I spent the first twenty-eight years upon this Earth in a state of ignorance. Even before the autumn trees of that cold November rain, the world to me was viewed through my self-constructed pinhole camera. It was one I was never taught to leave before my periphery faded into the fractal walls of that heptagonal throat. I was blinded to the truth of the world. For ten years, my focus was on the Baby's-breath. The ease of it. The purity of it. For eighteen years, my lens was covered by Cuscata. The ease of it. The logic of it. I wanted to coast along, never truly putting forth the effort to become what I should have been.

  I never spared a day of consideration. Every day that passed was another regret added to Epimetheus's jar. The past could not be changed. I knew that, but the guilt for not having that impossible ability still anchored my feet. I was drowning in a black sea.

  All because I was afraid. All because I was alone. All because... I thought I deserved it.

  I became a machine sustained by the flow of remorse within my heart, and the waning and waxing tides of perversion. From the jungle's ashes, a colony of Cuscata mistletoes grew as far as the horizon around me. This forest of plagues sang with quivering speeches in pure relief alone. There was no progress, for I lay underneath those vines of oozing indulgence. Blinded was I from the Sun, yet enough of it shone through the worm-branch canopies above to illuminate to me the obvious:

  I was awaiting my flight to the Abyss below.

  The question I never bothered to ask was how far down I was going to descend...

  That answer was as clear as the rivers of life: Nalthephus was going to drag me to the bottom of Tartarus, and lower still.

  After just twenty minutes, my senses were already wavering on the precipice of Earth. I recognized distorted voices coming from the eggheads, but they had no mouths. I saw that their shadows were the ones talking while their actual bodies were blurs of noise and light that warped the spacetime around them like microscopic singularities. The world itself was already warped in my vision. I was gazing into a fourth-dimensional object using second-dimensional eyeballs forged in a fifth-dimensional star, with each blink illuminating the dark matter skeleton of the universe for a femtosecond. I was already so disconnected, as my mind was on the verge of all forms of knowledge becoming a soup of coagulated, fatty gray matter. Smooth and thoughtless. Sounds became a jumbled mix of enraged echoes from the maniacal creaking of the upended & unmoving triviality, and the bouncing tremors of the placid waves emanating from the unending abyss. It was as calming as being on the top floor of a collapsing building, with every crumbling second being a maddening serenity. The dread was antithetical to the harmony that possessed my form. My fractured mind was the center of fission, while my bodily tomb was the vacuum between supernovae.

  The shadow eggheads oozed around the whirling, semi-Euclidean space. I could not comprehend them anymore; their words only sounded like the descending glissando of The Peanuts parents, but distorted and reverbed. With every penetrating blow of the disappointed trombone, the room began to degrade into a mass of iridescent sludge. In the stupor of this Syschian disarticulation, the eggheads, now all a menagerie of veiny black ovals, gathered into a coven of ritualistic depravity. Through apostatic witchcraft and perverse incantations, the four wizards summoned a fibrous plate with glowing brown and green mushrooms; the magic inside them was infected with an orange irradiance that flowed like the pollution of Wormwood. The fungi's slime preached stability and security, but Anansi's sacred venom could not be hidden from their flippant heresy. But there was nothing I could do once the black goose egg began to feed me the wretched devils. As one after the other was shoved into my mouth, and every chewing motion done, I could feel the oily marrow of deceptive, solid gasoline inflaming my throat with the lava of Mount Fuji, foretelling chaos and torment like I was to drown in the oceanic slog of wrath. As I ate the last of the mushrooms, there was a minuscule menopause, a moment where existence was not bleeding around me; it preceded my mind being born into a whirlwind of complete Fibonaccian hallucination, as the spirals of my sanity reversed.

  The void above was whispering hidden gospels of the stars. There was no hearing of the incomprehensible words, yet every syllable reverberated in my mind with revelations of the discordant nature of the other side. The trauma was added to by the sterility around me, offering only a harmonious death choir of the stillborn and murdered. The ovals, I witnessed, were cracked and defiled by some horrible six-pronged, rectangular pitchfork etched into their calcium exteriors. I heard in each of their yolks their Mephistophelian writings to the masses and their abject falsehood in representing God. I felt every evil, metaphorical touch they commanded upon other experiments, whether the ghostly bestiality of the goats they sacrificed to their cruel overlord or the Sisyphean cruelty of a toddler rolling her mother’s swollen corpse on a treadmill of jagged glass and rusted nails. I smelt the abominations on their lips, chiefly the rotten stench of their demonic Benedictian cannibalism and the acrid cost of their yolk-tentacle tongues. I was already terrified of the noise, the stench, the taste, the sights, and every other sense, existent and nonexistent, becoming corruptively telepathic. My soul was on the verge of spiraling infinitely down. My heart rate was increasing to the flapping pulse of Vela. They gave a sedative of some kind. It calmed my heart to them, but to me? My heart was racing Voyager I to Ophiuchus, 22 years delayed, and it was going to win this inverted contest of the tortoise and hare. In four seconds, my heart met Asclepius and the serpent he held. In two seconds, the healer imparted his story of restoration and being thunderstruck. The abominable serpent, disgraced 13th Zodiac, had shed his void-like skin to display his false grace and purity underneath. Even the holiest of men would find themselves deceived. I was not. He glared at me with his evil ichor eyes and commanded me to-

  Dive.

  The colossal serpent swallowed me into an anti-spiral. The truth of his darkness was one I had borne witness to, for his throat was a collapsing singularity containing an entire defiled universe within his eternity. A threshold was crossed in time, and I entered into an anti-Fibonaccian, downward-facing heptagonal corridor. It was an unnatural distortion, fraying from the logic of the hexagonal truth of the natural process. There was a choir of saxophones acting like cellos and drums as pianos, a dissonant hum only interrupted by the occasional moans and ribbits of Theravadin frogs. My descent down into cosmic gore always presented a piercing screech akin to nylon nails on a steel chalkboard. Within each side of the heptagonal prism were fractals and spirals of continually evolving patterns of plank-distance complexity, all of which were constantly revolving colors of neon carnage.

  Sink.

  As I was propelled further, the corridor's vertices transitioned into micro-prisms of infinitely shifting sheets of rectangles or infinitely spanning chambers of spheres, each one shifting from pink to chartreuse to lavender and then back again a thousand times a second. The hydrochloric acid of Babel was painted on the canvas of this psychoactive oblivion.

  Plummet.

  I briefly beheld a never-ending series of heptagonal hallways before I was presented with those walls that rendered the universe into a marble by comparison. There were several million walls of cyan and violet and gold and white spherical heptagons that my soul passed through like I was ascending and descending the spheres of Heaven over and over and over again. Star-quakes rumbled distant news: the left shoulder of Orion had at long last become a zombified singularity.

  Plunge.

  There was a dark place where the seven sides of the corridor were fractaline-textured triangles of bizmuthian iridescence, whose complexity I could not perceive in the mere moments I knew of them. Then, at the end of that hallway was a chamber whose tiles and columns were mycelial, fractal spirals of inorganic growths of oil-spilt recycling. Repeating in scale, forever in their multitude. Here I learned the wisdom of Mandelbrot and Julia, for they had discovered the shapes of unending spacetime.

  Cascade.

  A million billion sine-wave irises directed their attention to me. Processing. Processing. Processing. The Biblically accurate border agent possessed the central eye of a cuttlefish, itself a rainbow spectrum that was constantly cycling. It was surrounded by seven heptagonal disks that each contained millions upon millions of microscopic cuttlefish eyes of the same scintillating array of color. It had seven pairs of wings, with each feather being a worm that stagnated in their prismatic orientation. The angel judged me with its hypnotic pupils, analyzing with every infinitesimal cycle my existence and my nonexistence. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. As if it, a hyper-quantum mind of cyberorganic precision, was infinitely evaluating the logic of my place within spacetime, both of being and not being, and more. This cuttlefish angel could force upon me, if it so calculated its necessity, a seventh outcome or beyond that. Options that I would never be able to comprehend within the fabric of human thought. The Gatekeeper chimed a bizarre noise of mechanical acceptance. It was the warble of flexural vibrating steel sheets, the cry of channel-billed cuckoos, and the squishing pant of suffocating cuttlefish blended into a singular reverberation. At the onset of such a babble, I knew that the gate was before me, though I could not in any way understand why or how. The corridor briefly consumed my vision once more, while the angel receded into nothingness as if it had utilized a seventh option to the six-bound logic.

  Resile.

  It was phlegmatic. Heptagonal, still, but the corridor was an abyss of space and time. A singular point of rust was all that illuminated the infinity, as if it were the final brown dwarf defying death in a cosmic Dead Sea filled with black holes and black dwarves, all of which would be everywhere at the end of time. For one singular moment, there was a completely timeless quiescence, where sound and taste and smell ceased to exist. It was as if I had forgotten that I was human within that infinitely tiny zero point upon the surface of the abyssal glass sea. But I remembered what I was, where I was, and how I was meant to be. For I began this descent to-

  DROWN.

  In an instant, I was thrust towards that rusted, dilapidated star faster than the spin of a quasar. Upon my arrival as a bodily ballista, the gate was shattered like a hammer to a mirror. I continued to rocket forward above the infinite sands until I landed upon the abyssally warm, matte pearls of a crimson-coated desert, underneath a sky that paradoxically illuminated the land with darkness. I had broken through the barrier into what Project Stargate called the "Spirit World", though this desolation, that which was called Theia, was far more than what it ever described.

  I arose from the scarlet ground and observed my surroundings. It was an exaggerated Sahara in terms of topography, but had a color more similar to the Kalahari. Of course, no desert had a shade so close to blood. It was like God's very ichor drowned these sands so deeply that it scarred them into becoming perpetually vermillion. I was on top of a colossal dune thousands of feet tall, surrounded by millions of similarly titanic dunes and the occasional ivory spire that pierced the Heavens for dozens of miles, as if they clung on to a stolen divinity that they still pray to reclaim. There was hardly a sound in these wastes besides that wretched breeze that emitted the guttural waves of hunger, along with the heat sizzling the sands below like bacon fat on a scorching skillet. Smell was dominated by roasted and rotten coffee beans, along with the occasional waft of overripe lemons and burnt salt. The spires and the dunes dwarfed the abyssal valleys between them, some of which sank so deep as to border Hell itself. When I gazed into one such abyss off the cliff face, it was not completely void of light. Rather, all the way at the nadir of the pit was a singular, ultraviolet sphere, with a singular slit of gold, surgical patience. It stirred slightly and gazed into my soul like the abyss it entrenched itself in.

  It was an eyeball.

  I immediately shot away my gaze, and as I did, a rumble tore through the earth. The surrounding pellets of sand scuttled around like skittering insects. Quakes of a great draft whirled upward, as the corkscrew momentum of the desert leviathan created a vortex of red sand. After several seconds of this, the monster had revealed itself. I could only describe it as a colossal Bobbitt worm, thousands of feet long, with a singular ultraviolet, golden irised eye. It possessed a maw wide enough to swallow an elephant whole, while the external jaws were easily a hundred feet wide and were lined with dozens of mandibles that could turn a blue whale into mincemeat in seconds. The worm had a chitinous tank of a body that shone the colors of death: suffocating blue, decaying green, and molding white. Upon finishing its ascension, the sand continued to whirl in the air, blocking its visage as if it were hidden within the ashes of a volcanic eruption. Despite the blinding dust, its singular ultraviolet obelisk peered through the sand as if it were the searchlight of a distant helicopter. It was focused on me.

  I sprinted away in the opposite direction, fearing what it would do to me.

  I would have been chased around as it drilled through the ground, tearing apart the sand titans as if they were made of papier-mache. It would toy with me, as it deliberately allowed me to continue my hopeless escape from its jaws. It would have further delighted in the chase, as it lowered me further and further down into the wretched abyss of false hope as I continued into the singular direction of procedural generation, back towards that rusted gate that existed behind a rift I could not cross. And then, once it had been entertained enough, it would butcher the bowels of the earth below, forcing me to descend thousands of feet down into a cavernous sinkhole whose bottom was the jaws of the horrible demon that could destroy worlds.

  But it did none of those things.

  I tripped over myself, straight on to my face, the warm orbs acting as a cushion. I sensed that I wasn't being chased by the worm, so I sat up, turned around, and noticed that its visage was not that of a predator's. It was only observing me. No, not observing. Observation is curiosity, detail-oriented, and studious. What the worm was doing was examining. It was weighing its options, surveying the landscape, and evaluating my worth as a potential meal. This creature was not interested in the chase at all. Would the act of devouring me deprive it of more nutrients than it would gain? As the sand settled and I could more clearly observe the creature, the worm began its descent back into the abyss below. The ground rumbled slightly, and soon the desert around me returned to a state of burning harmony.

  After about a dozen minutes of contemplating my sanity, having beheld a series of impossibilities in mere moments, I arose and further examined the environment around me. Each direction seemed almost devoid of any kind of meaningful difference. Crimson pellet mountains and basins between them. Far to the east, though, I noticed a slightly off-color object that rested upon a far valley between several dunes. It was a pink and black rippling multitude, swaying in the accursed zephyr to defy the otherwise uniform velvet vistas. It was an oasis. Pink and black leaves... The realization of scientific fallacy burrowed my feet into the stars, and I finally bothered to gaze at the sun and the surrounding light, as I initially suspected that the desert was under a strange form of night that was intensifying in heat. When I briefly gazed upon that dread sun, it appeared as if it were in a permanent solar eclipse without the white corona. But there was no moon blocking that dreaded eye. The sun was black, a void even, with even the crepuscular rays it emitted being black rapiers that stabbed the bloodied skin of that world. The landscape was illuminated by darkness, yet the colors around me were still visible under the heresy that was this sun. It was a demonic polarity. This realm was a broken reflection, one where the Morningstar held dominion over all things, an inversality, and the results of such a dynamic were a glimpse into what would have happened if the Devil were God.

  This entire planet was a Golgothan graveyard.

  After the grim contemplation, I set my destination for the faraway oasis, taking care to avoid the pits. It was a treacherous peregrination, involving backtracking and dead ends due to either a cliff or unstable ground. My limited experience with the outdoors would be put to the test, and I hoped that Dad had taught me enough. No. As I looked down at the cross, I knew he did... I still miss him. It was going to take quite some time to trek through the ichor-drenched range of jebels and indurated towers safely. I initially dreaded the time it would take to find the essentials of life in this forsaken place, but luckily, there were a plethora of caves of near-unending quantity, a byproduct of the quakes caused by the thousands of titanic worms and the golden tide I had yet to witness. Despite the red death under the dread star outside, those burrows contained remnants of life defying the will of that heretic sun, spiraling through their sanctuaries to persist and remain.

  The first of these grottos I entered was dimly illuminated by rainbow-colored, bioluminescent fungi, all arrayed in bands from the red pileus bleeding through the visible spectrum to the violet volva. Each band flashed in order of its wavelength, as if reciting an eternal rite to honor their ancient god. In the middle of the crescent ritual of the two-foot tall funnels, there was a clear pool about forty feet in diameter and about five feet at its deepest, one that was connected to an underwater stream whose waterfall I could hear even through the liquid and stone soundproofing. The floor was mostly soft sand and loose stones, with a few scattered remnants of various troglophiles. Most of them were empty carapaces of arthropods and the tiny bones of fish or small mammals. But there was a noticeably large shell about three feet long, appearing to have come from a larger, darker variant of the horseshoe crab. I then focused on the largest of the aquatic denizens.

  It was some kind of bat-faced fish that was a pale red coloration, with light blue eyes, and an alkaline pungency that it emitted when I held the mostly unbothered animal. I decided to relinquish the wretch, fearing its smell was a sign of poison. Some time was spent observing the other odd creatures of that gloomy pond, such as bee-minnows buzzing around in fractured colonies, lion-leeches dueling each other in dominance rituals, and the occasional crimson-ringed cowsquid chewing the cud of scales from decomposing remains of a dead bat-faced fish. In time, I eyed a lifeform that resembled some level of normalcy: a baseball-sized prawn but shaped more like a crab, with a gleaming amethyst shell, an oily black underside, and green eyes. After deliberate examination of the swimming patterns of the violet crawn, I snatched the crustacean, deliberately grabbing the back of it to avoid being cut by its claws. Then, I secured my grip and smashed it against a nearby rock over and over and over again until it stopped moving. I reveled in having found some form of sustenance in this unholy world, and I swigged a few handfuls of water to celebrate. This was short-lived, as I then had to figure out how to cook the damn thing.

  There was no vegetation anywhere in the crimson extinction outside, while the producers in the cave mostly consisted of black and pink caveweed, both varieties of which sweat far too much to ignite. And no doubt those rainbow funnels were brimming with toxins that would contaminate the crawn with its smoke, if not outright poison me with the fumes. Racking my brain with solutions was an arduous process of recounting old memories, but eventually I decided to simmer the crawn with hot stones. I started by digging a trench into the softer sands of the cave floor, about half a foot deep and a foot wide. I then went outside to salvage smooth, dense, and dark stones that had been heated under the hot desert sun. After finding a decent amount, I tossed them into the pit. I then grabbed the horseshoe carapace and cleaned the inside of it. Afterwards, I harvested a plethora of the caveweed and set them on the bottom of the shell, and placed the crawn in the center of it. I then filled the shell with water and placed it upon the stones. I knew it wasn't going to boil, but ten minutes or so of a simmer would be good enough in this blood-scorched land. After the time had passed, the crawn turned into a dusky rose color, with tinges of petroleum black. I grabbed the chitin cauldron and set it into the pool, cooling the crawn to an edible temperature. The scent was a subtle mockery, as it wafted the taste of Play-Doh and fake roses. Using some of the fish bones, I, haggardly, cut open the crawn, taking care to evacuate the waste tube, and began to eat. The caveweed gave the meat a slightly briny taste, but otherwise the flavor was that of the smell of bleeding plywood and a dying dry-erase marker. I continued eating the rubber eraser, which was much more filling than I expected, as if I was eating a far greater meal.

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  I consumed all I could of the bitter crawn and tossed the husk into the pool, whose various inhabitants swarmed towards in gratitude. Then, I salvaged the cooking shell to form a makeshift hood by shoving most of it down the back of my shirt; the rough chitin of the shell was uncomfortable, but far more manageable than the eye strain and heat exhaustion. After observing myself in the water's reflection, I crowned myself as King Horse-Manure of God's Guts; a brief levity amidst the beginning of my damnation. I also pocketed the cooked caveweed as rations for later and the sharp bones as knives, forks, and insufficient weaponry. I then left the grotto to continue my hike across the vast expanse of a dead god. A few hours later, the void-glass sun began its return to darkness, and I went into another cavern, whose yawning esophagus was larger than the previous, to sleep in and indulge in some water. After removing my crown, I molded a hard pillow from the soft sediment next to the pond and lay on it, paying no mind to the death sonata of the outside winds; I attempted to rest in the cradled raft amidst a sea of prowling fears. In a matter of several hours, this realm became my home.

  6,551. One more to add to the pile... All so that I may sleep amidst those jagged memories...

  What I thought was early morning greeted me with nocturnal ambiance, a foreboding presence reminding me that I was in a realm of imagination. I ate my dried rations, which tasted mostly of salt and hand sanitizer, and keenly tried to entertain myself by reading the surroundings of my den of respite. Boredom lightly graced my shoulder, as all the differences I could revel in were the larger size of the pond and the greater abundance of pink caveweed. I noticed a faint rose-tinted suffusion emanating from the entrance. Curious, I gathered my supplies, crowned myself once again, and went out to investigate. What I saw were two fuchsia moons, one a waning gibbous and the other a first quarter, both twice as large as Earth's moon while being at similar distances away. The celestial twins glowed lustrously, emitting grand halos that arrayed the stage around me in a neon pink brume. Hazgaia, for all its abominable and nonsensical qualities, was still capable of intoxicating beauty, such as what I was witnessing before me. Such is the Pandoran realm of fantastical horrors and depraved wonder.

  Despite the brilliance of the moons, there was no light pollution to blind me from stargazing into the Zodiac, revealing many more dreamborne spectacles. Brown, violet, green, pink, and magenta stars shone above in their impossible magnitude alongside their natural counterparts, while giant artificial nebulas of green, gold, and orange hues littered the cosmos like oil spills in the ocean. But all those celestials were but peasants compared to that incomprehensible, spherical white colossus that held dominion in the northwestern part of the heavens. It was a hyper-massive white hole trillions of times larger than even the most titanic black holes of our realm. Around the albino tyrant were the infinitely spaghettified entrails of the stars who dared challenge the authority of the supreme one. No, not stars. Galaxies. No, not even that. Entire superclusters millions of light-years across. The cosmic intestines were a rainbow assortment, entire anti-spirals of iridescence coiling into the white hole to be devoured for their defiance. The hyper-massive entity consumed a tenth of the sky and dwarfed every single deity in the cosmos, planting himself as the chief of this ungodly pantheon. Despite his supremacy and color, though, he emitted no light beyond the surface of his own scales. This achromatic deity, devouring his adversaries like an esurient serpent, was a holy farce, for what level of divinity would justify his boundless greed? None at all!

  My indulgence of Knowledge's contemplative erudition had become accursed in its tanginess, so to retain my sense of scale, I returned my gaze to the land and surveyed the horizon from my sand titan's perch. Several miles in the direction of Boreas' winds, I beheld a golden light splayed horizontally for dozens of miles from east to west. Observing further, I made out the sloshing movements of viscous waves and the salmon-tinted fumes wafting off the sap. It was a shoreline, and the seawater was molten, aureate glass. Slow-moving, yet inevitable. The tidal effect of the two moons, and likely the albino serpent, had brought this demonic sea to these wastes from where once there was no ocean in sight or sound. And upon examining the position of the moons further, I realized that it was not even midnight yet. That silicon undertow was only going to continue marching towards my titan and further on.

  There was no telling what that gold death would do if I got near it. So after a few moments of observation, I found the swaying black in the far east and set off, paying special attention to the pelagic glass. While on the slog, I thought of the hours of this world. I knew I slept for what felt like seven hours, starting in the early evening, which meant it should have been early morning, if this planet were Earth. However, the night was on the precipice of the witching hours, defining that seven hours to me was three hours to this world. After a half minute of mentally calculating ratios, this meant that for every two and one-third hours that I felt circled the clock, one hour had spun for this planet. Therefore, with a rough approximation, I still had another seven hours of this barren orb's rotation to go before the dreaded eye would awaken to continue his tyranny, something that even the melted fondue decanter dared not intrude upon. The night would be sixteen and a third hours for me, an enervating exercise for certain. And that was assuming that it was summer in this world, given the inappropriate heat of this desert night. If it were winter, it might have been a full Earth day of those rosy disco balls weaving a Shakespearean tragedy as a son et lumière.

  These algebraic cognitions were only going to exhaust me more, so I retracted my high school failings and decided to amuse myself on the miracle of life off the shore of that radiating sea. A menagerie of fauna, having risen out of their hideaways from the void-dome, began to wander the more hospitable nocturnal wastes. Meandering the moving shoreline were creatures like jyrgrans, twenty-foot long crocodile-tigers, and great virtumadons, bison-sized elephants that had pale-golden skin and spiraling tusks akin to the shape of Tragelaphini horns. Flying towards the top of many of the ivory spires and red dunes were scissor-mouthed gulls, cream-feathered and raven-sized sea birds that had foot-long beaks that could stab or cut through fish or amphibians with infantile ease, similar to the predation tactics of herons. Hovering over the glass sea were a bouquet of sperm whale-sized, balloon-like organisms that, upon further observation, were giant octopuses that flitted through the air using a flotation sack burrowed in their heads. These akkoros would meander with the prevailing wind patterns, while they also sometimes descended back into the sea to catch whatever marine lifeforms they could wrap their tentacles around. One of these octopuses ventured far into the desert, arriving above one of the many pits that contained another of the giant worms. As expected, an earthquake shook the entire landscape as the akkoro was plucked and swallowed whole by the leviathan, as it just as swiftly descended back into its burrow. Thirty seconds is all it took.

  Three of Thiea's hours passed, and the sea was now only two miles away from me. Crashing and sloshing waves bombarded my ears, while the gulls, sandhoppers, and bisonfrogs chirped, croaked, and roared into a symphony that combined with the neon pink haze to truly create a theater of an absurdist orchestra that yet retained a semblance of the beauty of nature. Under this disco ball night, my nostrils absorbed scorched daffodil incense, burnt lemon ice cream, and salted ammonia. I turned my attention to the mystery that had clouded my mind over this area's food web: the apparent lack of producers. This ecosystemic oddity was later resolved by the wafting smoke I had seen before. I originally suspected that this was heat coming off the molten glass, but after observing some animals drinking the glass sea, I reconsidered this. I then figured that the smoke was a chemical byproduct of the phytoplankton and chemoplankton that floated on top of the glass sea. Combining the pink light of the moons and the shimmering chemicals of the glass sea, both kinds of plankton produced abundant levels of oxygen while detoxifying the ocean so that other forms of thermophilic life could flourish there. Traditionally herbivorous animals like the virtumadons instead acted more like flamingos or baleen whales, using their trunks to filter feed for the practically infinite amount of phytoplankton in the glass sea.

  The gold sea marched to its high tide, though I imagined that it could go even further under the spring or king tides. The orchestra of that night was at its crescendo, and the chaos of the night only grew. A couple more akkoros were ambushed by the colossal worms; the combined convulsions caused some of the titanic crimson monoliths to collapse into the sea below, coagulating into small islands that would be abducted by the sea with time. A couple of bull virtumadons were competing with each other for the reproductive rights of the matriarch. It was a fierce competition; the clashing tusks of the wide-eared mammals resulted in many bore holes of viscous blood and torn skin, revealing the delicate bluish-white marrow below. The larger and older bull charged his younger rival with remarkable efficiency, laying down his challenger into the ichor granules below, slightly burying him. The older bull had won, though his glory was short-lived.

  A chittering roar whistled from the west, and upon witnessing the source of the demonic cacophony, lo! A two-hundred-foot-long butterfly-dragonfly-Pteranodon hybrid, of a deathly starlight-chitin, ripped through the paper night sky, sounding like a thousand razors on chalkboard. The herd scattered immediately upon the arrival of the graceful terror, which had its eyes on a weary jyrgran. The titanic insect brutally pinned one of its obelisk forelegs into the poor animal, then it proceeded to use its massive proboscis to inject its prey with a poison that liquified the insides, allowing it to consume the liquified gore; it was as if the jyrgran was a body horror smoothie. While this world is beautiful in many ways, it can also be so disgustingly cruel. The great beast departed from its successful hunt, swiftly returning to its nest with the sound of groaning coils. Its singular eye was violet, with a golden iris, as it was the apex predator of Theia.

  The trek towards the oasis continued as the gold sea and its symphony began to recede, with fauna like the akkoros either chasing the sight of gold or those like the virtumadons retreating to their bastions to escape the sun. The brume was fading, while the demonic dark sun's incandescence crept his phosphorescent grasp back from the horizon. My destination loomed only a couple of miles east, and now I could observe the place further. While it was an oasis in terms of function, it was also ancient, given the size of the trees there, some of which were easily two hundred feet tall. This destitute garden may not have been an oasis at all, but rather the last vestige of a once great jungle, one that might have encompassed the entire wasteland in the past. I didn't know what I hoped to find there. For me, that oasis was my lure into the world of the fae.

  At the same time, the glass sea completely retreated from the desert with the return of the dark-eyed empyrean, casting the accursed chains of dark light to imprison this side of the planet once again. All that existed as the diurnal sound was the buzzing heat upon the stone and sand, the ravenous wind against the jebels, and the crush of crimson grains beneath my boots.

  I had finally arrived at the oasis, and its main tenants were indeed the towers of trees, whether the familiar Sombrero Amanita or the unusual Grootslang. The morning void sun pierced the canopy above with beams of infinite, rectangular black javelins, as if the dark sun was firing arrows against the Spartans of Thermopylae, and the tree tops were their fungal and scaly shields. Focusing on a Grootslang tree, I observed that it had the leaves of shark teeth, along with the ghostly black fruit of elephant eyeballs. The eyeballs were being eaten by mammaleaves, limbed mantis-like insects that had giant, fly-eyeball-shaped breasts, flowing chitin manes like horses, and a stinger like that of two scorpion tails. At the top of the Grootslang was a massive head and neck of a black-scaled snake-like creature, hidden in the brush beneath the pink-capped trees above. Similar to the titanic larva of the desert, this part of the tree was an ambusher, awaiting any birds like the scissor-beaked gulls to swiftly catch in the ambuscade that was its maw. The clicks of various mammaleaves echoed in the forest, while the occasional roar of blood tigers and squeals of manhogs reverberated from the darker recesses of the brush. The white forest floor consisted of horrid formations, mainly the human teeth-grass that, despite their name, were all a fungus colony that acted as a singular organism, feeding on the bloodied soil and other decaying remnants of the jungle that were not directly exposed to the black spears of the sun.

  SQUISH.

  I swiveled slowly to my left and saw an extremely unwelcome visitor to this grotesque jungle. Behind me, openly displaying his ghastly form, was an Eggman. He was five feet tall, with a black goose egg acting as the combined head and torso. The arms and legs of the cur were similar in shape to human limbs, but bloated and covered in egg-like skin. His noseless face contained, on the surface of the shell, jagged eyes and a mouth illuminated from the crimson yolk within. The creature grinned, creating egg-like crackles as it did so; he sputtered, emitting a fly-like buzzing as he did so. From the clamping click of his fingers, I was embedded into the nearby Grootslang, the snake's guttural hiss rejecting my imprisonment in its scales. A bowl then manifested in front of my face; the contents of the wizard's concoction were a vile crimson and violet mixture with the consistency of dry pulp and the appearance of famished, wet goat fetuses. I was to swallow this vile offering... I wanted to stop it, but I could not.

  I was bound, and the Eggman forced my mouth to open wide with his witchcraft. The wretched potion of abomination went to my lips, and I began to guzzle on the alchemical abortion that assaulted my maw like the Wrath of God against Sodom and Gomorrah. The taste spoke to me with indignation of the sacrificial fetuses, while the Heaven-forsaken stench of rot felt like the hatred of the wrathful of Phlegethon, as their sharpened spear-nostrils stabbed my soul a million million times in momentous succession. The boiling hate persecuted me by melting the entire pink jungle, the void sun, and the enamel floor into a fine pastel mass of a plastic elephant foot that screamed out in terror, as if the entire universe was being carved by the Devil himself. It morphed into a face so atrociously hideous that it would loop back around and attract even the planet Venus onto its coiled, speckled nose. Venus spread open one of her canyons and impaled herself onto the phallic neb. The sight was an atrocity against all things, a horror that traumatized even God-

  No! I don't understand... Why did it... Why did it replicate the speckled giant? Why did it replicate the demoness? Why did it replicate the coagulation on the floor? Why was it reminding me? Why was I remembering? Why was I...

  What the fuck did I do to deserve that?!

  Damn you, speckled giant! Why did you do that to her? Why did you make me watch? Why did you force me to participate? I still remember that wretched taste when you commanded me to you vile creature! And the gutting and the headshot... Why did you take him with you, giant?! Why... Why...

  Why did you... ruin us...

  I was hyperventilating. More sedatives were injected. I was pacified.

  Eve and the Devil consummated their union. The Liar's overabundant and vitriolic seed splattered across the trunk of Knowledge like the greatest heretical graffiti. Once the demonic liturgy between face and planet was over, Venus immediately defecated a new, vivid dream of depravity and confusion upon my form. The Ayahuasca had sent me further down, and I was in a completely dead void for a moment. My mind manifested a white thread of yarn amidst the cold stillness. I seized the string and pulled on the fibrous ligament of reality. My surroundings yelped with these throes and retaliated with a scream of infinite decibels.

  And yet ever so briefly, all was at peace. I floated on green cotton candy amidst a sea of honey. Held by the nostalgic, gentle arms of a mother carrying her sleeping child to bed. I was being transported from inferno to paradise. It was but five seconds, but it was wonderful... However, I felt a chain around my neck tighten in an instant. Then, it yanked me.

  I was thrust down with the force of a million suns exploding all at once into the now manifested golden sea, with the black sun above. There was no life but the phytoplankton and chemoplankton continuing the industrial alchemy. Worse still, the surface of the molten sea, much like magma in a volcano, was not completely liquid. Rather, the plankton on the top layer formed a protective, concrete-like crust to protect themselves from the black light, appearing much like lemon meringue martinis. This was death. I would have splattered against that plankton layer, as if I were a fly's red remains after a one-sided tennis match with a swatter. I accepted my fate, for there was nothing I could do. I closed my eyes and almost said goodbye, expecting a crash. But then, that familiar gentleness returned. It was accompanied this time by a warm and maternal voice, one in harmony with the strings of a lyre. She whispered in my mind before I would have become the liquefied blood cherry atop that glass lemon smoothie:

  "Breathe, my child. I have you."

  I did as she suggested, and as the steaming summer air filled my lungs, I was transported into another sky and landed with the sweet zephyr of a peaceful morning. Opening my eyes, I saw that I was on a beach, illuminated by an Earth-like sky, as I noticed that I was harbored by the white plastic beads of sand. The savory, aquamarine honey crashed upon me and the sands, engulfing us in a hearth-like warmth. The candied wind there carried a harmonious piano singing the chords of a loving choir of comfort and life. Behind me, there was another sound, the skittering of insectoid and the hopping of padded feet of millions of multitudes upon the sand. I sat up quickly to examine the source of the noises. It was an inconceivable hoard of giant scarabs in all rays of color and a smaller fluffle of magenta-colored, regular-sized hares and chinchillas. These curious animals all watched me with innocent and concerned eyes, all mammalian in their appearance. Upon seeing the giant insects, I wanted to sprint as far as I could, but I knew that was folly. Where the Hell would I go? That shoreline was endless, and there was only a chartreuse jungle further inland. So I remained still, anxiously waiting for what those decomposers would do to me amidst the company of so many adorable fluffballs.

  One of the arthropods, a Volkswagen Beetle-sized goliath, had on his great chitinous back a clear chalice of some kind of swirling, pure green and gold tea, with the smell of oranges, vanilla, honey, cocoa, and cinnamon gliding from the blessed mixture with a healing aroma. Another offering. No Eggmen. No forced ingestion. No grotesque imagery. No relapses. It was only a gift. It was my choice to accept. A kindness so unfamiliar to me... As the goliath offered me the drink, the magenta mammals gathered in a carol of sorts, chirping with their heavenly voices a perfect mimicry— No, this usurped mimicry. Their cherubim voices were a holy orchestra of beauty and miracles, light and serenity, harmony and liberation. Meanwhile, the scarabs besides the goliath had joined in the choir, adding baritone, Gregorian chanting to the orchestra, introducing an inherently holy reverence. All of that, when combined, dwarfed all attempts at Elysium concocted by mankind. I was enraptured by this performance. I never felt so at peace. I was going to accept that gift with wondrous and infinite graciousness to be free from this horrible nightmare. So I began to reach out to the chalice. It was a moment where my heart eased amidst these gentle and kind aspects of the divine. I would roam the Garden's infinite flower beds, forever in awe of all the utopian senses made real. This was to be my awakening. And I was going to embrace it fully.

  Ha! What a fool I was to think it would be so easy.

  A great tearing sound of pimpled skin amongst the great white clouds ripped through the atmosphere, and, with its terrible sonic bellows, launched my blessed moksha into the sands and sea. Upon seeing the fate of my deliverance, my heart became a buckshot sponge. Behold! A demon ship had clawed its way into this reality with sharp, multi-hooved bristles, sundering Nimbus’ domain like a child tearing open a Christmas present. It had the heads of four horse-lions, Peqans, in the hides of kings, violence, judgment, and decay. The goliath beetle snarled an order to the hoard and colony, as the millions gathered my body and we retreated into the jungle, leaving the goliath behind. It was futile, though, as a terrible shimmer of crimson plasma entrapped my body while injecting me with the fear of a mouse being hunted by a dragon. Before either army could notice, I was already being pulled towards that terrible maw. The hoard attempted to chase after me, flying high with their great wings, but the ship only shot each one down with incredible ease, rippling like the splotch of a meat cannon. The goliath was the last to attempt to save me from the Peqans, and he skillfully dodged several shots of the gore cannons. But, in time, the main Peqan-headed cannons fired all at once with horrible, guttural neighs that eradicated the goliath and the entire vicinity of the land and sea into nothing more than a charred, bloody paste. All other lifeforms were dead in an instant, with the exceptions of a lone scarab hovering with a rabbit and two chinchillas upon his stern, retreating to who knows where.

  They could not save me from the complete, abject horror of that Dragon's Maw.

  Lerukash, an incandescent green and ivory masterpiece of such boundless divinity that it has never once been attacked. The Fleet had been forged in the plasma of war, both in blood and star. And through Vrael dogma, the Fleet would continue their purification of Hazgaia.

  Grazhabol and Tshukoret, alongside their battle cruiser, Odamalisk, to drive the Kaltean people into extinction. The artificial cube satellite of Kuhwantar plunged into the bowels of its host gas giant, Halkapari's, dense atmosphere. Asalka's floating azure carapace tourist trap, Hyda, was obliterated by a nova bomb, sinking the remains of both the city and its people into the depths of the ocean planet. The guardian gun-moon Alikango damaged the Tshukoret heavily, forcing its retreat back to the main Fleet for repairs. This did little to stem the tide, as the Odamalisk and the Grazhabol by themselves were enough to obliterate the hollowed-out brown moon, disintegrating much of it into shrapnel that sprinkled down onto the highly polluted surface of the Kaltean homeworld. As for Tihn itself, the cruiser alone entered its carbon monoxide airspace to finish this crusade, while the Grazhabol would intercept any fugitives attempting to escape their judgment.

  Odamalisk and was initially spared the genocide of his people (as per Ibash), as the last remnants of his civilization were scattered to the wind and purified from the avarice of Marumon.

  Lerukash, so his entire Fleet was visible to him. Despite the resplendent shimmer and military might of his Fleet during the Crusades, Arrex had noticed that the strength of the vile gods had only grown, especially the fraudulent Albino Serpent's. He worried, as he always did, that the inevitable counteroffensive by King Yolm and his leagues of monsters would be a war unlike any other he had ever seen. The Treaty of Giza wouldn't last forever. He knew this. But, as of yet, the stalemate remains.

  Dreaton. The ship's subjects are split down the middle when it comes to Eggman compliance, so I am uncertain if the dimyonaut will be in Eggman or Peqan possession by the time we intervene. This would no longer be a Crusade, Holy Grail. Haste would doom us. We must consider our options."

  Dreaton to predict anything with certainty."