He’d done it. Sohow, impossibly, he’d—
The water behind him began to boil.
Nero’s relief vanished as he turned toward the pool. The crystal-clear surface was churning now, bubbles rising from the depths where the vast thing slumbered. The blue glow from the fungus reflected off the disturbed water, creating patterns that hurt to look at.
Sothing was waking up.
Then he felt it—a pressure around his ankle.
Nero looked down and his heart stopped.
A dark tendril, thick as his arm, had wrapped around his leg. It was cold. So cold it burned where it touched his skin. The tendril tightened, and before Nero could even think to struggle, it yanked him off his feet.
He hit the stone floor hard, his broken ribs sending white-hot agony through his chest. His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the smooth stone, finding nothing.
The tendril dragged him toward the pool.
"No—" Nero gasped, his dagger coming up to stab at the appendage. The blade bit into dark flesh that seed to be made of shadow more than matter. It cut, but the tendril didn’t release.
Another tendril erged from the water, then another.
They wrapped around his legs, his waist, his good arm.
Ruml Abellion’s voice reached him from where it lay pinned beneath the golden chain, and now the creature’s tone carried sothing Nero hadn’t heard before.
Fear.
"Wretched human! I do not care if I am bound for another hundred millennia! I shall devour your life! You have deprived of my freedom!"
Nero was hauled into the water.
***
The water is cold.
It is very cold.
That was Nero’s first coherent thought as the lake swallowed him whole. The temperature was beyond anything he’d experienced, beyond winter frost or mountain snow. This was the cold of spaces between stars, of voids where warmth had never existed.
It burned worse than fire.
As the tendrils dragged him deeper, Nero’s mind flashed back to another lake, another drowning. The day the Divine Will had looked upon him in Gor. The day the sky had torn open and that terrible eye had gazed down with judgnt absolute.
He’d been thrown into water then too. Left to die in the depths while the world above forgot he existed.
Was this how it would end? After everything he’d survived, all the battles and transformations and impossible odds, would he simply drown in a forgotten chamber beneath the earth?
The tendril around his leg tightened, pulling him deeper still.
Nero stabbed at it again with his dagger, the blade cutting through the shadowy flesh. But more tendrils erged from the darkness below, wrapping around his other leg, his waist, his chest. They constricted like serpents, squeezing the air from his lungs.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but feel that terrible cold seeping into his bones.
Through the crystal-clear water, Nero finally saw what slumbered in the depths.
It was enormous beyond comprehension, a thing that shouldn’t exist in any reality governed by sane laws. Its body was a grotesque fusion of fish and toad and bird, all wrong angles and impossible proportions. Massive antlers sprouted from its head like those of an ancient deer, each one covered in barnacles and strange growths. A sac filled with glowing blue fluid hung from its brow like an angler fish’s lure, pulsing with bioluminescent light that illuminated the horror of its form.
And surrounding that vast body were millions of dark tendrils, each one moving with independent consciousness, reaching out like the fingers of so blind god searching for prey.
The thing was still sleeping. Its enormous eyes remained closed, its massive mouth barely open. But the tendrils moved regardless, autonomous extensions of its will that functioned even in slumber.
One of those tendrils had found Nero.
And now dozens more wrapped around him, pulling him closer to that cavernous maw.
Nero struggled, his good arm thrashing, his legs kicking against the inexorable pull. His lungs burned for air that wasn’t there. His vision began to narrow, dark spots eating at the edges.
He was going to die here.
But even as that thought crystallized, even as the tendrils dragged him toward certain death, sothing else stirred within him.
The mark of phistopheles pulsed once on his chest.
The Vineheart in his core began to burn.
And deep within Nero’s consciousness, beneath the fear and pain and desperation, sothing older and darker woke up.
No.
He would not die here.
He refused.
The tendrils pulled him into the creature’s maw, into darkness so absolute it felt like being swallowed by the void itself. The cold intensified until Nero couldn’t feel his extremities anymore, until his thoughts began to fracture and scatter.
But in that mont before consciousness fled entirely, in that space between life and death, Nero’s body began to change.
His skin darkened, not to the grey of corruption but to sothing deeper. Pure black, like obsidian, like shadow given physical form. His eyes, both of them, began to glow with crimson light that cut through the darkness like fresh blood on snow.
The mark on his chest blazed with dark radiance, and from it, shadows began to pour. Not the gentle darkness of night, but sothing hungry. Sothing that had been waiting for this mont.
Nero’s consciousness fragnted, his human thoughts dissolving as sothing else took control. Sothing primal. Sothing that existed before thought, before civilization, before the Divine Will had imposed order on chaos.
The Yang form.
One thought remained in what had been Nero’s mind, repeated over and over like a mantra, like a command that overwrote everything else.
*Devour. Devour. Devour.*
Inside the creature’s maw, surrounded by crushing darkness and tendrils that sought to digest him, Nero’s transford body began to move.
His mouth opened wider than should have been possible, wider than human anatomy allowed. And from that impossible opening ca shadows that reached out with their own terrible hunger.
The tendrils that had dragged him here tried to constrict tighter.
Nero’s shadows wrapped around them and pulled.
There was a sound like tearing fabric as the first tendril ca apart. Then another. Then dozens more as Nero’s Yang form began to feed, consuming the very thing that had tried to consu him.
The vast creature in the depths finally stirred, its sleep disturbed by the sensation of being eaten from within.
But by then, it was far too late.
Nero devoured.
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