Book II - Genesis: The Origin of the World
"... No one knew when He disappeared. Some say He retreated to the fringes of this world after the Origin. Others, much bolder, will say He became the Origin. But the reality is that no one knows. No one knows, except for me, the Eyeless One.
I alone walked far enough to see what waited beyond the last light. I alone paid the price the Wall demands of all who would cross it, and I came back changed, my eyes traded for a truth no man should carry whole.
They ask me still, even now, decades later, what I saw there. I tell them nothing. The Wall does not let you leave with the words intact. It only lets you leave with the weight.
...
Before him rose the Wall of Truth. Insurmountable, it towered into the very heavens of this realm, its surface unmarked by door or breach, as though the world itself had decided, long before he arrived, that some questions were never meant to be answered twice.
Yet the Origin had no choice. He had to confront the Truth. It was his destiny that had brought him here, and nothing was, nor would ever be, more powerful than Destiny.
Some say the Wall remembers every face that has ever stood before it, and weighs each one still, long after the asking is done, as a judge weighs a soul he has already condemned and feels no further need to hear from.
Some say it forgets them all the instant they turn away, for it was never theirs to remember. Only the Wall's own silence is eternal. All else passing before it is dust, and dust does not ask to be remembered.
Let it be written that no plea has ever reached it. Let it be written that none ever will.
For the Wall does not answer the worthy, nor punish the wicked. It simply stands, as it has always stood, granting what it grants and withholding what it withholds, for reasons no living tongue was ever permitted to ask after twice.
..."
For the first time since his awakening, Atlas was seized by pure panic. Even though his mind had adapted faster than he would have ever thought, this time the situation was truly critical. He was pinned to the ground, and this thing seemed to want something from him.
The mutant pinning him down tried to deliver a sharp blow to his head. Its translucent arm beneath which veins carrying brown blood seemed to throb rose effortlessly into the air. With a lightning-fast motion, its fist hurtled toward Atlas's skull.
Acting on pure instinct, Atlas barely managed to dodge the strike, which grazed his left ear. He then desperately tried to scramble out from under the monster's grip. Despite the creature's seemingly superhuman strength, it didn't weigh very much. What was truly holding Atlas down was the iron grip of its legs, which had thankfully loosened slightly when it lunged to attack.
With a sharp thrust of his hips, Atlas managed to shove the mutant onto its side. The creature rolled a few meters away while Atlas scrambled to his feet, panting. From there, he finally had time to get a good look at what had attacked him, instinctively pressing a hand to his head where he had nearly been struck.
"What are you...?" Atlas breathed, narrowing his eyes.
He stared at a being closer to a primal beast than a human, like a man who had given free rein to his deepest, darkest desires: hatred, envy, gluttony.
Despite lacking eyes, the mutant seemed to be examining him as well. It had backed away a few meters proof that a shred of consciousness still lingered deep within that empty shell. It crouched low, as if proximity to the ground brought it comfort. It was still drooling profusely, but this time, it wore a smile laced with pure malice.
Suddenly, the creature lunged. Its dry, muscle-depleted thighs snapped into motion, launching it forward faster than any top-tier athlete Atlas had ever seen.
Atlas didn't even have time to react. The mutant delivered a vicious knee strike to his ribs, calculated to inflict maximum damage and agony. A sinister crack echoed through the air.
"ARGHHH!!"
Thrown to the ground once again, Atlas had never felt such excruciating pain. The wind knocked out of him, the air forcefully ejected from his lungs, the agony was so intense he couldn't even draw a breath. Hands clutching his body, his ability to think shattered, he was reduced to nothing but raw sensation. Eyes rolling back, collapsed on the ground, he saw the mutant laughing. As if it were mocking the frailty of his body. The frailty of his mortality.
Atlas's senses were so locked onto the mutant that he didn't even hear the muffled screams coming from behind him, right where Emma was supposed to be.
Suddenly, something cracked. This time, it wasn't his ribs.
The sound was darker, more diffuse, arriving from somewhere far away and yet so unbearably close at once, as though it had originated not in the world around him, but several layers beneath his own skin. At that exact moment, Atlas screamed. He buried his face in the snow, losing all control. Even the mutant abruptly stopped laughing, backing away with sudden caution, still crouched low, its blind sockets somehow fixed on him all the same.
Atlas could no longer feel his body. His eyes had rolled back, completely white, fixed on nothing. But it was what happened behind them that mattered. His consciousness was tearing apart, his sense of self stretching, splitting, dividing along some invisible seam he had never known existed inside him, the agony of it purely psychological and somehow worse for that very reason, as though pain that left no mark on the skin had nowhere left to go but inward. He clawed at his own face through the snow, his nails dragging bloody furrows down his cheeks, gripped by an overwhelming, almost ancient certainty that if he could only tear his eyes out, root and all, the pain would finally stop, as though some part of him already understood, long before he ever would, exactly what price this world demanded for the truths it forced upon those who hadn't asked to see them.
"Please," he begged, his voice cracking, barely his own anymore. "Make it stop."
And then, as if the universe itself had been listening, the pain finally faded.
His consciousness had split in two. It was a strange, indescribable sensation, like discovering a second pair of hands had been folded inside his own all along, two distinct ways of holding the same world, two distinct ways of seeing it.
But no sooner had the suffering dissolved than a dark, unfathomable anger rushed in to fill the space it left behind, as though nothing in this world, or perhaps in any world, could ever truly appease him again.
He snapped his head up.
His face was unrecognizable, marred by the bloody gashes he had carved into it himself. His eyes, azure blue only moments before, had darkened into a deep, royal blue, lit from within by something that looked, unmistakably, like hatred.
For the mutant standing nearby, who had since reconsidered its position, the shock was absolute. The frail little prey it had been playing with mere seconds ago seemed to have been entirely replaced by someone else.
Atlas's mind had split clean in two. Deep down, one part of him was still screaming, still terrified, still feeling every cracked rib with perfect clarity. But that voice was muffled now, shoved into the role of a spectator behind his own eyes. Something else had taken the wheel. An anger so dense, so total, it swallowed everything else whole.
I'm going to destroy it.
The thought didn't belong to the rational Atlas. It rose from somewhere deeper, somewhere new, somewhere that had no name yet.
He stood. His frail body shook, his lungs burned, but the rage drowned out the pain completely. His eyes had darkened to an abyssal blue, almost incandescent, edged with red, like embers refusing to die.
He stepped toward the mutant. No sprint, no warrior's stride, his starved body still had nothing like the muscle for that. But the fury didn't care what his body could or couldn't do. It simply answered.
Atlas drove his knee upward.
The strike itself should have meant nothing. A skeletal leg, a desperate lunge, the kind of blow a child could have shrugged off without flinching. But the instant bone met flesh, something inside him tore loose, violent and absolute, a pressure that had been building since the moment his mind first cracked finally finding somewhere to go. It didn't simply strike the creature. It unmade the space where the creature stood, for the briefest fraction of a second, before reality, furious at the intrusion, slammed back into place around the wound.
The crack that followed wasn't a sound so much as a verdict.
The mutant's ribs imploded inward, folding like wet paper around a fist that had never physically touched them. It was hurled backward through the air, slamming into the blue snow in an explosion of white, coughing up a thick spray of blackish blood as a howl tore out of something that no longer had the lungs to properly carry it.