"You Look Hideous" (Says My Mini-Me, No Thanks), The Sarcasm Strikes Back (and Fails Miserably), and Sawyer Gets a Front-Row Seat to the Apocalypse (Popcorn Not Included).
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Author Note: Well, the pleasantries didn't last long! Sawyer's attempt at witty banter falls flatter than a pancake, and Samu'el's got a vision of the future that's less "happily ever after" and more "everything burns." Buckle up, folks, because the stakes just went from "weird" to "existentially terrifying."
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"Good heavens, you look utterly hideous," Samu'el quipped, the words tumbling from his mouth with a mischievous glint that made him seem, for the first time, like the child he physically resembled.
A wide, impish grin spread across his small face, his earlier regal demeanor cracking apart under the sheer weight of boyish teasing.
For a fleeting moment, the immense gravity that had filled the golden hall seemed to lift, replaced by the lightness of childish irreverence, as though he had forgotten — or chosen to momentarily ignore — the heavy titles and burdens he had so effortlessly worn moments before.
Sawyer groaned inwardly, tipping his head back and fixing his gaze toward the unseen heavens above, drawing on every shred of patience he had left.
He could feel sarcasm bubbling up, sharp and bitter against the back of his throat, desperate for release.
"We literally have the exact same face, you little dumbass," he muttered, the words sliding out before he could censor himself, edged with a weariness he could no longer hide.
He dropped his head back down, leveling a flat, unimpressed stare at the miniature version of himself perched like a king on a golden throne.
"Now, can we cut the theatrics? What do you actually want? Let me guess—" he added, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "you're going to tell me to close the gate too, right? Maybe with some grand speech about destiny and duty and darkness?"
He threw up a hand in mock grandeur, adopting a pompous tone as he continued, "Slay the darkness, extinguish the eternal flame, close the gate, blah blah blah."
Sawyer ended with an exaggerated flourish, letting his hand flop dramatically back to his side.
The absurdity of everything — the colossal throne, the invisible stairs, the child-king doppleganger — it all pushed him closer and closer to cynical defiance.
It was either mock the insanity or be swallowed whole by it.
But Samu'el's response shattered the fragile shield of sarcasm in an instant.
"No," he said — just that single word — but it cut through the air with startling clarity.
Gone was the playful tone, the mischievous lightness.
In its place was something cold, immovable, and ancient, an authority that filled the space between them with a force Sawyer could almost feel pressing against his skin.
The sheer firmness in Samu'el's voice was enough to make Sawyer's sarcastic smirk falter and then vanish completely, replaced by a sudden, cold awareness that he had underestimated whatever — or whoever — he was dealing with.
"What?" Sawyer blinked, caught off guard, genuinely taken aback.
For a heartbeat, he simply stared, searching Samu'el's small face for some trace of the teasing boy from seconds ago, but finding none.
He had expected another echo of Joe's urgent, desperate pleading — another voice in the ever-growing chorus shouting for him to save the world.
Instead, he found something much heavier.
"A king does not beg or bargain, Enforcer," Samu'el said, his tone steady and unflinching, each word carrying a weight far beyond his small form.
His voice did not rise or fall, did not seek approval or understanding.
It simply was — inevitable, immutable, like stone carved by centuries of relentless winds.
Sawyer felt a shiver work its way down his spine.
There was something chilling about hearing that kind of authority spoken through the mouth of a boy, something that made the hair on his arms stand on end.
"He commands," Samu'el continued, and though his voice remained soft, it resonated with a depth that filled the empty, broken silence of the hall.
It was as if unseen centuries of rule and responsibility had compressed themselves into the small, straight-backed figure before him, waiting, always waiting for the right moment to be unleashed.
Sawyer swallowed hard, the weight of those words settling into his chest like a stone dropped into deep water.
"But this time," Samu'el said, his eyes narrowing slightly, "for reasons you will soon understand, I will not command you."
He paused deliberately, letting the significance of that decision sink into the tense air between them.
"I will show you — with stark and undeniable clarity — what will inevitably happen if you fail to close the gate."
His small hands rested lightly on the gilded arms of the throne, but there was nothing relaxed about his posture now.
Every inch of him radiated purpose, a grim certainty that made Sawyer's stomach churn uneasily once again.
"And in return for your success," Samu'el added, his voice lowering just enough to draw Sawyer in like a moth to a flame, "I will offer you a reward beyond your wildest imaginings."
The words hung in the air, heavy with implication, stirring something deep within Sawyer — a complicated, dangerous blend of fear, temptation, and desperate hope.
He suddenly realized that whatever was about to be shown to him, whatever truth Samu'el intended to unveil, it would leave a mark so deep it could never be fully erased.
Before Sawyer could even voice a word of protest — the knot of apprehension in his stomach tightening into something sharp and urgent — Samu'el moved.
The small boy-king floated down from the imposing throne, his descent unnervingly smooth, almost ethereal, as though gravity itself bowed to his will.
There was no sound, no rush of displaced air, only a surreal stillness as he drifted down until he hovered directly at eye level with Sawyer, their faces mere inches apart.
Sawyer instinctively stiffened, every nerve in his body on high alert.
Samu'el, without a flicker of hesitation, extended a small hand — a child's hand — and pressed it squarely against Sawyer's forehead.
The touch was startling in its contradiction: warm, almost painfully so, pulsing with life and energy, yet delivered with the commanding surety of a being far older than his appearance suggested.
"Wait—hold on a second!" Sawyer burst out, the words cracking from his throat more from instinct than thought, a raw, desperate protest against the unknown.
A surge of profound foreboding gripped him, twisting in his chest like a vice, every survival instinct screaming at him to pull away, to run.
But the plea came too late.
The instant Samu'el's hand made full contact, a violent jolt of energy slammed through Sawyer's entire being.
He felt it before he could even comprehend it — a blinding rush, an overwhelming force that bypassed thought and tore straight into the core of who he was.
Both their eyes flared, blinding and pure, an incandescent white light that devoured the world around them.
Then the flood came.
Images, sensations, emotions — a torrential cascade that smashed against Sawyer's mind with brutal, merciless force, ripping away his grip on reality.
It was not a vision; it was an experience, visceral and absolute, so vivid that it might as well have been happening to him right then, right there.
He saw towering skyscrapers — monuments of human ambition and triumph — crumbling and burning.
Roaring flames devoured them from within, windows bursting outward in showers of molten glass, their skeletal frames silhouetted against a sky thick with smoke and ash.
The air pulsed with suffocating heat, every breath tasting of soot and despair.
Grotesque creatures prowled the ruins below — nightmarish beasts with red-scaled skin stretched taut over rippling, monstrous muscles.
They were a twisted fusion of reptilian and something far worse, something wrong on a fundamental level.
Their savage snarls reverberated through the abandoned streets like an ancient war drum, and with terrifying, brutal efficiency, they tore through fleeing humans as if they were nothing more than paper dolls.
Blood painted the cracked asphalt in sickening pools, and the screams... the screams cut deeper than any blade.
Sawyer wanted to look away — God, he needed to look away — but there was no escape.
The vision gripped him with iron claws, forcing him to witness every horrifying detail.
Then came something even more impossible, even more horrifying:
Worlds — entire worlds — collided with Earth in sickening, deafening crashes.
Alien skies, impossible landscapes of towering crystal forests, endless black seas, and jagged floating mountains smashed into familiar streets and forests and oceans.
The ground itself twisted and screamed under the pressure, birthing impossible terrains where nothing should have coexisted.
Above it all, an all-consuming darkness unfurled.
It devoured the heavens, swallowing the sun, the moon, the stars — all of it — leaving behind a sky that pulsed with sickly, malevolent energy.
The world plunged into an eternal twilight, the line between day and night erased, leaving only endless, cold grayness.
The air was a choking miasma, thick with the acrid stench of burning flesh and the sharp, metallic bite of fresh blood.
Every breath scraped at Sawyer's throat, tearing at his lungs.
The sounds — the grinding collapse of buildings, the bestial roars of the invaders, the desperate, hopeless shrieks of the dying — merged into a single, overwhelming cacophony of despair.
It wasn't just sight or sound or smell.
It was everything.
Sawyer felt the searing heat of the flames licking at his skin.
He felt the bone-snapping impact of the creatures' attacks, the helpless terror of being hunted like an animal.
He felt the darkness pressing down on him from all sides, heavy and suffocating, like drowning in cold, black tar.
This wasn't a nightmare.
Nightmares could be woken from.
This was real — or would be, if he failed.
It seeped into him, seeped through him, staining his soul with a terror so deep it was almost religious in its intensity.
Sawyer's heart hammered against his ribs, frantic and wild, and for the first time in a long time, he tasted the bitter flavor of true, unrelenting fear.
It was a vision of the end — not just of a world, but of every world.
And somehow, impossibly, he knew:
This wasn't just a warning.
It was a promise.
Sawyer screamed — a raw, primal sound ripped from the very core of his being.
It was not a sound shaped by thought or fear alone, but by something far deeper, more ancient — pure terror that bypassed reason and seized the body in its most vulnerable state.
His throat burned from the violence of it as he staggered backward, his entire body recoiling as if struck by a physical blow.
Instinct took over.
His hands flew up to his face, fingers clawing at the air as though he could somehow wipe away the horrific images that still scorched the inside of his eyelids.
Every fiber of his body screamed at him to run, to escape, but his legs betrayed him.
He collapsed heavily onto the cold marble floor, the impact jarring the breath from his lungs in a painful grunt.
Panic surging through him, Sawyer scrambled backward on all fours like a wounded animal cornered by a predator, kicking and clawing desperately at the smooth surface to put as much distance as possible between himself and Samu'el — between himself and the unbearable, inevitable future he had been forced to witness.
His chest heaved in sharp, ragged gasps, each breath feeling like a knife being driven into his ribs.
The pounding of his heart was deafening in his ears, a frantic, erratic drumbeat that seemed moments away from shattering entirely.
Thoughts battered against each other in his mind, disjointed and incoherent.
There was no logic left — only the raw aftermath of horror, the disorienting vertigo of a mind pushed far beyond its limits.
Meanwhile, Samu'el remained utterly still.
The boy-king hovered a few inches above the polished marble, his small figure framed by the golden light that filled the massive hall.
His expression remained unchanged — calm, detached, almost clinical.
He observed Sawyer's breakdown as if it were an expected reaction, something studied and categorized rather than felt.
There was no sympathy in those ancient eyes.
No sorrow.
No remorse.
It was as if Samu'el had just screened a particularly graphic horror film of his own creation — and now, rather than being moved or disturbed by the devastation he had inflicted, he was merely evaluating it with cold, methodical detachment.
Perhaps even finding it... lacking.
The contrast was jarring, cruel in its starkness.
Where Sawyer's face was a canvas of agony, Samu'el's was a blank, unreadable mask.
Where Sawyer's body trembled with the weight of the vision he had been forced to carry, Samu'el remained suspended in that eerie, motionless poise, untouched and untouched by the maelstrom he had unleashed.
"What… what in the absolute hell was that?" Sawyer finally gasped out.
His voice cracked and wavered, the words barely more than a broken whisper that seemed swallowed up by the cavernous, echoing hall.
It took all the strength he had left to form the question, and even then, it barely held together, quivering under the weight of raw emotion.
Tears streamed freely down his cheeks, hot and blinding, cutting wet tracks through the dust that had settled on his skin.
He didn't even try to wipe them away.
There was no room left for pride or pretense — only the shattering, brutal honesty of a soul laid bare.
His entire body shook violently, wracked by tremors he could not control, as if he had been plunged into the icy heart of winter itself.
And despite the unseen warmth that radiated from the hall's gilded walls, Sawyer felt nothing but a numbing, bone-deep coldness creeping into him, anchoring itself in the spaces fear had hollowed out.
He was broken open, exposed, gasping for answers in a world that suddenly felt far more alien and merciless than he had ever dared imagine.
Samu'el simply smiled — a small, enigmatic curve of his lips that was far more unsettling than any overt threat could have been.
There was something ancient in that expression, something impossibly old and hauntingly familiar, as if he were a being who had carried the unbearable weight of countless lifetimes on his small, delicate shoulders.
The smile spoke of burdens no child should bear, of knowledge too dark for even the strongest mind to hold without cracking.
It was a smile that sent a fresh, involuntary shiver ripping down Sawyer's spine, leaving him feeling naked and exposed before something he couldn't fully comprehend.
"The future, Sawyer," Samu'el said at last, his voice so soft it barely stirred the heavy air between them.
Yet in its quietness there was a weight, a deep, almost sorrowful resonance that hung in the space like the low toll of a funeral bell.
"The inevitable future that awaits… if you fail to act."
Sawyer blinked rapidly, struggling to process the words through the haze of terror still clouding his mind.
His body, slick with cold sweat, trembled with the effort to remain upright.
The salty sting of perspiration dripped into his eyes, but he hardly noticed — every nerve ending was still screaming in the aftermath of the visions, the images burned into the deepest parts of his brain.
"What… what the unholy fuck was that?" Sawyer stammered again, his voice a raw, broken rasp that barely resembled his own.
The words came out in fits and starts, each syllable punctuated by ragged gasps for air, as if speaking them aloud might somehow make sense of the chaos inside him.
His entire body was slick with fear-induced sweat, his clothes clinging uncomfortably to his skin, adding another layer of discomfort to his already fraying nerves.
Breathing had become a conscious effort, each inhale a shallow, panicked gulp that barely fed the burning in his lungs.
The air around him felt oppressively thick, almost viscous, making every breath a small battle against suffocation.
He fought the rising tide of panic clawing at his chest, forcing himself — slowly, deliberately — to draw in one long, shuddering breath after another.
It was like trying to command a storm with whispers.
But somehow, through sheer force of will, the chaos inside him began to recede, if only slightly, enough for his heart to ease its frantic pounding and for his vision to clear beyond the immediate blur of fear.
"Aiden…" he whispered, the name breaking from his lips like a prayer to a distant, indifferent god.
The sound of it grounded him — or tried to.
He clenched his teeth and forced his trembling limbs to obey, pushing himself up from the cold marble floor, each movement a monumental task.
His knees wobbled dangerously beneath his weight, threatening to buckle again, but he planted his feet wide, steadying himself with stubborn determination.
The memory of what he had seen — Aiden trapped amidst that hellscape, the flames licking hungrily at the world around him, the grotesque monsters bearing down — slammed into him with renewed force.
Aiden's face, contorted in terror, burned itself into Sawyer's mind with brutal clarity, refusing to fade.
The thought of his friend suffering, helpless and alone in that nightmare, stirred something deep and primal within him: a desperate, furious need to protect, to change what he had seen, to fight against the monstrous future that had been thrust into his unwilling hands.
"Calm down, Sawyer," Samu'el said quietly, his voice unnervingly steady and composed — a sharp, almost jarring contrast to the frenzied panic tearing through Sawyer's mind and body.
The calmness of the small boy in the face of such devastating horror only made the situation feel even more surreal, more wrong, as if Sawyer had stepped into a world where terror and reason no longer followed the same rules.
Sawyer's chest heaved with ragged, uneven breaths, his wide, bloodshot eyes locked onto Samu'el's unblinking, almost serene gaze.
Every instinct in him screamed to run, to get as far away from this impossible child and the impossible visions he had just been forced to endure.
But his legs refused to obey, rooted in place by a mixture of primal fear and the heavy gravity of Samu'el's words.
"It was merely a glimpse," Samu'el continued, his voice light but carrying an undeniable weight, each syllable pressing down on Sawyer like a physical burden.
"A fleeting vision of what awaits… if the gate remains open."
"The future?" Sawyer rasped out, the word catching painfully in his throat.
His voice was hoarse, strained to its breaking point, barely recognizable even to himself.
His mind recoiled from the enormity of it, from the horrifying images still burning behind his eyelids — the flames, the monsters, the worlds colliding in grotesque chaos.
The very idea that such devastation wasn't just a nightmare, but a genuine possibility, crushed the breath from his lungs.
"You mean… all of that…" he swallowed thickly, the taste of bile rising at the back of his throat, "all of that will actually happen?"
"Yes, Sawyer," Samu'el replied, his tone devoid of hesitation, his face devoid of even the faintest flicker of sympathy.
He might have been commenting on the inevitability of a sunrise or the certainty of rain, so detached and factual was his delivery.
"If you do not close the gate."
The simplicity of the statement made it hit harder than any shout could have.
It stripped away any possibility of misunderstanding or hope for a different answer.
There were no hidden meanings, no softened edges — just the stark, brutal truth laid bare before him.
"I… I can't do this," Sawyer choked out, the words tumbling from his lips in a hoarse, broken whisper.
His head shook violently from side to side as if denial alone could erase the future he had seen.
His hands trembled at his sides, clenching and unclenching uselessly, searching for something solid to hold onto in a world that suddenly felt like it was crumbling beneath his feet.
His heart pounded furiously in his chest, a frantic, desperate rhythm against his ribs.
The sheer scale of what he was being asked to do — no, what he was expected to do — was too vast, too terrifying to comprehend.
"It's impossible," he said, the words barely audible, crushed under the weight of his own fear.
"I'm just… I'm just a normal guy, Samu'el. I'm nobody. I can barely manage to parallel park without causing a scene, let alone…" His voice cracked on a high, panicked note. "Let alone close some goddamn interdimensional gate!"
For a long moment, Samu'el simply stood there, his small figure bathed in the golden light of the hall, unmoving and silent.
Then, with a solemn certainty that carried more force than any shouted encouragement could have, he took a step closer.
"No, Sawyer," Samu'el said firmly, his voice low but resolute, a quiet authority that seemed far too powerful for someone his size.
"That simply isn't true."
His eyes, impossibly deep and ageless, locked onto Sawyer's, refusing to allow him to look away or hide in his despair.
"You can do this. You must do this. The power you need... it's already inside you."
He lifted a hand, palm open, almost as if offering a piece of invisible truth between them.
"A potential you haven't even begun to understand."
Sawyer stood frozen, the enormity of Samu'el's words settling heavily over him, wrapping around his soul like a chain he could neither accept nor escape.
Somewhere, deep in the pit of his gut, past the fear and the doubt and the trembling panic, a tiny spark — the smallest flicker of something else — began to stir.
But it was faint.
So faint he didn't know yet if it would survive.
"How… how can you be so sure of that?" Sawyer asked, his voice barely more than a broken whisper.
His hand, clammy and trembling, rose instinctively to his forehead, wiping at the cold sweat that had gathered there in slick beads.
The horrific visions of the apocalypse — the flames, the monsters, the guttural screams of a dying world — were still vivid behind his eyes, seared into his mind like scars that refused to heal.
The raw fear curled tighter in the pit of his stomach, a sickly, constricting knot that made every breath feel like a labor.
He struggled to reconcile the glaring ordinariness he had always known in himself with the impossible weight Samu'el seemed so certain he could bear.
It was like trying to bridge an endless chasm with nothing but hope and fear"Because you're me, Sawyer," Samu'el said, his voice calm and steady — almost impossibly so, as if he were the anchor in the storm tearing Sawyer apart from the inside.
"And I am you."
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Note: The City Department of Tourism would like to assure potential visitors that while local folklore contains tales of powerful visions, they typically do not involve the complete annihilation of multiple realities. If you experience such phenomena, please consult a qualified (and possibly interdimensional) professional.