A lone citadel hung in the open cold space, so far set apart that even the stars kept their distance. Each pillar rose from the darkness below and vanished into the void above.
In the great chamber carved from the beast of first days, men and monsters gripped their banners. All gazes fixed on the lotus that anchored the realms and the lone throne at its heart.
A white-haired figure sat there, eyes shadowed, his stillness holding the hall in check.
Leaders of great clans stepped down from their high pedestals to stand among the rest as common men.
One by one, they dropped. Knees struck the cold floor. Horns met the ground. Wings rustled and folded tight against their backs.
"Praise to the Highest."
Radeon's next blink came heavy and slow, his old signal to attend.
He turned his gaze to where no man had walked, to a distance no mind had ever managed to grasp.
Stilling his heart, he reached past stones and stars, seeking what men had no name for.
For a breath, he felt as if the trials of tribulation had heard him. It hung there, a hand poised above the cosmos.
Then his intuition screamed. Sudden. Brutal. Each surge louder than the last.
"This energy... something's amiss."
The innominate power rolled through him, trying to seize his flesh and steal his soul.
His skin crawled as the strange force pressed in again and again, searching for a place to root.
With his altered sight he saw across the vastness, the radiance from beyond spread and woke, drawn to every place that still held flesh and life.
Ranks of fighters sensed the anomaly at once and hurled their strongest strikes into the light.
"The light! It burns!"
"Do not let the light touch you!"
"Scatter! Scat—."
Joints slipped from their sockets. Skin puckered, then slid away in ragged strips. Ribs burst outward and hardened into crooked cages of limbs.
Armor, muscle, and bone clung together as if the bodies had never been theirs at all.
Pleas and prayers went unanswered. What began as cries for help curdled into roars of raw resentment.
"My son. Someone. Anyone," cried a father clinging to a warping corpse.
"Hold the line," rasped a captain, his voice already breaking.
The final curtain fell. Past and present lay bare before his eyes, yet the future stayed dark.
He chose his last act, ruler of these dying skies.
Laws etched in his own iridescent blood seeped from his flesh and coiled around his fingers.
Each gleaming sigil flew out to strike a star, and one by one the suns shuddered as their fire was stolen.
Behind him a vast dharmic form unfurled, a million hands stretching out to seize every realm.
Worlds shuddered in his grasp as he ripped them out of spacetime and hurled them into a darkness no chart had ever named.
As the massive realms traversed the unknown, those who had never learned to bow to fear raised their voices.
"Highest One, let us stand with you."
"Give us the fight!"
Their cries rose like spears toward him. Radeon paid no heed to their call.
His hands pushed the worlds farther away as he refused to listen to the brave fools still calling for one last stand at his side.
In the hush that followed, he stepped into place opposite the unholy light and let go of the last of his caution, choosing to stand where its hunger could see him clearly.
The quiet sea in his dantian heaved and broke. Waves of unbridled power rose, then smashed together, a storm that did not care if it tore him apart with it.
His golden incarnate morphed into something darker than black. His arms thickened, split, and opened into ranks of devouring maws.
The roots of matter and the spine of heaven tore loose and rushed to his innumerable mouths. They poured into him, grain by burning grain.
Distances between stars folded like alleys around a single street corner as he dragged the sentient blight toward him.
It fought back at once, its glare crawling over his flesh until his body stretched and warped into a mockery of its own shape.
Radeon did not yield an inch. Every drop of sentient radiance he tore free, he rammed into himself, forcing the alien will to burn inside his bones.
Power from dead stone, darkened suns, and every bodiless law he had ever bent to his will crashed together, one tide hurled at the foreign will, intent on tearing it apart.
Yet it did not shudder, nor did it break. His vast jaws curled. Mad grins lit the dark of his face.
His monstrous form began to distort and warp. Teeth. Eyes. Faces. All of it.
Radeon let gravity collapse them inward to a single bead of light.
The bead clenched into a hard black seed.
Then Radeon let that singularity of a body fail.
The void bloomed one last time. A flower with no creation. A light with no salvation.
Only a radiance made for ruination.
Silence.
Emptiness.
Null.
Radeon was gone. In his place drifted a speck no larger than dust.
Thoughts tried to rise but fell apart, eaten by the dark before any of them could take a name.
At the edge of what remained of him, a soft promise waited.
"Rest. Stop. Let go."
It would have been easy. Yet his will refused to fold. What was left of his mind pushed back against the dark with a single word.
"Why?"
No answer came. Only time flowed on, ages slipping past his speck. He hung there like a sentry with nothing to guard.
Then a jolt ran through his core, hidden currents bore him into a barrier that felt like a universe already on its last legs, familiar yet stripped and strange.
"Where?"
As he slipped through, a hard tremor ripped what was left of him.
The thin thread of his mind flickered in and out for days, fraying at the edges. He felt a single breath away from slipping into nothing.
"Just... a little... more."
The pull slowed, then stopped.
A sputtering cough scratched at his parched throat.