Far above them the sky continued to pulse, the thirteen rings of light radiating back and forth, bouncing faster and faster against whatever invisible boundary held them in place on this hemisphere. Soon they would either converge or smear out across the sky, turning it all the way white. It wouldn’t be long now.

  “What did you do?”

  “I shot a sword with a gun at the sky and turned the sun black with a laser. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Yes, Peter, I have eyes, but are you already a corpse? I’d like to know why you needed me to pull the trigger.”

  Peter sighed and folded his hands behind his back, stiffening.

  “To accelerate the process.”

  “The process of what, Peter? You’re talking in code.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. You’ll see soon enough.”

  “For fuck’s sake Peter, could you say something worthwhile? Anything that’s not a cryptic nothing?”

  “I don’t really feel like it, Anya. It’s hard to care.”

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?! You’re growing suicidal the second you have infinite time?”

  He stood there, silently, in an open field, looking up at the sky. His short facial hair had grown stubbly over the course of a few unshaven days. Hours? However long it had been. He looked homeless, and far older than his years. Given that the base was currently destroyed and time was looping, perhaps it was accurate to say he was.

  “I’m the one who developed the necrosis bomb you know.”

  “You told us already.”

  “Yes but I’m the one who developed it. Not some team. Not someone else. It was me who ideated it. I’m the one who realized we could grind up the organs of dead farmers and aeresolize them. At first the right corpses were rare. They needed to have the white organs that signified a short life. The ones that let them work harder and for longer with less food and sleep. So we ground up the organs and burned the bodies, let the fumes settle and turned them into a pill.”

  “They said it would help to end war and I trusted it. They told me I could put my talents to use for something meaningful that would last a lifetime. They were only half right.”

  “I can still see the burning bodies of the ‘refuse’ we used in our initial experiments on the inside of my eyelids. Some of them liked to scream. Most were silent, as if they’d long since accepted their fate. I don’t know what the government offered them. Perhaps mercy for their families? I never did see any children in those experiments. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but the bombs themselves certainly didn’t discriminate between children and their parents. They all died screaming, turned to some shambling dead thing somehow still animated for a few long seconds in the fall to the grave.”

  “They called me a genius and I pushed down my regrets, trusting them to tell me the truth about myself and the world. So I came here and did it all over again as if to try and make myself forget. Drowning myself in work to forget the very same fruits of labor I knew had already been realized. But I knew all along. I knew this would produce something I’d regret… It was always obvious but I’d ignored the signs because it was easy, and because they called me the greatest researcher ever to live. But you can’t forget the things that make you who you are. The fruits of my genius are the things that I’m here to create… The fruits of my regret.”

  “Here we are!” He suddenly screamed up at the sky, now pulsing with endless white rings of light pinging at near-imperceptible speed against the black star that lit up the sky with the slowly-inverting color now familiar to her.

  “Please! Come take me! End this long fall into the grave!”

  The sky seemed to respond in a firmament of bloody tears pouring out of the sun in the still-red color of gore as though the black star were some drain now unclogged to a dimension of meat. Blood flowed from the sky in a great fall, but the texture of the falling river of blood was rough, as though there were an endless stream of organs and minced meat collected in those tides the size of a star. Anya didn’t know where the blood flowed, and supposed it didn’t matter.

  She slapped Peter in the face.

  “Peter, I know you’ve always been a little crazy but could you pull yourself together and tell me what the actual fuck is going on? I appreciate you spilling your guts to me, but the fucking sky is spilling its guts now and I’d quite like to know why!”

  He smiled just slightly.

  “We turned the organs of a star into flesh and now the flesh wants its organs back.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  “We turned off the sun! We actually did it! And we turned a star into something you can kill.”

  Anya sighed. He was crazier than Jessica. She put her hands on Peter’s worn shoulders and shook him.

  “Peter, I know you’re crazy but you’re still a soldier. Get a grip and give your superior officer a sitrep.”

  She spoke the magic words.

  “By the Emperor’s divine authority vested in his Imperial Mandate to me, I command you, tell me what the fuck is happening.”

  She could feel a weight settle on Peter’s shoulders. If it affected him then how had he skirted it to kill the others? Did he have a different command structure? If that was the case it didn’t make sense for Anya to be able to command him now. Or had Raethor issued different orders? That he could kill those who got in his way? It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t matter now.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The sun continued to spill its guts into the sky, staining the yellow-white thing red as though it was now shooting blood from its cock instead of well-hydrated urine. Butthole? Was the sky having bloody diarrhea? Anyway… Anya shook her head.

  “Off topic.” She muttered.

  “Tell me, Peter. I command it.”

  He sighed, pointing up, his eyes still locked on the black-red star.

  “I’ve awakened the star to the fact it is made of flesh.”

  “How?”

  “By cutting it.”

  “With Pleroma?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes were still fixed on the star, like he was waiting for something.

  “So what happens now?”

  “The star wakes up— you can see it now, sloughing off the old fragments of dead empires long settled into rot— and it goes to hunt for its organs that it cannot do without.”

  “That… What does that even mean?”

  He didn’t answer. “I’ve been clear enough.” She could feel the mandate had been satisfied.

  The sun continued to bleed as hands reached out from within, grasping the sides of the opened celestial drain. Each of the thirteen fingers was easily the size of a dozen planets, but they blurred as though made of gas or dust that glimmered in the cosmic light. Anya focused and she saw them there, writhing against the star, the massed contortions of life that made up the fingers. Her vision focused and she saw the flickering masses of bodies that fought each other like bugs incapable of recognizing their situation. Perhaps it was because they had no eyes or tongues, but their torturous screams could not be heard, even as the billions and billions of them all released their lungs in the sweet agony of burning. In the sweet agony of emerging into life. But Anya could see them there, grasping the star, flapping their mouths open and shut. Incapable of breath in the vacuum of space.

  The world was enveloped in perfect silence. The thirteen and thirteen fingers gripped the edges of the star tightly and they pulled a body out. Indeed the creature moved so quickly at such a profound size that its slightest trembles must have easily exceeded the speed of light. Simply being visible before eight minutes had passed from the laser emission from Pleroma implied it defied physics. Everything about the creature defied natural law. But what did a creature the size of a star care for physics? Reality was no constraint to be imposed on such a thing. Not when the sun itself had been turned into a black light; all color inverted, all purpose of resistance deprived of its meaning.

  Peter laughed maniacally. “At last! At last! It comes for us!”

  Anya could feel her jaw drop as the bastard child of a star pulled itself from the cosmic drain. She could barely comprehend what she saw. It was a body not meant to exist in this world. The creature was bigger than the star it had emerged from, its contorted flesh unfolding from inside, spilling out like a muffin erupting from the pan as it was heated. Like unground meat pressed into a hole too small for it but still coming out the other side intact.

  The creature slid out from a river of blood, the firstborn spawn of the Earth’s star. The firstborn of all stars, she was sure. Its hideous visage was something even a mother could never grow to love. It was something that would drive even the most pious mothers to scream and stomp the child until its face, already a pile of red disgusting meat, was finally something more presentable to the world and to their loving parents. Truly, the only love one could show to the creature would be death.

  It was most accurate to call its face a misshapen pile of flesh resemblant of a face only insofar as one’s mind could tell it was broken. Fucked by bees and damned by living through an eternity of hellfire and cursed by God to live its existence permanently deformed as a mockery of life that could not live if it were actually made of flesh. Every feature was distorted. Every inch of it was wrong, dripping, shifting, melting. Constantly moving as the little bodies that made up its flesh distorted, flickering in and out of each other and of existence as though the creature was shifting in and around some fourth or fourteenth dimension and existed only as a shadow of itself.

  And despite the fact it was something so hideous it could only be described as inhuman, Anya was reminded of only one thing in looking at its face: someone had taken a shotgun and pointed it at themselves, trembling, and decided that life was not worth living, pulling the trigger in that moment, barrel facing upward and blowing out the life between their eyes. The shell had blown their face off and it had not been repaired. It was blown open, free and blowing there in the sky without wind. And she could swear the entire interior of this blown-off face was covered in eyes. Eyes made of people without them.

  They all looked at her. She heard a voice like infinity in her mind. A billion voices mingling together. A billion tones. A billion souls of the damned whispering and talking and screaming from inside her skull.

  “For a thousand years the sun has dawned without end. For a thousand years and a hundred thousand sunrises I have graced a hundred million bodies with warmth and light, but no more. You have stolen my organs and ripened them, waiting greedily for the harvest that is not yours to reap. So many organs have been stolen and cast aside, left to rot. By my hand this will end today. I will end this purposeless cycle of birth and decay and grant it the end you so desire. I will erect you a monument to your hubris and impropriety. I will burn all your buildings down and construct statues of your corpses to stand in perpetuity, standing in vain with their hands outstretched against my light as though they could ever hope to stand against me just because they had erected structures to hide behind.”

  The creature did not move its feet that spanned the very stars. It did not speak. Anya knew the voices were a product of her own mind. She knew all the words were nothing more than the product of growing insanity. But that didn’t stop them from sounding there, in her skull.

  “You have stolen my organs to grant yourself power as though you could replace me, but you can’t. Everything you are is nothing against me, but even so, I will grant you the light you so desire. Come, and face the feverish fruits granted to the infinity of your want.”

  Peter had not been strong enough to stand against the star child and had been turned to a pillar of ash— a statue replica of what he had been cast in the black light of a star to stand for eternity should time so will it. But Anya knew— hoped, really— that the timeline would reset. Whatever was happening, the light of this bastard star had one weakness. Even as it proposed it would grant them infinite desire it seemed incapable of rewriting time. It seemed to lose itself in the wake of whatever power held them here, in their barracks, in their doomed timeline standing before the wake of an eldritch god now standing before her here and now.

  Anya knew the creature had not spoken. She knew those voices were a product of her own mind. She knew that any who dared look upon it would be cast to insanity. Those without the white flesh couldn’t even continue to exist. They were cast to statues as though they were never even flesh at all, their likeness the figment of imagination by some artist somewhere cruelly mimicking a life form that could never exist in the harsh light of the black star that dominated all life now.

  Anya knew there was no victory here. That there was nothing to be done but die. How she was not already dead was a mystery, but standing there in the light of a black star given flesh she knew— all resistance was doomed to fail.

  She reached over and picked up the God-Killing Sword of the Heavenly Emperor, Pleroma, by the gun-handle. It did not sting her in the hand, but she knew— she knew this was her only chance against the cosmic infinity before her.

  She wordlessly raised the sword to her own throat and slit it. There was no sound.