The walls exploded. There was no shrapnel, no smoke. The walls, the ceiling, the room, everything exploded, to be replaced by an uncanny, deep darkness.

Noel went flying over my head, her body bent over itself in an extreme way. She went flying into the distance before suddenly stopping in the air and flopping to the ground like she had hit something. She hovered in the void, unconscious but still breathing.

The Book of Annihilation flapped in front of the bird. The bird whistled louder and louder but the laughter was intensifying as well. Soon, a bright light appeared overhead. No, two lights. One silver, one red.

A full moon, a red star, and a whistling bird floated before me in the void.

I couldn’t feel the floor beneath my feet, yet I remained steady in my position. I froze and observed the situation with bated breath. I was afraid that the slightest movement would draw the attention of the three Immortals. But I also knew I had to get out of the way. There was no way that I could survive a battle between the three of them from this distance!

The whistling stopped. The laughter died down soon after. The three Immortals faced off against each other. The moon began to grow larger. It also waxed and waned, flitting through to crescents and full moon shapes. But it was frighteningly strange. The moon had a silver color, but it did not glow. It was as if it gave off no light, and yet I could still see it. It was difficult to wrap my head around what I was seeing, and even tougher to describe it. Imagine if there was no light inside a room, but you could still see a silver disc. Now imagine if the silver disc was not luminescent, it did not give off any light, and yet you could still see it against the darkness.

My gaze was drawn to the silver moon with its hypnotic waxing and waning, and the more I stared at it, the more it felt like it was sucking me in. Deeper and deeper into a dance macabre. With chaotic music, flashing visuals, and a deadly smile that I did not notice until it filled the inside of my head.

Like a laser or the first burst of light at dawn, a line of red light shot through the smile. The red light was abrasive. The red light drowned out the silver moon, and unlike the moon, it looked like it was giving off its own light. Yet, somehow that light felt like something I should not have been able to see. As if it was a type of radiation outside of the spectrum of visible light. Eerie and disconcerting. It made my heart sink to my stomach. And with it, came an incessant ringing. A ringing that was cut down by a song.

A song without music. Something you couldn’t dance to. Lyrics incomprehensible, but beautiful. Like a song in a language I did not understand, but whose rhythm and cadence was enough to capture my attention. The song got stuck in my head. Once inside, it began pin-balling through my head, knocking things out of place.

I stopped thinking about how strange everything was.

I stopped trying to get away.

I stopped trying to close my eyes.

I let the song take over my hearing, the red light laid claim to my vision. And when I began feeling my limbs moving, moving, moving in a wild, wild way. I knew I had lost the rest of my senses. I had lost the rest of my senses to dance. To music. To madness.

My thoughts became a mess. One thought ran onto the next, free-falling, free-flowing, I wondered if Virginia Woolf would be proud of me. I chuckled. I smiled. I laughed. If I was still in college, in my dorm sipping tea finishing off a paper, I would have dropped everything and picked up Joyce. Or Nabokov, since this was positively Zemblan. So Zemblan. No, I needed Borges. I had to tell him, yes, I had to say this out loud. Open my mouth and say:

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“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius!”

Flapped. Something flapped beside my ear. A weight on my shoulder. It pinched. It hurt. What was it? I’d felt something like this once. In summer camp, when they brought along some guy with an eagle and they let us take pictures with the eagle on our hands. Except these talons were smaller, and the weight less heavy.

I turned my gaze and met a pair of beady eyes. A crown of orange feathers, tipped with an inky black. A long down-curling beak, thin and pointy. The feathers on its body were striped black and white. A tiny body. Truly minuscule against the massive moon and red star.

The moon grew and grew and grew and began to flash and morph. Its form became wavy, like a ripple across a lake, and began to change.

The red star also grew until it began to coalesce into a strange sludge. Disgusting red blobs bobbed up and down in the muck, slowly building something. Something strange and unnerving.

The bird on my shoulder flapped its wings. It shot into the air above my head and I blinked. When I opened my eyes again, there were two birds. I blinked again, five. I blinked once more, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty. I blinked one last time and there were thirty birds hovering over my head. Birds of all shapes and sizes. I felt like I should recognize all of them, and I did recognize them from the time I met them in the Plains of Serenity, but not from my world. But I knew they were from my world.

One of them was particularly eye-catching. It was like it had eyes on its feathers. A lustrous blue, lush green, swirling radiant purple. How could I forget about a bird that looked that strange? Well, at least my memories of birds had confirmed one thing. None of these were like the eagle that I had met in summer camp on my Earth. It was a strange thought that flew into my mind, but it made me realize something. The only birds I had forgotten about were these ones. The ones that appeared to me as a part of the Immortal of Desire. Why was that? Why would I forget about these birds, and none others?

The birds faced the rippling moon, the coalescing red star, as well as my confused self. They had the Book of Annihilation in front of them, but the book wasn’t fluttering. No, the book was closed, with only the word ‘Annihilation’ written across the front. Written in English, I might add. Somehow, that felt like the most bizarre thing about the whole situation. That a book with an English title was here in this world of magic, elves and immortals.

The birds began to sing. I clamped my hands on my ears. This wasn’t like the singing from before. It was harsh and painful. Like a screeching siren or nails raking across a blackboard. The singing stopped. I opened the eyes I hadn’t realized that I had closed. The thirty birds were gone, and in their place, there was only one.

Glorious golden feathers. A regal tapered beak. Dagger-like talons. One bird. There was only one bird. The bird looked straight ahead, opened its beak, and sang a single note. It opened its wings wide and flapped them.

Fire erupted over the bird’s body, on top of its head, along its long neck, and all over its golden feathers. The fire was everywhere, and it was a startling shade of gold. Golden fire, with only tinges of red and blue. It felt intense and unnatural, but there was no heat.

I staggered backwards. That made me look down. I was standing and all of my injuries were gone. I hadn’t realized that I was standing. My leg caught on something, which was strange because I was hovering in the nothingness, and I fell backwards. There was nothing underneath me, so my heart flew into my throat as I was hit by a sense of vertigo. How far up was I? How long would I keep falling?

The red muck finished its transformation first. The red star had become an eye. A single eye hovering without anything attached to it. The eye had nothing else on it. No arteries, no veins, no little pieces of flesh or skin like the floating eyes you might see in fantasy games. It was just an eye. A massive eye with a red pupil and no eyelid. Even the sclera had a reddish tint. The eye hovered in the void, but it did not turn to the golden bird. It turned to the moon as he finished his transformation.

Messy hair, chin full of stubble. Dark green eyes. Body wrapped in a white sheet like a toga. The Immortal of Madness materialized in the air, saw the other immortals facing him, and turned away from them. He met my gaze as I was falling through the void and smiled. A bright, sparkling, charming smile.

“Thank you!” said the Immortal of Madness. “Thank you for everything, Caspian Holm!”