I lie helpless upon a withered raft, floating in the impossible sea on the ocean floor beneath deeper waters above.

I feel something within me split and then vanish. I scarcely even have time to feel the sensation before calamity strikes.

The statuary facade is rent apart as the form within the depths pulls on the tether cast by its supplicant. The sky buckles, then breaks.

Like glass, the entirety of reality falls into shards. I see now that I was not within any physical space but merely surrounded by a painted bubble. The surface I perceived as the real, nothing more than a clever painting with depth, pulled taut over vacuum.

Darkness surrounds me and my raft, but with sense still exceeding the physical I perceive the approaching horror in full detail.

It falls clumsily outwards from the black like a newborn, a massive stone obelisk bearing a masculine figure with arms outspread in mock magnanimity. Its face, a wizened, grinning mask that splits into twisted rivers of stone with yawning, empty sockets pulled upwards into nothing.

A torrent of bone flows from the figure into the wall that supports its frame. The parchment dry medulla splayed open and twisted like frayed ropes, lifetimes writ upon each splintered wafer in agonizing detail. A macrocosm of hunger and hate.

The face grins, the same predator's grin of my doppleganger. It speaks.

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I am as awestruck as I am set still in terror.

It draws closer, and closer, and closer. What I at first thought to be a massive statue becomes so large as to dwarf the Orokin city-spires, then tower ships, then the very planets themselves.

Stars would fall as drops of dew upon its infinite form, and yet it continues to approach. When I at last expect it to crash against me, its scale only increases.

The hairline fractures, starving, gaping maws pulling me inward. Growing, growing, never ceasing as I am dwarfed by the infinite. I am given microscopic detail of its form, and that is when I recognize the individual composites and am cursed by an understanding of the entirety.

Within the chasms that form spaces between its ossuary cells, I see familiarity.

I see a mouth with invisible teeth that falls into a throat ringed with hands.

The throat opens onto a finger's tip, and skin rough and weathered forms a labyrinthine city, teeming with life.

The space between fingers, an endless emptiness.

Within the empty, capillaries sprout open from nothing and weep dust and sand.

Dry blood flows deep and quiet into a stomach resting directly above a vile heart.

With each beat, reality shifts and its hunger grows.

Within the atrium, a window opens and I see a mouth with invisible teeth, falling into a throat ringed with hands.

My descent has not been a path into deeper spaces. I have merely been an insect crawling upon a form massive and incomprehensible. I encountered not monsters, but lesser functions of a body without reason. Microphage set to devour the intruders within. Blind to the entirety, I traced the path of its chaotic viscera, its anatomy following no single line but spread grotesquely upon an entire web that paradoxically leads back into itself, through itself, intersecting with the origin point and terminating into its core where it begins anew.

Understanding shifts again and I realize I behold no single divinity, but a Monad. It has no beginning nor end for it encompasses itself. It is everything.

And with horror, I understand the sins of the empire. The unfathomable ruin we have brought upon ourselves.

By opening the doors of The Void, we have created a duality. Two totalities forced to meet upon the edge between worlds. But where one was, the other was not, and paradoxically it is the superior. It has the most to gain and the least to lose.

The horror I fall into is the grander hunger.

I am not being consumed. I am being reclaimed.

I see reflections of myself within the marrow of the Monad. Not the mockery that wore my face, but my true self, flawed and human.

I see everything taken from me by the starving beast displayed in the honeycomb lattice as sick trophies. Longing overwhelms me and my mind races to mend as many wounds as it can, greedily searching to reclaim what was lost.

But then I also see moments never experienced, decisions considered but avoided. I see myself experiencing triumph and hardship foreign to me, pain and pleasure unlike any I have ever known.

I see a proposal made then rejected and accepted then ignored then forgotten and never thought.

I see a family born then killed then spread thin and ignored and held close and dear then alone and unborn.

I see an empire fall around me consumed by machines and supported on their backs then fed fat by labor in the light of a dying star that was solemn and black and then unspun into the formative gasses as it failed to take shape.

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I see warriors of metal and pain reach towards me as saviors then destroyers as their blades pass through my throat then monsters that bleed metamorphosis unbound.

I see ghosts of sorrow suspended in blinding light and wreathed in shadow and poised delicately upon the edge between.

Moments flow like molten slag into the space that engulfs me. I see mirrors of myself within the bubbles pause, then turn towards the opening that yawns around their fragile existence caught on the marrow's edge.

Our eyes meet, and they each are pulled alongside me into the open space of this ceaseless horror.

The darkness deepens as we fall ever inward, and soon there is naught but ourselves. When we are at last enveloped entirely by nothing, a pinprick of light opens in the darkness. The figure affixed to the wall emerges. It tumbles forth and becomes everything once more.

The cycle repeats.

I grow in number until I am an army. My raft sinks, and I see myself fall into the infinite waters, lost forever as if I never was.

I cling to myself for solace and anchor. Unable to close my eyes, sharing a sensorium of infinite perspective, terror multiplied by each new mirror that is plucked from depths of the Monad's blood, I can only scream.

Infinite throats in harmony.

The cycle increases in pace.

I fall outwards onto myself. I am dragged from my precarious haven by desperate hands. I fall, and see the island of reason shrink with the distance until my vision from that angle ceases. No death nor pain, but simply unmade.

I am crushed beneath my own weight as the gravity pushes inwards. I am cast breathless into nothing as we pass from endless core into infinite space.

I am doomed to suffer an eternity of terror and then unmaking. Fuel of pain and fear for the torturer that encompasses all.

But then I see a light.

Not the pale light of the god-star bursting forth anew from within itself.

I see a light warm and inviting.

I see the towering golden edifice through which I entered from the world of waking, tangled deep within the non-linear anatomy of this eldritch space.

Without thinking, I dive towards it from the precipice and feel a new hand pull against me. The grip of another totality where it presses against the seam. Caught between two cosmic forces I swim desperately through darkness towards its orbit, begging to be seized by its gentle touch.

But I am not alone.

I swim with all of my others as a school of prey-fish, fleeing from a predator deep and ancient and full of teeth.

And we all know without knowing the same, horrible thought.

Only one of us can make the crossing.

I claw through the darkness like a man possessed.

Liquid nothing gains form as I approach salvation. Water becomes solid slope, a mountain of black which I ascend with fervor. The hollow god laughs, and its voice shakes the bond between the cells of my dreamflesh and I struggle to maintain my grip.

I see my others tumble away into the dark. Back into the throat of erasure. Their screams are cut with a terrible immediacy as their existences are unwrit.

Still I climb. Still I race myself.

I feel a copy grab my ankle, pulling, seeking to drag me down. I look and see my terrified face, pleading for mercy. I kick and the copy tumbles away.

I will be the truth to emerge.

Only I am myself.

The end pursues us, invisible, inexorable. It devours the half-real that settles on the threshold and seeks to tear our escape from beneath our feet. Dust flows from the light and through the horde as a glimmering river of gold, then vanishes when reaching the infinite end that bears down upon us.

My others turn to gauge the pursuer, but what they see immediately robs them of their sight. The apertures of the sensorium wink out with each curious glance and copy faces twist into bleeding masks of agony. I focus on my goal.

I reach forward to a copy ahead of me and claw into its back. It screams, but I bring its head against the ascent and use it as foothold. It falls silent.

I see a copy crawling towards me, drenched in blood. It reaches towards me, a knife held in its hand.

I bring the knife into the copy leg and carve through meat and bone. The other recoils and releases its grip on the ascent.

I watch the two fall back into nothing. A blow strikes the back of my head.

I strike again. And again. And again. My hands break upon the mass of splintered gore.

I leap towards the copy perched above the corpse of another. I hold its head between my hands and sink my thumbs into its sockets. Liquid sight floods into my palms and its voice joins the growing cacophony of my self screams and the pervasive laughter ringing through the empty.

The pursuer draws near.

I run on all fours as the path begins to level.

I see the tower of light rising above.

I sweep my leg outwards and catch the distracted runner alongside me.

I jump over the fallen body and strike the man ahead.

A silent spear pushes through my chest and spills my life into my arms.

I see the man clumsily holding the pistol, and raise my cudgel to strike.

I sprint past the sickening crunch as the weapon renders the copy skull like overripe fruit.

I throw the fluid I carry in my flask across the runner and he falls in agony as his skin falls away from bone.

Weapons both makeshift and orthodox, plucked from moments unreal and wielded against alternate selves as the chaos narrows towards the zenith of golden salvation.

My breath is fire in my chest.

I shoulder through the riotous mass. Red mist billows in the warm light of the edifice as it watches silently over the carnage. Judge. Arbiter.

I weep in terror as my shattered legs refuse to respond.

I scream with fury at the copy that splits my mortal shell.

My hands pull forth steaming viscera from the broken figure below me.

A hand grips the inside of my mouth and I dig my teeth into the skin slick with blood.

I run past the carnage, seeking escape above all else.

I tear the throat of the opportunist with my shredded hands.

I bite into the nape of its neck and shake with all my might.

I shrug off the pain.

I ignore the death.

I reach the precipice.

I see a crazed reflection desperate for survival.

I feel a voice without speech.

I hear words I refuse to understand.

I feel a mortal blow pare my life to mere moments.

I channel all I have left into a final, desperate leap.

I reach my hand outwards to the wall of light.

My fingers graze the membrane.

LOHK [https://i.imgur.com/QuYIiun.jpeg]