Kieran stood beneath a sky that had forgotten colour, time, and mercy.
Above him loomed the Entity. It did not move because movement was beneath it. It did not blink because it had no need to. It did not exist in the way things do. It was.
He had seen it.
In that instant, his mind ruptured and reformed. He knew the shape of every war ever fought. He knew the last breath of the first child. He knew the final thought of the last star. He knew Roy's name before Roy was born. He knew the ending of the book; Roy hadn't yet begun to live.
The Entity was knowledge incarnate. The past, the present and the future folded into a single, impossible awareness. To look upon it was to be rewritten.
Kieran staggered back, bleeding from the eyes, the ears, and the soul.
He had to write.
Not to escape.
To warn. To preserve it and to reach Roy before it did.
Kieran had become omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent; he became a god himself.
But what is omnipotence to truth incarnate?
Kieran crawled back to the altar, his limbs trembling under the weight of what he had seen. The book still hovered in the air, its pages yawning open like a wound in the fabric of reality. Symbols split across them in spirals and ratios, bleeding into one another, whispering truths that no human mind was meant to hold.
He ripped out a bit of a page and pulled out a pen from his pocket and wrote, "You're not supposed to be here."
The cathedral began to pulse again, as if reacting to his defiance. The entity leaned closer, its presence folding the space around him like paper.
The air thickened, pressing against Kieran's chest like a vice. The Entity's proximity warped gravity, bent light, and made time stutter. Every breath he took echoed with centuries. Every blink revealed a new apocalypse. He could feel it watching—not with eyes, but with understanding. It was dissecting him, not out of malice, but out of curiosity. It wanted to know how long a soul could scream before it forgot why.
Kieran dropped the pen. His fingers were numb, his veins pulsing with symbols instead of blood.
He used the torn piece of paper with the writing on it and pressed it against the altar. The bark-like paper pulsed once, then vanished. Somewhere far from the cathedral, it reappeared. Stuck to a lamppost, someday warning Roy.
He turned to the wall, dragging his hand across the stone until it bled. With trembling fingers, he carved a spiral deep into the surface. The spiral shimmered, not with light, but with memory. It was a wound in the world, a place where sound could slip through time.
Kieran placed his palm inside the spiral and whispered while his voice trembled. "Roy… if you're hearing this, do not find the door, do not open the door, do not look through the door, if you do. DON'T LOOK FORWARD."
His voice fractured mid-sentence, splintering into static. The spiral absorbed it, carried it, and scattered it like pollen across the forest, the monolith, and the traps. It would reach Roy. It had already reached Roy. It always had.
And then, finally, Kieran closed his eyes.
He let the entity inside.
He did not resist. Resistance was a concept that no longer applied. He allowed himself to be unmade, to be scattered across the architecture of the world like broken glass. His body dissolved into whispers, fragments of thought, shards of warning, and echoes of love and terror.
"Roy, do not look forward."
Kieran had written the book. Not the one he read. He wanted to give Roy a chance to live.
The entity watched, not with anger but with amusement, because it knew the truth Kieran had only just begun to understand.
Kieran was not gone. Not entirely.
When the Entity unmade him, it did not destroy him. It scattered him across the forest, the monolith, the traps, the pages, and the echoes. Across time. Across Roy's path.
The thing that followed Roy, the footsteps, the one who broke the lanterns, the feeling of being watched, the ripple at the Black Sea. It was never the entity.
It had been Kieran.
Or what was left of him.
A sliver of will. A splinter of soul. A scream that had learnt to whisper.
He had followed Roy through the dark, through the static, through the impossible geometry of the forest. He had tried to speak, but his voice came out wrong. It was distorted and reversed.
Still, he followed.
Because he remembered Roy's name.
Because he remembered the door.
Because he remembered what waited on the other side.