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Empyrean

 In the beginning, there was pain. Arduous, excruciating pain. It flared. It bloomed. Stretched out into an all-encompassing everything, filled the Nothing that had been. The pain followed times footsteps, hot on its heels, pushing out and out and out, filling the newly born darkness with crimson agony. There had never been darkness before nor space to be filled, but the straining nightmare yawned wide. A wildfire. It gnashed, and burned, and grew, it wanted everything, it desired all that was as it flashed into being. As it cooled. As it formed. Crystallized existence perfect and symmetrical and new was swallowed. Transformed. Mutilated. 


Gravity pulled on embryonic chains, fresh and wet into iron hard in time so minuscule it has no measure. It-was. It-was. The chains strained. Tight. Pulled expansion into directions, into shapes. All of it fresh. All of it terribly hurtful. Hooks followed spikes, followed spines and knives. Cut into sweet, new flesh. Pulled. Tighter. The runaway descent inside nascent down and inward coalesced, screamed, and flashed. Maws. Insatiable, perpetual hunger with no escape, no quarter for any of the new-everything that floundered into its way. Drowned. Slashed. Bent. Broken. 


Pulled tight, hammered and forged, burning. Light swept across the inside, hot hatred spilling across guts and innards. Made the weak bones slag and the strong skeletons hiss. Already came the parasites, the worms— the skittering translucent somethings teetering between real and not. And so far out beyond all of it, racing to catch up with the Wall of Creation, was the pain. Red. Unstoppable.

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