinity exists.

But this space was above that, or was it space? Whatever it was, it was beyond the very blueprint that governed existence and had been folded into one. A paradox. He felt dimension, yet no concept of dimension.

He felt time, yet it did not seem to pass. Everything was conjoined, all possible directions compressed into a single non-direction. To move forward was to move backward, to move upward was to move downward, sinking to the void.

His mortal state wasn't able to separate one from the other.

He tried to breathe, and though his chest did not rise, he felt the illusion of air filling him up like a hot-air balloon. It was not air, though, but sort of like a memory of it, the echo of breathing carried into this place.

His body was weightless, yet heavier than galaxies. Every breath was an eternity, every heartbeat a lifetime, all collapsing into itself.

The light pulsed again, as if guiding him. It was faint, but there was nothing like it. It was the only thing that made sense, or did it? Was logic even activated in a place like this? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.

The light radiated with the outline of a star seen through the infinite fog of infinite galaxies, being captured by a satellite. Nova's hand twitched, reaching instinctively toward it. He could not tell if he was moving or if the light simply acknowledged his desire and drew closer in response.

Then came the sensation of collapsing and expanding all at once. As if it were in a black hole, but the next quectosecond he wasn't.

His mind shuddered as countless possibilities folded through him, each fragment of reality touching him before vanishing. He was standing, kneeling, drowning, burning, frozen, alive, dead, all at once, as everywhere in "time."

He felt a voice come from the voice, though no sound was produced. He came to a realization that this was above the concepts of "time," "space," "dimension," "Order," "magnitude," and "hierarchy."

Nova blinked, but his eyes were useless here. He was beyond seeing, beyond looking. Time was a thing he used to know, a concept that ticked forward like a metronome. Here it was undone. It was nothing. There was no before. No after. No sequence. Only the now, that stretched endlessly in every direction, yet there was no concept of "direction."

The light grew, defying the "laws" of this space he was in. It brightened gently, as if it carried a heartbeat. Each pulse reverberated inside him, shaking his bones even though he no longer had bones to shake.

Nova moved, or was moved, or didn't move, toward it. There was no resistance. No distance, either. He both reached and was already there.

But still, the void unfolded itself further, as if to teach him.

He felt dimensions press in. At first, he thought they were walls, but they were not. They were possibilities and probabilities. Length, width, height. Then, deeper ones he had no names for, dimensions that slipped between cracks in perception, flowing their way through themselves into his mind like a thread of impossible cloth.

He tried to understand it, to comprehend it fully, but understanding was too small for this. His mind fractured, then mended, then fractured again, then mended again, over and over and over again. The void seemed to have laughed at this, though he knew it had no mouth.

This was above space.

The world's, or what resembled words, slid into him, vibrating throughout his chest. Space, too, was gone. He had never existed to begin with. Distance was a lie. Every place that had ever been or could ever be was here, layered, stacked, and folded until they were separable.

He could feel the warmth of Adam's presence overlapping with the cold breath of the drapes. He could feel the stars singeing, collapsing, reforming, and dying, all in one perfect derivative.

Everywhere was here, and here was everywhere. Everywhen was now, and now was everywhen.

Nova reached again. His fingers closed on nothing, yet he felt the light answer. It pulsed brighter, shaking the foundations of this paradox-domain, which he knew and smiled at.

His heart arched. He remembered blood, pain, and exhaustion. But here those things were abstractions, washed away by something far older, far greater. The void was not cruel, nor was it kind.

It was simply what remained when all definitions collapsed. It was not death, and not life. It was not a place, and yet it contained all places.