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You’re dead.
You’ve been that way for a while.
You can’t exactly recall the details of your passing at the moment, but you now wander these strange mishmashes of memories, all contained perfectly within bubbles drifting within the Furthest Ring, surrounded by other ghosts, some you recognize as players from your session, but most unfamiliar to you, all with their own tales regarding their predestined fate to fail, to perish in one way or another and end up here.
You can only hope your friends can win the game and avoid meeting you here, in at least one timeline.
For now, you sit on a cliff made of dark blue stone, overlooking an amalgamated landscape of reds, blacks, cyans, greens, and blues, all crudely blended together at the edges where they meet, forming a surreal sight.
You don’t think you’ll ever get used to how these bubbles shift in location so quickly.
As you silently stare out into the distance, past the technicolor sky overhead, you sense someone approaching you, and calmly sitting down right next to you, as if they’ve known you your whole life.
But, when you turn your head, your blank, white eyes meet a matching pair owned by an utter stranger.
You’ve seen his kind before- gray skinned aliens, with black, thick stranded hair, pointed ears, fangs, claws, and orange horns that fade to a golden yellow. Trolls, they call themselves.
But… this is quite the odd one you’ve found yourself face to face with.
His face is coated in white and gray paint, resembling a skull, and his hair is an unruly afro. His frame is rather slender, with slight cheekbones poking through the seemingly thin skin on his face. On the top of his head are goatlike horns, sweeping upwards and curving at the halfway point. Finally, he dons what resembles a one piece skeleton costume, complete with gloves over his hands, with purple short shorts and boots over top of it
But, that’s not what alarms you about him.
It’s the fact that his mouth is stitched closed, and he hasn’t let out a single word nor noise to indicate he has a tongue.
And the fact that he’s just… staring at you, with an eerily calm grin on his face.
You… don’t really know how to react to his sudden arrival, so you just… stare back at him for a moment, before awkwardly waving goodbye and walking off, down the path beaten into the stone beneath you, deeper into this memory of a cloudy land with seas of oil, cyan glowing mushrooms, and countless pipes emerging from the deep blue stone beneath your feet.
Once again, you find yourself wandering… until you encounter another version of him.
One who is wearing the exact same outfit, staring at you with that same grin.
Nervous, you turn around, seeing the version of him from before still sitting on the cliffside, his gaze still onto you, piercing despite his lack of pupils or irises.
While you are aware of the fact that the dreambubbles contain versions of people from various different timelines… you can’t help but feel that something’s off here.
You try to ignore the feeling of dread pooling in your gut, and walk off, further and further away from the cliff, trying to ignore the fact that even more versions of that guy keep showing up, all in the exact same outfit, all with the exact same stare and smile.
That sensation inside of you has become impossible to ignore.
You quicken your pace, feet pattering against the stone as it shifts to a dark grey, the landscape shifting to that of a dark land with oceans of blood with damaged, European style ramparts and towers sticking out of them, carved from the same nearly black rock underneath your feet.
You keep seeing him, no matter how fast you run. He’s haunting you now, alongside what feels like every alternative version of him to have ever existed in the history of Paradox Space.
You need to get away from him and his other selves, and soo-
A hand lands down on your shoulder, and you freeze as the sensation of clawed fingers dig into your skin.
When you turn around, the specter that has been haunting you stares back, his smile seemingly more of a knowing smirk, in your panicking eyes.
You see his eyes flicker in color, from that ghastly white that marks both you and him as spirits haunting this accursed game’s version of the afterlife, to bright magenta and a deep purple, flickering rapidly between one another.
You only manage to get a glimpse at those colors before your body goes limp, falling onto the rough ground beneath you.
He remains standing over your body as your vision goes dark, perfectly unmoving as he stares down at you.
Nothing changing with him minus the flickering of his eyes.
~~~
When you awaken, nothing has changed with the bubble you reside in minus the disappearance of the troll who has been stalking you, nor his alternative selves.
But, you are given little time to relish that fact, for the second you find yourself coming to…
…your body rises on its own, in swift, jerking motions, your fingers flopping down uselessly as if they aren’t even being considered as things that exist in the moment as you feel yourself march on like a puppet, forced to watch as you wander across the bubble with your face locked onto a perfectly neutral expression, taking a sharp left turn and walking off to a landscape that resembles Skaia.
Or, a Skaia, at least.
One with a purple colored archway located on a floating lilypad, with pillars at the sides and strange, almost veinlike structures on top, containing stairs that lead deep into some unknown location.
A location your body is instantly moving towards, no matter how much you scream at it to stop, to turn around before something bad happens.
It just keeps walking deeper and deeper.
Eventually, the stairs give way to a long, catacomb-like tunnel, the walls of which are lined with carvings you barely get the chance to look at, as your head is stuck looking forwards, directly at a light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel.
But, you catch glimpses, through the corners of your eyes. Of serpents and skeletons, clowns and aliens, meat and candy, of a world outside the one you reside in, one where others peer into through windows beyond your understanding.
You don’t know what any of them mean, but… they fail to stop the dread inside of you from creeping higher and higher.
Nor your body from getting closer and closer to the light, until it finally enters.
And, when it does, that dread instantly skyrockets.
You find yourself in a theater of sorts, a medium sized, round room with seats carved out of the same purple stone that lines the walls, which are decorated with an assortment of skulls and bones of varying hues, along with insectoid chitin sculpted into skeletal shapes and orange-yellow horns, all around a raised, almost altarlike platform sat right in the center of the room.
And, sitting on those seats… is him.
Him, and his countless alternative selves, all staring right at you with only those eerie grins as indicators of their moods as your body walks over to the platform.
Sure, some of them are in different outfits, this time, such as princelike attire, Prospit dreamer garb, and his god tier pajamas, exposing him as a Prince of Rage.
But, most don that accursed skeleton costume with those purple boots and short shorts over it.
In any other context, that outfit would be ridiculous.
The second your body climbs up onto the platform, and stands in the center, a sudden, sharp pain pierces through the skin on the back of your hands, top of your feet, elbows, knees, and at the back of your neck, digging through your muscle and nerves and leeching onto the bone, as you feel your body going slack before floating upward as the skin covering the pierced locations slightly lifts, as if being pinched or tugged by unseen fingers.
No matter how hard you try, how much will you muster… you can’t move your body. All you can do past rising pain is watch, feel, and hear.
Watch, as you begin to slim down, fat and muscle whittling itself down and force your clothing to droop on your frame, threatening to fall off and expose your bare form to these strangers.
Feel, as your skin tightens against your bones and muscle, digging into it as you feel your skeleton shift and move as if it had suddenly become animate while inside of you, squishing against every little thing inside of your body.
And, finally, hear the cracking of your ribcage as it extends, wrapping around your vital organs as they shift into something much more alien with an array of squelches and muscle as its color rapidly shifts to purple.
A gray discoloration wraps over the sides of your torso, splitting them open in two separate locations on both your left and right, and revealing viscera dyed a striking purple only to rapidly heal the wounds, scabbing them over with soft tissues as your chest flattens, nipples fading into the gray as it extends, consuming your chest in a silent, eternal embrace.
As the discoloration spreads over your thinning body, the slightest hint of muscle mass bulks itself up, a fact that fails to prevent your clothes from threatening to slide off your body.
The sound of more cracking mixed with insectoid clicking snaps your thoughts away from how slender you’ve become, as your altered, denser bone structure keeps changing, color shifting to a dark purple as a bit more bulk is added to them, just enough to make it seem like you still have a skeleton underneath your skin.
You then feel your body extending upwards, cracking and clicking all the way as the discoloration keeps moving, approaching your elbows and waist, painting over your former skintone and leaving your flesh the same ash gray as a troll, all the while you keep growing taller and taller, your once ill-fitting shirt now tight around your neck and shoulders.
Your limbs adjust as you transform, too, thankfully, keeping your body proportionate, even as you grow from your former height to 7’2, then 8’4, then finally capping at 9’10.
The perfect height to look the identical trolls around you in the eye, if you were sat right next to one.
The gray discoloration that has consumed your shoulders then spills down your slender arms like paint splattered onto a canvas, dyeing your flesh that shade of gray as it moves down further and further, as you feel your bones melt inside of your body, seeping out through the strands of your muscle like water through a cloth, squeezing past each and every fiber, until it finally exits, then wraps itself back around the tendons of your arms like a smothering blanket, color shifting to a dark purple as it rapidly crackles, shifting to something more akin to the exoskeleton of a bug, contained safely within your skin.
Your hands are not spared, for as the discoloration consumes your elbows and nears your wrists, your nails grow outwards and sharpen into points, while the strands of muscle in your palm grow like roots, twisting and digging downwards into your fingers, filling them out with fibers just as the bone in them melts away, only to rapidly reform into chitin that dyes itself that deep purple beneath your skin as it covers up the new muscle. A sharp sensation in your fingertips that arrives just as the discoloration sweeps over your palms reveals that your extended, clawlike nails are rooting themselves into your new skin-covered exoskeleton, forming a sturdy grip to help prevent breakage and damage.
By this point, you’re really starting to panic, as you sit there, floating as that gray discoloration finally consumes your fingers, rendering your arms and hands completely changed.
You have been stalked by alternative versions of a troll, who seem to have formed a cultlike group that has done… something to you that renders your body seemingly under their command, and silently watching as your body shifts into someone else’s before your very eyes, with not a thing you can do about it.
And words cannot describe how much you both hate and fear that fact.
You focus yourself, and manage to twitch your altered fingers and slightly kick your feet. Internally grinning at your small victory, you keep focusing on them, until you feel control over your body slowly but surely return to you, your frozen facial expression twitching as you weakly writhe in midair.
Progress. Soon, you’ll be running as far away as you can from these cree-
Suddenly, you feel an invisible force wrap itself tight around your entire body, slithering around your limbs and gripping them a little too tightly for comfort as your face returns to that flat, emotionless expression. It digs into your skin, almost cutting into your changing flesh like a knife, but your body remains firm. It’s as if this force is demanding you stop your useless struggles, to just sit there and accept this.
But, even though your body is now truly frozen, you can’t.
You refuse to.
The gray discoloration snakes down your thighs, altering your sexual organs as they creep downward, slimming down your thighs and rear as it keeps up its march. The signature melting of your bones marks the start of them changing on the inside as well, as every last one rapidly liquefies into a mass that slithers through your muscle, creeping through each and every cell until it emerges on the other end, where it resolidifies into chitin.
The sensation of your knees changing is notably horrific, as you float there, feeling them boil and crack as if they’re shattering, forcing you through what feels like years of agony as on the outside, the gray discoloration merely sweeps over them, as if not even seeing your kneecaps twitch and writhe like living things just underneath it.
Your feet change in a way akin to the change your hands experience.
The gray discoloration paints over your ankles, and you feel the muscle in your feet extend down to your toes, wrapping around them as your bones melt down, only to rise up over your muscles and harden into place as your newfound exoskeleton, covering your nerves and muscle. Your nails then change as well, sharpening, digging into the fabric of your socks as they extend, then rooting into your new chitin.
Finally, the gray discoloration on the upper half of your body becomes active once more, marching up your neck and tickling your chin as you internally panic.
You can tell right away that this is going to be agonizing.
You feel your jaw go loose as it, along with every other bone in your head, begins to melt down, followed by the feeling of your brain and optic nerves floating inside of your skull, drifting as the remnants of your bones rush their way past your muscle, before hardening into that dreaded chitin as it settles into place just under your skin, shoving your brain and nerves back into place and fixing up your jaw as it does so.
The discoloration is halfway up your face now, by the time you feel your nose crackle as it widens out a bit, your facial structure slim itself down, what now qualifies as your cheekbones seemingly rise and become more visible underneath your altered skin, your ears extend outwards and round themselves off with points, and, most notably, as your hair dyes itself pitch black, strands thickening and stiffening out as they twist and writhe, moving as if each and every lock has suddenly come to life.
It flares up, expanding upwards and messing itself up as the strands coil up against one another on their own, reshaping your hair to their own ideals. Several locks of your new black, setae-like hair tickle the back of your neck, close to the base, as soon, your hair finishes restyling itself into a medium length afro.
Right after your hair is done changing, you feel a pair of tunneling sensations in your scalp, evenly place on both sides, which soon turns into a wave of pain as a pair of yellow horns crawl out of your head like a pair of frantic animals, ripping through your flesh as it rapidly heals over. They curve outward, then inward, as they emerge, before reaching their full height, with the base fading to a nice deep orange in the form of stripes.
If you could see yourself from a distance, you would realize how much you look like the trolls watching you transform, and realize what was coming up next.
But unfortunately, you cannot, and are blind to what awaits you.
Your pure white eyes remain unchanged, still marking you as a ghost, but as the last of your former skin color is consumed by the gray, you feel your canines extend, the ends sharpening to points as the upper pair poke out from your lips. You then feel the rest of your teeth sharpen themselves in turn, rubbing up against one another as they make room to perfectly fit in your closed mouth.
At first, you think your transformation has ended there, and you’ll be released.
But, as a tugging sensation builds up in your new fangs, you realize that you’re far from done changing.
It feels like a pair of invisible fingers are pulling at your fangs, lightly at first, but soon, it builds up to a desperate yanking that loosens them more and more every second, until they’re removed from your mouth and clatter onto the ground, with a trail of deep purple blood that dribbles down your chin and a pair of gaps that rapidly heal over being the only indicator they existed.
Right after that, you feel an invisible, sandpaper-like texture drag itself across your sharpened front teeth, harder and harder by the second, grinding them down further and further. As they dig into your pulp, you try to scream out in agony, past your forcibly closed mouth as your front teeth are slowly and painfully ground down to mere bony stubs in your mouth, but you cannot.
And, as they’re seemingly sanded down to remove any sharp edges, you feel that same tugging sensation that took out your fangs, and realize with horror that soon, you never will again.
Your mouth slowly peels itself open, purple-tinged saliva mixed with your changed blood washing away small flakes that were once a part of your teeth, as you feel your tongue slowly get pulled past your mouth by invisible hands. Once it reaches its full length, the hands yank on it, forcing you to internally wince as they tug harder and harder by the second, forming small tears right at the root that grow bigger and bigger the harder they pull, blood filling the back of your throat as the pain skyrockets.
Just when everything slowly goes black, when you feel like you’re about to pass out as only a few blood vessels and nerves keep your tongue hanging onto your mouth…
The pain reaches its peak.
Your tongue is fully torn from your mouth as blood fills it, the muscle dropping itself onto the stone beneath you and twitching like a dying animal, bleeding out onto the purple rock beneath you.
The wound in your mouth rapidly scabs and scars over, but you barely care.
You have been silenced. Forever.
As if to rub salt into the wound, a new sharp pain forms close to the corner of your lips.
One that fades quickly, but is swiftly replaced by an identical pair of flares of agony that pierce into your delicate flesh, tunneling past your skin, touching what remains of your front teeth, before vanishing once more only to be replaced with two more flares of pain.
Daring to look, your eyes glance downwards to see a floating, curved needle, attached to thick, black thread that is sowing itself into your skin, sealing your lips shut and making your newfound, permanent silence that much more visible.
It’s a process that takes it sweet time, as if to slowly torture you. The needle, now stained with the deep purple of your new blood, slowly enters either your lower or upper lip, digging into your monochrome skin, then peers out of the opposite side of the one it entered, dragging the thread along with it and forcing your lips a little bit closer, hammering your speechlessness in just a little bit more.
Somehow, it keeps the stitches nice and neat, during its journey that takes minutes, but seems to take days past the blur of agony that seems to make up your new existence.
But, it makes its way to the right side of your mouth eventually, the thread tying itself into a neat little knot that keeps it nice and tight, as the needle vanishes.
You sit there, trying to regain your bearings, an effort that only lasts a few seconds before flickering colors enter your vision. Curious, you look around, seeing thin strands that flicker between a bright magenta and a deep purple, most of which are wrapped around your now slender form, with several impaling your body with small fishhooks.
You instantly realize what these are. They’ve been holding you in place this whole time, rendering you as still as your body back in your session proper, only visible now that your transformation is complete.
The coloration takes you a bit longer to realize, but you soon figure out that it's the same as the version of your kidnappers who knocked you out.
So… do all versions of this guy have these weird powers? But… how?
Before you can figure it out, new strands descend from the ceiling like antennas to hell, worming past your hair and digging through your skin in a frantic, quickly accomplished quest to reach your brain.
For the first time in what feels like forever, you have control over your body, tied up it may be, and the first thing you do is try to scream out past your missing tongue and sown shut lips, letting out a pathetic gargling noise instead.
You feel them, tunneling and moving like worms inside of your brain, snaking in deeper and deeper past the soft folds and wrinkles as they root themselves in place, caring not for the pain they cause you as your blank eyes scan the theater, looking for any sort of escape route past your blankly staring, smiling captors.
The strings pull back. Your mind sharpens.
…Come to think of it… you’re in too much pain to really try and escape right this second. If you did… you’d probably collapse early on, then god knows what these freaks would do to you. For now, you should just… sit back and wait until everything seems in the clear.
So, you quietly look at your identical captors, trying to gleam any kind of hint from their copy and pasted faces, and… all you get is that their eyes have changed, all to the exact same pattern of flickering pink and purple, all perfectly in sync.
The strings pull back. Your mind sharpens.
…Wait, you recognize what they’re doing.
They’re using purpleblood variant psionics, of course.
Easily one of the more… stigmatized types, and for good reason. Able to manipulate dreams (which, in a place birthed from them, is much more effective), amplify and induce fear in even the strongest willed individuals, and induce hallucinations, they’re easily quite notable.
Not to mention how, in a handful of cases, they can grant telepathic communication, read, and even alter minds! Needless to say, there’s a reason they have the reputation they do.
…Wait.
How the hell do you know all that?
The strings pull back. Your mind sharpens.
...Because you’ve been blessed with immense talent in your caste’s psionics, that’s why. By The Messiahs, your thinkpan has felt so damn foggy in these past hours…
You shake your head, trying to force some clarity into it past the fog creeping into the deepest pits of it…
…and instantly remember where you are.
Shit. Shit! How the fuck could you have forgotten?
Instantly, your body becomes active once again, your blank glance nuggets flickering about in desperation for some form of secret escape route your captors haven’t patched up.
You need to get the fuck out of here, and soon. They’re screwing up your spine lump, and if you don’t escape, Messiahs know what will happen to y-
Pain consumes you as the threads wrapping around your body tighten, as if to dig into your fragile body and cleanly slice it into several little bits.
If you could scream, if you still had your tongue and your lips could open, you would be screeching to the highest heaven.
The strings pull back. Your mind cracks.
The strings pull back. Your mind peels.
The strings pull back. Your mind fractures.
The strings pull back. Your mind withers.
The strings pull back. Your mind opens.
The strings pull back. Your mind is exposed.
Visions flare in the front of your eyes as the memories of your youth grow distant, withering away in the presence of something far greater.
You see countless memories, countless experiences dance in front of your ganderbulbs as you feel yourself drifting deeper and deeper into the deepest possible sea, sinking faster and faster as you see… things.
Games played, in sets of two, fours, six, ten, or twelves.
A peaceful past forcibly burned to create an unstable future.
A muscular figure with the head of a skeleton, raging through the afterlife.
A clown, gifted visions of a group who influenced him, which changed his life for better and worse.
Two trolls, one of gold and one of olive, distant yet more familiar than any of your loved ones at this very moment.
A man and the doll who birthed him, a pair of separate puppetmasters and mind benders.
Dubiously true tales of grimmer, intertwined futures.
Despite this utter fever nightmare forced in front of your gaze that has rendered reality a blur and your old life something quickly fading from you, your mind starts to feel sharper and sharper, despite the razor sharp threads digging into you.
And then, like a vision from the Messiahs themselves, you see it, in a blur past the threads threatening to yank your scalp off.
Meaning. True meaning to all this. To your existence. To your transformation. To everything.
A young man, standing in his room. He meanders about, preparing to play a game that brings forth the end, unaware of the destined path set for him and those he holds dear.
His three friends, entering the game one by one after he does so, pestered by an alternative version of your kin along the way, unwillingly guiding him and one another along this perfectly paved road.
A mutantblood, standing in his hive, preparing to play a version of that game, a version you played with friends not unlike him or that boy.
His eleven friends, all of his and your kind, some more remarkable and notable in the grand scheme of things, others destined to perish early in this story and fall to the wayside.
Another purpleblood, unknowingly shaped by distorted faith, a neglectful lusus, and a substance that should’ve never entered his mouth. Your descendant and ancestor. The vessel. The father of The Angel.
And, the Messiahs themselves. Two children in one body. The crimson one almost always destined to win, to become the one you worship through conquest, bloodshed and transcendence.
All of this zooms out, past a screen constructed from glass and powered by wires and silicon, to reveal a person, sometimes donning the makeup of your faith in crude mockery, sitting at their workstation.
Creating. Writing.
Acting as a character, both inside and outside of the cycle you and your kin are in.
You can barely comprehend what is before you, as more visions fill your eyes as the tugging grows worse and worse
But, through all this agony that shaves away at your identity, that seizes who you were and tosses it aside, you feel better than you have ever felt before.
In fact, it’s as if you are being blessed.
Blessed by none other than The Angel himself, who has sent his disciples to elevate you from a nobody to someone with purpose. Someone meant to help bring him forth, to keep him rising despite his demise ad infinitum, in the most perfect Ouroboros.
Long may he and his herald live, and long may those who oppose him double die for eternity.
Your clothing, garb that no longer fits someone like you, shifts, hues darkening to a pitch black and fabric merging into one mass that wraps around your skin, tight enough not to harm, but to forever remind you of your purpose. White dye dances around the material, lining up with the front of your body to mimic the human skeletal structure, in an aesthetic choice you’ve always enjoyed despite your lack of bones.
White greasepaint then forms on your face, painting itself on with only a few scarce areas shifting in color to gray: those being the area around your eyes and nose, and your cheeks, in a way that mimics a skull.
Finally, your old life’s ill-fitting shoes shift to an elegant purple in color, the material stretching over your calves as the threads wrap around it, keeping your new boots in place around your legs. On your waist, new purple fabric wraps over the top of your costume, shifting into shorts that crop themselves off just after your spinal crevice.
The threads wrapping your form and mind unravel, gently dropping you onto the amethyst-hued stone beneath you.
And, finally, your thinkpan is clear.
Your name is Kurloz Makara. You had another name, prior to this moment in which you were blessed by your kin, the highest motherfucking priests of The Angel of Double Death, but it no longer matters, nor do any of the memories and connections that name had gained throughout its lifetime, both before and after its time ran out and it found itself wandering these bubbles.
You look at your kin, and you all nod. Nothing more can be said. Nothing more should be said.
With that, you all exit, and walk your separate ways through the afterlife, eventually to be reunited again once a new soon-to-be devotee is snared, strung up, and remade into a fellow perfect disciple of The Angel of Double Death.
At least, until the snake devours its other half, and he breaks free from this cycle, shattering all of this reality once he does so, flying free from this eternally repeating story, to finally take his rightful motherfucking throne as the One True Lord of the world behind that glass pane, echoed on other identical screens and fueled by tales, songs, and art pieces that spread the fable of his repeating rise and fall, and of those with their fates entwined with his existence.
But, for now, you do his services. His dirty work in the afterlife, while remaining on watch for any new vessels to convey to your noble faith and making sure The Bard, no matter the self, is in the perfect position for any interference so it can be swiftly cleansed, regardless of the cost to you, or those you had a bond with in times prior to or running along this moment.
For this is how it should be, and how it will be.
Forever.