Suddenly, the world seemed to halt. The breeze froze mid-whisper, the melody of battle strangled into silence, and even the endless march of time refused to move forward. What broke that silence was no natural sound, but a rupture of an echo dredged from the pit of hell itself. The sound did not merely ring; it invaded. It crawled into the marrow of gods and demons alike, stealing their breath, paralyzing their hearts. All eyes fixed upon the mask, and the mask, impossibly, was still.

It was a face carved between two realms—wrath and serenity stitched into the same flesh.

On the left, humanity had long since fled. What remained was lacquered armour masquerading as skin, the visage of a man reforged into a demon's icon. The brow and cheekbones were ridged with cruel, deliberate carvings, each line sharp enough to wound the eye. From the fractures seeping across its surface leaked faint streams of ember-orange light, like veins carrying molten fire. A horn's broken base jutted from the temple, its spiralled ridges burnt black at the root, paling toward an ash-white edge.

The forehead's jagged planes converged upon a third eye, rimmed in cracked, molten edges. Its iris burned alive—yellow feeding crimson, crimson sinking into black, a vertical slit slicing through the glow. The lids were scorched, blistered, torn raw, as though the eye itself had devoured them. Shadows pooled beneath a protruding brow ridge, casting the blood-orange eye into a hollow of menace. Even the nose sharpened into a blade, its angles cruelly predatory, while ornamental scars swept back across the cheek into darkness. The snarl below stretched cracked lips into lacquered shards, revealing an elongated canine slick with wet glint—yet the mouth behind it was not flesh, but void, a blackness that devoured the gaze.

On the right, serenity answered. The skin was unbroken, luminous with a faint inner glow, its surface soft and unscarred. Lines bent with gentleness, curving into balance. Light touched it like dawn on still waters, calm and undisturbed. Upon its smooth forehead, a second third eye blossomed: pearl-white layered in translucent ruby, haloed in rose light, its pupil perfectly round. It radiated composure, a jewel of quiet divinity against the ruin beside it.

...............................

The first breath was wrong.
From the left mouth, a tar-black gas unfurled, curling like smoke yet heavier, sinking instead of rising. From the right mouth came its counterpart, a pallid, chalk-white vapor, soft as breath upon glass, but strangely cold, clinging to the air like frost. They wept together, although it was not with water. From the right eye, thin rivulets of red began to pour, not tears but blood in steady threads. From the left eye, something darker pressed forth, viscous, shapeless, like tar given life. The face was crying, but each stream contradicted the other, as though the halves of a single body belonged to different deaths.

Then the third eye quivered. Slowly, its sealed lid broke open, and from within surged a thick stream of blackened blood, the liquid searing as it rolled downward, soaking the cheeks and dripping onto the jaw. The entire face seemed to sag under the weight of this grief, flesh damp and glossy, a mask drowning in its own fluids.

Atop the head, something began to bloom. Pearlescent orbs swelled like tumours, each pulsing faintly with light before splitting open into bleeding blossoms. They were lotus, but wrong—petals lacquered in crimson, veins crawling with dark pus that seeped out in threads. The blossoms sprouted and tore as fast as they opened, leaving a crown of rotting flowers on the human skull.

The face shuddered, and with a groan like stone splitting, the two halves began to tear apart—not along the natural seam, but down the centre of the chin and skull where no separation should be. Flesh peeled, bone cracked, skin resisted then surrendered. The halves drifted apart like continents breaking away, and through the rift, nothingness waited.

At first, that flowing river was seen, but it started to dissolve into pitch black. But the darkness shifted. Hairline cracks spidered across the ceiling of that void, glowing faintly violet. Like the half-open eye of a colossal Buddha, the cracks widened, trembling. A slit opened, and through it poured a searing red radiance. The emptiness became a chamber flooded in crimson. A sea made entirely of blood, without shore or reflection.

The eye itself bled like a victim stabbed within its socket, and though it was divine in scale, its weakness was hideous, suffering made eternal. Its iris glowed not with colour but with burning galaxies, spirals of fire consuming themselves.

And then, without warning, five more eyes opened above it. Each peeled open like infected wounds in the sky.

The first eye glowed golden. From it trickled yellow ichor, thick and glowing faintly like melted wax. Its iris resembled fractured glass, shards rearranging endlessly.

The second eye was pale blue. Its blood was thin, almost watery, and each drop hissed as it touched the red ocean. The iris was a crystalline world, veins of frozen rivers branching like arteries through transparent stone.

The third eye shimmered green. Its tears oozed in thick vines, each drop trailing tendrils like roots. The iris pulsed with an image of endless jungle, but inverted, vines curling into galaxies of thorns.

The fourth eye burned violet. Its blood was darker than wine, streaked with sparks of light. The iris was a storm—clouds roiling inward toward an eternal spiral, lightning frozen within.

The fifth eye opened in sickly pink. From it spilled froth, bubbly and corrosive, that sizzled upon contact with the red sea. The iris resembled fleshy tissue, an inner world of membranes and nerves, like a living organ turned inside out, throbbing with whispers of joy and disgust at once.

....................

The eyes hung there in perfect geometry, six corners of a hexagon, all staring, all bleeding at once. The colours mixed in slow spirals, and where no mortal eye could track, infinitesimal seeds were born, each one splitting into more until the sea became thick with unseen life. The stench was unbearable, iron-rich blood curdling with the sour tang of rotting fruit, mixed with the raw musk of something recently slaughtered.

From that shifting soup, something began to emerge. At first, nothing but veins—endless cords of red, coiling like worms. They collided, bent, fused, tore, then merged again, a throbbing nest of organic ropes. They pulsed as though some colossal heart far below forced ichor through them. The sound of it was wet and suffocating: shlorp, crack, squelch, the veins tearing against each other like raw meat stretched too thin. Suddenly, one bulged upwards, straining, splitting open to reveal a grotesque bud.

It did not bloom like a flower. It unrolled like a rotten scroll, leaves curling outward, yet each leaf was nothing but layered horrors—bones pressed into veins, teeth lined up like pale midribs, skull fragments fused into ridges. Patches of skin stitched across the surfaces twitched as though still alive, gooseflesh rising. Within the folds beat embedded lungs, tiny hearts, tubes and valves sputtering out dark fluid. From the leaves sprouted ribs like spikes, and tiny suckers wriggled, glistening wet. The smell was overwhelming—blood warm and metallic, mixed with something acidic, almost chemical. Oozing from between the seams, fresh streams of gore dripped, as if the leaves themselves had been cut from screaming animals seconds ago.

Another bulge swelled, veins parting to make way for a second bud. This one grew larger, trembling with spasms before peeling itself open. A lotus—but no lotus ever looked like this. The bud-petals did not soften into beauty; instead, they yawned like worm mouths, ridged with thorns that tore the membrane apart. Other petals followed, not petals at all but skeletal hands—five-fingered bones curled outward, locked together, bound by ligaments stretched thin as paper. Translucent membranes connected them, quivering when the bloom breathed. And in the centre of this horrific lotus, the stamen swelled into a single, glaring eye, its iris burning with cruelty. It blinked with...

All across the blood-realm, more grotesque blossoms rose. One lotus grew from fiery feathers of birds, the barbs blackened and smoking, fused to skulls of sparrows and hawks, their beaks snapping soundlessly. Another swelled from veins that split into wings of bats, stretched and webbed, dripping black ichor that hissed as it hit the blood-sea. Yet another bloom bore animal heads grafted into its petals, deer eyes rolling, dogs' muzzles locked open in eternal howls, the stench of decay wafting from their mouths.

Each bloom pulsed, shuddered, then settled into place, feeding on the red sea. But their growth was not steady. Many swelled halfway, then split with a cracking noise, shattering into fragments of bone and tendon, dissolving back into the blood. The air was filled with the sound of splitting flesh, cracking bone, dripping pus. The void trembled with their birth and death, as if even this world rejected their existence.

Still, they multiplied, grotesque lotuses of bone, blood, and torn life, until the entire red world became a forest of horrors, a garden of abominations blooming in unending cruelty.

..........................

Then a sudden shook happened, 6 giant pillars. The pillars groaned as they settled, cracking with the sound of marrow splitting inside them, as though they had been pulled directly from the spine of some colossal corpse. A tremor rattled through the sea of blood below, and then it came—the loon's roar. It was no bird's cry, but something lower, wet, like air being forced through a throat rotted with worms. From the surface of that endless crimson sea, six colossal loons rose, their bodies skeletal yet swollen with patches of festering skin, feathers slick with rot and clinging like mould to carrion. Their necks twisted unnaturally as they spiralled upward around the six bone pillars, beaks chattering like rusted blades grinding together.

When they reached the top, their skull-beaks locked into place, each aiming inward, and with another sickening bellow, they vomited beams of light. Not one colour but six, each hue writhing like it wanted to crawl off the light itself, sickly yellow, bruised violet, ocean-rot green, pallid white-blue, a flesh-pink far too human, and a final red that was not absence but anger. The beams converged, colliding in a convulsion of sound like teeth gnashing, birthing a flat plane of liquid darkness. It hardened, shivering as if alive, until it resembled a platform of black glass slicked with oil and blood.

On its surface something began to grow. At first, only outlines, vague contours like hands pressed against wet paper. Then came the skulls, five of them, enormous, each forcing its way out of the sludge of black like new-borns from a diseased womb. The first gleamed a pale silver that glistened like mercury; the second, golden but tarnished as if dipped in bile; the third bone-white, pitted with cavities as though eaten by insects; the fourth a deep charcoal, its surface cracking, dust spilling out like ash; the fifth shimmered magma blue, as though the marrow inside it still burned with trapped fire.

Their empty sockets were dark, but then, flicker. A hollow light seeped in, not glowing but oozing, as though some unseen organ behind the bone had ruptured. The sockets filled, then erupted. From them bled streams, not clear blood but viscous rivers of crimson too thick, almost gelatinous, sliding down in ropes. It poured across the black platform, spreading into patterns—circles, pentagons, hexagons, designs that twisted and shifted like living geometry. Each shape pulsed faintly with iron and rot. The smell was unbearable: copper of blood, sour of spoiled milk, sweetness of decay all suffocating at once.

The black substance across the platform began to flow, dragging everything toward the centre as though the ground itself were swallowing its own vomit. Slowly, piece by piece, a throne began to emerge. Not golden, not silver, but a throne of bone. At first, it was hidden beneath the black film, but as the sludge thinned, the truth came out: it was no crafted seat. It was a collection of bones ripped raw from animals, fused in impossible angles. Spines coiled upward like serpents, ribs interlocked into a jagged crown, femurs jutting like spears. The marrow within them still shone faintly, as though freshly gnawed.

The throne did not simply stand. It grew. Blood soaked it, filling its cracks, binding it tighter, and the black pus that had flowed earlier now hardened into resinous veins streaking the surface. It became majestic in the most grotesque way, like a carcass dressed in royal garb.

Behind the throne, a new structure rose, not carved but thrust from the very bones of the world. Spines elongated, curving into an arc that resembled a cathedral window, yet their tips were sharpened into hooks. On them were impaled the skulls of beasts. Wolves frozen in snarls, their teeth still wet with phantom saliva. Ravens with hooked beaks locked in eternal hunger. Rams twisted, horns coiling like blackened lightning bolts, charred from within. And worst of all, a bull's skull split jagged down the middle, as if some unseen god had smashed it in fury.

To be Continued...