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This is what it means to be Alexander Galanis, a soldier serving the Hellenic Army of Greece, who has recently come home from a campaign in Egypt to see his family. This is what it means to be alive on the day the secrets of the abyss below are brought free to the light above. A shiver runs down your spine as you feel a piller, for that is the closest thing you can compare it to, built of pure and utter wrongness, easily taller than Everest, rising mere kilometers from you.
“Don’t look don’t look don’t look!” you repeat to yourself, almost like a mantra. In this instant that stretches out past eternity and slows down until a nanosecond would take years to pass, all the instincts in your body scream at you that if you don’t move you will be safe. But you know that you must look because your wife and infant son are standing behind you and you need to make sure they are safe. You almost stop yourself. It would be so easy to stay still. But you must look. You must know they are okay.
Quickly, you wrench your body around.
The world fractures.
Time stretches and compresses simultaneously.
Your hope dies.
You see that which should not be seen.
It was an indescribable abomination, some sort of grotesque manifestation of shrieking chaos and memetic lunacy. Its mere shape that in and of itself flickered in and out of this plane of reality defied the feeble confines of human language and understanding, its very existence an affront to the laws governing reality. A humongous maw made of the essence of a black hole cracks open and out comes the abyss itself. Through it, you see a distant world located eternities away where the worm gods of Fundament demand eternal tribute as is the way of their foul sword logics, where the weak will serve the strong, where the thralls die for the acolytes that serve the knights and wizards that kill at the behest of the god hive. Now they march for your world, another to be infested and conquered with an innumerable line of wretched one-eyed ogres and screeching, foul spellcasting wizards. You do not know how you know any of this but at this moment you don’t care, because you have just felt your mind shatter under the weight of infinite knowledge, your decades spent honing both your mind and body in the army mattering little. Your family suffers the same fate, who stand almost comatose a few metres away from you. When the thing’s opened maw begins to sing the song that will sunder all life, death comes quickly to you, and you accept it freely for what can you do to defy the power of such cruel, powerful gods?
This is what it means to be Kofi Abimbola. You had moved last year to Greece after saving your money for decades, earning painstakingly in a below-minimum wage job, living in poverty for most of your life. You had never felt at home here, with your new coworkers being almost as degrading as your old bosses, you had taken up religion in the last five months as a way to cope, with the hope that your faith would one day be rewarded and you would live a free life. As you take a bite of a cheese bagel, biting your tongue to keep from lashing out at your condescending boss, who is currently berating you for a minor mistake in some company spreadsheet, a chapel dedicated to nuclear chaos and the embodiment of the malignity that lurks behind the eyes of humanity, rises from the ground, erasing the existence on the buildings that once sat there so utterly that they may have never existed at all.
You witness a god break free from it’s doors, made of an incalculable amount of vaguely avian wings and whirling eyes littered throughout its rotten torso. Your new coworkers are consumed by its infernal power, something similar to black fire, but beyond the grasp of flame and life. It is less genuine heat and more a manifestation of the song it will soon sing. You alone are spared. You fall to your knees, hands clasped above your head as you pray to your new god. After all, what else could you do when your belief is recognised by a wretched god? When it grants your prayers and gives you its blessing? Its eyes, multitudinous, gazing in every conceivable direction, spill tears of molten magma on the destroyed street below, as an orifice that might pass for a mouth if you didn’t look too closely, opens. “Oh, how it will sing!” you scream feverishly, a manic deliriousness overtaking your mind as the god sings and all living beings around it are consumed by dark anathema power.
This is what it means to be Shinen Notatakai. A pile of unconscious cultists lay melted at your feet, their minds overwhelmed by the power of the thing rising from an altar of flesh and blood, even with their preparations. You almost bite your tongue when you feel five more rise around your country, their positions lining up to a twisted version of a satanic symbol. “The seals were broken,” you whisper in horror. The Singers, anathema creations of the concept of nothingness from the very beginning, sealed by Dark and the Flame and the Disparity life exists under, eons ago, have risen once more. They herald the end of everything the godflame touches. They seek the end of all life both past and future. From its chest comes surging pantheons of godlings, like a detestable swarm of locusts, all vying for the right to destroy this world in the name of the Singers, incensed by the prospect of battle and death. The fabric of space-time bends and warps, and a rampaging Godling materialises in front of you, swinging a sword hewn from the screams of a dying star and the skin of a planet.
All of these things pass through your mind. Your weapon, a spear gifted from the still-beating heart of an ancient Dragonlord, drops from your fingertips. There is no escape. There is no hope now.
“Oh,” you say softly, almost whispering to yourself. “This is the end of the world, isn’t it?”
The Godling’s sword makes contact.