The child-Thenos, now the size of a young stag, crouched on the cold, nourishing surface of the World Stele.
His seven arms braced against the stone, each finger tasting the history of slaughter etched into it. His feast was a banquet of stolen power—the silvered resilience of the Celestials, the deep-rooted greed of the demons, the shattered spark of the gods.
Each essence was a new color on his palette, a new note in the song of his becoming. His form, a chimera of mottled, bruise-like flesh and shifting, metallic sheen, pulsed with voracious life. The silence was his dining hall.
It was then that a new sound insinuated itself into the feast, a sound of the void. A stress fracture only a being like him could sense
"CRACK—CRACK!!!"
His head, too large for his growing body, tilted back. The two pools of absolute blackness that were his eyes turned upward, and he looked past the dimension he inhabited. And he saw.
