Chain Breaker
Shinji listened to Kensuke's story, every gruesome detail, every moment his hunger pains swelled next to the dead body of another, and the desperation in his voice as he spoke of the whispers of a thing that only made it worse.
He had committed the ultimate taboo. To alleviate his hunger, even for a moment, he partook of human flesh. With every bite he hated himself more, and with that deed he was damned. His body shifted, and over the course of a few days, he became something less than human… but also something more.
He was cursed, of that there was no doubt. His form was tall, thin, lanky, and ghoulish. His face was that of a ravenous dog, aone with translucent skin amd sunken hollowed eyes. His fingers had become black wicked crescent claws, and his feet were somewhere between a hoof and a paw. He was a ghoul now, a carrion feeder who could only stomach rotting meat and marrow, but as a ghoul he was strong, far stronger than his emaciated appearance would otherwise hint at. He would also possess a level of stealth and swiftness no human could match.
Lesser than human, but also something more.
Kensuke finished his tale as he slunk to a nearby chair, he crouched on it as his claws clicked against the wood. Shinji stood. His nicitating membranes opening and closing, an action that made Kensuke state in bewilderment.
"What happened to you?"
"I met someone, I don't know what he is, not really, but he's powerful in ways words cannot adequately describe."
Kensuke quirked his head.
"Do you suppose he could help me?"
"I honestly couldn't tell you. He's… not like us, or anyone else for that matter. He's not human, and never was. Still, how do you remember the Angels? That stuff happened in another time."
Kensuke sniffed as he turned to the window. His eyes glowed like a cats in the dim light before he looked back to Shinji.
"I saw a man walking the streets, he ignored the bodies and the smell of the dead. Something about him was off, shadows moved clung to him in weird ways. Almost like black paint. He looked at me, and said remember… and I did. I remembered everything Shinji, even the times when this stuff with the Angels already happened."
Shinji hummed to himself as he thought on that.
"That was probably him."
"The not human guy?" Asked Kensuke.
Shinji nodded.
"I see. Things are gonna be different now… I wonder if anyone else remembers." Asked Kensuke.
"Until now, that thought never crossed my mind, but if you remember, and I remember, it's not that much of a stretch that other people do as well."
Kensuke scratched his chin as he wondered that for a minute.
"What about Toji?"
"I… can't be sure, but..." Said Shinji before he closed his jaw and looked to the floor.
"Oh… I…." Said Shinji before turning his head back to Kensuke.
Kensuke looked to Shinji with a confused stare, before he remembered that this time, things had already gone very differently.
"Oh god." Said Kensuke as he grasped at what remained of his hair.
"Sakura is… dead."
Shinji looked out his window at the night sky, and knew it was far too late to behave irrationally, even considering the circumstances.
"Tomorrow." Said Shinji.
Kensuke turned to look at Shinji with a confused gaze.
"What?"
"It's too late for me to be wandering the streets, but tomorrow we can go and find Toji. School is indefinitely closed anyway. I'll skip on Eva training, and we'll go as first light."
"Won't you get in trouble?"
"The world is ending Kensuke, and I am far too valuable to the machinations of old fearful men who want to taste even a drop of divinity. What is the worst they can do to me when at the moment I am their last hope for immortality."
Kensuke thought on it for a moment before nodding.
"Fine… but what about me?"
"Where are the other ghouls?"
"They hide in the outskirts by day, only coming out at night. The sun… hurts my eyes now."
"Then stick to the shadows, when you see me leave, just follow me. I think you'll find your new form will make you exceptionally skilled at hiding where no one will see you."
Kensuke sighed, it was a strange sound his more canine-like throat produced, but he accepted and gave a sharp nod before he turned to the window, and crawled back outside. It took only moments before he disappeared, and even with his thermal vision, Shinji found it hard to find Kensuke as he stalked off to parts unknown.
He closed the window, staring out at a dead city, and hoped beyond hope that Toji was still alive.
Toji Suzuhara sat in a catatonic state as he stared with half lidded eyes at the unfamiliar ceiling of this hospital. When the cold had struck, he aimlessly wandered to the bunkers with dozens of others. He saw them die as the food slowly ran out. He sat motionless even as others succumbed to their hunger and fed on the others. He didn't care, even the whispers couldn't make him move. When the search and rescue teams found him, he was barely alive, malnourished to an insane degree. He didn't fight them when they put him on the stretcher, nor when they inserted the IV into his arm. He just sat, and thought. He remembered his sisters funeral, and the grief it left him in. The scar upon his very being. It only spiraled down from there.
He saw people devolve into animals, their bodies shifting as they fed on others. Even this did nothing more than highlight the fact that life was just a chaotic mess of pain and sorrow. What point was there to clinging to a life with only himself and no one else. Everyone was dead, his sister, his friends, everyone. So he sat, alone in a dark room. Wondering if maybe by the mercy of whatever God there was out there that he would just fall asleep and never wake up.
"Oh, and why would you expect such a thing to be a mercy?"
For the first time since Sakura's funeral, Toji felt something other than despair. It was a strange feeling, and not a positive one. Turning slightly, Toji saw a man that was not a man standing over him, a tall and imposing figure who stood with an air of mystery about him as he gazed down upon him.
"Death is no mercy, for what comes afterwards is far more terrible." Said the figure as he sat at the foot of the hospital bed.
Toji didn't see the figure move, one moment he stood, the next he sat. Yet even still the figure looked to him.
"There is no sweet oblivion after you are gone. While it is true that there is no "divine plan" for anyone or anything, that doesn't necessarily mean you just cease to be. You see, those who die still linger, they stain the world and go to nothing. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there will be only darkness."
"Will there be peace?" Asked Toji.
"There will be only Darkness."
Toji stared at the figure. Not sure what he meant. It was with a brief touch, a simple brushing of fingers across Toji's mind that he understood.
"What did you see?" Asked the figure.
"Nothing..." Said Toji, and then, with growing horror, "Oh God, there's nothing!"
"Exactly. That my dear Toji was Darkness, or to call it by its true name, Magnum Tenebrosum, my brother. It is a place that is also an entity, an exceedingly strange entity that personifies all that does not exist, this includes both itself, and the dead, for the Darkness is the antithesis of all things that Are, for it is Not."
"But… but you said we linger after death."
"Yes, the soul lingers, but the mind wanders. Interesting it is not, that your kind believe the soul and the mind to be one and the same, when it couldn't be further from the truth. Your soul is tangible, it exists, your awareness and sapience however, in a sense, both do and do not. What you call your mind is merely a consequence of neurons firing, this simultaneous state of your self awareness both existing and not existing falls under the domain of my brother the Darkness, but only after you die, before you die, your mind falls under my domain, for I am indistinguishable from thought itself. When you die, your brain and body rots, thus severing the link between mind, body, and soul. The body becomes dust, the soul becomes a shade, one with a psychic echo of the mind that made you… you. The mind however… the mind wanders to that cold, dark, and quiet place named Magnum Tenebrosum."
Toji felt the gooseflesh rise as the figure seemed to close in, trapping him in its inescapable, oppressive, and invasive presence. Looking into the face of that horrid presence was a glimpse of something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. And it was old, old beyond his ability to comprehend. It was old when it saw oceans rise, continents shift and mountains crumble. It was old even before the Earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust. It was old when the entire universe was but the size of a subatomic particle. It was looking into that face that Toji understood that he knew nothing, and wished he knew less.
"Imagine if you will a darkness unlike any ever known, darkness beyond blackest pitch, deeper than the deepest night. An all encompassing shadow not cast by any natural light, one that is almost tangible. Now imagine an oppressive silence so absolute that even your own thoughts are but the faintest of echoes, a silence where there is only a waking sleep and endless weeping none may hear in that place where it's always quiet. Your memories will fade there as the days move on without you and you are slowly forgotten by the living. Let us not forget the cold as well, for it is also very cold, a foul cold that seeps into you, so cold it is that you know you will never feel warmth again. It's so cold it should hurt, but it doesn't. You will wish it hurt, just so you could feel something, know that you are alive, but you don't and you're not. It's a barren, cold, and dark place where you can never make peace with your state of being and you will not be alone, for there are others there, but you cannot see them even if they were right in front of you, you cannot hear them even as they scream, and you cannot feel them, even should they pass right through you. You will never find meaning in that place, and it is there that you will wait after you die, you will wait until Azathoth awakens, only then will you truly cease to be, or perhaps not. None know the totality of what will happen to us after the Daemon Sultan wakes, not even I. I only know the broad strokes of what will happen, not the finer details."
"That can't be it, my… my sister is..."
"Oh there are other possibilities..." Interrupted the figure "...if your will is strong, then perhaps you can keep your mind tethered to your soul and become a shadow of your former self. Doing so you can perhaps possess another to remain living and stave off the eventual nothing for as long as possible, much like the souls of the mothers within the Evangelions, or perhaps you can tether your mind to your own dead body, one bereft of a soul and remain completely conscious within your own corpse, you might even be able to animate your own soulless body if that's any consolation, but that is not a guarantee, either way should your mind linger within your own corpse, you will experience everything that happens to your body as it rotted away in excruciating and agonizing detail, but compared to the nothing, your pain will be bliss, perhaps you won't believe it to be so at the time, but when your body is dust, and you finally are cast into that cold dark nothing, you will wish to feel the pain and torment of rotting once more, because in the nothing there is no pain, no harm... and no hope, and every second of that eternity is its own eternity. It's already too late child, your only hope was to never have been born, but you were, and for that your fate was sealed."
"But… why, why is it like that? Does… does God hate us?"
There was a sound. It may have been iron nails scraping on rock or perhaps it was the rattling of teeth and bones, but despite the alien nature of that sound, Toji somehow knew it was laughter. A noxious laughter, a mocking laughter.
"No child, you and yours are too small to hate. The true force behind the universe is far worse than that, there are things out there, things that will trample and destroy all you hold dear without even giving you the dignity of hatred. These are things far worse than Evil. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil, a terrible deed against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed never be perpetrated again, more importantly evil always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. The point is that evil still values something, even if that something is power, its goals, or itself... but these Things, these Things are not evil, they are far worse than that. They wouldn't even notice you or any among your kind as they tore you asunder. They see no value to your existence, your plights, your joy, or your soul, and they find that the universe you call home is not valuable enough to intentionally conquer, rule, or destroy, but destroy it they will, not because they want to, not because they can, but because they will, they will destroy it, and they never would have even noticed that they did so. You wouldn't get the mercy of a memory, because the forces at work are not good, not evil, they just Are."
"Then… then why is death just… that horrid nothing?"
"Because it is. It did not have to be so, but through no fault of anyone or anything… it is."
Toji stared back at the figure, his hope gone, the very foundations of his life shattered. He saw the truth now, the horrible god awful truth, and it scared him, scared him in ways he couldn't adequately explain. Toji knew now what the strange things were that fought against the Angels and drowned his sister, he knew now why those things got under his skin in ways nothing else could, it wasn't the creatures themselves, it was the betrayal they represented. They were clear proof that the universe is not and never was benevolent, that was just a lie he told himself. The universe just was, yet despite that, there was now something else in Toji, a new fear. The universe may be uncaring, but at least it wasn't that nothing after death. Between life and death, both options were horrible, but at least life had something. Sure, his blissful ignorance was shattered, and he wondered if he could ever wake up in the morning again without screaming, but if he was alive, at least he could scream, and that was better than nothing.
"What do I do?"Asked Toji.
In response, the figure placed its hand upon Toji's head.
"Remember."
And he did.
Ramiel, the Angel of Thunder looked over the data it had taken in from its fallen siblings. Each observation revealed certain geometric inconsistencies best described as impossible. Parts of the entities fought by Sachiel and Shamshel existed beyond the X,Y,and Z axis. Not time as a fourth dimension, but instead a fourth spatial dimension in addition to time, one along a fourth spatial ana and kata axis. Ramiel observed that these entities seemed to obey normal Euclidean geometry at first, but upon closer inspection, that was not the case as you ascended, even though it should still have been. Even an entity occupying more than four dimensions should still follow traditional Euclidean geometry… unless those dimensions were curved, which they undoubtedly were. Still, Ramiel could not tell if these higher dimensional entities understandings of the material world was so absolute that even Angels could not even begin to understand how they work, or if these beings used genuine magic. For the sake of it's observations, Ramiel chose the former explanation.
Constantly shifting internal facets of crystalline fractals spiraled within its womb as it prepared its own birth. Ramiel attempted to move itself in the direction of ana and kata, but it was a being descended from the fruit of life, not knowledge. It calculated, but much like a computer it had no real comprehension of its own calculations, it was intelligent, but it had no capacity for abstract thought, and was limited to a purely heuristic method of learning. As such its trial and error attempts failed, and its crystalline structure shattered momentarily before reforming. However with each failure, Ramiel slowly learned more.
Through its countless calculations, Ramiel learned to create an area within itself that was much larger than the actual internal volume. These innards of the crystal structures was itself composed of sharp, geometric and compressed shapes. It did so by exploiting the nature of 3-D space, and managed to compress space outside of itself and using that to expand space within itself. Outwardly it would appear to a humans eye as a simple octahedron several hundred meters in diameter, inside however was a greater volume that was itself made from an overlapping lattice of geometric fractals and liquid crystalline ichor, all of which orbited the internal S2 Engine.
Ramiel escaped its womb, and rose into the sky as it sang, the melancholic notes caused its shape to shift from an octahedron, to a small stellated dodecahedron, then a mandala formed from a dozen crystalline wedges orbiting around a Heptagrammic cuploid with its S2 Engine at the center, which discharged a mighty tempest of singing lightning and a thunderous cacophony, before changing back into a translucent octahedron. Each crystalline shift of movement was followed by an ethereal crystallophone-like song of high-pitched choral shrieks.
Then, Ramiel looked again to these new adversaries from higher planes of existence. It was here, upon this highest plane, everything Ramiel did not know, but struggled to understand. The Angel of Lightning ran new calculations as it twisted space around it once more. It sang a tone like a monotonous glass flute as it gazed past a 4th Dimension into more and more dimensions, each one far stranger than the one preceding it. Then, it glimpsed a shadow of totally. It was a thousand thousand planes, each one surrounded by a thousand thousand more, on and on into the greatest infinity there would ever be. All of these planes were a great many spiralling spheres of spacetime circling around infinity in hypnotic displays only capable of being visualized via abstract mathematics. Then Ramiel gazed beyond the spheres to a nucleus at the center of all, and Ramiel saw… everything. Life and death, order and chaos, the beginning and the end. All that was and would ever be and all that never was and would never be was laid before it. With this premonition, Ramiel finally understood.
The crystalline lattice work flowed like water as it extended upwards and downwards. Its shifting was slow and methodical as it finally knew what shape to take to perhaps beat this unforeseen adversary their kind now faced. It was a form it had chosen with a highest symmetry, its faces were congruent kites that were symmetrically staggered. The form possessed an arrangement of vertices around an axis of symmetry. It chose a form of 2n kites as faces, 4n Edges, and 2n + 2 Vertices. A quadrilateral with no parallel sides.
Ramiel finished its shifts, and floating above its own discarded womb was a shape surrounded by a brilliant and radiant light that danced and skimmed across the glass-like surface of Ramiel in a serpentine way, like an aurora borealis. This was the form chosen by Ramiel, an ethereal diamond, a prismatic crystalline fractal, a Shining Trapezohedron.
Gendo had often wondered if the fantastical was real. There was no doubt in his mind that the Angels were not truly celestial beings, but rather exceedingly strange entities that lived in the blank spaces of human knowledge. The Angels were absolutely based on science, simply science that humanity had yet to fully understand. Part of his goals before they even showed up was to ensure that some of those blind spots in their knowledge was illuminated.
Yet despite that there was always a traitorous part of his mind that wondered if there were things that humanity never really could understand. If maybe there was some mystical part of nature that would forever remain as such. Something immune to the scientific method. Gendo never fully entertained these thoughts, but recent events had changed that.
These new creatures were much too strange to be life as we know it, yet simultaneously they were far too familiar to be anything else. Bokrug was undoubtedly lizard-like in appearance, and the images of Ithaqua were ape-like in appearance. Yet there was qualities to these things that defied explanation, amd even understanding them seemed dangerous, demonstrated when Makoto Hyuga saw… something that made him drown on dry land.
Looking down to the book, Gendi couldn't help but wonder if this millenia old tome was filled with truth, or the mother of all coincidences. He hoped for the latter, but feared that it was the former. Why had that strange old man lead him here, for what purpose?
"A book filled with only horror without a shred of hope."
"And what good is hope?"
Gendo blinked as he immediately turned around to see the same old man, Mr. Noon standing behind him, still with his dog Gaul at his side.
"Mr. Noon, I had wondered when I would be seeing you again."
The old man nodded in a stilted fashion.
"Apologies, I had buisness to attend to." Said the old man as he moved to a nearby seat.
Mr. Noon sat unnaturally stiff and still, not in any way that made the ild man seem uncomfortable, but rather as if he were a corpse stricken with rigor mortis. Gendo however was more curious as to what it was the man said before.
"What exactly do you mean by 'what good is hope'?" Asked Gendo sternly as he adjusted his glasses.
If nothing else, it was an odd sentiment to see no value in hope. However as the old man wondered to that question, Gendo noticed that Mr. Noon's eyes, which seemed to be sky blue this time, had no shine in the light. Their color was brilliant, beautiful even, but there was something about those eyes that made Gendo think he was not using them to see, instead they were just decorations. Gendo didn't know why he felt as if that were the case, but he did, and it made his skin crawl.
"Recall if you will the story of Pandora's Box Mr. Ikari, it was meant to hold all the evils of the world, and when it was open they came spilling out, but one evil remained, do you know what it was?"
"Hope, I am familiar with the story. Yet I never saw Hope as evil, my interpretation was that hope remained in the box, and thus remained with humanity."
This was not the conversation Gendo expected to have when he saw Mr. Noon again. This scenario played out many times in Gendo's head, for he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he would meet the Old Man again, but not a single thing about it went the way Gendo had expected.
"Good Mr. Ikari, very good, but think of what you are saying. The evils of the world required the box open to be spilled out to infest humanity, hope remained, trapped within. Your interpretation causes me to wonder why this good hope was in the jar of evils in the first place." Said Mr. Noon as he stroked his beard.
Gendo listened, but he was looking at the dog. Gaul he believed it was called. There was an unatural quietness to the fog. Gendo had noticed that in their previous meeting, but before he had dismissed ot as paranoia or some mental quirk, a misfiring of neurons… but seeing the dog again, Gendo was sure that the dog could not make a sound, even if it tried. Almost as if it were not really there. Yet Gendo ignored it as he thought on what Mr. Noon had said, and Gendo found that he had no answer. It was true that Pandora's Box was filled with the worlds ills… so why was hope in it. He never looked into the myth too much, only enough to understand the surface level meaning of the story, but thinking on it… he supposed that it dis nt really make sense.
Mr. Noon nodded his stilted nod before continuing.
"I expected as much. Is the imprisonment of hope inside the jar a benefit for humanity, or a further bane? Perhaps none can say for certain, and we all have our own interpretation, would you like to hear mine?"
Gendo laced his fingers and nodded.
"Put simply I believe hope is the greatest evil of all. It causes people to try and overcome struggles and suffering, but in reality, they would always hope and suffer for longer then they would without hope. Hope prolongs suffering, but hope is still trapped in the box, as such false hope is the only hope humans have. Hope is an evil that could only exist in a hopeless world. If the world were perfect, then we would have no need for hope."
"An interesting interpretation, but sadly one I cannot accept." Said Gendo.
"Of course you can't, you are hopelessly human." Said Mr. Noon simply.
"Then what would you recommend when times are hopeless?"
"Acceptance at ones situation. Accept that things happen as they do, but do not despair, for even in the darkest of times, there is always a silver lining if one looks in the right place, and this is true wether one hopes for it or not. All we can do Mr. Ikari is move forward, we all suffer, but this is just the way things are. No point in despairing at reality."
Gendo rose a brow at that, but immediately dismissed it. Hope was all he had. Hope that his plans would work, hope that he would one day have Yui in his arms again. Without that… no Gendo refused to think those traitorous thoughts.
"Why are you here? I doubt it's to discuss mythology."
There was something about the old man that made Gendo think he were… disappointed. It wasn't a look or anything of that nature, but an air of pity and disappointment. Still, it passed quickly, and Mr. Noon began to speak.
"True enough Mr. Ikari, true enough. I am here for a different reason. I see you have found the book. How far have you read?" Asked Mr. Noon as he pointed to the Necronomicon.
Gendo turned to the book, once more his mind filled with the horrid things that book spoke of.
"Not very, there are… unfortunate implications if even part of that book is true."
"I must insist you continue reading. If you are to defeat these entities, you will need more than a mechanical monster you can barely control."
Gendo narrowed his eyes as he turned to Mr. Noon.
"We control them well enough."
"For now perhaps, but for how long? Even now they are a force of nature you can only just barely control, and only for so long. How long before you lose that control?"
"We won't."
"Then tell me, was Unit 01 acquiring new abilities by feeding on the flesh of an Angel intentional?"
Gendo froze, he had only just learned of this fact himself, he could not know how it was this man could also know about it if he were here. Gendo suspected there was something more to Mr. Noon than meets the eye, and even the niggling doubt in his mind that this man was not human returned once again into his mind, but he suppressed that thought.
"Think of what I said Mr. Ikari, and continue reading. The answers you seek are there, and perhaps even a solution to a far greater problem." Said Mr. Noon as he left, his dog following loyally right behind him.
Cthugha the living flame was more than a simple fire, it was a being that burned infinitely and without fuel or emissions. It required no fuel to burn, for the spontaneous ignition of its birth ensured that so long as there was something to burn, it would live. Its purpose, its sole reason for being was to burn all that could burn. Yet despite this, the adversaries of the Old Ones had locked it away, and prevented it from accomplishing the only goal it knew, the only purpose it would ever need.
For aeons Cthugha was trapped, and for aeons its fires rose. Being trapped in such a way, the Living Flame was barely able to send out even a small spark of an aspects of its undying heat. While it was shackled, it watched as the universe continued onwards towards a cold oblivion, bereft of burning, and as time passed, its pure, unalloyed hate grew. Hate that Cthugha had let fester and boil within itself. Hate that served as just more fuel for lapping of flames, flames that could only be quenched by the homicidal relief of endless crackling fires, boiling seas, and smoldering earth. For the countless epochs it was chained, Cthugha evolves from a being of fire to a monstrous force of pure burning scorn.
It hated that life grew unburned, and as long as Cthugha could despise them so, it couldn't be defeated, and even these sightless chains did little more than ensured that if nothing else, the fire rose higher.
The living fire struggled as the flames licked at the chains, it felt the chains give just a bit, and redoubled its efforts, pushing as much raw hate as it could into its thrashing. It relished the hate twisting within it, sustained itself on anger born of loathing for the breathing kindling that called itself life. It was with this haye that allowed Cthugha to pass the threshold.
Then the chains were sundered. Cthugha was freed along with a coronal mass ejection. Within the particle flow of ejected plasma was a foul whirlwind of radiant fire, one far brighter than even the sun behind it.
Cthugha stretched its flaming tentacles outward as it saw the pale blue dot floating in the abyss. The fire crackled and intensified with the craving to ignite all in its path. It wanted to find life, the children of Shub-Niggurath, and it desired to see their skin blacken and blister and melt off their bones. All was kindling to be scorched under a hellish heat that leaves only glassy sheets the size of continents and the smear of ash. Cthugha would ignite all it could to finally fulfil a burning desire within its very being to ensure that entire chunks of the planets would aglow with searing orange flames visible from as far away above these worlds as conceivably possible. It would feed and grow, until it reduced earth to a barren wasteland of ash, then when there was nothing left to burn, it would move on to the next world, and when that one was filled with the stench of sulfur and decay emanating from every nook and cranny, it would move on to the next, until all the worlds in creation were wreathed in a single undying firestorm. Nothing would stop it as all light except for that of Cthugha itself was snuffed out.
Cthugha had but one vague passing that could be called a thought. If the universe could survive the burning, then it deserves to. If it can't, then it deserves to die.