Asking for financial support because i'd like to keep both writing and having electricity.
If you'd like to read up to 20 chapters ahead, you can support me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
Thank you for all your support. it really keeps the story going.
Not into subscriptions? No worries! If you'd still like to support my work, you can leave a one-time tip on Ko-fi.
Thank you so much, and may good fortune find you.
☕ https://ko-fi.com/thanarit
The void went black.
Not the sensory absence of the ritual, which had its own textureless pressure. This was a different black: the kind that exists inside sealed rooms, inside the space between one thought and the next before the thought arrives. It had depth and direction. It was the black of something present rather than something absent.
Then Hastur appeared.
Ren had no reference for scale. The figure was draped in yellow robes extending past any boundary he could locate, each fold moving with a slow, unnatural shift as if the fabric held its own agenda and merely tolerated being worn. Layer upon layer of it, descending into dark below and rising into dark above, and above that: a crown of black stars circling in patterns that obeyed nothing recognizable as celestial order, each revolution leaving a faint trail of darkness that dissolved before it finished forming.
Where the face should have been, there was nothing. An absence that swallowed every attempt to measure it and returned nothing. Ren looked anyway.
The proportions shifted with each observation. One moment: a tall man. Another: something standing above mountains, robes extending past both horizons. A third: something so vast that what he had taken for sky was just another fold of yellow cloth. No two observations agreed. He stopped trying to reconcile them.
The air at the figure's edges shimmered, and in that shimmer Ren caught fragments: broken cities he had never visited, seas without coastlines, towers in states of ruin suggesting civilizations he had no name for, constellations arranged in configurations implying a different sky entirely. They appeared and dissolved at the periphery.
Colors bled from the void around it. Every shadow in the space leaned toward it. The geometry of the dark appeared strained, subtly incorrect, as if reality was doing math on whether it could continue to contain what stood in it.
Despite all of this, the figure did not move.
Then a hand descended.
It came down through layers of reality with the unhurried certainty of something that had never been stopped by anything, and it settled on top of Ren's head.
The blood vessels in his brain ruptured in several places simultaneously.
He registered this clinically because it was the only register he had, and noted: no malice in the pressure, no intent toward damage in the contact. The hand rested on him as a hand rests on a child's head when the person holding it is simply acknowledging the child is there. The ruptures were incidental. A consequence of proximity rather than purpose.
So he didn't try to kill me, Ren thought, through the hemorrhage. Best news I've gotten in a while.
Then the voice came.
It arrived inside him rather than from a direction, through the same channel the ritual had used. He braced for the distortion he knew from prior encounters with beings at this tier, the speech that dissolved into frequencies bypassing language entirely and leaving only half-comprehended impressions.
He understood every word.
What do you seek, Ren Hector?
His name. Spoken by something that predated the concept of naming. The shock landed before he processed its cause, and the understanding followed half a second later: I comprehended 1% of his Law and now I can understand him.
He filed this and answered, because the hand was still on his head and the blood vessels were still ruptured and hesitation did not seem tactically sound.
"I seek sanity," he said. "And I seek to retain my humanity."
The hand patted him once.
Then Hastur spoke.
. . .
"You ask to be sane."
The voice carried no echo, no reverberation. It simply was, with the flatness of fundamental things. Each word did not fill the void. It displaced it.
"Why? Because sanity is comfortable? Because sanity is familiar? Because the crowd has convinced you that agreement is truth?"
The robes shifted. Something moved in the fragments at the figure's edges, a brief flicker of people looking upward at something Ren could not see. Their faces were certain rather than afraid. That was worse.
"Look upon the world, my knight."
Knight, Ren noted, and filed it.
"A murderer calls his actions necessary. A king calls conquest justice. A priest calls faith certainty. A scholar calls ignorance knowledge delayed. Each believes himself sane." A pause, vast and unhurried. "Tell me, which of them is correct?"
Ren said nothing.
He was a doctor who had performed surgery with ten arms in a black-walled clinic and called it medicine. He had a position on this question. He kept it to himself.
"Good. The first crack in the mind is doubt. The moment a man questions what everyone else accepts, the prison walls become visible. Once seen, they cannot be unseen."
The black stars continued their silent revolution. Ren watched them and thought about the year he had spent in Victoria accepting what people called normal and what they called monstrous, and the specific gap between the two categories that nobody had ever been able to explain to his satisfaction.
"You fear madness because you believe madness is chaos. You are mistaken. Madness is liberation. Madness is the refusal to kneel before assumptions. Madness is the courage to ask whether the foundations of the world deserve to stand."
"The sane man accepts. The madman examines."
Something in Ren's chest that had been braced against all of this for the entire ritual slowly, without his permission, stopped bracing.
"And what of depravity?"
The light faded further. More ruins appeared at the figure's edges, more skies belonging to other histories, each one the aftermath of a world that had answered this question incorrectly.
"That word carries such fear. Such disgust. Such hypocrisy. Men condemn depravity because it reveals them. Every desire denied, every impulse buried, every forbidden thought locked behind trembling walls: these are called depraved. Yet men dream of them in secret. They imagine them in silence. They hunger for them while pretending otherwise."
Ren thought of the things he had never said aloud. The gratitude he performed clinically because the genuine version felt too exposed. The anger he catalogued and filed because feeling it fully would mean acknowledging how much certain things had cost him.
"Is the liar more virtuous than the honest beast? Is the man who hides his darkness superior to the man who acknowledges it? He is merely more afraid."
"Depravity is the recognition that darkness was always there. The fool believes himself pure because he refuses to look inward. The wise man knows purity is ignorance wearing white robes."
The hand on his head had not moved.
"I do not command you to become a monster. I command you to stop lying. Stop lying about what you desire. Stop lying about what you fear. Stop lying about what you are."
"A man who knows his darkness can rule it. A man who denies his darkness serves it."
"Madness precedes depravity. First, the chains upon the mind must break. Then the chains upon the soul. Only then does freedom emerge. True freedom. The freedom to see. The freedom to know. The freedom to become."
"When the world calls you mad, smile. When the world calls you depraved, laugh. For the world fears only those who have ceased believing its lies."
The voice stopped.
For one second, the void held everything exactly as it was.
Then Ren's body exploded.
Every cell, every reconstructed piece of the form the rank-up had built, detonating outward simultaneously in a sphere of force and light that erased the center because there was no longer a center to preserve. The void absorbed it. There was no sound. Sound requires a medium and the medium was gone along with everything else.
There was no Ren Hector for approximately two seconds.
In the real clinic, on the tile floor of the reception area, the white oval mask landed with a sound that was very small in the sudden silence. Everything else that had been Ren was simply absent. The antiseptic smell of the room remained. The red glow under the grafting room door pulsed slow and steady, indifferent to the vacancy.
The mask lay on the floor.
Then it began.
The mask was part of him. It had survived the explosion because it was structural, not ornamental, the same way bone survives what flesh cannot. It was part of his body the same way the Laws he carried were part of his body, and it remembered what it belonged to.
The reconstruction started from the mask outward.
Skin first, climbing from the mask's edges in thin sheets that thickened as they spread, pulling form from the Law that had already learned this route once tonight. Then the frame beneath, bone and structure and the architecture of everything else, assembling in the order that the Law of Skin dictated, outside to inside, surface to depth. It was faster than the first time. The route was familiar now.
Ren landed on his feet.
He stood in the clinic, fully present, coat in place, tentacles folded, in the exact configuration he had been in before the ritual began, as if nothing had happened to him at all except for the specific quality of the silence in the room and the fact that he had just died for the third time and come back through his own face.
He stood there for a moment.
This, he thought, looking at the clinical calm of the room around him.
This is the Law of Madness and Depravity.
He did not finish the thought. The shape of what he had comprehended resisted language, as the Law of Skin had before he learned to articulate it over weeks of practice. It was there, lodged in him, below the register of words. He would know it when he was ready to name it.
The question was whether it was worth what it had cost.
He did a rapid inventory. One million Fear Points. Two seconds of nonexistence. Whatever his brain was going to need time to account for. The complete structural dissolution of his body and its reconstruction from a mask outward. One philosophical address from a cosmic entity that had called him knight, which he was still processing separately.
In return: S-rank equivalent. 1% comprehension of the Grand Law of Madness and Depravity. And something sitting in him now that had no name yet but had weight.
If this new power is not worth it, he thought, with great precision, I am going to lose my absolute shit.
He picked up the mask from the floor out of reflex. It had never actually separated from him. He held it anyway, the smooth white oval, unmarked by any of what had just happened to the body it belonged to.
He put it back on.
The clinic was quiet. Martinez and Lily were asleep on the residential side. Rhea was in the room with the cup of pens on the windowsill. The world was exactly where he had left it.
He sat down on the floor, which was the most honest response he had available.
He could feel the 1% sitting in him beside the Law of Skin: present, available, not yet fully legible. He had learned the other one. He would learn this one too. Whether two seconds of nonexistence and a cosmic headache had been a fair price was a question that would answer itself in time.
He sat with that.
The red glow pulsed.