When the circle was fully drawn beneath Henry’s feet it was an intricate web of blood mixed with the dirt and stone fragments strewn about the floor around him. It was a reddish-brownish-gray work of curves that intersected and diverged with no discernable pattern, and yet it pulsed a soft red in time with Henry’s breathing. As the archon stepped away he began at first to speak and then to chant louder and louder.
“Oh great one, hear us and give us your ear. We will not disturb you if it is willed, but we would greatly appreciate your merciful guidance” it began, but quickly became an unintelligible mix of what seemed to be Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and a thousand other fragments of different languages Henry did not recognize. It would be insufficient to call the chant foreign, or unintelligible, as it had begun in a language understood perhaps by magic and diverged to languages Henry could perhaps begin to recognize, but then began to drift further and further into gibberish as though all sense of coherence in the world had begun to break down.
Slowly, the world itself began to desaturate. The walls turned from a gray stone to something more resembling clouds dissolving from heat and being blown away by the wind. The Scourgeborne made no expression, but Elder Sion grimaced as he continued to chant. Clearly he understood this was the prelude to something awful, but dared not disrupt the rite. Henry knew little of magic except through the media produced in his own world, but it was apparent enough that stopping now would mean the ire of forces beyond this, or perhaps all, worlds.
The stones strewn about the floor began to scutter around as though living mice. Light from the painted glass windows to each side of the chapel began to fade from its multicolor to shades of gray and then black. Soon enough they were snuffed out. The archon continued to chant as his face began to wither into a husk. His beard was withering, the skin below his eyes began to droop, his lips quivered and sweat poured from his face and bald head. At first the man had seemed ancient, but now he seemed beyond years, as though he would collapse into the earth at any moment and was nothing but a corpse given brief reprieve upon the earth.
The men in crystalline armor looked no worse for wear, but their bright adornment had likewise faded and though they wore helmets and stood as statues, Henry suspected they might remain that way if they didn’t leave this place. If he pleaded the elder to stop he just might, and if he urged the guards to leave with him it was possible they would do the same, and yet Henry did not speak. It wasn’t just that he feared encouraging the wrath of his unknown patron; in the deepest part of his heart Henry wanted to see what happened next.
As a little over a minute passed the world finished its transition into the void. The stone walls of the chapel had disappeared and in their place was a great gray expanse of nothing. Where once had been bright painted windows was now soft emptiness in all directions. It wasn’t uniform, but contained no clouds nor even so much as a single other thing in its great expanse. It contained nothing but shades of swirling darkness without so much as a single source of light, and yet the expanse was lit. In this void of shifting lack of color there were four people to be seen, and all were visible to one another.
The Archon stopped chanting when nothing of the original room remained. Not so much as a single stone lay beneath their feet between them and the endless expanse, and yet they all stood firmly in the lacking air of this place as though because the will of its owner allowed them to transcend gravity.
He spoke in a soft, trembling, and fearful voice,
“What have we done?”
“What do you mean?” Henry asked.
“I fear we’ve awoken… no, brought the attention of something we shouldn’t have.”
The elder had once worshiped Yaldabaoth in the hopes that He would one day return to establish a harmonic kingdom and reclaim His domain over the world. He had once truly believed that day was imminent, but after a thousand years to wear him down he had finally broken… Yaldabaoth was not here. Yaldabaoth was never here. Sion would not see Yaldabaoth return. He began to cry, unable to restrain himself. He had lived for so long. He had helped so many to establish themselves, and yet here he stood in the midst of a world-ending calamity, incapable of so much as hearing its voice without breaking down physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. He was unable to resist and he fully understood why. Sion had dared to encroach within the domain of one who could put visceral pressure upon the world through a small pinprick crack leading not even here, but to the void between worlds. This entity was beyond power, beyond words. To be in this place was a violation of life and he knew in this moment he would live no more. At least in acceptance of death he could try to accomplish his original aim, he thought to himself, stealing his body for one final attempt at saving the world from calamity.
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“Please, you have to stop this. You can resist him! You don’t have to become the channel for his will into our world!”
From the deepest reaches of the void and booming to surround Henry from every direction a voice rang out in a deeply basal tone as if to answer this insubordination.
“What need have you of a mentor so lacking in understanding?”
Henry began to speak, but no voice emerged from his open throat. The archon tried to scream and terror showed on his withered face now appearing much more as a skull than the head of a living man, but it was futile. Gem-laden statues no longer stood to observe them, seeming to have begun the eternal fall that was inevitable in this place for those undesired by its creator.
The voice went on.
“The gods of this world mindlessly take without consideration of what it means to have. These things, these people, these places, this world, it all belongs to me and through me to you. To take means to destroy, one cannot possess without first showcasing enough power to force or intimidate those who would take from you to cast aside their ambitions. If, in this act, the item of contention is destroyed one can always procure another. It is the act of showcasing force which is fundamental to ownership, as all ownership rests on the ability to force others to acknowledge it.”
The archon fell to his knees and wept but the voice did not stop speaking.
“For you to have and to wield my power means, fundamentally, that everything you see will fade away as you live on. This world and everything it contains is meaningless in the face of eternity, of omnipotence. What does it mean to own when everything you possess will crumble to dust as you continue to be whole? It means one must eternally acquire more. There can never be enough when the lifespan of what is owned is finite when yours is not. If, in ten million years, you own nothing, you will not fade.”
The archon was crumbling to dust as if he were aging ten thousand years each second.
“If you accept me you will face a far crueler fate than that, no, you will continue on in the void. You will not crumble away, you will float in nothingness for eternity without so much as even the sensation of a fall. Your mind will slowly lose itself to numbness and yet sleep will evade you. Your body will atrophy and become a prison, and yet it will live on. To avoid this fate one must acquire world after world forever.”
The archon no longer existed except as a pile floating in the gray swirling sky.
“This is to be our shared fate, our eternal prison, and you cannot avoid this inevitability once on the path before you. Even if I cast you aside you’ll forever belong to me. Even if I absorb you into myself you will share my consciousness. And yet when all things in this world and every other you could ever have imagined have faded, you will have power enough to destroy all the rest and create ten thousand more from within yourself.”
The pile of dust had begun to shrink and decay.
“This task is to become as a blight on the orchard, on all orchards of all worlds. They are yours for consumption. This is a task for a man who cannot bear any longer to be, for all those who would shoulder this fate will meet a cruel end, and yet for the course of the pursuit shall have all things even as he loses himself.”
The voice paused for a long second, and in it the last remains of others in this place faded from existence.
“Is this what you want?” it finally asked.
Henry answered in a soft voice, but it showed no hesitation,
“Yes.”
“I want power beyond measure. I want to take all things in this world and in every other world. I want to be rid of my anxieties. I want to lose all my doubts and fears. I want to become something other than the fragile and self-destructive human I always was. I want to take all the things that are already mine. I want none to be able to stop me.”
Henry paused as if contemplating his next words.
“I want to take it all and still crave more.”
“Spoken like a true isekai protagonist,” the voice resounded, and then the world returned to color.