The evening air carried the weight of rain that had not yet fallen. Kahn left the main avenue and followed a cracked road that wound toward the valley's industrial edge. The sky over the distant warehouse district glowed faintly orange where the city's lights bled through low clouds, a sickly hue like rust in water.A faint tang of ozone clung to the damp air, mixed with the sour odor of mildew and old metal.
The fragment beneath his skin pulsed with an irregular rhythm—too slow for a heartbeat, too quick for breathing. Each beat whispered a single impression: downward. It pulled at him like a tide, urging him toward the dark pocket of streets that sagged along the valley floor.
The neighborhood beyond the last bus stop felt wrong the instant he stepped onto its cracked pavement. Buildings leaned against each other in weary angles, their concrete skins flaking like diseased bark. Windows were cataracted with grime; shutters sagged as though the wood beneath had swollen and rotted for decades. The smell of iron was stronger here, metallic and damp, the scent of wet nails left too long in the rain. Every breath tasted faintly of pennies.
Streetlights lined the road but gave no comfort. Their bulbs buzzed faintly, halos flickering with anemic light that seemed to slide off the walls rather than illuminate them. Shadows pooled thick beneath sagging awnings and recessed doorways, blacker than should be possible. When Kahn moved, the darkness seemed to tighten in the corners of his vision—as though the street were exhaling after each of his steps.
A faint sound drifted from ahead. Not voices, not machinery. It was the slow crackling hiss of something decomposing, the delicate break of fibers surrendering to damp. Like paper left in water, or meat left too long in heat. The sound grew louder when he slowed his pace.
The alley appeared without warning—two buildings slumped toward each other to form a crooked mouth. A single streetlight stood at the entrance, its glass globe clouded with moisture, the filament inside flickering like a dying firefly. The air inside the alley smelled of wet iron and rotting leaves. Kahn's shoes scraped against pavement furred with a carpet of moss that squelched like soaked fabric.
Halfway down the narrow corridor a symbol burned faintly against the far wall.It was not paint or chalk. Its lines hovered a hair's breadth above the crumbling brick, as though etched into the air itself. Black at first glance, but laced with threads of dull copper and a deep, bruised purple that throbbed in slow pulses. Each stroke shifted as he looked—curves fraying into granular specks, edges eroding even as they re-formed.The shape resisted memory: when he tried to trace it with his eyes, the beginning had already decayed into something new.
The fragment beneath his skin leapt like a struck wire. Pain shot up his arm.Whispers slid across his thoughts: Entropy… Dissolution… Divinity through ending.
The puddles on the pavement quivered in sympathetic rhythm. Their surfaces clouded, skinning over with thin films of mold that bloomed and withered in seconds. The bricks around the sigil blistered, flakes curling outward, falling as gray dust that never quite touched the ground before dissolving into nothing.
Kahn stepped closer despite the screaming instinct to flee.
The symbol pulsed brighter, and the alley responded. Moisture bled from the bricks, streaking down like tears. Rust blossomed on the iron pipes that ran along the wall, crawling outward in fractal veins that spread faster than corrosion should allow. Wooden pallets sagged and collapsed into damp mulch. A plastic bottle at his feet yellowed, cracked, and crumbled into a fine powder that the stagnant air refused to scatter.
Time itself felt brittle. Every second seemed to splinter into fragments that aged and died before he could fully register them. His own breath left his mouth in clouds that browned at the edges before fading.
Something vast stirred beyond the physical. Not sight, not sound—a pressure, a gravity of presence. It pressed against his mind like a wet cloth, testing the porousness of his thoughts. Behind the symbol lay a mind of decay, an Aberration whose obsession with rot had reached the Entropy stage—neither dead nor alive but becoming. Its hunger was not destruction for its own sake but completion, the sacred mathematics of endings.
The fragment throbbed in recognition. It wanted—no, needed—to bridge the gap.
Images flooded Kahn's skull like spores exploding from a ripe fruit:
Wood collapsing into fertile soil, only to sprout something darker. Cities eroding into skeletal grids that still pulsed with power. Flesh sloughing away to reveal patterns of growth hidden inside bone.
The smell of iron thickened until it was almost sweet. The sound of quiet cracking became a chorus of infinitesimal fractures. His teeth ached as if enamel were softening.
He raised a hand before he realized it. The fragment pulsed in answer. The symbol flared—copper bright, then black again—its edges unraveling into dust that hung weightless in the air like the ash of burned paper.
The wall behind the sigil sagged inward, brick softening like wax near a flame.For a breath Kahn saw through it: a void of infinite corrosion, surfaces collapsing and rebuilding in endless loops. A presence waited there, vast and patient, an intellect born of rot. It was not inviting. It was simply inevitable.
Come, the whisper said—not a voice, but the silent certainty of things that decay.
Kahn stumbled backward, heart hammering. The pavement beneath his shoes softened, moss liquefying into a dark paste that clung to his soles. The air tasted of old blood and rain-soaked copper. Behind him the entrance to the alley seemed farther away than before.
He forced his eyes from the symbol and turned. The world lurched. Bricks crawled backward into youth only to crumble again. Streetlight halos pulsed in slow, diseased rhythm.
One step. Then another. Each movement tore like fabric, the sound of a wall collapsing somewhere inside his skull.
Finally he emerged onto the cracked sidewalk of the main street. Cars passed with mundane indifference. A child laughed in the distance. The smell of exhaust rushed in like a blessing.
But the fragment inside him still pulsed, triumphant and hungry. Behind his closed eyelids the sigil of rot burned on, disintegrating and reforming in endless rhythm. It whispered a promise that chilled him more than fear:
All things end. I am the ending that becomes god.