We hit the bottom, but there was no impact. No crunch of metal or shatter of glass. We simply… splashed.
The Subconscious was an ocean. But not of water. It was a thick, black fluid that smelled of old blood and forgotten birthdays. It was the liquid form of Repression.
I dragged my avatar of scrap and god-code to the surface. We stood knee-deep in the black muck, the sky above us a bruising purple, devoid of stars, hung with heavy, weeping clouds that looked like gray brain matter.
"Where are we?" Tali's voice trembled inside the Node. "It's so… loud. The colors are screaming."
"We are in the basement," I said, looking around.
This wasn't a city. It was a junkyard of a life. Rising from the black ocean were islands of twisted memory.
To my left, a mountain made entirely of unread letters.
To my right, a forest where the trees were IV drips, their tubes tangling like vines.
In the distance, a massive, rusted clock tower that had no hands, ticking with a sound like a breaking bone.
The Ledger flickered, its text blurry, struggling to parse the non-data environment.
"The Author is gone," Warp analyzed, his form glitching as he tried to apply physics to a dream. "The Narrative Layer is dissolved. We should be free."
"We aren't free," The Mender said, her voice disgusted. "We're immune. Look."
She pointed to the black water. Shadows were moving beneath the surface. Pale, faceless things. They swarmed around my legs but didn't touch me. They recoiled from the Zero-Day God's chaotic aura.
"The antibodies of the mind," I realized. "They hunt foreign thoughts. But we... we are too big to eat."
"We need to find the Core," I told the Node. "The Host. The man who is dreaming this hell. We wake him up, and the simulation ends."
"How do you find a man hiding in his own nightmare?" Cas asked.
"We follow the pain," I said. "Pain is the loudest thing in the room."
I scanned the horizon with the Primordial Sight. I ignored the visual hallucinations. I looked for the density of suffering.
And I saw it.
Far ahead, in the center of the ocean, there was a structure. It wasn't a castle or a tower.
It was a Bunker.
A massive, concrete block, featureless and gray, sitting amidst the waves. It had no windows. No doors. It was a monument to the desire to not be seen.
"There," I pointed. "That's where he's hiding from death."
We began to wade through the black ocean. The movement was slow, heavy. The air felt thick, like breathing syrup.
As we moved, the landscape reacted. The Subconscious knew we were coming.
The ocean bubbled.
From the depths, something rose. It wasn't a soldier. It was a memory given flesh.
A giant, skeletal figure rose from the muck. It was made of rusted hospital beds welded together. Its head was a giant, blinding surgical light. Its fingers were scalpels the size of scythes.
It didn't roar. It emitted the sound of a heart monitor flatlining. BEEEEEEEEEEP.
"It's the fear of the end," the Mender whispered, paralyzed. "You can't fight it. It's inevitable."
The Prognosis swung its scalpel-hand. The air screamed.
I raised my arm—the one made of the Zero-Day God's chaos.
"Inevitability is just a lack of imagination," I snarled.
I caught the scalpel blade.
The impact drove me down into the muck. The weight was crushing. It felt like the weight of every day you realized you were getting older. The weight of time running out.
"Give up," the flatline sound vibrated in my skull. "Rest. Sleep. Fade."
The Node began to dim. The urge to just lie down in the black water was overwhelming. Why fight? The bunker was so far away. The water was warm.
"Spite," I repeated.
I looked at the blinding light of the Prognosis's face.
"I don't want to rest," I gritted out, the Zero-Day God flaring to life, burning white-hot. "I want to complain."
I didn't push the blade back. I infected it.
I channeled the Zero-Day God into the Prognosis. I fed it the concept of "Remission." The concept of "False Hope." The concept of "Medical Miracle."
The Prognosis shrieked. Its certainty wavered. The rusted beds that made up its body began to uncouple. The flatline sound broke into a frantic, uneven rhythm.
"You are not inevitable!" I roared, ripping the scalpel form its hand. "You are just a statistic!"
I swung the stolen scalpel-arm and smashed the surgical light of its head.
Glass shattered. The light died. The monster collapsed into a pile of wet, rusted metal.
We didn't stop to celebrate. We marched on.
Finally, we reached the Bunker.
Up close, it was even more imposing. A solid cube of gray concrete, rising a hundred feet out of the water. It radiated a cold, desperate silence.
"No door," Cas noted. "It's solid all the way through."
"It's a Panic Room for the soul," Warp agreed. "He has walled himself in. He refuses to perceive the outside."
I laid my massive claw against the cold concrete. I could feel him inside. A tiny, terrified spark of consciousness, curled up in the dark, pretending the universe didn't exist.
"Knock, knock," I whispered.
I didn't punch. I used the Mender's power.
"Mender," I said to the spirit inside me. "Don't fix it. Unmake it. Deconstruct the wall."
The Mender focused. She saw the stress points in the concrete—the psychological cracks in his defense.
The wall groaned. A hairline fracture appeared. Then another.
I pushed.
With a sound like a tomb being breached, the concrete crumbled. A hole opened.
We stepped inside.
The interior wasn't dark. It was blindingly bright.
It was... a child's bedroom.
But it was wrong. The furniture was too big. The colors were too saturated. It was a memory of a bedroom from fifty years ago, preserved in amber.
In the center of the room, sitting on the floor, surrounded by toy soldiers that were actually frozen Gardeners, was a boy.
He looked about ten years old. He was wearing hospital pajamas.
He didn't look up. He was playing with a set of blocks. Building a tower. An Axiom Tower.
"Go away," the boy said. His voice wasn't a child's voice. It was the voice of the Host—ancient, weary, layered with the dust of centuries. "I'm not ready to go."
I knelt down, my massive, terrifying form filling the room.
"You've been playing for a long time," I said.
The boy knocked over the tower.
"If I stop playing," he whispered, looking at me with eyes that held the depth of a dying star, "the lights go out. And I'm afraid of the dark."
I looked at him. This was the enemy. The tyrant. The creator of Neovalis. A scared old man hiding inside the memory of his childhood.
And then, I saw it.
Behind him, on the wall, was a drawing. A child's crayon drawing.
It showed two stick figures holding hands. A boy and a girl.
Underneath, in crude letters, it read: ME AND ELARA.
My heart stopped.
Elara. My sister. The name I had chased for twenty chapters. The name I thought was a glitch.
She wasn't just my sister.
She was his sister.
The Host was my... brother? Or I was...
"Who am I?" I asked the boy, my voice trembling.
The boy looked at me. He smiled, a sad, cruel smile.
"You don't get it yet, do you, Glitch?"
He picked up a block.
"You aren't my brother. You aren't my trauma."
He pointed at the drawing of the girl.
"Elara was real. She died. Fifty years ago. I couldn't save her. I built this whole world, this whole simulation, to try and bring her back. To write a story where she lived."
He pointed at me.
"But the simulation needed a variable. A constant. Someone to look for her. Someone who loved her as much as I did."
The realization hit me harder than the Prognosis.
"I am not a tumour," I whispered.
"No," the boy said softly. "You are the part of me that refused to let her go. You are my Grief. I cut you out because you hurt too much. I threw you in the dump."
He looked at his hands.
"But Grief... Grief is the only thing that's real anymore."
He stood up. The room began to shake. The Bunker was collapsing.
"You wanted to wake me up, Kael?" The boy's eyes turned black. "Fine. But if I wake up, I have to remember that she's dead."
He screamed.
"AND I WON'T DO THAT!"
The reality of the bedroom shattered. The floor fell away.
We weren't falling anymore.
We were dissolving.
"Four chapters," I thought as the world turned to white fire. "Just four chapters to teach a god how to say goodbye."