A Darker Path (DB)

Category:Story
Category:Halloween
Category:Special Event
== WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT. ==
ASCIIN SERIES
Fortunately, Asciin had a happy ending... but, what would happen if he went down a darker path?
== Chapter 1: Calamity ==
"All right, then. No giving up. I'm getting to the end of this, whether it's possible or not!" With new motivation surging, he ran, arms out, into the barrier. He slammed against it with one fist, the other, and both. For what felt like another eternity, he pounded against the wall, never wavering. Nothing would stop him, not even the limit to all things. He envisioned his world, and his family on the other side. He pounded harder.
It worked.
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The Allsphere Weaver felt a disturbance in the Hypercosmic Ocean of Realities. An Allsphere had collapsed in on itself, seemingly for no reason at all. Near the wreckage, it saw... a human? That couldn't be right. It went to check.
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Asciin saw the Weaver approach. Finally, it was time for his vengeance.
"Your end is at hand!" he declared. "You cannot hurt another being!" The Weaver regarded him with stone-cold silence. It seemed unmoved by his threat. "Fine then, how about I show you my power?" He imagined pure power, swirling around him. The surrounding Hypercosmic Ocean, though not actually water, began to boil. "How's that? This is the power of the one who will smite you!"
Still, it remained stoic.
"Then how about I-" Asciin stopped as a wave of unimaginable agony washed over him. He could feel every form of pain, and an infinite amount of it.
"You are feeling the pain of every being in the Allsphere you have come from," a voice told him.
"Holy crap, it talks," he groaned through the pain.
"Your ascent has caused untold misery. Each time you broke the ceiling between Allspheres, layered so carefully, the higher collapsed onto the lower. The same apocalypse you went through is now happening to countless others. Allsphere Amalgamation, the process which took your parents' lives, is one of precision and intent. It is to advance the development of all worlds. What you have caused came not from any higher purpose, but from pure, unadulterated anger. Just as the lower gods warned, you have brought your own pain upon more others than you can imagine."
Asciin heard this over the infinitely many noises in his head. He could feel everything that everyone was feeling, all at once, as if he were all of them. He lost friends. He lost colleagues. He lost mentors, and students, grandparents, grandchildren. He lost his only child. His spouse was killed in front of him.
From countless fresh sets of eyes, his parents died all over again. He couldn't take it. He wouldn't take it.
"MAKE IT STOP!!!"
And it did stop. The Allshpere that had been collapsing was frozen. Inanimate. Lifeless. He released his grip on it. The agony resumed, and he stopped it again.
"Do you see what you have done? By all accounts, you have become the monster you believed me to be."
"I..."
The Allsphere Weaver was silent, seemingly awaiting his response. It fears me. If this assault doesn't cow me, nothing will. Around the two of them, countless Allspheres floated, full of thriving life and happiness. He wished with all of his heart, or whatever was left of it, that he could have been in one of those, and spared the horror he'd witnessed.
"I HATE YOU!" Around him, countless Allspheres shattered. This caused a chain reaction, and Allspheres further out were also affected, creating a shockwave that rocked the entire Hypercosmic Ocean. Then, like a supernova, it all collapsed back in; if this was an ocean, then there was a global tsunami descending upon them. "It's over, Weaver. I'm the new god of this world."
"You are the devil that ends creation." Despite its own evidently inevitable demise, the Weaver's tone was even. "My Ocean is folding in on itself, coming under you power as it has been touched by your wrath. I shall accept my fate; no longer is there anything I can do. I will warn you, though, that mortals will not sink into the abyss so willingly."
"Please," Asciin scoffed. "If I can kill you, no mortal can stop me. Besides, I only came for you. I have no quarrel with anyone else. They're nothing but collateral, and if they live, I don't care."
"You say that, yet you are living proof that now god is eternal upon their throne. If a mortal can surpass me, so too can they surpass you. I can see it in your eyes: you will not stop at me. Your bloodlust cannot be satiated, and creation itself will break beneath your hammer of loss before you rest."
"My power is a result of your own foolishness. If what you say is true, and I continue, I won't be giving any lower being any such chance." With only moments left before impact, the Weaver nodded.
"Perhaps not. But you may be surprised."
"I won't."
And then the entire Hypercosmic Ocean descended upon the once-almighty being, ending its reign. The Ocean of Allspheres exploded outward, bursting from a singularity that it had condensed into in an infinitely dense form of Allsphere Amalgamation. A new world was born, and with it, a terrible new Weaver to preside.
Asciin, the Weaver of Death, made his declaration to all:
"I'VE WON!"
== Chapter 2: The Idea ==
He floated alone in the Ocean, waiting for the feeling of triumph to come. I’ve killed the Allsphere Weaver. I completed the task I set out to accomplish. Why do I feel so… empty? The idea came abruptly, and seemed embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. It's still unfair. Why should I be the only one to suffer? I didn't do anything to deserve what happened to me, which means that by the fundamental law of equality, you don't need to deserve something for it to happen to you. I'll make everyone hurt just as much as I did. Then, I'll finally be satisfied.
He extended his hand toward two nearby Allspheres, and with his complete control over his surroundings, smashed them together. Immediately, the realities they contained began to tear at the seams, collapsing their fundamental laws. Every horror Asciin had witnessed was now unfolding before the eyes of every single one of the infinitely many people, gods, animals and any other sentient things within the Allspheres. However, the Hypercosmic Ocean didn't sweep in yet, didn't wash through with its tide of destruction; such erasure would be a mercy, an end to the torment, and Asciin couldn't have that. No, he wanted them to pay for not understanding how he had been hurt. Besides, allowing the Ocean's waters to come into contact with the lower beings was an action that ran the risk of them gaining powers similar to his own, in which scenario he could end up like the Allsphere Weaver, dead and gone, with any trace of his being utterly purged from the fabric of reality itself. He wasn't going to take that chance if he wanted to fulfil his thirst for vengeance upon everything and everyone.
He stopped that train of thought in order to focus on his quarry. This is just random chaos. Not painful enough. I need determined, cold, and precise torture. He randomly selected a young college woman who had just watched her entire sorority catch fire out of the blue, and placed her in an infinite void. There was no air for her to breathe, no food or water, nothing to pass the time. Asciin removed her need for such things, but not the feeling of the need; she would be stuck, starving, thirsty, asphyxiated, yet never losing consciousness or life. From his own perspective, it would be over in minutes, when he completely destroyed the Allspheres involved in his play, but time was a subjective thing; she would be there for the rest of eternity. He saw a man, hugely overweight, perhaps in his late sixties, and put him on a treadmill set to a few light years per minute. Then, he installed barriers on all sides of the object, so that the man, in no way physically fit enough to run a normal treadmill, would be trapped there. He would impale families together, then separate them across distances further than their minds could comprehend, so that they would bleed out alone and desperate. He saw people realize, in their final moments, that they should dwell less upon hate whilst they had the time, and merged them with their worst enemies. Untold despair fell upon all those whom his gaze descended onto, as a vicious hawk did toward its unsuspecting prey. But Asciin was not hunting; he held no need for food, nor did he do this for necessity at all. Sheer malice, nothing but the will, the desire, to hurt others was what drove his actions as he methodically sowed far greater suffering than anything he himself had experienced. Coldly, over the next few minutes of his existence as an unopposed god, he made each individual being suffer their own personal hell, beyond anything that any had imagined in their time in their pathetic, futile lives.
Finally, it was over. No more pain could be inflicted upon the numb worlds, and so he removed them, wiping the two Allspheres from the Hypercosmic Ocean of Realities without so much as a memory, save for his own. He looked around, then inward. Somewhere, deep down, he knew that this was wrong. He knew, in his heart of hearts, that this wasn't fair, or just, or vengeful. He was simply addicted to death. And no amount of hurting within himself could justify what he had just done, nor could he ever undo or repent for it. Not that there was anyone or anything to repent to, given his position at the pinnacle of the world. He had no plans to anyway, for in his conscious mind, the forefront of his psyche, only one thought rang clear and escaped through his mouth.
"And yet, I still feel nothing."
== Chapter 3: At The End of All Things ==
He looked around at his remaining surroundings, and the infinity of Allspheres that still existed. That didn’t work. Now what? Again, the answer was obvious. I’m still surrounded by infinitely many Allspheres, all blasphemously thriving. I’ll fix that, and I’ll finally be able to rest.
He allowed his power to flood out across all of the Hypercosmic Ocean, drowning the Allspheres. Nothing would escape. All would perish. He could sense many mortals turning to religion to protect themselves and their families, praying to a god who either didn't exist, wouldn't hear them, or was just as doomed and impotent as they were. The end of all things was nigh.
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Everything had been destroyed. The Ocean of Realities, once vibrant and teeming with life and laughter and love, was barren, stripped of its contents. Now, only on Allsphere remained. Asciin came down on it with what could only be known to his victims as divine fury, retribution for some unknown sin that could only be cleansed by complete extermination. First, of course, he came to a world nigh-identical to his own home planet. He did this with every Allsphere; it reminded him of what he'd lost, kept him going, despite something inside him constantly protesting against the endless violence. It rose up now, a sick feeling in his gut that he couldn't quite put a name to, or get rid of. No matter. He squashed it down. Soon, after all, it would be over.
First, he came upon a family of four, a man, a woman, and two children. With just a whim, he manifested an explosion in between all of them, not enough to blow them to bloody pieces, but certainly enough to hurt. He picked one at random: the man. For the other three, he created a wall with three large, sharp hooks to hand them by. He levitated them each onto one, hanging them by holes that he pierced in the backs of their throats. They would watch.
"Alright," he said calmly, "let's start the show." He punched the man in the gut with enough force to puncture the skin, then reached both hands into the wound to tear the gash wider. The man screamed in agony, and his family's shock was palpable from the side. Asciin reached inside, and pulled out a kidney. He chucked it to the side. Over the course of an hour, slowly, he removed the man's non-vital organs, one at a time. He should have been dead by now, between the shock and the blood loss, but Asciin didn't let the pathetic creature slip off into the darkness so easily. The man tried to crawl away, dragging his gaping body across the concrete of the street he'd been thrown onto. Without so much as looking up from the intestine he was now studying with morbid interest, just for the sake of frightening the children, he manifested a sharp metal pole above him. It fell, with enough force to shatter stone, right between the poor soul's ribs, just millimeters away from his heart. Trapped and impaled, the man gave up. From the bottom of the pile he'd created, he pulled out the spleen. "I know what you're thinking, you know." He calmly walked over, towering above his victim. "That I'm cruel, and this is out of the blue, and you've done nothing to deserve this." Painfully, the man tried to nod. Asciin violently stepped on his head. "Wrong. I've endured pain at the hands of a god, just like you are right now. I see myself as a sort of cosmic equalizer, really. After all..." He bend down and shoved the spleen into his captive's mouth.
"Why should I be the only one to suffer?"
He shoved the spleen further into the man's face, forcing it down his throat.
"CHEW!" Tears were forming in the mortal's eyes. "DID YOU HEAR ME?! CHEW!" Reluctantly, the man began to bite into his own organ, reducing it to a slimy pulp in his mouth. After a while, it was ground finely enough between his teeth to swallow, which Asciin made him. As Asciin walked back to the pile, the man choked out one word.
"Why?" Asciin stopped dead.
"Why? Why am I doing this?" He laughed, shaking the whole world in the process. "Because I've lost everything. I had a family once, too. They died. So why should anyone else's live? After all, I must have gotten this power from that event for a reason." He picked up a kidney. "I'm going to make you feel all the pain that I did before you die. And when the end comes for you, trust me, it'll be a relief."
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The man was dead. Over the course of a day, Asciin had fed him his own entrails, his family watching the whole time. He walked away, not bothering to finish off the others. The children only had minutes left, now that Asciin wasn't keeping them alive to see their father's display. The woman would last a little longer, being an adult, but she too would cease to live by nightfall.
The slaughter continued.
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This was the final kill. In all of the Hypercosmic Ocean of Realities, there was only one Allsphere left. In all of the Allsphere, there was only one universe left. In this entire universe, only a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, was left. The boy's parents had been with him, moments ago. Now, they were just wet, crimson splatters on the wall of the kid's house, oozing slowly down the side.
"Well, you're the last entity in all of creation," he told the teen. "So you're special. Not lucky, per se, given all of... well, this. But special. Anyway, how would you like to die?"
"Just do it," the boy muttered. He seemed utterly broken.
"Excuse me?"
"You can kill me in literally any way imaginable, right? So just kill me. Get it over with."
"I'm afraid you're mistaken," Asciin clicked his tongue at the youth. "I don't simply kill people. I'm not that merciful. Not, I need to hurt you first. Hurt you more than you could ever imagine."
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'VE ALREADY DONE?!" The boy's scream was so loud, so abrupt, that it actually hurt Asciin's ears. "YOU KILLED MY PARENTS IN FRONT OF ME! YOU MADE ME WATCH MY ENTIRE WORLD BURN AROUND ME! AND NOW, YOU'RE SAVING ME FOR LAST, AND ABOUT TO KILL ME IN THE WORST WAY YOU CAN THINK OF! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH THAT HURTS?!" Asciin just looked at him, shocked. In this kid's eyes, he saw, more than anything, himself. The same sorrow, the same loss, the same anger and defeat...
The same hate.
He walked up very close to the mortal, the only mortal, and changed back. Now he was Asciin. Not the Weaver of Death, not the devil that ends creation, just Asciin. Asciin as he had been, before any of this cosmic stuff had intruded on his life, just a seventeen-year-old boy.
"I know exactly how much that hurts." The boy looked at him incredulously.
"You do?"
"I should, considering the same thing happened to me."
"You're lying."
"I'm not. There was once a god, like me, that destroyed my world. I was just a teenager myself back then, and I watched my parents die. Somehow, I survived; I felt scared, and alone. I made a few friends in the place I'd been dropped in, but... well, you can probably guess how that went." The boy had nothing to say, so he continued. "Somehow, in the event that took my parents' lives, I gained power. Immense, unstoppable power. I used it to kill the god who had wronged me, thought that I would feel satisfied if I got revenge. I was wrong. So next, I tried to make everyone suffer the way I did, which caused all of this. I became the god. I became... well, I guess I'm just as bad as the Weaver."
"You rotten, pathertic, filthy SCUM!" The boy punched him across the face, and in mortal form, Asciin couldn't block it in time. "Did you think that would make me feel bad for you?! You knew exactly how awful what you were doing was, yet you continued anyway. You've caused infinitely more suffering than you yourself have felt. You're disgusting." With an uppercut to the jaw, Asciin fell onto the ground, too rattled to think to enter his godly state and defend himself. Bleeding on the ground, he spoke back.
"You don't know me." Yet, with rising clarity, he realized that the boy had spoken perfect truth. None of this was right; it had been his pain, his wound, and he'd lashed out and let it reach others in his blindness. He felt a hard blow to his skull; he'd been kicked.
"I don't care if I know you," the boy's voice trembled. "I care that you die."
Wow, he really is just like me. Except for him, there's no one left to hurt once he's killed me. And no power for him to hurt people with.
What a pathetic end.
In his clarity, Asciin could easily go back into his invulnerable form; he could splatter this human across the remains of existence for daring to raise a fist to him. But he didn't.
"I can tell you from experience that revenge won't get you anywhere," Asciin told the kid beating him.
"Nothing will get me anywhere," the boy said, raising his foot directly above Asciin's face. "So why even care?" His foot descended.
"Alright then," Asciin said as it crushed his nose and pushed his throbbing head into the dirt. "Just... don't say I didn't warn you."
And then, from his wounds, Asciin died, and his killer understood the emptiness that he'd felt.
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Asciin came upon an Ocean that was very different from the rest. There was only one Allsphere, within it one universe, within which there was one human.
Odd.
He pulled this Allsphere into the Postsphere, where he hoped this child could find peace. He didn't know what calamity had befallen this place, but he thanked whatever force was even above himself that he hadn't gone down a darker path.
Category:Canon
Category:Divergent Branch