The sound of the world breaking and crumbling apart was not audible. There was no such sound to be heard, and yet it could be heard nonetheless, a cacophony of sounds and voices that were reminiscent of the concept of insanity, and the concept of the mind of a man who is slowly going insane.
"Ah. Ah. Ah!" A scream of despair, a wail of pain and a wail of agony.
A body that had been ripped apart by claws and teeth, the flesh torn apart and shredded, "My sweet honey child. My beloved little Zabulus." The sound of a woman's voice that came from a corpse that should have long since been buried in the dirt and decomposing, "You were my favorite child."
"..." The fake corpse that stood in front of him was nothing more than a fake. What was he to do? What was the way to end this all?
Stuck within his own soul, trapped within a controlled body that he could no longer move on his own, his heart ached as his memories flooded back. His memories that were not real, his memories that were of his own design and of his own mind, and the memories that he had fabricated for himself, the memories that were a lie, the memories that momentarily became truth.
It is true, a lie temporarily becomes the truth. But why is that? Why do lies become truths?
Lies become truths when they're repeated, when they are believed in. And the more often that they are repeated, the more that people believe in them. But even if a lie is believed in, it still doesn't mean that it is the truth.
So, in what sense would it be the truth? What would be the criteria that a lie would need to pass for it to become the truth?
In a social sense? In a personal sense? It depends on who's telling it. It depends on who's believing in it. And the person who tells a lie, and the person who believes in that lie, will never truly know whether it's true or not. Not until the corruption of their very souls reaches their physical bodies. And by then, it will be too late to stop. And they will be forever trapped in their lies. In the lies of the past.
The lies that they tell themselves. They eventually corrupt their memories, confusing them with reality. They won't know which outcome was the real one, and eventually the lie will be chosen, permanently altering the past.
And in this way, people become confused, they become lost, and they are unable to find the way back to reality, the path to what really is.
Another way to put it, is that delusions become reality. That delusions become reality when they're believed in enough.
......
"Mother." Mouthed the entity that stood in front of the dead and decaying body, the corpse that was not moving and had not moved in the past two thousand years. "Mother... I vowed not to kill... And yet... And yet...! And yet! I killed you! I'm a failure, mother! I am nothing but a pathetic failure! I'm sorry!" Screamed Zabulus in a fit of rage, his 'hands' that were really his arms and fingers wrapped tightly around the head and neck as he cried, his body shivering and shaking, and tears flowing down his face, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" As his fingers, or rather his hands, began to dig deeper and deeper, as he dug his nails into the dead, decomposing body, he began to cry, as his fingers began to shove into the skull of the corpse and the flesh, and his nails dug in deep, tearing off chunks of the rotting flesh.
"Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?! Why? Why?!" Screamed the being that had now lost its mind. "Why did I have to do this! I was going to kill myself! Why didn't you stop me?! Why did you let this happen?" But he asked and it echoed as the noise became a sum of densely layered screams that were incomprehensible, that were not of a single language. The sounds that echoed and echoed, and echoed and echoed and echoed, were the screams and the cries of the damned and of those that were damned. But they all came from one being that was many.
A formless shade that had no meaning in this world, in flight from what was to come, in fear from the creature that had killed them all. From the one that had given them their life and taken it away from them.
The sound of their cries and their pain echoed and echoed and echoed and echoed, until the sound became deafening and the sounds became one. And the one who had been crying was now crying in agony. His body was no more and he was no longer a part of this world, and yet his mind and his heart and his metaphysical existence still lived, in a way.
"You... you were my mother... You... you were supposed to be the one who loved me. You were supposed to love me! Why did you not?!" A quiet resentment grew across his face, his hands and his arms were now digging into the head and skull of his dead mother, his hands that were really just his fingers digging into the flesh, the flesh that had rotted and was no longer alive.
The moment of his death had been the moment when his mother had died as well.
Who was it?
It was suddenly a quiet night when he entered a haze and the sounds of the world around him became quiet.
It was suddenly the dead of the night and a quiet haze and a fog had settled upon his vision, a haze of his vision that had not been seen for some time.
His vision that was never there, his sense that only he had.
It was the quiet of the night, and it was the night that he had died.
He had been stabbed in the heart, the day his existence began moving towards a darkness.
Was it now that it began moving towards a greater darkness? Or perhaps, that was how it was always supposed to be, the life that he had always been supposed to have.
Perhaps, it had always been this way, the darkness and the quiet, and the darkness and the quiet of the night, and the haze and the haze of the fog. The fog and the haze. Did it truly matter how any of it was told?
Did the importance of this tale even exist, in a universe where it would simply cease to exist in the first place?
Did the importance of this story even exist when it was never meant to be read? Never meant to be spoken, and never meant to be uttered?
Why did we bother to tell a story, that is simply going to disappear into nothingness?
What's the point?
A death scene that is never completed, an endless loop of suffering and torture, for no reason, with no end, and with no ending, with no closure.
He forever cried out in pain, the one that was damned.
His mouth, his jaws, his tongue, and his teeth, were opened wide in agony, his vocal cords and the bones that were connected to it were stretched beyond repair and his entire body and everything else around him was broken and torn apart.
For him, that day may seem like other days, once again he was mangled by a great grinding of gears that had chewed his body up and spit it out, only to be grinded up once more. Bones and sinew and flesh and organs and everything else were crushed, mangled, and torn, and ground into dust.
But there were no more days like that for him.
Or perhaps, this was simply the end, and he was simply stuck in an endless loop of his own suffering, with no way out, and no end in sight.
An endless cycle of death and rebirth, that never ended, for an eternity.
The world had forsaken him, so why shouldn't he forsake it?
Why shouldn't he destroy it and tear it down?
He had been thrown into the world that had abandoned him, by the beings that abandoned him, and the things that had abandoned him. Was he deserving of any other fate?
Why shouldn't he destroy this world of his and this story of his and the whole of humanity and everyone and everything that ever was?
With no telling of an emotion on his face, he stood up and the body that he held rolled, it was then that he began to conceive for this world its end. A conclusion to the story that had never been written, an end to this tale of tales that he had created and imagined within his own imagination.
Without saying a word, without feeling anything, he walked forward into a hallway and turned to a room where an anomaly of a book resided.
The book told of his entire life. There was nothing he knew about the world beforehand. He was caught in his own imagination, which was as far from reality as the book he was reading. He was reading the pages, reading about events that he himself had experienced, and he was experiencing them again, and it made him wonder, what had really happened? Why can't he remember any of this, under this incessant gaze? Is it that he simply cannot remember the past because it had never really occurred, or because he had erased his memories, so that he might experience them for himself, and experience them once more?
There was a voice of someone who was standing right next to him, talking to him, talking to the one who was standing there, as he watched the words appear in his mind.
But then he stopped listening and instead watched the words form in his head.
'There is nothing for you'
'There is no one for you'
'There is nowhere for you'
'There is nothing to be found here.'
'It was always destined to be this way, the most evil being to ever live was bound to die alone.'
These sentences were appearing in his mind. They were not written in his mind, they were spoken in his mind.
Then the words dispersed and canceled each other out and were replaced by others.
'Die alone,' said one sentence, and another added, 'in a field of blood, and gore.'
"The end." Those were the only words that appeared in his mind.
'Kill the light.' One more sentence.
Then they disappeared, one by one.
There was no more, for he was finally complete, and he knew that he had finished the final page of his story, that he had finished the story of his existence, his life, and everything he had accomplished.
Now, all that was left was to carry out that end.
A sudden presence alerted him. It was a being of incredible size, but not physical mass. It was like an empty shell, a large sphere.
No.
A cube that could stretch eternally in all directions, infinitely expanding, growing, consuming, becoming bigger, larger, more and more than anything that could possibly be contained. An infinite expanse of nothingness that encompassed the entire universe.
That was the nature of this thing that spoke to him, that whispered in his ears. The infinite expansion, the endless abyss that encompassed him.
And yet, there was something else, a hint of familiarity, something that was vaguely recognizable, a faint whiff of nostalgia, of remembrance, of a memory, that was not of the present. A nectar that spoke of the past, the future, the present, and all that was in-between.
He heard whispers of a being, who spoke of death, life, destruction, rebirth, a beginning and an end. All things that are, all things that shall be, and all that has been. In a whispering, comforting tone, that seemed familiar. It was like hearing everything that he had known before.
It was as if...
He was living an innumerable amount of different lives.
Memories afloat, drifting in and out, as they passed through time, and as the rest of humanity existed in a state of purgatory.
All these millions upon millions of years.
Millions upon millions upon millions of times.
Joy, sadness, anger, fear, betrayal, evil, good, melancholy, love, and ultimately hopelessness.
As all the memories swirled inside of his head, swirling, swirling, and swirling and swirling around and around and around and around and around, he began to feel lightheaded.
Though, now an answer was clear in his mind. No matter the number of lifetimes, there would always be the same outcome.
As the foggy and hazy memories in his mind started to dissipate, he became aware of his surroundings, of his position, and the space of the environment around him.
In the world of the living, he saw a black sky above him, devoid of stars or any light.
The world was silent, and nothing could be heard except for the gentle breeze of the wind and the rustling of dead trees.
As he started taking confused steps, the crunchy leaves underneath his feet made soft crunches with each step
Confusedly wandering, Zabulus stumbled onto a oval shaped mirror. The reflection stared back at him as he gazed into the mirror in horror at what he saw.
Where his eyes never were, they were now replaced by a complete blackness, as if the darkness filled in the sockets, akin to cement filling. The left side of his face had several spikes impaled throughout, and he looked as if he had been beaten relentlessly. The right side of his face had cuts across it as if he had been slashed.
Of course, he'd metamorphosed into a different shape, thus Vadim's hair wound up eliminated from this body.
'It's you.'
Said a voice that spoke through his ears in his mind, and spoke to his heart directly.
'I am glad.'
Those words, those three words.
They were spoken in a low, guttural, raspy tone.
It sounded as if the voice came from all around him and also as if the words were being spoken by his own lips and coming out of his own mouth. It was all too confusing for him.
Zabulus' head whipped around, searching for the source of the voice. But behind him was nothing but the remnants of a past path he took here, the trees were gone, there was no rustling of dead trees, no noise, just him and a voice within.
He wanted to speak to it... say something back.
Thus a smile formed on his face. A crooked smile, a demented and sickeningly wicked grin, like that of a child that was delighted to have gotten away with mischief.
"Hahaha..." He let out a cackle as if to laugh in the face of whatever spoke to him. The image within the mirror did not move, yet he kept laughing and giggling and smiling, and it got worse and worse as it went along, as he slowly descended further and further into his own laughter.
"And who might you be? A strange man comes to me in a dream? No! This isn't even a dream!"
'This is what your existence has become, Zabulus.'
Zabulus? That wasn't right. Anything should know by now that Zabulus was nothing but a false name.
"Oh, how fun this all is! You know who I am, yet you call me by a name of falsehood. Oh, dear, I suppose I'll have to return the favor, eh?"
There was no response, after all he was speaking to himself, as was expected of anyone.
Zabulus' laugh continued. "Oh! How fun indeed! So very entertaining! But you're boring. I know your type. You are a liar. A charlatan. Such as I. I don't enjoy myself, so let's just cut straight to the chase and skip the small talk, hmm?"
Nothing.
"..."
"...Nothing?" He spoke once more as if trying to provoke the one who called out to him. But then he figured, it gave up simply because its little provocation failed, or whatever else it meant. He didn't care enough to think about it.
"If that is how it is to be, then so be it. Forget about it. I have something else to do."
Taking a moment, he snapped his fingers and the glass within the mirror became dark, as if it suddenly went through a transition between two realities that were the same yet completely different.
On one side of the mirror was a dark void-like abyss that was slowly becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second.
On the other, was where Zabulus could not see, lest he entered this gateway.
A hand reached outwards into the glass and through the glass. Then Zabulus stepped into the gate.
Vanishing into the mirror and erasing his presence within the temporal plane that is currently our world.
To bring about chaos and discord within a system that already has plenty enough chaos and discord to spare.
All in due time, he will bring his own finale to the world.