////

I shredded the air around us with phantom solar flares, scouring everything but the heart and the anomaly into fundamental fields and leftover quarks. I knew that this would have not ended the fight given that the heart of a world-wound had a stabilizing effect on the existence of its paired guardian anomaly, but it did clean up the battlefield of any would-be reinforcements. I’d only have to contend with a single Antediluvian instead of many.

The harvestman spoke with a garbled, manic affect; accelerating and skipping and changing randomly its cadence of speech. I could see the gears turning in its head, fractal dendrites recursing into fourth-dimensional axons, paracausal energy jumping between.

“[It is too exalted//Too advanced//It is not human?]”

The guess was only half right but it stopped my advance—but not because of surprise. No, instead the concept of spatial expansion under strain of dark matter was severed, nullifying my ability to flicker around the universe.

I invoked [Zeroth].

My touch returned to me, even the numbness of my non-existent skin paling before the esoterica’s platonic form. I brushed my fingers through the air, usurping the subliminal influence of the anomaly’s opposing esoterica.

With a twist, it broke apart and I blinked forward five meters closer. Just one more meter and I would have reached the harvestman; space-time was still healing from the brutal beat-down we both inflicted upon it, making any sort of transdimensional hopping unpredictable and short-lived. Even those five meters had been a gamble given I could have been spat back out a half kilometer away through the accelerative properties of worm-holes.

But, the jig was up. I hadn’t been fast enough in killing the harvestman before it connected the dots with red thread, forming a syzygy that would have fit right in with the blooming stage of schizophrenia.

“[It knows things//Not should know//It’s seen Us before?]”

The anomaly’s esoterica triggered, the clause splitting me down the middle into two halves like a magnetic-resonance-imager dividing a body through the sagittal plane—funnily enough, I did feel an electric-field disturbance. The attack would have eviscerated most people, spilling guts and making internal organs into external ones.

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

Unfortunately, I was closer to an Outsider.

The universe blinked and now I was two, having reflected my separated halves across their sagittal planes through ontological mitosis—the observer effect was my close friend, afterall; I had full control over my self or, in this case, selves.

We were repelled, our opposing polarities such that the closer a half came to the other, the stronger the magnetic push. In a jiffy, my two halves sandwiched the anomaly in between them, crushing it in place. This aforementioned jiffy was not in the vulgar sense but instead the time it took for light to travel a fermi in the vacuum—roughly the size of a nucleon.

The harvestman screeched algorithmically, each syllable a shard of broken glass made of recursive equations. Just when both halves were about to touch their hands together, the anomaly spat out another explanation.

“[It is anathema//It is nothingness poured into the shape of a woman//It is not//Is it not?]”

Instead of severing my physical form like last time, or isolating a universal phenomena like the one before last, the entity cut in half my ability to think and process reality. My thoughts slowed, my perception of the world drowning in treacle. My brain no longer produced memories, amnesia taking hold again and again and again and again and again and—

“[I have seen you before.]” I confirmed, finishing the hubris-clause of [Ragnarök-Womb]. The entity’s musings hadn’t been enough to trigger it the first two times as the harvestman’s brain was less of a three-dimensional organ and more of a fourth-dimensional tesseract that could paradoxically occupy what should have been mutually-exclusive strata—not unlike me.

What the harvestman hadn’t taken into account was that I had more than a simple mortal mind, having sectioned away the ageless part of myself in the deepest pit of my soul.

Now that it was far too oversatured for the uncertainty principle to protect it, insanity took hold. Cognitive dissonance overcame the harvestman as its amygdala made apophanic connections that led nowhere and everywhere at once. Where epiphany pertained to consensus reality, apophany was an unrealization.

The Antediluvian withered away into itself, the gyrification of its cortical folds giving way to recursion and then non-existence. I hugged myself, devouring my other half and becoming one once again.

Where the anomaly was dragged kicking and screaming into [Euclid], my feet alighted onto the terra firma of [Golgotha].

////