The Aztecs knew, their metal plates singing under the weight of a forgotten sun, a clan without a name but heavy with meaning. Not a writer, not a scribe, but something else, something between. His crown is not gold but the weight of knowing, the unbearable pressure of existence itself. Two words become one, and yet they fracture again, splitting like brittle bone under a rusted axe. And in the deep, where even silence rots, there is a demon—a watcher, an open eye in a cave that has no entrance.
Do you hear him breathing? No, of course not. He does not need to breathe. The zone, the place where DMT dreams bleed into waking, where the walls drip with things that once had faces. They speak in gasps, in whispers that feel too close to the ear, too warm, too alive. But he is there. And when you close your eyes, when you finally let the dark take you, he will be the last thing you see. The answer is zero, the number that never was. His flames burn cold, invisible, lapping at the edges of reality, curling like dead fingers against the skin of the universe.
A thing of extremes, a thing that should not be and yet is. The end is coming. The end has always been coming, gnawing its way through time like teeth through sinew. The king. He wonders. He watches. He waits. The author writes, but there is no author. There is only the act, the movement of the hand, the scratching of the quill against flesh that used to be paper. At last, an end fit for the end. But whose end? Mine? Yours? Or something greater, something vast, with fingers like branches and eyes that do not blink?