E V E R Y T H I N G

P A U S E

Waves of reality streaming from the blur halt in their gold and green glory. dollar signs of old ink freeze in their Brownian motion.

The Sun peers at the trio. On its spatial axis, it rolls to face toward them, a blazing eyeball of red and yellow. Every red jet of plasma and cool sunspot another pupil of flickering, horrid size.

An object of mass far exceeding anything else in the Solar System, the Sun's size is barely comprehensible.

Most of humanity fails to look at it with fear.

Instead, as the source of life, many would anthropomorphize it as a kind, warm, and loving center of the universe. For those more logical, it is merely the subject of scientific curiosity and fascination, or the bane of red heads who have not invested in Vitality.

Some view it religiously, as its importance to humanity, and life in general, cannot understated in the slightest.

In reality, the Sun is merely an attachment to the STAR shining their curious light from behind it.

Actually, that is a poor choice of words. "In reality" does not apply in this situation. It is always to difficult to avoid pitfalls with the Stars when you must eschew such notions as reality as being, but ah well.

A provider - a mother - dangling from a far more incomprehensible entity worshipped by far fewer than their attachment. The being or beings or nonexistent entity behind the Sun and the rest of the stars is FRIEND to only Señor Screaming Fingers and Sol in this dream. There are other worshippers, just not in this amusing delusion of the Stars. Perhaps, among your company in the dream that you struggle in, there is a dreamer who peeled off their mask and gets to explore tear-shedding wonders.

But who cares about this?! This religion is not one that is yours, nor is it FUN if you pick it up under duress. What matters is that this attachment, the Sun, makes for a wonderful beach episode!

E V E R Y T H I N G

B E G I N

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Atop the hierarchy of Earth, she makes an imposing figure at the center of the world's motion. An entitlement to being the superior race creates the cold ice in her expression. Oh so fragile it is though, metaphorical cracks radiating out from the sneer of disgust. The cold ice is held together by the vice of greed, the Mesh of Taxes.

'Its toxic traits should be contained, not let loose. Its blood should not be allowed to taint any one of her blood with its hysteria,' the hypocrisy of her paranoid love for her family does not even cross her mind. 'The creature's blood poisoned so many good humans.'

She does not even consider the mistakes she made in cleaning Sol.

She is far too restricted by the measures she took to protect herself from the follies of her youth.

'Its wicked soul is unholy and inimitable to life itself. The soul contains so many influences vying for control. The imprints of the false deity Torment Diarrhea, scarring from a weak mindset, and long-term predation of Vengeful Spirits... it is clearly an issue when the traces of the Antichrist are the most benign ones that can be found. And even if the Torment defying God's will had not been explicitly declared taboo by Him, I would detest it nonetheless on sheer moral principle. Why are the higher-ups I have shackled myself to simply letting it go? It is infuriating.'

The soul disease is such a nasty method of execution, one that makes her barely able to fathom the cruelty of the creature that possesses it. The Tailors her IRS had enlisted to create a sufficient containment for the soul of the self-named Sol... she had observed the few that died from touching it before the appropriate safety procedures had been devised.

The dead bodies, and the unnecessary suffering as they exited the moral coil, were horrifying and nauseating to look at.

And she can think of a few more choice words to add atop the two descriptions too.

Walking through the motions of making funerals she quite literally can not mourn, surrounded by those clothed in black all able to feel the empathy she had to excise as she meshed with Death... they are boring, and oh how foul is the childish psychopathic mindset she must fall into!

...

It was times like this that gave the desire for my personage those few final steps to ascension into the Essence.

Exhausting times. Painful deaths.

It brought back... memories.... Memories far back in the recesses of her mind.

So far back. All the way to the antiquated times of the late 1700s, when Essence was barely permeating her world... she had chosen the concept of Death. A waif of a girl who warmed the bed of a general in the English army. The man had been stationed in the Americas...

As the blood leaked out of his blubbery neck onto her fingers, her fight with consumption, which gave her the figure he found so attractive, started to turn the tables. Lungs seized, ropy strings of saliva filling up her throat. While she stumbled around, wheezing, loud shouts of panic and awe passed from outside the ship, through the bedroom's walls. It was far different from what she would have expected from enemy attacks

Her curiosity, not stifled even by the general's unwanted advances, took her dying self out to see whatever was going on.

A crackling entrance of orange hellfire and Satanic red lightning - rather what she had quite imagined the gates of Hell to look like then, to be frank - towered far above the giant, oaken masts of the warship in both height and width.

Her eyes shined with candlelight-colored rings of flame, wild winds whipping her hair and dress around. Her shattered arm dangled, furnace-like winds searing past her crooked fingers wrapped around the general's sword.

The reason for the damage was simple. The bone had been too weak to take her full body weight and the wild struggles of her detestable husband.

Her exposed skin tingled with the most peculiar bite of acid.

The soldiers, muskets and swords raised, collapsed in horror. Something that would have made her scoff at the supposedly God-fearing men. She held back her judgement though.

And she was right to wait.

The men screamed, raising in pitch until they cut off too early. The silence of their transformation was far more unnatural, something she ended up struggling to cope with, first sating her need for noise with the screams of the monsters and then the clink of coins.

Their biology was rearranging, corruption taking hold of them because none had accrued any Essence.

She, on the other hand, had a blue script blinking in the corner of her eyes, letting her know about the first two Essences she earned with the aid of the Magical System: Blue script ticked in her head with the clatter of a typewriter. Upon reading, she received her first mesh and trait: the Vigilante Mesh and the Strong Willpower trait.

She clenched her newly healed hand tightly.

Magic blessed few in the early days.

But its gifts to the chosen few were numerous in the early days. Miasma lagged far behind the advent of Magic, which enabled the System to take a more active approach. It made her superhuman immediately, healing her consumption immediately and broken limb. Extra Stats and as much regeneration as it could heap on the first ones who would forge the path of Magic for the forseeable future.

And most importantly, stabilizing herself with an Essence known only to Magic Deities and early members of their universe's encounters with Magic. There is little that encompasses it easily. Order is barely accurate, given freedom is so important to Magic. Morality is such a flexible concept, filled with quandaries and paradoxes. Limits is one of the worst possible concepts for it, despite it being opposite to the epitome of Miasma, which are concepts to the logical, but extremely disgusting, peak. The most effective is, though distasteful to admit, coined by the rare cultists of the Stars. It is... Continued Quantity. What exactly does that mean? It means, according to the cultists, that it allows the Show to continue to entertain the Bleeding Eyes Above. According to her, it means that it is the Essence which stabilizes reality from breaking down utterly into something inhospitable to life. Perhaps she is missing a good amount of information in her version, but she couldn't care less about the nuts and their supposedly-predating-God Stars. God came first, and the religion was given explicit proof a century after this incident.

This portal was to the section of the Demonic Universe filled with the Essence of Sloth. And so, the sailors and all else lost their lives to the madness of Belphegor. Their throats shriveled like prunes, while their lolling heads distended into bruised-blue masses lacking definition. Bones cracked and shattered as their limbs retracted into their wobbling, volatile-looking torso.

Red coats burst at the seams, buttons pinging against the deck. Then the bulging torsos and heads reached some threshold, a dry rattling sound chilling her to the bone. She gasped in horror, her mouth dropping open.

She scampered down the stairs leading to the hull, heart and feet thudding loudly in unison as she hurtled down the brig. The deafening silence built up in her mind, her shoulders pulled tight and close to her chest. The rattling got slightly louder.

Her wide open hands grabbed a door frame, flinging her into a room. Was the rattling louder? It was a dead end. No, no, no! It was!

Wrong direction! She reached backwards, not even wasting time to turning backwards. Fingers flung her from the wooden frame back out into the hallway. She skidded down stairs after stairs, stumbling over bars and blinking furiously because her sweat burned her eyes.

She couldn't hear the sound, her panting and heartbeat drowning it out. It only increased horror. She couldn't keep her finger on the pulse of the disaster.

Her lungs wheezed, a crippling pain in her abdomen as she suffocated in order to flee fast enough. The rattling shook in her ears again. Magic's gifts barely kept her from falling apart. The lamps' candle flames trembled, and it was not due to her consumption-wracked body's passing.

The rattling was shaking the hull itself.

She groaned in distress, incoherent and bouncing drunkenly from door to door. She looked back to the last few lamps of the warship's depths.

There were no lamps this far down.

Her feet slapped meatily against the planks, blood dripping down from holes torn by wooden pegs, the treenails holding the ship together, which hooked viciously into her soles and came away with a piece of her.. Swollen, pink fingers shook in front of her, impaled with splinters from dragging herself along the claustrophobic darkness as much as she was running. The rattling grew more.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

An explosion knocked her forward mid-step, though it was surprisingly gentle about it, merely floating her a few steps forward. However, the cacophony of a entire forest simultaneously shot with a hundred-score of cannon-operating battalions and then chewed to bits by some leviathan with far too many teeth made her ears gush wet liquid profusely down the nape of her neck, no doubt blood.

She whipped around wildly, eyes widened with incredulity.

Like God himself swiped at the ship, she found herself bathed in sunlight, nearly all of the ship gone. She blinked furiously, hissing in pain at the sudden light. Though she raised both hands to her forehead, they failed to block out all of the tall white cliffs' beacon-esque light glaring in her watering eyes. The sparkling waters of the large estuary of Chesapeake Bay, the austere cliffs reflecting demonic red light, and the trees far off in the distance...

All were fast disappearing. The relatively tiny remnant of the front ship toppled forward, bow first. She reached wildly, franticly, desperately for the crumbling edges of the pale wood. She screeched to the clear blue skies of the island Jamestown, her fingernails scraping against gravity.

Waving vines covered in long white fluff danced near her. She was no naturalist then, nor now, but even then she knew that needles fine as hair on mystical tentacles belonging to some man forsaken to the Demons would easily put her down. As a result, in that instance, she had to avoid them even as she fought to avoid Icarus's folly.

A feral will in her eyes, she stabbed the cutlass in between the planks. Slowly, her atrophied muscles pulling her dangling form ever so minutely up, her swollen fingers digging in the grain pillars, separated by age and whatever the creatures did.

It was only much later, once she fought far more of the exploding Sloth-corrupted soldiers, accrued Speed and Perception, and humanity entered the Magic Age that she learned what exactly had happened. The head is repurposed into an organic octahedron of bone which contains a sloshing chemical mix much like coconut milk in appearance and smell, with a fractal of bone that resonates with Spiral. The torso is turned into a high-pressure bomb cell, with organs and limbs converted into tentacles coiled together in far greater densities than is stable. The dry rattling comes from the Sloth Essence rejecting the amount of action and energy involved in such a process more and more.

The ugly transformation is capped off with death: the Sloth Essence kills the corrupted for being the epitome of not lazy. The removal of the Essence holding the creature starts the reaction, and each foul monster unfurls out into a cyclone of whips spinning faster than she could see.

She uncomfortably and very unsteadily placed herself off on top of the really thin side of the floor. It dug into her bosom and abdomen, but all she could was scoot herself along the vertical floor. No position was comfortable, and her fingers could not support her to act like some monkey any longer. All propriety was lost as she ungainly dragged herself atop a small cross post to balance awkwardly on her toes.

The rest of the ship was slowly being turned into nutritive substances for the demonic soldiers, with some demented hair do growing out of it. The white-fur covered vines laid limp across the ground, many meters in diameter with the ship within its radius.

She grimaced deeply.

To get anywhere, she would have to emulate a circus act. Rooms were sheared open, fragile walls becoming poor floors and floors flipping to minute balance bars. Whatever force that had taken the ship left wicked spikes growing from much of the exposed wood. Some places were even crumbling as she watched, too thin and damaged from the most peculiar explosion. Even to take a circuitous route down to the keel of the boat would have more than a few perils and difficulties. Just getting back up and out of the ship would be an exercise in futility.

There was no choice but to go forward, though that did not stop her from making most unladylike swears. She'd put their twisted existence to rest, and if there was nothing left in them, she would still do it even if she died in the process.

No point in letting these mockeries continue to besmirch the flesh of these soldiers while their wives and children mourned their husbands and fathers, or for parents to someday encounter

Carrying her sword, she eventually navigated her way off the ship. Eventually, her toes were buried in gravel. She was bleeding all over the rocks of the island's dark grey coast, but with a whispered prayer and the healing of Magic itself, she marched past the boiling heat of the dormant portal and killed all of the corrupted soldiers' vegetative matter spreading along the island.

By the end, with ichor dripping from her sword and a not-yet-stifled sense of empathy in her eyes as she wept for the lost souls, she began her journey along the path of Death.

A century later, she was an isolated beacon, a frigid bastion against the hordes of demons. Slaying hundreds of thousands, day in and day out. Eventually, she became a part of the U.S. government... just because?

The country formed around her, and any nationality became pointless in her endless, senseless dive in death. Eventually, just by dint of proximity, she became a citizen to avoid complications.

And then, randomly, a few decades later, she checked her notifications while eating some food and sinking her scythe into the brainstem of a Berserker Fiend. And she realized...

She had killed a few soldiers without realizing, her rampant aura extinguishing their souls in passing them by. And she did not care at all.

The realization chilled her to the bone. She did not care about her fellow men's deaths at her hands at all. At some point, she had taken a skill to help her keep going through slaughter, and without realizing, it had evolved to be a permanent protection against shellshock constantly trying to create Miasma.

Ultimately, it was beneficial, keeping her from going off the deep end in her defense against these Satanic creatures.

But the costs she faced... they were so painful. She could never marry, because she couldn't leave psychopathy without becoming murderous. And the family she had, the children she mothered with coin and male prostitutes... Truly, she could only give penance for being a horrid mother. Her inability to feel empathy led to her hurting her own children constantly. She could only make it up to them with favors and protection.

Emotional connection was impossible.

And worse, she only faced them because, as she found out later, people used the Magic System to improve their Satanic rituals. They unwittingly drew in the Demonic Universe, which followed their sin. Now Earth intersects with the place of all evil, and she continues to face painful consequences created by the many little connections with Essence-filled Dimensions which pepper Earth.

But a stationed American general, someone she talked with on top of the wall that had popped up to box in portals without realizing, asked for her to help them with some paperwork.

Without even realizing, she fell into the gears of bureaucracy. Maybe not the most fulfilling thing, she found something startling in the peaceful activity: an replacement for her lost empathy.

If she could no longer care for others, then by adding a monetary incentive to keep others alive, she could care for their fiscal value. She threw herself into it, trying to increase everyone's value in her eyes as much possible.

She could never make it just a stop-gap solution. Her empathy could never return to her, blocked by the years upon years of war trauma weighing on her soul, but the Mesh of Taxes kept her stable. It balanced out the Death Mesh.

And so, it elicited a minor sense of horror to see the mirror-like shards cavorting in and out of the writhing scar "tissue" of the metaphysical soul. To see the pustules behind each shard, hanging like vials strewn over a city's utters, primed to injecting concepts of disease into the victim's body like syringes.

It reminded her of the dying Sloth-corrupted soldiers she had hacked... All of the mercy kills she did over the years pounded a headache into her skull...

Oxymoronically, this soul plague's method of death strengthens the body on a conceptual level.

But here is the twist. It turns the jaundiced body right around onto the soul, your Miasma-infused immune system now able to send T-cells against your own spiritual soul.

Finally, your soul mummifies in the most gruesome way possible.

The outer shell of the soul peels off in long strips, before reattaching back to its insides. The soul's insides are forced out by the immune system, leaking out through spaces between the "bandages" to get drained by the monster's hungry soul, and your body collapses in a mirror of the husk of the soul, cracking and crumbling to dust.

As skin, muscle, and fat cells transmogrifies on top of your organs into ash, your physical guts evacuate out of every greying orifice, but disappear out of reality before right before exiting.

You have the displeasure of suffocating as your insides pull apart, hemorrhaging scarlet and becoming exposed to a desiccated outside as they attempt to leave through your nose, mouth, and ass. Eyes fall into the emptying skull and ear drums.

And not only that, it makes it vastly more open to the influences of... she wanted to puke even thinking of the existential crisis-inducing entities... the Stars. Their consistent terrorism through their proxy, the mustached entity known as Senor Screaming Fingers, made it clear to her that letting them have another twisted creature would only harm the world.

And what should she do about the elephant in the room?

The heart bearing the stinking mark of the Fae... it did not go unnoticed to her. The weak pixies' touch on the beating organ is surprisingly Essence-intensive, like one of the chattering pests had been alchemized into the monster's heart. It would have just been another idiosyncrasy of the low-level chimaera, which had an abnormal amount of traits switching out its body parts, but... with this...

She had fought against Demonic Essence for ages.

She had fought against Magic's dark side in giving some animals sentience as monsters for ages.

Would this be the next front? Push her and those like her further to the edge, straining humanity's beleagured soul?

She does not want others like her, torn apart by war after war after war. This monster is a pie touched by the fingers of so many entities.

Could Magic last against another threat?

She did not think it could. She might have to snap a few of the restraints of the Mesh of Taxes, because action needs to be taken.

It must-

Her gaudy skull leans to the side, her neck craning with Ninja-like Dexterity to get her head out of the way.

A head-sized diamond whiffs by her head.

If not for the helmet and the lack of air inside the black void, she would have felt the breeze of the classic shape of the round brilliant cut on her cheekbones.

Transformers-style, stocky limbs unfold out of the diamond nearing impact. It ends its brief flight by landing on all fours, hot sparks flying off of its pointed legs as it scrapes to a stop.

Before it even stops sliding, its spikes start to scrabble under its ottoman-like body, futilely trying to reverse the momentum so it can charge at the giant.

She waggles her finger side-to-side at the crystalline Anathema. It has impressive empathy for such a simple construct, having sensed her choice. Must have grown to take after this monster, evolving to have some of the Charisma.

On reflex, she lifts up her arm like a rifle, her other arm now holding Sol's head by the hair and Dennis by his hospital gown.

Her palm fulminated into a spiky burst of black edged in ultraviolet light, before calming down into a black flame dancing horizontally to her hand. splayed outward, facing. It cast their shadows in an spectrum of light alien and invisible to us, but sensed by the two of the four unliving beings. The ones still moving despite being as dead as the snoozing Dennis and decapitated Sol. Death means surprisingly little here, surrounded by so much of it.

Emotion swirls along the amorphous crystal-thing's raised back, facets pointing higher in an imitation of a stonefish's back's row of spines. A tiny mouth made of teeth and not much else catches the light in an open yell as it rears back, reminiscent of a horse's threat.

It evolves, its transparent body lit up with blinding light.

'No! I will save you, my best friend,' Facet thinks, in the dialect of its birthplace.

The language of laughter chimes from its mouth, building into a shriek as it hurtles toward the giant's legs. It raises its now-Pink forelegs to attack.

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Skinny, poorly-carved poles made of wood, attached to each other end-to-end by nonexistent joints, prop up on all around the domain. They run crooked and roughshod through the void, lit strangely by still-flickering black flame, while the other sources of light, the eyes of the Lady of Death & Taxes, are closed. The spindly snaths creak and groan, an haphazard architecture suspended in an area seemingly divested of all else in substance.

But.

...

They slowly funnel back into the blaze lighting up the ever-present rule of tenebrous Magic. A hand is attached to the end, its fingers made of curved steel blades. They drag it slowly with them.

...

Pink silicate is slowly strewn in its wake.

...

Black melts away to reveal the daylight of an alien sky. Though it is still Earth.

They will arrive soon at the School for Magics, Demonics, and Altogether Eldritch Entities.

'Once I resurrect Sol, I will do it. I will take the Fae Heart of the Teen Vixen away. It won't die just from that though, nor is death the safest way to eliminate every last trace of it. It has so many entities hanging onto it, they could just resurrect it.'

Death is such a trite thing at high levels.'

Instead, I will cash in every single last favor I have, gathering hundreds of experts, Elven and human, to tear into and mar the Fae Heart of the Teen Vixen. All this until it is the perfect sympathetic gateway.'

In one day's time, I will DIE for my ideals. May God forgive me for throwing away my life.'

However, it will be worth it.'

She gives a shuddering breath.

The Miasmic Goddess's schemes will be rolled back centuries of progress. She will eliminate the Vengeful Spirits who got their hands on the monster. All of the Truths within the Miasma connected to her - like that indestructible medal of The King's Sacrifice and the ones hidden within its body's makeup - will be deleted from reality. They may come back, but they will not have the advantages they have now, being in this creature's body. The eldritch entities will lose a plaything to mess with the mortals.

She will detonate herself into a pure spirit of Death, and enter the sympathetic gateway. The instability of not naturally ascending into one will force her to disintegrate, and she will completely delete all traces of this creature in the same way this will delete her.

'It will be worth it. For the taxes' growth.'