Chapter 36
And it was in that moment Ophistu understood why his body trembled, not from fear but from familiarity, as if recognizing a truth deeper than any scripture, negating the idea that there is a form of suffering that seeks no salvation, without searching for deliverance, for the suffering itself had become home.
There was no denial, no will to reject that the body had crossed over, triumphant through ages without ever truly living within them.
It stood upright, calm, radiating an eternal presence. Yet it was not the most comforting kind of eternity, rather one so suffocating it froze the air. Its skin was a faded gray, like a forgotten tombstone, not merely a surface but a manuscript, a raw text for a suffering that had never been carved.
From every pore, thin voices seeped through, not the whispers of men but echoes, the repetition of oaths from imprisoned souls, endlessly screaming without pause, declaring that within this body there were no organs, nor any flesh.
Only a spiritual prison that made existence itself an unending torment.
The right side of its chest was split open, revealing something no mortal eye was meant to see. Not a heart in any biological sense, but an organ resembling a barren womb.
It moved slowly, trying to arrange a pulse that was never meant to happen. It was not a source of life but a hollow space where hope should have grown, yet had instead become a field of sterility.
It was the mother of ruin, not because it created, but because it could give birth to nothing except emptiness. Its motherhood was not tied to love but to a curse, for it did not carry a future, only the suspended weight of death.
Its right hand gripped a long staff, certainly crafted from the bones of prophets. Each joint was not dead, still holding the echo of prayers once uttered in desperation, now petrified, screaming through the object that bore them.
The staff was no weapon, but a reminder, spreading the message that the bearers of revelation could be replaced, turned into material, broken and rebuilt, made into mere instruments of submission.
Its left hand held prayer beads, jet-black as if burned, devoured again and again by a curse that was never lifted. These were not beads for prayer but beads of malediction, forged from faith betrayed so many times it no longer contained any spiritual power beyond vengeance.
The creature was not trying to instill fear.
It merely stood.
And in that stillness, all of reality began to fracture slowly, as if recognizing a new hierarchy. Those who looked upon it would never be whole again, for before them stood not just a symbol of suffering, but suffering itself in its most perfected form.Silent, unwilling to move, yet eroding meaning from within.
Its feet were inverted.
Every step it left behind tore through reality, not merely wounding the earth but scoring existence itself. Behind it, fine cracks split the air, hanging without sound, signifying that space and time were holding their breath.
Its steps left no dust, only shadows. Not ordinary shadows but remnants of being, never complete, fragments that should never have existed yet remained, fossilized in an aging silence.
Time bent near the creature. Not because of acceleration or delay, but because it refused to submit.
Seconds no longer followed in sequence, minutes crawled in uncertain directions. Past and future hummed together, colliding with every breath.
The air nearby no longer served to sustain life but became a weight, pressing from every side. Each molecule seemed tainted, infected by an alien presence, carrying the scent of iron, blood, and tombstones eroded by ages.
That body, if it could even be called such, was the failure of all interpretation. It did not writhe, did not move with purpose, yet its presence rewrote meaning.
Every inch of its skin appeared ancient, not because of time but because it bore too many unfinished narratives.
Flesh may once have existed, yet now it was bound and fused with nothingness, turning the body into a library of suffering, unreadable, perceivable only through sensation.
At the same time, the creature's stillness reacted, causing the world below to lose shape. The once-blue sky paled to ash, not because of night or clouds, but because it submitted to a hierarchy older than all ages, impossibly ancient, unbearably cruel.
Clouds spun without direction, rain never fell, hanging instead as hesitant drops. The earth no longer supported life but served as a vessel, a basin for wounds seeping from hidden dimensions, where unknown voices cried not from grief but because they no longer had a reason to make a sound.
No being around it knew when its existence had begun. Perhaps before the first voice was ever made, or perhaps beyond the oldest desires of will.
It declared nothing, demanded nothing, judged nothing. Yet with each passing second it placed its feet upon the ground, all that was real began turning into doubt.
Structure, identity, even consciousness dissolved into meaningless dust, until only a pain remained, impossible to truly explain. The pain did not come from wounds, but from the faint knowledge that something which should never have been was standing with a certainty stronger than the laws of nature themselves.
Across its back, precisely twenty-seven black spikes were driven in. Not an arbitrary number, but the result of three multiplied by nine, a numerical structure not merely symbolic but an integral part of the architecture of suffering itself.
Each spike was a brand, not only upon flesh but upon the domain, the reality beneath it.
The black iron did not rust, for it had never been made, but grown, born from oaths left unfulfilled, sprouting from the most petrified spiritual wounds.
The spikes were not aligned, yet not random, for each one etched the mark of a different form of denial, an unforgivable sin, not due to its enormity but because it had never been acknowledged.
It was a perfection, not in the soothing sense of the sacred, but as a climax, the final chapter of all human effort to reject the holy.
The body endlessly engraved and solidified resistance against faith, not as an enemy of God, but as proof that not all suffering seeks redemption.
In its form, denial became flesh. In its steps forward, every sacred call was repelled, returning only as the echo of wounds, indistinguishable from wisdom.
Its voice could not be fully captured by ordinary hearing. It existed as a broken harmony of three octaves, moving side by side yet never uniting.
The first was a whisper, like the voice of a tempter at the root of the soul, soft and full of promise, yet carrying only emptiness.
The second was a scream, sharp and unrestrained, as if torn from thousands of sufferers who had no words for their pain and could only howl in eternity.
The third was a murmur, faint as an unfinished scripture, where every word carried meaning beyond comprehension yet felt undeniably true, pressing upon the spirit until resistance became impossible.
The combination of the three did not create a symphony but a fracture, a shattering of how the world understood sound.
They did not arrive at once, but alternated, overlapped, dominated one another, each forcing itself into the center, and in doing so, silencing all other sounds nearby. Not through volume, but because the existence of that voice was more real than silence itself.
To be continued…