Being the Fourteenth of the Lost Scriptures — the Third Canto of the Dissolution, As inscribed upon the walls of the Mausoleum before the Burning
Thus spake the tablets of the Mausoleum, recovered from the ash-gardens of old Hoofstad:
At the dawn-before-dawns, there was but one truth: Daedos1; The Womb-That-Was; The Garden of Ideal Perfection. A paradise of intention made manifest, where the First-Fires danced eternal of creation and unmade nothing, for nothing had yet learned to die.
They moved through their paradise like children in a nursery of infinite wonder. They built rooms of crystallized laughter; They wove corridors from the mathematics of joy; They painted walls with colors that had no names because names are boundaries, and boundaries had not yet been invented. Trees grew in non-Euclidean spirals, their fruit glowing with soft internal light. Rivers of liquid silver sang quarter-tone melodies as they flowed uphill. The rooms were infinite yet unpeopled, and walls hummed with the unvoiced hymns of Gudang's symmetry. It was beautiful, in much the way that a dream is: complete, self-contained, and utterly fragile.
Claudius the Ribbon-Dancer moved through the halls of heaven with grace that made the universe weep with envy. His red ribbons—seventeen thousand strands of woven starlight, each one a prayer given physical form—trailed behind him like the tails of comets which knew nothing of falling. When he danced, realities formed in his wake, and when he rested, those realities held their breath, afraid to disturb his slumber.
Yet from the shadow of Augustus—whose white robes were sewn from grace and whose golden hair caught light that had yet to be—there stirred something other. Something that looked upon paradise and saw only the absence of endings. For what is the first breath without the promise of the last?
Ginnung, whose name means The-Gap-Before-Being, uncurled from the cosmic nadir where he had slumbered since the First Kindling. He arose from the glory-wound of Augustus' silhouette like smoke from a guttering candle, manifesting as discontent without face. His head was a bulbous mass sown with a hundred perpetually-sealed eyes dreaming constantly of conclusions, each lid a locked door to an ending that had not yet been permitted to occur. Eight arms—each a different length like broken branches of a lightning-struck tree, a deliberate asymmetry said to have offended Volyx's sensibilities of Order—were folded in a silent mandala. In its center, he cradled The Unword: a singularity of not-being that pulled meanings into silence and drank definitions and excreted nothing.
The other Flames did not wholly embrace Ginnung as a sibling, for his sphere of influence was one which they remained wary of.
He was Ginnung the Void-Dreamer. Ginnung the Ending-Keeper. He was the black period at the conclusion of every sentence the universe would ever write. And he waited — for there is nothing else an ending can do.
From the scattered mosaic-shards of the Temple floor, painstakingly reassembled:
The Bull's arrival left in its wake a kink in the veil, that tear where realities bled into one another like wounds left too long unstitched. And from the tear, strange new creatures crawled forth: small things, soft things. Things that breathed and bled and died with such startling frequency that the Fires initially mistook their deaths for a form of reproduction.
They were the first Humans, the yolk of the old world's cracked egg—though in the eyes of the Siblings, they were the same as ants in the eyes of humans. They looked upon the First-Fires, with all the power they commanded, and fell to their knees in prostration. The collective of celestial siblings were deified as Gods — a title gifted from smaller mouths speaking smaller prayers.
The humans built temples from materials that would rot. They offered sacrifices that screamed. They created entire systems of meaning around beings which had never asked to be worshipped, that simply existed in the way that stars exist: burning, beautiful, utterly indifferent to the mathematics of adoration. Nonetheless, some of the Gods were charmed by this veneration.
Philia opened her gardens to the ant-things, teaching them which herbs healed and which herbs killed (often the same herbs, she noted with a healer's dark humor—"dosage is everything, children; the difference between medicine and murder.").
Cygnus walked among them, cataloging their stories, their names, their flickering lives that extinguished so quickly she could barely finish recording one before another demanded her attention.
Even Claudius found himself softened by their strange devotion. They wove his ribbons into their wedding ceremonies. They named their children after the colors of his dance. They died with his name on their lips, as though saying it might carry them somewhere gentler than the grave.
Yet Ginnung only watched. And counted. And in his hundred-eyed darkness, he calculated the costs.
The humans multiplied as though it were perhaps their only true talent. They built cities in domains that had been pristine. They carved names into walls that had been nameless since before naming existed. They brought with them their diseases, their desires, their noise.
Oh, the noise.
The Gods had known the profound quiet of being the only voices in an empty room. Now, everywhere their ears could reach, there was always chatter, always prayer. There was the endless, grating, inescapable sound of need—for food, shelter, meaning. For the Gods to notice them, to love them, to save them from the consequences of their own mortal architecture.
For a time, the ant-things had been grateful. For a time, they had understood their place in the hierarchy of being: small supplicants in a paradise built by hands larger than worlds. But gratitude curdles. Reverence rots. The children who worship their parents inevitably grow to resent them—this is the tragedy of all creation, that the created must eventually unmake the creator or be unmade themselves. The humans grew restless, feeling entitled to more than survival. They demanded comfort, demanded explanation. One ant cannot harm a god. One ant is barely a sensation against divine flesh. But a swarm? A billion ants with a billion tiny mandibles, each one cutting a wound so small it cannot be felt but so numerous that the cumulative damage is catastrophic?
Gods would fall. This was the fate which Ginnung foresaw for his Council which he shared with his siblings. He knew that he could not allow it to come to pass, if for no other reason than that destruction could only occur on his terms.
This section was found carved into the reverse side of a Philiac's meditation slab, as though meant to be hidden:
It was a day that had no sunrise, for days had not yet learned to begin properly.
The summons went out in the way of old, through implication. One moment, the Gods walked their separate paths through Daedos. The next, they stood assembled in the Amphitheater of Eternal Witness, a space that existed in the fold between Hoofstad's conception and its eventual decay.
Claudius sat upon a throne of solidified starlight, his ribbons coiled around him like sleeping serpents, trailing behind him like accusations written in silk and velvet.
Augustus radiated beside him, his Angelic presence white and blinding, draped in robes of silk that caught no light for they were a source of light in and of themselves.
Gudang perched nearby, her pastel hues casting reflections that had no source, her musical eyes seeing patterns in patterns and futures in futures.
The Allseer attended, though she wept without sound, for she had already seen how this council would end. Philia held her hand—or was it Philia who was held? The goddess of love could heal what had not yet been wounded, but she could mourn it.
Argos came armed with his spear. His own hundred eyes were open wide where Ginnung's remained sealed, blooming across his flesh like wounds that refused to close.
Divus counted the grains of time spilling from aer fingers, knowing that some of them would shortly cease to exist.
Y'liad lurked at the edges, his presence a tension no-one acknowledged.
Volyx observed from a throne of obsidian that materialized beneath him without conscious command.
Atlas stood apart, the crown above his head chittering like the legs of spiders, dripping memories that were not his own.
And, of course, there were many others which would later be forgotten, their names erased by time's indifferent hand, their aspects absorbed into greater aspects, their individuality dissolved into the collective memory of what once was.
Ginnung spoke rarely; for when he did, stars forgot how to burn. "I would speak, brothers and sisters…" he announced as he entered the hall, his voice resonating with the collapse of stars. "I would be heard."
Claudius inclined his head. The Champion's courtesy was legendary, even then—he would offer respect to an enemy moments before killing them, this being the nature of honorable combat. "Speak, Void-Dreamer. The Council listens."
What followed was a recitation of mathematical proof delivered in the language of ending. If it were to be approximated in the words of human language, it is understood that Ginnung spoke of the humans. He named their numbers. He spoke of their accumulation, their rate of increase, their exponential demand on resources that had been infinite before their arrival but were now somehow dwindling, as though the act of observation diminished that which was observed. "They are wrong," He said, and his hundred eyes remained sealed as always, dreaming of endings behind lids that had never opened and must never open. "They do not belong. They multiply. They name things." He raised four of his arms toward the crystalline ceiling, where the geometry of heaven reflected endlessly inward. "Look. Look at what they have done to our paradise. See how they worship us with their pathetic offerings—their rations and their berries—as though veneration could unmake what they have ruined."
And the Gods looked. They saw the temples the humans had built: crude stone stacked upon crude stone, mortar mixed with animal fat and human desperation. They saw the offerings left to decay at divine feet: fruit that had gone soft, meat that had gone green, flowers that had dried into papery ghosts of beauty. They saw the graffiti: Names; Dates; Pleas for mercy; Declarations of love. Obscenities carved into surfaces that had been pristine since before obscenity was invented. The humans had marked the paradise with their symbols, their sigils, their pathetic little attempts at permanence.
"They leave their dead to rot in our corridors, staining them with their hideous residue," Ginnung continued. "They form their 'factions' and wage their petty wars. They have turned paradise into a hospice."
"They are guests," Philia countered in the language of honey and morphine. "They came unbidden, yes, but they are—"
"-PARASITES." Ginnung spat, blackened saliva flying from his mouth and eroding holes in the walls and floor where they landed. For a moment, just one of his eyes near the lower left of his face twitched as though attempting to open. "An infestation in a body that was pure. We never invited nor created them. They were never meant to exist here. We built this place for ourselves. For family. They crawled in through cracks we should have sealed, breeding in spaces we should have burned. And soon they shall demand we justify ourselves to them. They bite the hands that tolerated their feeding."
"They are merely curious. They seek to understand. Is that not beautiful?"
"Understanding is the first stage of consumption." Ginnung's arms shifted, longer ones folding over shorter ones in configurations that made spatial logic weep. "They will understand us. Then they will use us. Then they will forget what we were before they understood. They have already begun. Augustus preens when they worship him. Gudang creates for them now—not for joy, but for applause. And now? Now we squabble over who receives more of their worship."
His accusation hung in the air. No-one denied it.
“Ginnung,” Argos’ voice boomed from everywhere and nowhere. “This is not your calculus to solve. The Garden, and all within it, lies under our protection.”
“Your 'protection' is a delay. You protect the disease and call it mercy. I will restore the purity of the equation.”
"And what would you propose?" Argos asked, his hundred eyes narrowing in concert.
Ginnung extended forth his longest arm—one that could reach across three entire realms—and opened his palm to reveal the kernel of unmaking. Where it passed, color drained from the world, sound was extracted from the air, and form relaxed into a grey, potential mush. A patch of glowing moss became inert dust. A singing crystal became silent, dead quartz. It could almost be taken as a gesture of threat. "I propose a cleansing; a purification. The mortals must be excised…" Ginnung stroked the singularity with one of his smaller hands, almost tenderly, as if he were holding a pet. "The kernel is sufficient. One word spoken into its heart, and it will consume everything that does not bear our signature. The mortals. Their structures. Their 'civilization' and their 'settlements.' Every trace of their incursion will collapse into the point of no return, and we will begin again."
"You would vandalize our art," Gudang breathed in disbelief, her multicolored hair dimming with horror. "All the rooms we built together—"
"I would destroy corruption," Ginnung corrected. "Our rooms can be rebuilt. Better. Purer. Have the humans not already vandalized your precious 'art' beyond salvation?"
Claudius said nothing, but his silence held the weight of a blade yet to be drawn.
"I have seen this conversation, and where it leads," The Allseer said, and all of her eyes (even those yet to grow) fixated upon Ginnung with a gaze between sorrow and recognition.
"Then you know I am right."
"-I know you are certain. Those are not the same."
Ginnung's hundred sealed eyes pulsed behind their lids, twitching as if itching to open. "The garden is sick. The ants carry the sickness. We must burn the garden to save the gardeners, or the gardeners will become the garden, and the garden will become them, and we will wake one morning to find ourselves naught but the shape of their expectations."
"We could guide them," Gudang offered meekly, though her voice cracked like old paint. "Teach them—"
"You cannot teach a virus to be a flower." Ginnung's arms extended, and the kernel between its palms began to spin—slowly, inevitably, a miniature apocalypse rehearsing itself. "I will cleanse what we have made. I will return Daedos to the silence before naming. It will hurt when it all ends…but then we can begin again, without the contamination of being known."
Augustus’ wings flared slightly. "You would destroy it all, then? The worlds we built? The lives we shaped? For what? Because they are not as we imagined?"
"Because it is broken," Ginnung hissed. "And a broken thing cannot be mended. Only remade."
Lilith shook her head in disbelief. "You speak of brining countless souls to their end before their time. This I cannot sanction."
Not even Clavis could bring himself to align with Ginnung's vision. "The humans are indeed cause for concern…but to outright eradicate them all is most radical a measure."
Finally, Claudius arose from his throne. The motion was slow, deliberate, weighted with the significance of a god choosing to stand when sitting would have been easier. His ribbons uncoiled behind him, seventeen thousand strands of woven red light beginning to move in patterns that spoke of coming violence.
"No."
A single syllable. The smallest possible refusal. And yet it landed in the amphitheater like a meteor striking an ocean, sending shockwaves through the assembled divinities.
Ginnung's bulbous head craned agonizingly towards the direction of Claudius. "Brother. You…disagree?"
"I refuse."
"This is no mere matter for refusal. The equation is simple: remove the variable that corrupts the function. The garden returns to equilibrium. We return to what we were. Endings are my domain; I know their value better than you."
Claudius' ribbons began to unfurl, sharpening at the edges. "Then you know that endings must be earned." The Champion's voice rose, and somewhere in the garden, flowers began to wilt from their sheer proximity to his conviction. "The ants did not ask to come here. They fell through a wound we failed to mend. They are frightened and small and they die, brother. They die so easily. And still they build. Still they hope. Still they look at us and see something worth believing in."
"They see reflections of their own terror, shaped into faces they can worship. We are are their coping mechanisms."
Claudius stepped forth, and his ribbons spread behind him like wings; like the unfurling of a war-banner, casting the shadow of something that had already decided to become a weapon. "The humans are flawed. They are noisy and demanding and ungrateful — and yes, some of them have bitten the hands that fed them. But they are alive. They create. They love. They build things from nothing and call those things meaning. They name their children after the colors of my dance, brother Ginnung. Let them find meaning in meaninglessness. Let them name the nameless. Let them try. If we burn them for the crime of existing, we only prove that we were never worthy of the paradise we built."
“Sentiment. The true infection.” Ginnung's arms rearranged themselves. Eight hands, each holding a different aspect of the kernel—past, present, future, possibility, probability, certainty, doubt, and the space between doubt and certainty where all endings gestate. "Pretty rhetoric from a pretty dancer. You would fight me, for them? For ants? Do you truly think so lowly of me, brother? I am a gardener, pruning a blighted branch before it poisons the root.”
"I would fight you for the idea that fighting can mean something," Claudius retorted. "I would fight you, because if we become Gods whose resolutions are annihilation, then we were never Gods at all." Claudius' sharpened ribbons wove themselves into a sword. It had no name, that blade. Names would come later, in the aftermath, when the survivors tried to make sense of what they had witnessed. Some would call it Mercy's Edge. Others would call it Ginnung's End, though that naming would prove premature. The blade was the crystallized intention of protective, righteous violence; the physical manifestation of willingness to kill in order to prevent more killing. It was impossibly long, inscribed with verses that wept silver. "I will not permit the unmaking of lives that have already begun, nor are yet to begin," Claudius declared. "I will not permit the erasure of beings who have done nothing wrong except exist in a place that was not built for them. If you wish to cleanse our paradise, Ginnung, then you will have to cleanse me first."
Ginnung laughed, and the sound was terrible, like a final breath and the closing of a coffin. It was the laughter of one who had seen every ending that ever was or ever will be and found them all to be equally hilarious in their inevitability. "So be it, Champion. Let us discover together which is stronger—Continuation or Conclusion."
Scribed by the quill-hand of Thalzor the Unforgetting, last of the Hoofstad Archivists, whose eyes wept oil unto the labyrinth-floors:
There were no traded blows, no parried strikes, no martial exchange of flesh against steel. A battle between gods is not a contest of bodies but a collision of meanings—two cosmological forces attempting to prove that their definition of reality is more fundamental than the other's.
Ginnung moved first2. His eight arms unfolded like a reverse-blooming flower, and the kernel between them screamed with the absence of sound — a silence so aggressive it left bruises on the ears of concepts that had never needed ears.
The first blow erased the ground where Claudius had been standing. The stone unmade itself, the air forgot to be breathable, the light surrendered its wavelengths and became something that had never been anything.
But Claudius was not where he had been standing. Claudius was dancing. His ribbons spread across nameless dimensions, singing as they cut through the idea of Ginnung's movement. Each arc severed the thread of Ginnung's next action, removing from existence the possibility of the Void-Dreamer moving left, moving right, moving forward. Claudius was editing a possible future, red-lining the apocalypse, sending creation's suicide note back for revisions. For one impossible instant, Ginnung was frozen in potential—all his options edited away by a weapon that understood surgery on the level of fate.
"You cannot dance forever…" Ginnung growled. "You are merely delaying the inevitable…"
"Delay is all that any warrior has ever been." Claudius spun, and his ribbons wrapped around two of Ginnung's arms to ground him, to remind the concept of destruction that it still occupied space, that it still had form, that form could be held. "Every victory is temporary. Every hero eventually fails. But temporary matters. Delay matters. If I give the ants one more day, one more hour, one more breath-"
"Then they will use that breath to fear. To suffer. To die confused and unmourned in rooms that remember nothing. Is that mercy? Is that kindness?"
"It's theirs." Claudius pulled, and Ginnung stumbled—an impossibility, a being of abstract entropy losing its footing, becoming for one instant something that could be touched. "It is their fear. Their suffering. Their death. Not ours to take. Not ours to decide."
Ginnung's sealed eyelids twitched more erratically. Something behind them began to awaken. Something vast. Something that had been dreaming of nothing for so long that nothing had become its native language. "If my eyes open," Ginnung whispered, "everything they behold returns to the Void. Everything. You. The ants. The garden. The concept of gardens. The memory of ever having wanted gardens. I will look upon Daedos, and Daedos will become a word that means nothing, because there will be nothing left to mean." Ginnung struck with the weight of a dying sun, palms outstretched to crush the knight into a singularity.
The rest of the pantheon gathered in witness, sidelined upon marble balconies that overlooking the battlefield—a room-within-room, where floors tiled themselves eternally.
Augustus stood rigid, his angelic form flickering between states of being. He wanted to intervene but could not determine which side to support. Ginnung stood in direct opposition to his sphere of Creation, and Claudius was his brother-in-arms, a fellow dancer in the great choreography of creation. Yet he recognized Ginnung's function, and his argument was not necessarily wrong. "The storm overreaches…" he whispered to Gudang. His eyes, beyond beauty, tracked the pulse of the Unword through the battle.
Gudang clutched her hands together, foreseeing thousands of possible outcomes, all of them tragic in their own way. If Claudius won, the humans would continue their parasitic expansion until nothing of the original paradise remained. If Ginnung won, the humans would simply… cease, mid-breath, mid-thought, mid-existence, their entire species edited out of the cosmic manuscript. She fearfully clutched onto Augustus' robes.
Philia wept in compassion for Ginnung, who would never understand why his logic failed—for the logic was sound, the mathematics correct, the conclusion inevitable given the premises. But premises built on the assumption that life has no inherent value will always conclude that death is preferable to continuation. This is the failure of pure reason when applied to impure existence.
The Allseer had closed every eye except one, and that one wept tears that fell upward, refusing to acknowledge gravity's jurisdiction.
Argos' hundred eyes tracked the combatants with the cold precision of judgment already rendered and not yet spoken, tallying the odds with those unblinking orbs. He murmured sigils, wards flickering against the Unword's null-pull.
Clavis stood at a threshold that led nowhere, keys jangling softly—each key a door to a future that might not survive the next few moments.
Volyx watched with obsidian patience. The Dark Sovereign spoke to no one; he simply observed, for observation was already a form of verdict.
Even Shani gazed upon the raging clash of titans. She grip on her naboot tightened, the muscles in her wrist already subconsciously twitching with Tahtib-rhythms. She wished desperately to intervene, to come to her lover's aid. Yet something within her resisted; for gods do not meddle lightly in sibling-sorrow.
And still others watched. Smaller gods, lesser aspects, beings who would never earn entries in the great taxonomies of divinity but who nevertheless were in that moment, witnesses to history being made through bloodshed.
Time had no meaning. The seventh hour was a courtesy, a narrative convenience, a way for witnesses to organize their trauma into something resembling sequence.
They fought through geometries that had never consented to be geometric.
They fought through colors that had been invented specifically for this violence and would never be seen again.
They fought through the screaming of flowers that understood they were dying and did not understand what dying meant.
Claudius bled, and his blood fell upward, sideways, through, around. The ichor of War in its purest form, each drop containing enough suffering to fill an ocean yet also the potential for healing.
"You fight well, brother…" Ginnung acknowledged. Two of his arms had been severed now, tumbling into the space-between-spaces. "Better than I anticipated. But you fight for a losing cause. The parasites multiply. The corruption spreads. Even if you defeat me here, you cannot defeat entropy. You cannot defeat the fundamental truth that all things end."
"Indeed, all things do end," Claudius conceded, his voice ragged. Although Gods do not tire, they can nonetheless be diminished, and diminishment has its own forms of exhaustion. With this realization, Claudius suddenly had an idea. "…But not all things end now. Not all things end because you will it. The humans have their own stories, Ginnung. Their own beginnings, their own middles, their own conclusions. You do not get to write their endings for them." Suddenly, he launched himself forth, blinking across space to bombard Ginnung with an overwhelming onslaught of strikes. His ribbons solidified as silk became steel and grace became gore.
Ginnung diminished as each ribbon-strike from Claudius carved away something conceptual. The idea of absolute endings became the idea of probable endings. The certainty of annihilation became the possibility of postponement. The kernel between Ginnung's hands flickered, its singularity hiccupping, its gravitational certainty developing doubt. "You…you are killing me…" Ginnung rasped with wonder in his voice—the wonder of something that had never imagined it could be subject to the process it embodied. "How is this possible? I am the Unmaking and the Undoing. You cannot unmake nor undo myself."
"I am proving you wrong," Claudius corrected. His ribbons—exhausted, dragging, still sharp enough to cut causality, coiled for the final strike. "I am demonstrating that endings are not absolute. That even the god of endings can change and be changed.
"If I can change, then nothing is certain. If nothing is certain, then everything is chaos. If everything is chaos—"
"-Then everything is possible…" Kirai said to himself from the sidelines, a grin beginning to form.
Claudius' execution of Ginnung manifested not as a physical strike, but in a spoken sentence. Each ribbon-tendril became a word in a language that predated languages, a vocabulary of violence so old it had been present at the first disagreement between existence and void. The ribbons wove through Ginnung's non-form, through the eight arms and the sealed eyes and the kernel of unmade potential, and they narrated an ending.
Ginnung's scream carried the color stars being extinguished and the texture of a mortal's final breath. His remaining arms came apart in distribution. Each arm became a trajectory, a vector, a direction in which his divine gore could travel as it splayed across the heavens, painting the void with streaks of midnight. The sealed eyes burst behind their lids, and what spilled out was everything that Ginnung had been: every ending he had dreamed, every conclusion he had promised, every period at the end of every sentence in every story ever told—erupting outward in a cascade of dying meaning. It splattered across stars that had not yet been named. It dripped onto moons that would later be discovered and worshipped. The ghosts of every apocalypse Ginnung had ever dreamed of inflicting were now left homeless and seeking new vessels to fill. It pooled in the spaces between spaces, forming pockets of ending-potential that would trouble travelers for millennia to come.
The force of his unmaking knocked the Pantheon from their feet. The shockwave rippled through the dimensions, cracking the foundations of several realms.
Amidst the rainfall of conceptual gore and philosophical viscera, Claudius collapsed to kneel upon one knee—his ribbons frayed to threads, his armor dented and cracked, his beautiful face streaked with Liquid Pain and Ginnung's unmatter, coated in the black ichor of the Destroyer, his brother. He looked at his hands, trembling. He had saved the parasites, but he had killed a god to do it. He breathed in the dust of the dead god. He looked so terribly tired. "It is done," he whispered — to no-one, to everyone, to the ants who would never know what he had spared them. "It…is done."
—-
The other Gods approached slowly, carefully.
Augustus reached Claudius first. The Angel's white robes were stained with the colors of Ginnung's ending, the impression of conclusion that would never wash out, that would follow Augustus through the centuries until his own ending later arrived and painted those robes permanently black. "Brother, you are wounded."
"I am." Claudius was unable to deny it. The gaps in his being were visible, places where his form simply stopped, edited absences in the manuscript of his existence. "But I will heal. The humans will continue. This was… sufficient."
Shani was next by his side, tending to his wounds in whatever way she could, using Claudius' own ribbons as bandages for him.
Philia rushed to the wounded places in the world, her hands glowing, trying to stitch meaning back into the scarred earth, to heal what could be healed. Much could not.
The Allseer departed without speaking. She had seen this. She had seen what came after. She would tell no-one.
Augustus knelt beside his brother-in-arms, his glory dimmed by something that might have been grief or may have been the first seed of the resentment that would later bloom into murder.
Gudang jewel-wept openly as she stood at the center of the cracked paradise, watching the Absolute Point pulse with new instability. Ginnung's death had only served to widen the wound between realities, now yawning with hunger in ways that it had not been hungry before. She knew she would have to fix it eventually.
Clavis gathered the keys that had fallen from his belt during the battle. Three were missing. They would surface later, in hands that should not hold them.
And Volyx melted back into shadow, carrying with him the memory of how a god could fall. This information would prove useful. Eventually. When the time came for other fallings.
Claudius looked up at the heavens, at the scattered remains of Ginnung painting the firmament in colors of conclusion. "It must be cleaned, before the humans see. Before they understand what was nearly done to them."
But cleaning the remains of a god is not simple work.
Philia tried first, her healing hands reaching toward the scattered eyes, the severed arms, the pools of ending-blood that had collected in cosmic crevices. Her touch—usually so gentle, so restorative—recoiled from Ginnung's remains. They were anathema to healing, designed at the fundamental level to resist restoration. "I cannot," she reported, her voice trembling. "It… it rejects continuation. Every piece is a small ending, refusing to become anything else."
Others tried. Failed. Reported similar results.
The blood remained. The eyes remained. The arms continued to twitch in dimensions that had no business containing twitching arms. Ginnung may have no longer posed an active threat, yet his shadow now loomed large over Daedos, cast over it from the heavens themselves.
Solaris, the Starmother, looked upon the writhing dissolving mess of Ginnung. The malice was still there. The gore was trying to reassemble, trying to pull the light out of its surrounding space.
"We cannot leave this here," She declared. "It will rot the roots of the world."
Solaris gathered the remains. She took the hate, the gravity, the hunger of Ginnung, and she began to weave. She spun the corpse into a tight, screaming knot around the Unword. She compressed the divine flesh, ichor and bone into the singularity-syllable until it ignited then collapsed inward. She had created a grave that was also a prison.
With this, Solaris ejected the kernel into the deepest darkness of the cosmos.
Time passed. The humans multiplied. Built. Prayed. Rebelled. Were forgiven. Rebelled again. This is the cycle of mortal things—eternal resentment paired with eternal forgiveness, neither side able to fully commit to either war or peace.
The scattered remains of Ginnung—those which Solaris had failed to contained—drifted all throughout the fractured liminal spacetime of Daedos, now called "The Backrooms" in these days. His ichor congealed into pockets of ending-potential, spaces where things that entered sometimes forgot how to continue. These would be called "blips" by the humans. Those hundred seeing-ending-eyes attached themselves to concepts rather than locations, appearing in the periphery of vision whenever someone contemplated finality. And his arms found their way to dark places. To the spaces between levels. To the cracks in reality where broken things go to become more broken.
All that truly remained of Ginnung was the Unword—that starless singularity that had dreamed of absolute endings— ordained with his divine gore, nestled at the center of the heavens like a parasite finding its perfect host. Solaris thought she had reduced it to a mere black hole—a useful tool, a gravitational anchor, a way to organize the chaos of her domain's expanding void into something manageable. She fed it matter. She fed it energy. She fed it the discarded remnants of dead stars and the forgotten prayers of wanderers who had stared too long into portholes.
She did not realize what she was building.
It swelled, turning blacker, hungrier, colder. Mortals would come to call it Null-06.