The Black-eyed Twin let out a slow breath, as if savoring something unseen.
"My, what a delicious power."
Then, without hesitation, he raised his hand.
A portal tore open.
Then another.
Then another.
One by one, they formed in the empty white abyss.
Too many.
I lost track.
The sky—or what should have been a sky—rippled, distorted, stretched apart by the sheer weight of what was coming.
The Black-eyed Twin laughed.
"Yes."
More portals.
More rifts in reality.
"This is exactly what we wanted, Brother."
And then—
They came.
The first to emerge was a being of light.
I had expected something grotesque, something monstrous—but this one was beautiful.
Its form was radiant, draped in golden robes, its face shifting between endless expressions, flickering from sorrow to joy to rage in an instant. A golden halo hovered above its head, but its eyes—its many, many eyes—glowed with something cold. Something detached.
It looked angelic.
But there was nothing human in its gaze.
Nothing merciful.
The next was a nightmare given flesh.
It crawled out of the portal, long, spindly limbs bending at unnatural angles, its arms nearly dragging along the ground.
Its head was featureless, nothing in it at all.
It didn't walk.
It skittered.
Twitched.
Moved like it was barely holding itself together.
And yet—when it turned to me, I felt it.
It was aware.
It was watching.
The third looked like a man.
No, it was a man.
Or at least, it looked like one.
Simple robes, simple face—brown hair, a slight build, hands folded neatly in front of him.
His eyes, however, were pitch black.
Empty.
Like a void wearing human skin.
And when he blinked, for just a fraction of a second, I saw something else beneath.
Something vast.
Something limitless.
And then—
More.
More and more of them poured forth, too many to track, too many to count, each one different, each one wrong.
Some were towering giants, bodies wrapped in twisting smoke.
Some were writhing masses of limbs and eyes, stretching and stretching and stretching.
Some were shapeless, existing and not existing at the same time, their outlines flickering between forms.
And all of them—
All of them were here.
All of them had come.
And I, just one man, just one mortal—
Was standing in their presence.
"My fellow Gods!"
The White-eyed Twin's voice rang out, filled with delight.
His arms stretched wide, his smile growing, twisting, stretching just slightly too far.
"Welcome to a land without a God!"
A ripple of silent excitement passed through the gathering horrors around me.
I could feel it.
The anticipation.
The hunger.
"It's a free-for-all!" the White Twin continued, his voice rich with amusement. "Any of you here have the chance to conquer this realm. It's within everyone's grasp!"
His brother laughed.
"But don't fight each other, yeah?"
A few of the Outer Gods shifted. Some twitched, others grinned, some merely stared.
More of them kept coming.
Pouring through the portals, stepping into this world that had never known their kind.
Creatures beyond my knowledge.
Beings beyond my understanding.
Then—
The last portal opened.
Bigger. So much bigger.
A tear in existence itself, warping everything around it.
And for the first time—even the Twins looked uncertain.
Their grins faded.
They stood straighter.
Their gazes fixed on the portal, their expressions unreadable.
They looked worried.
Then—she arrived.
I couldn't describe her.
Not properly.
My mind—my very thoughts—*couldn't seem to form the words.
What was she?
A woman?
A storm?
A being of shifting light and endless shadows, a shape that could not exist yet was standing before me.
I couldn't comprehend her.
Couldn't process her.
I knew one thing—
Among all the gods that had arrived, among all the horrors standing in this place—
She was the most powerful.
Even the Twins bowed.
The White-eyed Twin's voice, for the first time, was soft.
"Welcome, Acheron Vashtia..."
He straightened.
And his grin returned.
"The God of Death."
THE END
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