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You’ve been wandering for what feels like years, though you know it’s not possible. You were just there, placing colorful tile after tile in a secluded corner of the evolving world. Maybe that’s what triggered the dark miasma: you weren’t contributing. At least not in any meaningful way.
Whispers string through your head, and you know that’s not it, because you’re not important enough to change the ebb and flow of the darkness you dredge through.
It comes for all.
The new and absolute knowledge stutters your heart painfully. The air you suck in only weighs you down, only gives you enough oxygen to keep moving forward, unseeing as you are.
Unseeing as the Void chooses you to be.
You're going mad here. Tendrils squirm through your mind, carrying demonic words scratching through static. Yet there continues to be nothing. There's no evidence of the legendary hive mind that consumes indiscriminately. Veterans had warned you of the wide-stretched white grins emerging from the black, as well as the bleeding-red eyes… And the coils branching from a buzzing, ever-changing core that reaches for your soul's work just to drag it down into oblivion, and your memory with it. All who warned you did well to terrify with their stories, but being enveloped in the Void is more than being frightened.
It's being swallowed whole, your existence snuffed out, your soul damned to float amongst the rest of the Void's will.
You wrap your arms around you as you continue stumbling forward, and you can't help but think that it all wouldn't be so bad if you only had another here to commiserate your fate. Surely there are others like you. There must be. In fact, it's impossible that you're the only one here; as you were falling, you heard the cries of your neighbors… Until you didn't, and all sound disappeared into a vortex, and your own scream shoved down your throat. Even now your footsteps are silent.
The only thing that remains is the constant static drilling into your brain stem like a weevil and the nails-on-chalkboard demands to keep going, pathetic little thing. Struggle, struggle against the all-knowing night, until you break and dissolve. So you do.
And it hurts. The helplessness gnaws behind your eyes, begging to escape through tears. Nothing comes, thus you receive no cathartic release from your turmoil.
Unable to stop, your feet trudge on while your mind finally stills. A dissociative calm takes over. You feel drawn towards nothing. Pulled, led, with an unwavering force.
It's only then that you realize you've been wandering with your eyes closed. There's a light trying to break through your lids, and you let it.
No… It forces you to open them. It pries you open.
The face materializes from the dark in a flood of multicolored pixels all converging, squirming apart and back together in a morbid facsimile of life. A crown of gold–and purple, green, red, blue–adorns the space above two monstrous, swirling and bleeding eyes along with a yellow, rictus grin with thousands of teeth. It would be impossible to count them, as they come and go, come and go and go and come–
You want to turn and run. More than anything you want to break eye contact with the entity digging through your consciousness and stealing your breath.
This is It… The Void. The King, the Lord of All and Nothing.
It won't let you leave. You'll never leave.
Whispers solidify into deep rumbles from the unmoving Cheshire grin. They reverberate through your body. You have to blink, your eyes burn, but it doesn't let you because it didn't tell you you could. Instead, demands for undying fealty spear into your jellied flesh and into your prefrontal cortex.
As soon as the Void's will breaches your grey matter, the dark explodes in a kaleidoscope of color. Two bloodied eyes multiply into four, six, ten, more---you can't count them all. Doing so might finally break you. Each are made from the devoured pixels of forgotten works… You can feel the disappointment, anger, and sadness radiating from each piece loosely combining to make an Eldritch nightmare beyond your comprehension. The yellow teeth pick up another row… Horizontally. Three rows of teeth stack, one upon the other. Rivets of blood pour over them and down. They snake towards you, ready to welcome you into the Void.
As more eyes form above a skeletal, misshapen body, the Void allows your mind to calm. It takes your fear, your failures, and your fickle mortal woes and wipes them all away in a rush of pure nothingness so complete it stills your frantic heart.
Why were you fighting? What was taken from you that you wouldn't have lost to time anyway? Why deny your transience in the face of a perfect amalgamation of shattered hopes and dreams?
It's useless. Join the Void. Become something more.
You do.