It was hot. Voices of varying degrees of pitches, but the same degree of desperate rose around him. Worn thin from wailing, crying out in shock and pain. The one at his side (he hadn't bothered to remember her name) pleading for him to give orders, delivering statistics that made zero difference to the escalating swampy heat. Sweat ran down his skull as the voices seemed to slowly fade away. The one which was crying out in pain had been cut short. The other three slowly joined him in silence. A grin of satisfaction was quickly snuffed out as the ground beneath him quivered.

The silence was hungry, and an unnatural roar erupted from the pit below, beckoning him to be devoured too.

His plan had been executed perfectly so far, but the experiment had turned up some unexpected results. All that he had counted on was rapidly deteriorating, and he was seconds away from being devoured by the raging beast below too. The tears on the edge of his being were proof, feeding into the hungry void, beginning to be sucked into a reality so torturous, nothingness was a better alternative to what was about to befall him now.

He had studied its nature and nuances for the large majority of his lifetime, and the way it refused to be defeated, even by him, should never have been crossed out of his small list of ways this could have gone wrong. You don't temper the beast, you reason with it. It was too furious and wrathful to allow a mortal to lord over it, use its power for what could have been something wonderful!

He laughed, how naive and prideful of him to think anything less. That had been his true downfall, the thing that had held him back from achieving full control of reality itself. He screamed into the abyss, unable to believe his own shortcoming had led to this! It seemed to ripple with amusement, mocking him as the rest of his soul was preyed on. He refused to accept this! He refused! His body began to crack, as the rest of his life drained out of him, leaving the host empty. The reality around him shook with mirth, roaring and whooping at him as its walls swallowed him whole.

The last thought he could keep track of was sucked away into the silence. He screamed it over and over but nothing carried. He couldn't even hear the raging torrent of soul sucking judgement around him. He was a tiny shred in a huge mass of nothing, his life double as insignificant now that he was only one in a million trapped in its massive confines. He continued to yell, two words on repeat as the void began to uncaringly discard his place in itself. The void itself found him insignificant, but he refused to let it, he refused to be forgotten in such a low place! He refused! He kicked its surface, yelling and screaming, kicking and thrashing at its walls.

He refused!