Willow stepped through the portal first and popped two spiritual pills. They exploded in her stomach, almost bringing her essence capacity back to full. Leopold walked through next and squinted his eyes as he looked around the battlefield. The emperor dodged and attacked further away.

“I can’t see anything,” Leopold said. “Maybe I can feel it. In that direction with the emperor. It feels like… death.”

“Or something worse, whatever that could be,” Willow said, calming the storm of essence within herself to fall in line with the rest of her body. Quickly enough she got a grip and it surrendered control to her.

“He doesn’t look like he’s getting very far with his attacks,” Leopold said. The emperor lashed out at that moment with another wave of green energy, which disappeared in the center as it impacted whatever the thing chasing him was. She noticed that he didn’t dare to physically strike the creature.

“Don’t touch it,” Willow said. “Whatever you do don’t let it get within striking range.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he said. “You can see it, can’t you?”

“Almost,” Willow said. “But you still can’t?”

“Still can’t,” Leopold affirmed. She felt the air around him begin to buzz.

“Just be—,” she said, but he was already gone. Immediately a tree at the edge of the battlefield was sliced down the middle and the wooden stakes hurled toward the emperor. For someone who couldn’t see the invisible monstrosity, Leopold had pretty good aim.

Willow sank her psychokinesis into her body and rocketed off across the churned, frozen earth toward the emperor, each step throwing up sheets of dirt behind her. It was out of the corner of her eye that she saw one of the sheets buckle slightly from the passage of something huge, and she dodged at the last second.

The invisible thing barreled through where she’d just been, then stopped all at once. She touched down and the thing began moving again.

Two of them? Were there more?

“Another one here,” Willow shouted as she dodged out of the way. She used psychokinesis to dig in the dirt until she found a buried stake which she uprooted and hurled at the invisible thing. The wood splintered and it just kept on coming.

“Fuck,” she breathed, and activated acceleration. Even with the extra speed she was barely able to dance around it. Maybe if she had Leopold’s speed she could get an advantage, but as it was the monstrosity was keeping her on her toes.

Fire lanced across the battlefield to splash against the invisible hillock and Willow caught Leopold’s strategy. She wove a quick spell and unleashed a bolt of lightning toward the creature pursuing her, but the attack simply danced around it. How could it be resistant to both fire and lightning?

Water, wood, metal. She summoned elements from thin air and sent them barreling at the creature, but it repelled every attack. She even sent an unconcepted stream of essence at the thing, which did nothing. The essence just splashed off of it like it was totally immune to the substance.

Nothing was totally immune to unconcepted essence.

“I’m not seeing any weakness,” Willow shouted before realizing it was futile. She was accelerated just enough that the emperor wouldn’t be able to hear her, and Leopold was on a completely different level of acceleration as she saw bolts of ice materialize in the sky to ram down around the invisible creature.

Willow jumped high in the sky and disabled her acceleration.

“Close the doorway,” she screamed, hoping the emperor was listening. It was her only chance to speak to him, because she was hurtling down toward the ground and one of the monstrosities was waiting there like an invisible dome of death.

Re-accelerating, she used a gust of wind to blow herself sideways hard enough that she lost her footing on touchdown and skipped across the frozen battlefield a couple of times before she found her feet. The thing was coming at her again like an unstoppable stampede and she froze at the sheer size and sensation of it. It was almost upon her and it felt like death.

No, worse. It felt like the destruction of the soul.

Willow screamed and lashed out, not with her body, but with her psychokinesis. Over two hundred spells combined to form a great heaving force which slammed into the rampaging invisible thing. Willow was pushed back by the colossal creature, but its pace slackened and then stalled. She was going up against its sheer strength… and succeeding.

At less than ten feet away, she finally saw it. Not invisible, but nearly so. The air bubbled around it as if repelled by its very presence, the earth churned slightly like it was boiling. Within the great hill of the creature she saw vortices and whorls in a substance that almost appeared gelatinous. But it wasn’t a gelatin, it was… nothing. This creature was made of nothing.

And then it began to suck. It tried to inhale something from her, and only the distance between them kept it from succeeding. Arms out, feet and psychokinetic limbs planted in the ground, Willow felt a sensation similar to the deathworm again, but infinitely worse. It wasn’t trying to suck out her essence.

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It was trying to suck out her soul.

She didn’t know how she knew this, but she felt that it was true. Whatever the interlopers were that let them travel through time, whatever of herself that might survive her death to travel either into the heavens or perhaps into the future, that was what this thing was trying to consume. It was trying to eat her, in the most literal sense of the word. It sought to consume her very being.

Half in fear, half in fury at the existence of this abomination, she lifted with her psychokinesis. The front of the thing left the ground, the hillock bending up in the air, and then somehow it lifted free of the earth completely. It writhed, suspended in the air, but no less powerful for that. It tried to shake free and it was almost successful in the attempt, but Willow clamped down on the thing, which yielded slightly like a thick jelly.

“Let’s see how tough you are now you bastard,” Willow growled and pinched. Blades of psychokinesis slid from top and bottom simultaneously. The thing resisted for a moment, then its body gave way. It cracked like gelatin and the blades slid clean through.

The two halves of the thing, this pneumavore, writhed for a moment more in midair before they stilled. Willow would take no chances though, and diced them a hundred times further. Invisible starstuff fell to the ground in piles and she backed away as it disgorged between her psychic fingers. She didn’t want to touch even the entrails of this thing.

Willow scanned the battlefield but couldn’t find Leopold. A grove of trees shuddered on an abutting mountainside and Willow smiled. Clever for him to use the trees as a way to track its location when he couldn’t see it. Lightning flashed between the trunks and one of the trees exploded, to be quickly doused by the advancing pneumavore.

Willow turned to the colossal doorway and found the emperor standing before it, hands upraised. He was doing it! She sighed in relief before she realized there was something wrong.

In her second sight the emperor’s essence was a tempest. It puffed out through his robes randomly, as if his body could barely contain it. As she watched he fell to his knees, followed by an explosion of essence disgorging from his body.

The quality of the darkness in the doorway changed, and as she watched, something pushed through that darkness. It was huge, taking up the top two-thirds of the doorway, and she realized with horror that it was a face. An enormous, inhuman face. A single giant ear adorned one side of its misshapen head. It appeared in the doorway and angled its great head down to look at the now insignificant form of the strongest living human on Earth.

The rest of the emperor’s essence fled from his body, boiling off into the air. Willow was brought to her knees as well by the presence of the terrible thing. She couldn’t help but watch; her own psychokinetic spells evaporated at its presence. It wasn’t something that could be fought, only observed.

Watched—as it watched them.

The great head hinged open at the bottom, and the thing’s mouth looked more like a crevasse in a mountainside than any orifice she’d ever seen. The head lowered slowly until it entirely enveloped the emperor’s kneeling form, then the mouth closed.

There was no doubt in her mind that the emperor was dead.

The thing didn’t even chew, but it did look back up. Its terrible gaze swept across the battlefield to… her. Willow found that she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t turn away. Her eyes were locked onto the great watching thing’s face. It had no eyes, but she knew it was watching her. The giant ear wiggled, a slight movement that was still enough to send a gust across the churned field.

The thing’s face grew larger and more defined the longer she looked. Trees crashed in the distance and the doorway loomed larger than ever as the thing took up her whole vision and the entirety of her world. This thing wouldn’t destroy her soul, she knew.

It would only destroy her body.

Willow blinked and shook her head a bit. She was standing before the doorway, staring up at the great faceless head, and its mouth was opening once again. How had she gotten here? Had she walked? Had it hypnotized her? She couldn’t move for fear of the thing. Its terrible gaze weighed her down like a thousand tons of rock. Death would be a blessing.

It lowered its head and, just as the antediluvian jaws were almost upon her, a great speed barreled into her and carried her across the battlefield. Her mind took a moment to come back to itself, but she recognized Leopold’s back as he carried her over his shoulder.

The thing’s gaze swept the ground toward them, but Leopold was faster. Much faster. He shot off into the trees and dodged through the forest until she no longer felt it searching. He crested the mountain, slipped down into the next valley, then up another mountain. His speed was almost unaccountable, but she welcomed it. Anything to get her away from that thing.

🜛

Leopold ran until his essence was nearly spent. He collapsed into a heap against a tree and laid Willow beside him on the loam. He took great sucking gasps of the now thin air which seemed so much like a viscous liquid when he was at high acceleration.

A few minutes passed before he realized that Willow was still staring up at the sky. As he watched he wondered if she was even blinking. She was breathing, she was alive, and he could feel the wisps of essence circulating in her body. She was low, very low on essence, but not as low as he.

“Willow,” he asked, and shook her. She didn’t respond, but kept staring up at the sky.

“Willow, please,” he said, and got on his hands and knees above her.

“Come on,” he pleaded, and shook her head side to side. She blinked.

“Please come back to me,” he said, and stroked her hair. She’d gotten dirt in it, and he picked out threads of splintered wood from her hairline.

Willow’s eyes moved, at first searching around, then to his face. Leopold smiled.

“Got you just in time,” he said. He didn’t want to ask why she’d walked right into the thing’s jaws. He didn’t want to ask how she’d lost all of her essence. Both of those were questions he didn’t think he could stand the answers to right now. Right now, the world was only them. In the forest, under the trees. A few hundred more miles of running and they could build a house. Try to forget what had happened and make what they could of their lives.

“That thing,” Willow whispered, which jolted Leopold from his fantasies.

“Yeah,” he asked, leaning closer.

“That thing is eternity.”