“Thank you for your help,” said Madness as his body appeared from the Nothingness.
I sized him up as I turned around. He looked different in here. There was no wild look in his eyes and his hair wasn’t disheveled. He was wearing a beige shirt and a pair of faded jeans and he looked incredibly, incredibly normal.
Madness looked at his hands for a moment, turning them around in silence before clenching them into a fist and closing his eyes and saying something under his breath. I couldn’t hear what he had said but the gratitude and relief on his face was telling me all I needed to know.
“You’re welcome,” I said at last. “But if you wanted this all along, you could’ve tried to hurt the Simurgh properly.”
Madness looked up at me quickly. Then, he flinched and brought a hand to his forehead again. “Even here, I can’t shake the urge to react that way, my apologies.” He looked up at me with the clearest eyes I had ever seen on him. “Are you telling me you still don’t understand?”
“Understand what?” I said.
“That I was only obsessed with the Simurgh because of what had happened to me when I first came to this world,” said Madness.
“You told me you arrived in the Nothingness through meditation. At the time, the Simurgh had split apart some of its domains to create the Evil Eye and the physical world. You happened to drop by and grabbed a bunch of free domains, which made the Simurgh furious,” I said, summarizing everything I had learned through my temporal domain and the stories the Immortals had told me. “The Simurgh lost control of the Evil Eye and you were able to team up to beat up the Simurgh. I saw it when I went to the past. I saw the way you defeated the Simurgh, sealing it for many years.”
Madness nodded. “You must have seen what happened to me after that then, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You seemed listless and expressionless for a really long time. You were wandering aimlessly until you found the early elves and taught them what you knew. I suspect you had something to do with the creation of sentient beings in this world. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re all fantasy races that were well known on our world.”
Madness chuckled but it wasn’t a menacing kind of laughter. A welcome change, for sure. He said, “I think some of my thoughts leaked out while I was taking over some domains. They infected the Simurgh while it was in a weakened state. Who would have thought, a lame college kid who liked reading light novels would end up shaping up a whole world like his favorite fantasy stories.”
I shook my head. “Were you behind the sudden appearance of humans, too?”
Madness frowned. “No, I have no idea where the humans came from. Perhaps they came from another world like we did or perhaps the Simurgh made more people like me. I don’t know.”
It was an odd conversation to be having in a dimensionless void. And having it with Madness, of all people, was stranger still. “Wait. I can’t believe I haven’t asked this before. What’s your name? Like, your real name, from Earth?”
“I don’t remember,” said Madness with a sigh. “It’s been so long and my experiences when I took over the domains and fought the Simurgh… they were so extreme I barely remember anything at all. The only reason I remember what I looked like and where I came from is because those thoughts were fresh in my mind the moment I came here.”
“But then how do you remember the fantasy stories from Earth?” I asked.
“They came to mind when I fell in here. Something like: wow, can’t believe I ended up in another world. It’s just like that story I once read, or something like that,” said Madness, his voice increasingly laid back. “You said you wanted to know why I was obsessed with the Simurgh, right?”
I nodded. “Sorry. It’s been so long that I’ve had a casual conversation like this. Got a little carried away there. Please, go on.”
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“You should know that I didn’t take over the free domains because I wanted to. Those domains were sort of all over the place back then. They really, really wanted to return to the Simurgh’s control, but the Simurgh was too busy splitting off the ones it didn’t want, so it couldn’t focus on the ones it was planning to take over again once it was done,” said Madness. “And when I arrived in the Nothingness with my modern knowledge, those domains practically flew right into my mind. Let me tell you. Suddenly gaining the sum of all knowledge about everything from sleep to dancing is not a pleasant experience. It felt like I had had too much to eat, except it was in my brain and hurt like hell.”
I remembered how it had felt just absorbing the knowledge that came with the temporal domains and the domain of Evil. I didn’t envy what Madness had gone through, absorbing the knowledge for a bunch of domains at once.
“Not only did it drive me a little crazy,” said Madness, with a pause. “No, it made me very crazy. But it also made me choose a core domain to center my personality around. It was basically impossible to survive the process of absorbing all of those domains all at once without picking one of them to rule over the others.”
“And you chose Madness?” I asked.
Madness blinked. “It wasn’t really a choice. It was the domain I had the most affinity with at the time, having been driven mad by the experience I was going through. It was also the only domain that let me keep some control over myself. Madness is erratic but also quite freeing. I didn’t have to change my morality too much or become some sort of disassociated deity.” He looked around the Nothingness. “I chose to go mad for a way home. Being driven mad for something rather than by something seemed like it would give me something to work towards and I was right. The only problem was, the only way back was to return to the nothingness, and the Simurgh sent me down to the physical world. The only way back was to be Annihilated, and that was the one thing I could never get the Simurgh to do. Not until you showed up that is.”
“Well, you’re welcome for that. But now that we’re here, do you have any idea how we’re supposed to return to Earth?” I asked.
Madness put a hand on his chin and thought for a while. “I think I do. I used to meditate back home for an hour or two every day. It helped me control my stress and anxiety. Doing a bit of that here should be good enough, however…” He brought his gaze back to me and gave me a determined look. “…we can’t leave yet.”
I frowned. “I agree. I was going to ask you to stay back for a moment and help me take down the Simurgh completely. It’s too dangerous leaving it alone in that world, now that the other two Immortals aren’t there anymore to hold it in check. My friends are still there and I’m sure you at least care for Noel, since she became your Ikon.”
“Of course, I am concerned for the people of that world. You saw how much I wanted to help them against the monsters and disasters that the Simurgh created? I wouldn’t leave them all behind,” said Madness. “But there’s a bigger problem. We haven’t been completely Annihilated.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Can’t you feel it?” said Madness. “In your head. Can’t you feel the domains? All the knowledge for things that you shouldn’t know about. Can’t you feel it in your head?”
“Yes, I have everything related to the domain of Evil and a lot of knowledge associated with the temporal domains still in my head,” I said.
“Same here for me and my domains,” said Madness. “But true Annihilation should take away all of those domains. That’s why the Simurgh tried to use it on you even though I was nearby. Annihilation frees the soul from the physical body, but it frees the domains too. We should have lost all control of our domains but we haven’t and that can only mean one thing.”
“What?” I asked.
“It means we aren’t alone in here,” said Madness as he snapped his fingers and the Nothingness shook and the air stilled and a blob of color appeared over our heads as if it had been there all along.
The blob of color unfurled its wings and let out a cry and a tiny bird appeared in the dimensionless Nothingness. It was a tiny bird with a vertical crown on its head and a long, thin, sharp beak that reminded me of a woodpecker.
The Simurgh floated in front of us without flapping its wings. Its two small beady black eyes stared at us without blinking and when its voice came out, it echoed around the Nothingness, escaping from the Simurgh’s body without its beak ever opening, “Welcome, outsiders, to the place that I wished you would never return to. After everything that we have been through, I will offer you one final deal. Return to your world in peace or face my full, undivided wrath.”