The red horizon widened until it swallowed every coordinate.
Light did not shine here; it screamed.
Equations burned across the sky like constellations in revolt, each one trying to become the final word of the universe.
He stepped forward and the ground ignited under his feet.
No material, only thought—ideas condensed into plasma, every concept a separate flame: justice, love, infinity, self.
They wheeled around him like comets.
Each whispered a promise: Take me, name me, and I will make you whole.
For a few breaths he believed them.
He reached for one—control—and fire entered his veins, molten certainty.
He reached for another—divinity—and the heat became unbearable.
Every notion he touched multiplied until there were too many to count.
He could feel his skull filling with light.
The body below the thought staggered, arms wide, a man crucified on his own comprehension.
"This is the last gate," God said.
"The fire of everything you cannot hold."
He tried to answer but his tongue had turned to light.
The words came out as geometry.
"The mind," God continued, "was not built for infinity. You've reached the threshold of its engine. Remember the protocol."
Somewhere behind the static of creation he heard it: the phrase learned in the tower, the rhythm of the sword.
He raised the blade, now almost too bright to see, and began to cut—not against the world, but through the swarm of ideas.
First he cut the fantasy of magic.
Then the belief that he was god.
Then the lie that knowledge alone could save him.
Each severed concept fell away as a shard of burning glass.
The fire did not vanish; it refined.
Every swing left behind only warmth, only the clear golden oil he remembered from the beginning.
"Cut teaches itself," he murmured. "The sword knows what to remove."
The roar faded to a heartbeat.
Flames folded inward.
He stood at the centre of a ring of quiet radiance, his chest shining through the wound the throne had left.
"You trusted," said God.
"You stopped trying to steer the stars."
In front of him the circle of fire reformed into a single shape: a sun resting upon a cross of light.
It spun slowly, the four arms marking reason, will, memory, and mercy.
"Every god humans name is me," God said.
"They look into me and see their own faces staring back. Each mask correct. Each mask false."
The scholar watched the symbol revolve, light casting through him until he was transparent.
He felt no need to speak.
Even thought would have been noise.
"This is heaven," God said.
"Perfection. Stillness. Nothing left to want."
He looked into the calm brilliance and saw what perfection meant—no conflict, no motion, no surprise.
A clock wound so tight it could never tick.
"It's beautiful," he whispered. "And lifeless."
"Then you are ready," said God. "Return."
The circle contracted to a single point that pulsed once like a heartbeat, then burst into twelve streams of light—the echoes of the twelve cosmic masks he'd met before.
They spiralled around him, singing in tones of iron and mercy, folding him downward through layers of fading flame.
He felt the pull of gravity again, the slow return of air into lungs, the sound of his own body waiting below.
The last words of God followed him like a trailing chord:
"Balance is the only immortality. Keep the pen. The scar remembers."
And then the fire went out.