The darkness lifted, and Nulls stood at the edge of eternity.
His form was wrong. Every part of it violated senses he no longer possessed, a protoplasmic bubble of condensed impossibility that shifted through shapes no geometry could contain.
Calling it grotesque or disgusting would compliment creatures far more coherent than what he had been. His surface rippled with colors that existed only in the spaces between dying thoughts, and his edges bled into the void where matter forgot how to hold itself together.
A thousand mouths opened and closed across his membrane, each one tasting dimensions that had no names, each one whispering equations that would shatter any mind that heard them. His body was a wound in the fabric of reality, a place where the laws of physics came to die, and he had worn this form for longer than most universes lasted.
Beside him, two other wounds pulsed with their own corrupted light. Polaris had condensed himself into a lattice of spinning mechanical tendrils, each one tipped with a sensor that could detect the smallest fluctuation in the cosmic background, each one linked to a processing core that could calculate the position of every atom in existence simultaneously.
His form was slightly more stable than Nulls's, but only in the way that a collapsing building is more stable than an exploding star.
Dawn had chosen a different configuration, a web of crystalline filaments that stretched across the control room like frozen lightning, each strand vibrating at a frequency that kept the worst of the outside horrors from overwhelming her senses.
Together, the three of them operated the dome that Nulls had built to keep the vermin out of his sight. Outside the dome, chaos reigned absolute.
Innumerable elder gods pressed against the barrier, parasites from beyond creation, beings that had existed before the first law of physics was written and would continue to exist after the last law was repealed.
They had no shapes that could be described, no intentions that could be understood, no hunger that could be satisfied.
They simply were, and their existence demanded that everything else stop existing, that the tree at the center of all things be consumed down to its last root.
Among them, the amalgamation of the entire Theos species writhed and clawed, a single amorphous entity that had once been billions of distinct minds, now fused into a screaming mass of hunger and regret and the desperate need to absorb everything that remained.
It had chosen the other side. It had abandoned creation. It had left Nulls and Polaris and Dawn to clean up the mess.
Inside the dome, the Nexus Tree rose through layers of reality that stacked like pages in a book, its branches holding entire timelines like fruit, its roots sinking into the bedrock of existence itself.
The tree was dying. The parasites were gnawing at its base, and the amalgamation was tearing at its branches, and the only thing keeping it alive was the dome that Nulls had built and the three beings who operated it.
Nulls operated half of the dome's systems, his consciousness split across a thousand control interfaces, each one requiring constant attention and adjustment.
Polaris and Dawn each operated a quarter, their minds stretched thin across interfaces designed for someone with twice their capacity.
They needed each other to compensate for their weaknesses, needed to communicate constantly to avoid gaps in the coverage, needed to work together as a single unit despite their individual flaws.
Polaris's tendrils twitched as he adjusted his section of the dome, compensating for a surge of pressure from the amalgamation's latest assault. "We can fix this," he said, his voice translated from the vibration of his mechanical cores into something that approximated speech. "If we coordinate the next counter-pulse, we can push them back far enough to reinforce the weak points."
Dawn's crystalline filaments pulsed in agreement, her response too fast for any organic mind to parse. "The loustern quadrant is holding, but the western boundary needs more power. I can divert from my secondary systems if you can cover the gap."
Nulls's thousand mouths curled into expressions that might have been smiles. "Fix this. Fix this." His voice dripped with mockery, each word shaped to cut deeper than any weapon. "You cannot even operate your own sections without holding hands like frightened juveniles. You stood beside me at the beginning, and yet you still chose them. To become part of the problem rather than the solution. And now you come crawling back, begging to help, acting as if your betrayal never happened."
Polaris's tendrils went rigid. "We made a mistake. We admitted it but we came back."
"A mistake." Nulls's form pulsed with contempt. "You handed them the formula to make a creatures that could harvest the tree, that. Mind you. Was from one of my stolen books, that was confiscated by the very government that the two of you chose instead of me. The thieves came crawling back to the victim after they choosed to teamed up with other thieves to robbed the victim, and now the other thieves are both of our problems." Nulls clapped using two of his limbs. "Bravo, another day of the great Polaris-Dawn magnum opus."
Dawn's filaments dimmed, her light shrinking inward as if she could hide from his words. "We are trying to make amends."
"Amends?" He laughed, the sound was the death of his hope, not that he got any. "You cannot make amends for what you have done. You can only stand there and watch while I do the work that should have been yours, and you can pray that I am strong enough to carry your weight as well as my own."
The elder gods surged against the dome, a wave of pressure that made the entire structure groan. Nulls adjusted his interfaces, compensating for the assault, stabilizing the boundaries that Polaris and Dawn had let weaken. His movements were precise, efficient, absolute.
A crack formed in the western wall. Dawn's filaments snapped into action, trying to seal the breach, but something was already through. An elder god, smaller than the others but still vast beyond comprehension, had slipped through the gap before she could close it.
Its form oozed into the control room, a mass of eyes and mouths and limbs that moved in directions that violated every law of physics. It reached for Polaris, its appendages stretching across the space between them in ways that should have been impossible.
Polaris tried to defend himself, his mechanical tendrils lashing out with energies capable of leveling the branches of the tree, but the elder god absorbed the attacks and kept coming. One of its limbs wrapped around his core, and Polaris screamed as the thing began to consume him.
Nulls's form shifted, condensing into a spear of pure ontological rejection, a weapon designed to erase things that should not exist. He struck the elder god at its center, and the thing convulsed, its matter dissolving into the nothing it had crawled out of. The limb around Polaris went limp, and the rest of the creature followed, obliterated by the force of Nulls's attack.
Polaris floated in the space where he had been, his form damaged, his tendrils twitching with residual pain. "I... thank you."
"Do not thank me." Nulls reformed into his original shape, his thousand mouths sneering. "I did not save you for your sake. I saved you because I cannot operate the dome alone, and your death would mean the end of everything. You are useful, Polaris. That is the only reason you still exist."
He turned to face Dawn, his contempt radiating from every pore of his impossible form. "And you. You let it through. You had one job, one section of the wall to maintain, and you failed. How many more times must I clean up your mistakes before you learn to perform the simplest of your duties?"
Dawn's filaments curled inward, her light almost extinguished. "I am sorry. I tried to—"
"Trying is not doing." Nulls's voice rose, each word a hammer blow. "The creation is on the line. The entire Nexus tree, all of existence, every timeline that ever was or ever will be, depends on us holding this dome. And even with both of you helping each other, your side still has breaches. Still has gaps. Still fails."
He gestured at the interfaces that surrounded them, at the data streams that showed the constant pressure of the elder gods against the weakened sections of the wall. "This is why you will always be number two and number three. You do not have the capacity. You do not have the will. You do not have the strength to be anything more than supporting characters in a story I am writing alone."
Polaris's tendrils twitched with barely suppressed rage. "You are not the only one who has sacrificed for this."
"No." Nulls's form pulsed with cold amusement. "But I am the only one who has succeeded. I am the only one who has held this dome together while you two fumbled and failed and ran to the enemy for comfort. I am the only one who has designed the systems, built the barriers, and maintained the infrastructure that keeps everything from collapsing into chaos."
He floated closer to Polaris, his presence pressing against the other being's damaged form. "You are the second smartest being of Theos. Do you know what your greatest accomplishment has been? Operating the machines that I built. Machines that you have proven, time and again, that you are incapable of operating without assistance."
Polaris's tendrils curled into fists. "That is not fair."
"Fair." Nulls laughed again, and the sound was poison. "Fair has nothing to do with this. The elder gods are not fair. The amalgamation is not fair. The extinction of everything that exists will not be fair. The only thing that matters is competence, and you have none. Both of you are useless. Luxers. Parasites who feed on the work of others and contribute nothing of value."
The word hit Polaris like a physical blow. His tendrils went limp, his light dimmed, and something in his core seemed to crack. Dawn, too, recoiled as if struck, her crystalline filaments pulling back from the interfaces she was meant to be operating.
Luxers. The worst insult in the Theosian language. A word reserved for those who consumed without producing, who took without giving, who existed only as a drain on the resources of others.
Polaris wanted to strike back. His tendrils charged with energies capable of leveling the entire root system of the Nexus tree, enough power to erase galaxies, to unmake timelines, to reduce everything Nulls had built to rubble. He raised his mechanical limbs, aimed them at Nulls's core, and prepared to fire.
Nulls did not flinch. "Those toys cannot even destroy the tree. What chance do you think it have against me?"
Polaris's tendrils trembled. The energy in their tips flickered and died. He lowered his weapons and turned away, his form shrinking in on itself, defeated by the simple truth of Nulls's words.
Dawn floated between them, her crystalline filaments spreading to block Polaris from view. "Stop this. Both of you. We are on the same side."
Nulls's thousand mouths curled into a sneer. "We are on the same side because you have nowhere else to go. The moment the amalgamation offers you a place, you will take it. You always do."
"That is not true."
"It is." He turned back to the interfaces, his attention returning to the dome, to the elder gods, to the dying tree. "But it does not matter. I am activating the Omni-physical temporal manifold. It will freeze all levels of higher space-time, inside and outside the creation. Everything except us will stop."
Polaris looked up, his damaged form still trembling. "How long?"
"An hour. Maybe less." Nulls's form pulsed with the effort of preparing the manifold. "It is my last one. I could produce another, but my schedule is filled to the brim with operating the dome and dealing with the two of you."
The manifold activated, and the world went still.
The elder gods froze mid-lunge, their endless hunger suspended in a moment that would last for sixty minutes. The amalgamation's screams went silent, its amorphous body locked in place. The tree stopped dying, its decay halted by the manifold's power.
Nulls turned to face his companions one last time. "This is your chance. Prove that you are not useless. Prove that you can help. Or stand there and watch while I do everything myself."
He waited for an answer that never came.
The manifold pulsed, counting down the seconds until the elder gods would move again. Nulls returned to his interfaces, and the three of them worked in silence, trying to save a creation that was already dead.
Our Nulls watched from outside his own memory, trapped in the perspective of a self he no longer was. He saw Polaris's shame and Dawn's exhaustion and the contempt that dripped from every word his past self spoke.
He felt the weight of the dying tree pressing against his consciousness, the endless assault of the elder gods, the slow collapse of everything he had built. And somewhere beneath the mockery and the cruelty and the cold, cold logic, he recognized something he had never allowed himself to feel.
The manifold pulsed around them, freezing time at every level of existence, holding the elder gods and the amalgamation in suspended agony.
Nulls turned from his interfaces, his protoplasmic form shifting to face Polaris and Dawn. The weight of the dying tree pressed against his consciousness, a constant reminder that every second of this hour brought them closer to the end.
"I knew this would happen," Nulls said, his thousand mouths curving into expressions that held no warmth. "I knew you would fail. I knew the dome would crack and the vermin would break through your sections because you cannot hold them, because you never could hold them, because you are and always have been inadequate for the task you claimed you wanted."
Polaris's damaged tendrils twitched, sparks of residual energy flickering along their lengths. "We are doing the best we can."
"Your best is worthless." Nulls's form expanded slightly, his membrane rippling with contempt. "Your best let them through and nearly killed you. Your best would have ended everything if I had not intervened. So do not speak to me about your best. Your best is an insult to the word."
Dawn's crystalline filaments dimmed further, her light almost extinguished. "What do you want from us? We came back. We are trying. We cannot undo what we did."
"No." Nulls floated closer to them, his presence pressing against their damaged forms. "You cannot undo it. You cannot fix it. You cannot help enough to matter. The only thing you can do now is listen."
Polaris's core pulsed with something that might have been defiance. "Listen to what?"
Nulls raised one of his tendrils, and a holographic projection materialized in the space between them. The image showed a device, vast and complex, its structure woven from equations that made the mind hurt to contemplate. The Omnia-mortis. A weapon designed to end everything.
"The Omnia-mortis is a conceptual bomb," Nulls said, his voice flat and absolute. "It does not destroy matter. It does not destroy energy. It destroys the idea of existence itself. When it detonates, every timeline, every reality, every universe that has ever been or will ever be will cease. The Nexus tree will be erased. The elder gods will be erased. The amalgamation will be erased. Everything that is, was, or could be will become nothing."
Polaris's tendrils went rigid. "You cannot be serious."
"I am completely serious." Nulls's form pulsed with cold certainty. "This is my contingency plan. This is what I built while you two were off making deals with the amalgamation and letting the elder gods gnaw at the roots of creation. This is what I have been working toward while you fumbled and failed and made excuses for your incompetence."
Dawn's filaments curled into tight spirals, her distress visible in every vibration of her crystalline structure. "You would destroy everything. Not just the enemy. Everything. The tree. The creation. Us."
"If necessary." Nulls dismissed the hologram with a wave of his tendril. "The Omnia-mortis is the final option. The last resort. The end of every path that leads to failure. If we cannot hold the dome, if the elder gods break through, if the amalgamation reaches the tree, then I will activate it. I will end all of it rather than let them have it."
Polaris surged forward, his damaged core flaring with anger. "That is madness. There has to be another way. There is always another way."
"There is no other way." Nulls did not retreat from Polaris's advance. "I have calculated every variable. I have explored every possibility. I have run the equations through every framework that exists, and they all lead to the same conclusion. The tree is dying. The creation is collapsing. The elder gods are winning. The only choice left is how we lose."
"We could fight." Dawn's filaments straightened, her light strengthening for the first time since the breach. "We could keep fighting until the end."
Nulls laughed, and the sound was the death of hope. "Fighting is what you do when you have no other options, I have given you a better option. The Omnia-mortis ends the war. It does not prolong nor does it extend the suffering. It ends everything, cleanly and completely."
Polaris's tendrils curled into fists. "You would kill us all."
"I would save us from a worse fate." Nulls's thousand mouths closed, then opened again, each one speaking in unison. "The elder gods will not stop. The amalgamation will not stop. They will consume everything, and then they will consume each other, and then they would wait for the tree to regrow and consumed that too, endless cycle of consumption. The Omnia-mortis stops that cycle. It ends everything."
Polaris charged his tendrils with energy, the same power that could level the tree's roots, and aimed it at Nulls's core. "I will stop you. I will destroy the Omnia-mortis. I will not let you end us."
Nulls did not move. He did not defend himself. He simply looked at Polaris with contempt that had calcified into something harder than diamond.
"You cannot destroy it. I built it to be indestructible. I built it to survive anything your toys could throw at it. To ensure that my final option remains available no matter what you do."
Polaris's tendrils trembled, the energy in their tips flickering and dying. He lowered his weapons and turned away, his form shrinking in on itself, defeated by the simple truth of Nulls's words.
Dawn floated between them, her crystalline filaments spreading to block Polaris from view. "If you do this, you will be alone. Truly alone. There would be. No tree. No creation. No us. Just you and the nothing."
Nulls's form pulsed with something that might have been sadness, might have been acceptance, might have been the exhaustion of a being who had carried the weight of existence for too long.
"Better than being in whatever hell both of you put us— the entire creation in." He turned back to his interfaces, his attention returning to the dome, to the elder gods, to the dying tree. "The Omnia-mortis is my only hope. If you want to stop me, be my guest. But you cannot, and you know it. So do your jobs. Hold your sections. And pray that we never reach the moment when I have to use it."
The manifold pulsed, counting down the seconds until the elder gods would move again. Nulls returned to his work, and the three of them labored in silence, trying to save a creation that was already dead.
Our Nulls watched from outside his own memory, trapped in the perspective of a self he no longer was. He saw Polaris's defeat and Dawn's despair and the cold certainty that dripped from every word his past self spoke.
He felt the weight of the Omnia-mortis pressing against his consciousness, the knowledge that he had built a weapon to end everything, the understanding that he had been ready to use it.
And somewhere beneath the contempt and the cruelty and the cold, cold logic, he recognized something he had never allowed himself to feel.
The manifold pulsed around them, freezing time at every level of existence, holding the elder gods and the amalgamation in suspended agony.
Nulls turned from his interfaces, his protoplasmic form shifting to face Polaris and Dawn. The weight of the dying tree pressed against his consciousness, a constant reminder that every second of this hour brought them closer to the end.
"I knew this would happen," Nulls said, his thousand mouths curving into expressions that held no warmth. "I knew you would fail. I knew the dome would crack and the vermin would break through your sections because you cannot hold them, because you never could hold them, because you are and always have been inadequate for the task you claimed you wanted."
Polaris's damaged tendrils twitched, sparks of residual energy flickering along their lengths. "We are doing the best we can."
"Your best is worthless." Nulls's form expanded slightly, his membrane rippling with contempt. "Your best let them through and nearly killed you. Your best would have ended everything if I had not intervened. So do not speak to me about your best. Your best is an insult to the word."
Dawn's crystalline filaments dimmed further, her light almost extinguished. "What do you want from us? We came back. We are trying. We cannot undo what we did."
"No." Nulls floated closer to them, his presence pressing against their damaged forms. "You cannot undo it. You cannot fix it. You cannot help enough to matter. The only thing you can do now is listen."
Polaris's core pulsed with something that might have been defiance. "Listen to what?"
Nulls raised one of his tendrils, and a holographic projection materialized in the space between them. The image showed a device, vast and complex, its structure woven from equations that made the mind hurt to contemplate. The Omnia-mortis. A weapon designed to end everything.
"The Omnia-mortis is a conceptual bomb," Nulls said, his voice flat and absolute. "It does not destroy matter. It does not destroy energy. It destroys the idea of existence itself. When it detonates, every timeline, every reality, every universe that has ever been or will ever be will cease. The Nexus tree will be erased. The elder gods will be erased. The amalgamation will be erased. Everything that is, was, or could be will become nothing."
Polaris's tendrils went rigid. "You cannot be serious."
"I am completely serious." Nulls's form pulsed with cold certainty. "This is my contingency plan. This is what I built while you two were off making deals with the amalgamation and letting the elder gods gnaw at the roots of creation. This is what I have been working toward while you fumbled and failed and made excuses for your incompetence."
Dawn's filaments curled into tight spirals, her distress visible in every vibration of her crystalline structure. "You would destroy everything. Not just the enemy. Everything. The tree. The creation. Us."
"If necessary." Nulls dismissed the hologram with a wave of his tendril. "The Omnia-mortis is the final option. The last resort. The end of every path that leads to failure. If we cannot hold the dome, if the elder gods break through, if the amalgamation reaches the tree, then I will activate it. I will end all of it rather than let them have it."
Polaris surged forward, his damaged core flaring with anger. "That is madness. There has to be another way. There is always another way."
"There is no other way." Nulls did not retreat from Polaris's advance. "I have calculated every variable. I have explored every possibility. I have run the equations through every framework that exists, and they all lead to the same conclusion. The tree is dying. The creation is collapsing. The elder gods are winning. The only choice left is how we lose."
"We could fight." Dawn's filaments straightened, her light strengthening for the first time since the breach. "We could keep fighting until the end."
Nulls laughed, and the sound was the death of hope. "Fighting is what you do when you have no other options, I have given you a better option. The Omnia-mortis ends the war. It does not prolong nor does it extend the suffering. It ends everything, cleanly and completely."
Polaris's tendrils curled into fists. "You would kill us all."
"I would save us from a worse fate." Nulls's thousand mouths closed, then opened again, each one speaking in unison. "The elder gods will not stop. The amalgamation will not stop. They will consume everything, and then they will consume each other, and then they would wait for the tree to regrow and consumed that too, endless cycle of consumption. The Omnia-mortis stops that cycle. It ends everything."
Polaris charged his tendrils with energy, the same power that could level the tree's roots, and aimed it at Nulls's core. "I will stop you. I will destroy the Omnia-mortis. I will not let you end us."
Nulls did not move. He did not defend himself. He simply looked at Polaris with contempt that had calcified into something harder than diamond.
"You cannot destroy it. I built it to be indestructible. I built it to survive anything your toys could throw at it. To ensure that my final option remains available no matter what you do."
Polaris's tendrils trembled, the energy in their tips flickering and dying. He lowered his weapons and turned away, his form shrinking in on itself, defeated by the simple truth of Nulls's words.
Dawn floated between them, her crystalline filaments spreading to block Polaris from view. "If you do this, you will be alone. Truly alone. No tree. No creation. No us. Just you and the nothing."
Nulls's form pulsed with something that might have been sadness, might have been acceptance, might have been the exhaustion of a being who had carried the weight of existence for too long.
"Better than being in whatever hell both of you put us— the entire creation in." He turned back to his interfaces, his attention returning to the dome, to the elder gods, to the dying tree. "The Omnia-mortis is my only hope. If you want to stop me, be my guest. But you cannot, and you know it. So do your jobs. Hold your sections. And pray that we never reach the moment when I have to use it."
The manifold pulsed, counting down the seconds until the elder gods would move again. Nulls returned to his work, and the three of them labored in silence, trying to save a creation that was already dead.
Our Nulls watched from outside his own memory, trapped in the perspective of a self he no longer was. He saw Polaris's defeat and Dawn's despair and the cold certainty that dripped from every word his past self spoke.
He felt the weight of the Omnia-mortis pressing against his consciousness, the knowledge that he had built a weapon to end everything, the understanding that he had been ready to use it.
And somewhere beneath the contempt and the cruelty and the cold, cold logic, he recognized something he had never allowed himself to feel.
He had been afraid. Afraid of losing. Afraid of failing. Afraid of being alone in a way that even the end of existence could not touch.
The manifold pulsed again, and the memory held, and Nulls watched his past self prepare to destroy everything he had ever known.
Polaris moved faster than any calculation could track. His tendrils shot forward, severing the limbs that held Nulls's connection to the bomb's control interface, the severed appendages scattering into the void like broken promises.
Nulls retaliated instantly, a wave of force that sent Polaris tumbling backward through layers of reality, but the bomb had already fallen, already drifted, already begun its descent toward the roots of the Nexus tree where the elder gods pressed against the dying dome.
All three of them raced toward it, crossing dimensions that folded like paper, traversing realities that stacked like pages in a book, passing through universes that bloomed and withered in the space between heartbeats.
Multiverses and the above stretched and contracted around them as they moved, structures that Theosian minds had conjured over eons of existence, each one a monument to their species' ambition, each one now a corridor in the final chase.
Polaris reached the bomb first, his damaged form clutching the device to his core, his tendrils wrapped around its surface in a desperate embrace.
Nulls arrived a microsecond later, his presence collapsing the space around them, and he attacked Polaris with a savagery that shocked even Dawn. Each blow landed with precision that spoke of centuries of practice, each strike designed to incapacitate rather than kill, to break rather than destroy.
Polaris's tendrils snapped, his core cracked, his form dimmed across every frequency that Theos could perceive, and still he held onto the bomb, his grip unbroken despite the systematic destruction of everything else. Nulls did not reach for the device.
He reached only for Polaris, beating him until he hung in the void barely alive in every definition of the word that any species had ever conceived.
Dawn tried to intervene, her crystalline filaments lashing out to shield Polaris from the worst of the assault, but Nulls brushed her aside with a contemptuous gesture that sent her spinning through a dozen dimensions.
He trapped both of them inside a simple three dimensional Omni-physical cube, its translucent walls glowing with the same purple light that had illuminated his sigils in the battle below the ocean.
Two of the Theos's finest, beings who had helped shape the foundations of existence, trapped in a shape that human children learned in primary school.
The manifold's power continued to drain, its charge dropping toward zero as the elder gods and the amalgamation pressed against the dome with renewed fury. Ten percent remained.
Ten minutes of frozen time before everything would resume, before the dome would crack, before the tree would die. Nulls stood before the cube, his form still damaged from Polaris's attack, his severed limbs already beginning to regenerate, his thousand mouths closed in a line that might have been sadness.
"I am disappointed in both of you," he said, his voice flat and absolute. "I regret taking you as my students. I regret accepting you into my university. I regret calling you my children. You were always more trouble than you were worth, and this final failure proves everything I ever suspected about your incompetence."
Polaris pushed himself up inside the cube, his damaged core flickering, his tendrils trembling with the effort of remaining conscious. Dawn helped him find his footing, her filaments supporting his weight, her light mingling with his in a display of solidarity that Nulls had not seen from them in centuries.
"You have lost," Polaris said, his voice crackling with static. "Either you detonate the bomb with us inside this cube, or you open the door and we find another solution together. Either way, you cannot operate the dome alone. Even you cannot hold back the elder gods without us."
Nulls turned away from the cube and walked to the interior layer of his side of the dome. His claws traced a seam that none of them had ever noticed, and he tore the panel open with a single pull.
The machinery inside gleamed with the same design, the same structure, the same impossible elegance as the Omnia Mortis. In all the centuries they had operated the dome together, Polaris had never seen this chamber, had never known what lay behind Nulls's section of the controls.
The interior was a mirror of the bomb, a larger version, a more complete version, a device that could destroy not just the tree and the elder gods and the amalgamation, but the totality of existence across every dimension, every reality, every possibility that had ever been or ever could be.
"I do not need that pathetic excuse for a prototype," Nulls said, his thousand mouths curling into expressions that might have been contempt or might have been exhaustion. "I have been building the real Omnia Mortis inside this dome for centuries. The device Polaris holds is nothing more than a decoy, a distraction, a toy I created to keep you two occupied while I finished my true work. The only reason I chased you across the Nexus tree was because you had the audacity to decapitate my limbs."
Polaris slammed his damaged form against the walls of the cube, the impact sending shockwaves through the translucent material. "You cannot do this. There has to be another way. There is always another way."
Dawn pressed her filaments against the barrier, her light flaring with desperate intensity. "Father, please. We can fix this. We can work together. We do not have to end everything."
The manifold timer continued its countdown. Five minutes remained.
Nulls walked to the edge of the cube and placed one of his regenerating hands against its surface, his form casting a shadow over the two beings trapped inside. "You took too long to call me that. I waited centuries for those words. I waited through your betrayals and your failures and your endless excuses. And now, when it is too late, you finally remember who I was to you."
Dawn's filaments pressed harder against the barrier, tears of light streaming down her crystalline structure. "It is not too late. It is never too late."
"For the sake of the totality of existence and every being that dwells within it, this is the only way." Nulls's voice softened, the contempt draining away, leaving something behind that might have been tenderness. "I do not hate you. I have never hated you. I hate what you did, the choices you made, the side you chose when the amalgamation came. But I have never hated you."
Polaris stopped pounding on the walls, his damaged core pulsing with something that might have been grief. "Then let us out. Let us help you find another path."
"This is the last time I solve a problem you created." Nulls's thousand mouths curved into expressions that might have been smiles. "I miss the days when our only concern was fine tuning a universe. Adjusting the gravitational constant here, tweaking the speed of light there, watching a new species take its first steps toward sentience. Those were the simple, good days."
He paused, his form flickering with something that might have been laughter. "This is not a good improvement. But a bad improvement is still an improvement. And in a way, I am proud of you. You pushed me to create something beyond myself. You forced me to consider possibilities I would have otherwise ignored. You made me better, even as you made everything worse."
One minute remained.
Polaris threw himself against the walls of the cube again, his tendrils flailing, his core screaming with effort. "There is still time. We can still fix this. Please, father, do not do this."
Dawn joined him, her filaments battering the translucent barrier, each impact sending ripples across its surface. "We love you. We have always loved you. Even when we made terrible choices, we never stopped loving you. Please, please do not end everything."
Forty seconds.
Nulls watched them struggle, his thousand mouths closed, his form still, his presence a calm center in the chaos that surrounded them. "You are trying to give me something to watch while the timer runs out. It is a kind gesture. I appreciate it."
Thirty seconds.
Polaris threw his body against the wall one more time, his tendrils cracking, his core fracturing, his form collapsing against the translucent surface. Blood or something like it leaked from his wounds, staining the barrier where his face pressed against it. Tears streamed from his eyes, real tears, the first tears Nulls had seen him shed since he was a child learning to shape his first universe.
"Please," Polaris whispered, his voice breaking. "Please do not leave us alone."
Twenty seconds.
The elder gods began to stir outside the dome, their frozen forms twitching, their hunger returning as the manifold's power dipped below critical levels. The amalgamation's claws scraped against the barrier, leaving grooves in the once smooth surface. The tree groaned, its roots straining, its branches swaying in winds that had not blown for an hour.
Ten seconds.
Polaris threw himself against the wall for the final time, his limbs breaking, his core shattering, his form collapsing against Dawn's filaments as she caught him. They held each other in the center of the cube, their lights mingling, their tears falling, their voices raised in a wordless cry that echoed across the dimensions.
Five seconds.
Nulls sat in the center of the chaos, his damaged form settling onto the floor of the dome, his thousand mouths closing, his eyes fixing on the cube that held his children. The elder gods pressed against the barrier, their forms beginning to breach through tears in higher physical space time, their hunger finally unleashed.
The amalgamation's claws reached through the largest tear, stretching toward Nulls's seated form, toward the tree behind him, toward everything that remained of creation.
Three seconds.
"I am sorry," Nulls said, his voice carrying across dimensions, across realities, across the spaces between spaces where nothing else could travel. "I would always love you."
Two seconds.
The amalgamation's claws closed around him, but before it could find his throat.
One second.