Azulus stepped across the temple threshold with her blade still drawn, eyes scanning every ripple in the veined floor and twitch of mbranous wall.
The air pulsed with a scent like scorched marrow.
The corridor ahead twisted inward like a throat. Each wall folded and unfolded like lungs under strain, revealing symbols etched with curving hooks and fractured language. Azulus ignored them.
She’d seen too many broken alphabets in too many cursed places to be impressed.
As she walked, the light dimd into rhythmic flashes. The floor beneath her shimred with residual heat, squelching under her boots like softened sinew.
She moved deeper. Every step guided her through chambers that grew narrower, then wider, then staggered again in proportions that defied balance.
She passed through arches carved from jointed ribs, under chandeliers of ossified eyes and inverted hearts. Ti lost relevance. At last, she erged into a vast atrium.
The space widened like the inside of a forgotten cathedral.
On the far wall, stretching from floor to vaulted ceiling, hung a form.
Humanoid, partially.
An angelic entity was bound to the wall by strands of glowing sinew and spires of hooked flesh.
Her lower body dissolved into a cascade of blooming flesh and pulsating threads, sinking into the temple’s structure as though she was both prisoner and source.
Her upper body retained form. Bare arms spread outward in a cruciform posture, wrists entwined in living cords. Her torso was clothed in a strange ceremonial vestnt—part silk, part muscle, stitched in golden lines that looked like wounds made holy.
Her hair was two-toned, white and gold, cascading in waves over her shoulders. Above her head spun a red halo, distorted by rings of shifting light.
She smiled, wide and bright, as if expecting a guest.
"Welco," the angelic being said, her voice lodic and painful in the sa breath. "Apologies if the place feels shabby. I haven’t had ti to redecorate."
Azulus stood still. "Comfy living here?"
"Glad that you asked." The smile widened, though her eyes did not shift. "Every mont here is agony. Every breath is a scream dressed in mory. Pain coils through like a second heartbeat...
"I’ve lost everything that I hold dear, even if they were only here for a mont. I’ve had enough of isolations, so I befriended it, repressing every inch of my feeling into a sickening barb, tornting my soul with every conscious mont."
Azulus let the silence hang before speaking. "Want to get you off the wall?"
The angelic being chuckled softly, cords of tension quivering across her shoulders. "With that oversized blade of yours? The one that could slice hundreds of flying islands alongside in just one swing if you wanted it to?"
Azulus drew the blade fully, its edge reflecting light from the pulsing chamber. She gazed at the entity. "Have we t?"
"Once. In another possibility. A different world. You wouldn’t rember it, but I rember everything."
"Huh." Azulus raised her eyebrows slightly. "What’s your na?"
The angelic figure hesitated.
Five seconds later, her smile reshaped itself, curling with sothing mischievous.
"Oizys."
"A unique na." Azulus nodded once. "Barely a na that exists within my mories. Guess we haven’t really t with each other, after all."
She stepped forward and swung her katana in a downward arc, then spun into a full crescent.
The impact rippled through the room, tearing into the wall of flesh and fracturing the bindings that held Oizys in place. The cords snapped in staggered pulses, releasing geysers of light and ichor.
The room shuddered. Flesh peeled inward. The entire chamber collapsed in on itself.
When the noise stopped, Azulus knelt, one hand bracing the ground. Her breath ca short and uneven.
"That powerful swing must’ve fatigued, to the point that you can’t move. So how can you still stand?"
"I can barely stand," Azulus said. "But if I don’t, then it’s over."
Oizys stood beside her, completely free, as if she had not just been impaled into the world itself.
Her skin bore no wounds. Her smile never faltered. She extended a hand.
Azulus took it without a word.
"How long were you stuck here?" she asked as Oizys pulled her upright.
Oizys tilted her head, brushing strands of radiant hair behind one shoulder. "About two thousand years, give or take. Maybe longer. I stopped counting when my spine started echoing other people’s prayers."
"Sounds miserable."
Oizys laughed, light and cheerful. "It was. But there were perks. For instance, whenever this god of flesh killed sothing, its soul, its mory, its fear—they ca to . I fed on it, like how Nightmares are dealt with~
"Eventually, I just beca so powerful but with nothing to do. Since you know, trapped and bound, and all that."
Azulus leaned on her sword like a cane. "You don’t sound like soone who was trapped for that long."
"That’s because I stopped feeling trapped." Oizys winked. "Everything only matters if you care about it."
Without asking, Oizys lifted Azulus into her arms. She carried her with strength that belied her angelic appearance.
They passed through corridors that unraveled behind them, the temple shedding walls like dead skin.
"Where did you co from, Azulus?" Oizys asked.
"Vaingall," Azulus replied, not trying to reveal much.
Oizys blinked. "Is your Vaingall in a similar state as this one?"
Azulus hesitated. "No?"
Oizys turned slightly, as though tasting the word in the air. Her smile tightened.
"You know, this used to be a place called Vaingall too."
"I see."
Azulus didn’t react much, but her grip on her sword changed.
Oizys looked toward the horizon, her gaze sharp and distant. "A horrible thing happened here. Sothing that is so horrible that I want to puke a thousand tis, and more horrifying things happen afterwards. Eventually, it beca a downward spiral of horrible things happening after one another, that beca worse and worse~
"And that horrible thing might happen to your Vaingall too~"
It was a lot of information that Azulus must consu all at once,
"Can it be prevented?" Azulus asked.
"All tilines spiral. So end in fire, so in flesh." Oizys raised her hand. Shadowy flesh blood across the ground. It was not the sa as the original god’s growth—this one pulsed with her will, its movents more controlled.
She gently placed Azulus onto it.
Azulus narrowed her eyes. "What are you doing?"
Oizys smiled faintly. "I’m trying to trace your signature. If I can map it properly, I might be able to open a gate back to your world, or tiline, or whatever... Fathomi is one hell of a ss in terms of what is really happening...
"But before that."
Black tentacles rose around her, wrapping her arms, her torso, her face.
They pulsed, trembled, then evaporated into wisps.
When they faded, Oizys stood anew.
Her halo had changed—no longer red, but violet. Twin black angelic wings unfolded behind her back. Her hair had turned two-toned: black and crimson. Her eyes shimred red with a softness that could cut steel.
Azulus, confused, gestured her hand. "What’s with the new look?"
Oizys gazed upward.
"There was soone who tried to save . Soone who gave everything, but couldn’t reach , nor live long enough to tell everything she had in her mind...
"We rged at the end, whether by design or by decay."
She looked down, a slow grin forming, in which she showcased a pained tears streaking down her face toward Azulus.
"I thought I’d wear her form for a while. As an expression of love and admiration, and maybe represent her in any of my future endeavors."
"I see."
Oizys crouched low beside the platform of shadow-flesh, her violet halo casting soft spirals of light across the mbrane-walled clearing.
Her fingers shifted quickly through dozens of layered sigils, each written in glimring strands that bent space when touched. The air cracked with abstract pressure.
Azulus stood with one hand on her sword, still bracing herself against the constant hum of this unnatural world.
She watched Oizys work, unsure whether she was impressed, alard, or just tired beyond reason.
"Will it open?" Azulus asked. "It seems that you’re having quite the trouble."
"It should," Oizys replied, her voice calm but taut. "If I map your signature properly and connect it to your original presence point, we should have a backflow stream to your point of entry. It won’t be precise, but it’ll get us close."
"I might be able to help, I have the necessary skills needed to manipulate space."
"That’s where you’re wrong, little mouse," Oizys giggled. "What we actually need is not space manipulation, but ti control."
Before Azulus could respond, the sky split.
A crack echoed across the heavens of flesh, parting the sky’s mbrane like a torn hide.
A hole, jagged and thrumming with unspeakable force, opened above the crimson tower.
Sothing ca through it.
It wasn’t falling or flying or crawling. It was simply there, as though reality had given up trying to stop it.
Azulus couldn’t move.
She stared upward, her breath locked. Her thoughts refused to take shape.
The creature descending through the rupture could not be described, only felt—an overwhelming sensation of hatred so absolute that it stifled aning.
It had no constant form.
It had every form.
It was evil.
Pure, unfiltered, and ancient.
A being that could weep gold and consu the entire ocean with its hunger alone.
The sky bled around it. The land reacted violently, spasming in waves of flesh and shrieking nerves. Tentacles retracted. Eyes vanished. The mass flesh behind them began to dissolve like sugar in black water.
Oizys clicked her tongue. "Of all the timing... Beast of Lant had to be here now? Talk about an ill fated encounter."
Azulus finally tore her gaze from the sky. "What... is that...?"
"Beast of Lant," Oizys said, her hands continuing their movents through the sigil-construct. "An anomaly. One of the few things in existence that doesn’t belong to this realm, or any realm." Her hands began to move faster, and so did her mind. "It cannot be analyzed. It cannot be fought. It’s not made of matter. And to make it worse, that thing is very smart unlike a simple Nihil that sought destruction throughout the land."
The sky screeched.
"What does it want?!"
"To inflict pain," Oizys replied. Her voice trembled for the first ti. "It wants to unmake everything. And it doesn’t kill you in a traditional sense. It shreds your essence, your soul, your story. It unthreads you so thoroughly that even your mory is erased from the world’s fabric.
"My constant tornt in that chamber is nothing when it cos to what the Beast of Lant is about to do to us if it caught us."
Azulus stepped backward. "What do we do? What do we do?!"
Oizys kept working. Her breathing was shallow. Her wings flared outward in defense. "Almost there... just need to anchor it..."
The Beast of Lant scread.
The sound did not reach through ears, but nerves, soul, marrow.
Azulus collapsed to one knee, eyes wide with panic as her own psyche buckled under the pressure.
Oizys let out a strained hiss. "Now!"
A portal snapped open above the platform—a swirling aperture of distorted light and reversed gravity. It whirled with pieces of forgotten sky and shattered tiline fragnts.
Without hesitation, Oizys lashed out a black tendril. It wrapped around Azulus’s waist.
"Aa—!"
Before Azulus could finish, she was yanked forward, her form pulled into the spiraling gateway.
Oizys followed a heartbeat later, her body breaking into filanted shadow.
The portal sealed shut behind them the instant the Beast’s presence touched the ground they had stood upon.
Silence.
Then air.
Then green.
Azulus stumbled, catching herself on uneven terrain. Her boots t stone.
Vaingall.
Not the ruined one. Not the flesh-ridden hell.
The real one she knew.
She blinked up at the forest canopy and the clean air. She could feel the familiar rhythm of sanctified land beneath her again.
Oizys stood nearby, hands on her hips, wings flickering out of sight. She was smiling, wind catching the edge of her black dress.
"To think that I can return to this place again..."
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