by P. S. Power
Boiled in the space inside of him, even if it meant his temporary death.
If he didn't just pop into the void and school them for a while more peacefully.
So he fought, to save his oldest and best friend, tearing apart enough that just taking a single step broke a bone in his foot. At least that was what it felt like, though the bone was still solid when he checked his shadow. It hurt, and when he tried to block out the horrible and sharp pain, using the might of his full ability to focus, nothing happened.
He could make himself move, fighting the being within, that darkness which was doing everything he could to destroy Zack. What couldn't happen, apparently, was making things not burn and ache as he did it. Driving himself, pushing his mind, he found that there was one thing he could do that Big Shadow wasn't able to match yet. Slow time.
So he did that, and kept going. His mind not able to block the sense of ripping and shredding and burning, he pushed. Even in the first step, which took so long that it felt like years were passing in order to make it happen, Zack moved.
One foot at a time, Zack shifted back toward his house. A block and a half away. It took a time period that felt impossible for the real world. Even as the daylight drew near no one saw him however. He was battling too hard for that to take place, apparently, and the reason he was taking damage, or felt like it, had everything to do with why he wasn't visible to anyone else. They, both of them, were out of phase with the space around them. Normal matter couldn't exist that way.
So he was, technically, battling along with Big Shadow in a dimension that they were creating between them. At least he was. Big Shadow was clearly doing the whole thing in the real world, and not taking any pain from the whole thing. Which was a jerky thing for him to be doing, as far as Zack was concerned.
The pain grew, uncontrollable on his side of things. Nothing even distracted him from it. He'd lost limbs and had them destroyed while attached and never felt anything like it. He had to breathe, but doing so made him feel like he wanted to die. Not that he would. Rather, it was that he would have gladly volunteered for it, if it had been an option.
The air about him glowed red, which he couldn't be totally certain wasn't his eyes trying to disintegrate. They burned like they were made of fire. He hadn't known that anything could hurt as much as he did at that moment. Still, even if the being inside of him was bellowing, trying to distract him so that he could win, they kept struggling. Fighting to cause what each wanted to happen.
The only thing that allowed him to keep going on, to face the agony he was undergoing as he walked in near slow motion through the nice little beach town, was that he knew he had to. More, at some point in time, he already had. And in that moment, would again. There was no real fear that he would lose, because he hadn't. Zack was there, because things had worked out. That meant he wouldn't be giving up.
So instead, he simply feared taking the next step. Over time he felt himself tearing. Without end. The world around him slowing so much as he focused that the people started to look like they weren't moving. It was hard to pay attention too, but after a while he saw that the birds, three seagulls above him, were flapping their wings, but so slowly that he had to stare for what felt like twenty or thirty minutes to notice it. The problem was that he couldn't keep going if he let his concentration lapse even a little. At the same time, the pain kept going, growing.
After centuries of pure torture, not able to breathe any longer, he reached the shortcut he needed. It was right there, but blurred and distorted, thanks to the battle going on inside of him. All he had to do was climb through it, and get to a node, then climb in. There, in that absence of anything, things would be sorted instantly.
You. Will. Not. Live.
The message was from his friend, and came so slowly that he missed it the first few times. It was, helpfully enough, being chanted. Drawn out over what felt like months or years per word. If it hadn't been for his life in the void, he would have missed the helpful information totally.
It was tempting to try and send a message back, though it was kind of clear that he was processing the whole thing on a much faster level than Big Shadow was. Doing it by so much that the whole thing simply wasn't fair at all. He was the only one feeling pain from this. That meant he had to figure out what to do, in order to help his friend.
The way home, or even into the void, was blocked as long as the being was inside of him. It took a long time to figure out why that was, since he could have drawn energy from the world and push a shortcut from there into a node directly. That had always been possible for him, but until he'd seen others do it, the idea hadn't occurred to him. It was a new thing to him, but he could work out how to do it in his mind.
Big Shadow was stopping him, but by resisting, and doing things correctly, Zack could slip by the blocks that were put in front of him, stopping the easy use of the shortcut by blurring reality.
If he did that however, at that moment, from the place he was in, then a rip would open up in the very fabric of reality. Which was, of course, the whole point. He could push himself into the void from there. From anywhere, now that he understood the idea. If he did, at that moment, carrying Big Shadow inside of him, then he'd become the gate that the dark monsters needed to enter reality.
So this moment was the point of his existence. If he took the easier path, the creative one, then everything would be lost. At the same time he was being tortured beyond anything imaginable, to try and get him to do something new, instead of taking the impossible path. That was, instead of going through hell, he was supposed to take a shortcut.
It didn't take him long to work out what the answer was, though it was much harder to think now, since the burning and sense of dissolution was greater now than it had been. Much so. Enough that he didn't have a way to explain it. Even to his own mind. The concept just couldn't exist for him.
Worse, it wasn't reaching a level where it was as bad as it could be. The sensation kept growing. Blooming, like a flower opening in slow motion.
So what took him a while was figuring out how he was going to have to get home. That part was needed, since the service that Merry had to do for him suddenly made a lot of sense. What didn't was that there was no easy shortcut for him now. Only a long walk, in slow motion. Every step twice as hard as the one before.
He took the first step of the impossible journey, and slowly sent a message to the being inside of him.
I. Will. Save. You!
If he was understood, Zack didn't know. He had to increase the power of his focus to keep going, but as he did, the world around him drew out, distorting by slowing, and blurring, as light itself warped around them. He pushed to a level that he neared the death of mental singularity. That point of oneness that, if he went too close to it, would turn his mind into a single point that was so dense nothing would ever escape from it again. The whole time Zack pushed along, he kept trying to explain to the being inside of him. They had time, even going like they were.
Millennia passed. For him. Not the passenger with him.
At first it felt like a mere decade or two per step. Then centuries. By the time he hit the city limits, it was thousands of perceptual years for him just to move a few inches, as he folded the universe around him in a way that no one had probably ever done before. Step by step, he moved. Through a hell worse than even he had ever thought could exist.
It occurred to him then that his friend, Courtney Moore, had once told him that if he chose to go back to the world instead of staying dead, he'd suffer more than any being ever had. For longer than anything could. Really, he'd figured she was just being dramatic. She had been an actress in life and an Alede. To him that had made sense at the time. Now he knew that he was kind of an asshole, doubting the dead woman like that.
It had clearly happened in the afterlife, and there she was, honestly crying about what he was going through at that moment. Warning him. If he ever saw her again, a certain Alede was going to have to be apologized
to. She'd mentioned that her very horrible death was a thing that she would have gone through herself, a thousand times, to save him from this.
Now he got it.
Then, all he could do for what felt like the rest of time, was move. The whole thing was beyond even his own ability to understand, and eventually Big Shadow, whose job it was to try and destroy him utterly, started to scream inside of him. It wasn't from his own pain, since the being didn't have that, Zack knew.
No, it was that the creature was starting to understand what he was going through.
Zack, sending the thought so slowly that it took longer than he'd thought was possible, even as the world warped and didn't move.
I. Will. Save. You!
Then for longer than he could have possibly guessed at, he walked through a smear of something that his brain didn't understand in the slightest. To be totally fair, he wasn't really certain that he had a brain left. It might have melted, or gone away in some other way, long, long before. When he got to Underwood, which was only about a hundred and thirty miles away from where he started, Zack didn't remember what he was doing.
The only thing that was there any longer, was the desire to save the poor, screaming, thing that existed inside of him. That was all his life had ever been about, he was nearly certain. Still, he moved, walking past people, and not stopping until he was in front of a glowing blur. It wasn't pretty, since nothing had been in so long that he didn't think that sort of thing could exist for him any longer.
Still, there was a thing he had to do.
That thing, that had made him move in the first place, before the beginning of the world. That part wasn't literal, Pain Beast knew. It just felt that way. The thing there was that, to him, it was the simple truth. Pain Beast was, now, the oldest thing in existence. Even the universe was his junior in a very real way.
He sent a thought, since he'd done that for a very long time, to try and calm the poor Sufferer. It had a name, but he didn't recall what that truly was now. He was just the being within, or the Sufferer. Carried inside the Pain Beast. His friend and only companion. The other half of what was.
The glow in front of him didn't move, because the world didn't. It hadn't for... The only thing that acted was him, after all. Once, before a time had stopped, that had been different. He... Thought. The agony wasn't even pain now, having gone so far past being something that simple that soon the name he'd given himself at the door of the new place he'd entered was probably going to have to change.
Standing still, he waited, not certain what to do next.
There was a single thing he did, with his pain form. The container in which all agony exist. He said, without end, a single thing.
"Now." At least that was his plan. Pain Beast didn't know why that was, but it seemed like a thing to do.
Finally, over the course of what seemed to be forever, all over again, the glowing blur moved behind him. Then, in a rush that took him by surprise, his head rolled from his shoulders, the pain leaving at once. Leaving him straddling where he was, and the node to everywhere else. The relief of it snapped reality so hard that a piece of it nearly broke open. Letting other things in.
Hanging behind and over the form of his body, he watched it all.
Merry, the tiny glowing thing, whispered to the air.
"You are the Gatekeeper!" There were tears to the words, but that stopped as Zack wrapped his shadow around his friend, and used the nearest node to slip into the void. Thankfully, that allowed everything to come back to him. First he remembered that he was. Then, over time, a long while, the rest came back.
He was Zack. The Gate that never would be. To that end, he had won.
There we go. Now, you and I need to go and do some things. Hang on, friend. All will be well.
There was an answer, that sounded normal really. They existed in the same time stream now, it seemed clear.
What are you? The masters said I must come and kill you, even at the cost of my own being, but I cannot. You are more than I am. They made a mistake. We should have sent an army.
Zack smiled, and projected that to the creature he was holding, inside of himself still.
I am now, and always have been, your friend.
That got him to laugh inside, since he recalled the line having come from a movie. Then he sent a vague feeling that the thing inside of him needed to hang on. After all, Pain Beast, Zack, only knew one way to slow time, and did that again. It was a lot easier now, without the pain. He'd practiced that for so long that he was a master of it. In a very real way, time itself flowed through him, and was a part of what he was now.
Then, without half trying he unwound the stream of everything that had ever been, stepped behind the void itself, and moved to a time before he'd been born. Zack, carefully, unwound all that had happened, going back to a place before anything about him had existed. Just floating in the void with his friend. Tens of thousands of years before the consciousness that was him came into being.
Then he slowed time, and stayed there, for a short time, teaching his new friend, who had been with him forever. The being had suffered for him, hence the screaming when he'd understood what had been going on. That was the thing that made it all possible.
The arch-demon had learned to care about something else. A thing that was nearly impossible for his kind. Empathy. To feel the pain of another.
It wasn't enough. Not to fix all they had to for the being to become the Big Shadow. So Zack stayed with him, through the ages, teaching him all that would be needed to make things right again. Until a time that wasn't even worth counting, given what had happened. It was nearly as difficult for the first thousand years or so as the walking had been. The Sufferer, Big Shadow, was hard to deal with. Annoying, really. Over time he learned, and became better. Something more than what he had been.
Finally, Zack was able to let the being go. To be free.
It promptly ran off. Vanishing through a node so fast that it had to be warping and slowing time in order to get it done. Zack laughed, and changed his own point in time, wondering if all reality was going to be destroyed when he got back. There was nothing to do now but trust the Big Shadow had learned enough.
He walked out of the node into a little shop that filled containers with things that no being truly needed. There was a red haired female there, and another, who wasn't the same person, that had dark hair. They had clothing on, which was the rule in this place. That was fine. He was in the same kind of thing, and always had been. The trick, he was nearly certain, was for him to let the world around him choose its own time frame. It was stuck in place still, at the moment, so while he processed it all, Zack tried to recall what was around him, like the thing beneath him that kept him from falling through the world. He wasn't certain, but he kind of recalled it being called... Floor.
That could be ground.
It seemed a bit wasteful, having two words for the same thing, but that was how things worked. There was a lot of waste in this world. For instance, he needed to breathe, and go find the physical form he used to have. That was out front, over by the glowing woman. Merry. He'd made a new one when he'd come back, but it was the same, more or less.
She didn't look at him, still holding a two foot long silver blade in her hand, looking sad. Frozen, too, since it was harder to let go of how he'd lived for longer than reality had existed to that point than it seemed like it should be. He picked up the old, worn out body, and gently took himself to the void again. There he let it go, and settled the mess it made, it's dissipation having boiled the void a bit. Putting a dead physical thing there had caused an explosion, which had made a mess of space.
He hated that.
It was a thing that he'd taught his friend, Big Shadow. Who, in turn, had done the same for him. It was a circle, but a good and solid one. A lot of circles were like that.
Then he went back, and stood in front of the tiny woman. She was an Elth, which meant that her inner self wasn't the same as a human's. Also,
she was short. Adorable, he realized, that coming back too, as he finally managed to let her speed up, by letting go of everything.
The whole thing still felt like it took a while to manage, at least several weeks, of him remembering his old life and letting himself relax now. Slowly, she spun, the blade coming up first, then pointing at him, as if to strike him down. That wasn't a worry for him now. Not there, where it was so simple to go into the void. Using his hand, the right one, at a guess, though he wasn't totally certain of that, he reached out and took the shining blade, pulling it gently from the wonderful being's fingers.
She moved a bit, and yelled slowly. Just as she finished, he got back to what he thought of as real time. There was still blood on the floor, because it hadn't occurred to him to mop it up yet.
"Hi! Sorry about that. Things took a bit longer than I figured they would." It felt strange to speak like that, using his words and voice. Zack watched the ripples that they made passing through everything. Almost instantly the woman, who was a girl, truly, for her people, froze. She looked youthful enough but was only in her forties. For her people that was just out of school, practically.
She lunged for him after a few seconds, but gave him a hard hug, her face damp from the tears that had leaked from her eyes.
"Husband? You live? How?"
She wasn't the only one there, and there was, in fact a bit of a crowd watching them. Some of them had probably just seen something fairly strange, he was willing to bet. Him being beheaded, and then vanishing, only to end up standing there. Hugging a little person, while holding a long knife.
He managed not to sound too strange. At any rate, the words were in English, and the order of them felt about right.