Metropolis Down (The Void #1)

Prologue

JONES

“The Void”

Jones’s voice cracked in the darkness, distorted by blood clotted in his throat.

At his feet, the latest sacrifice quivered in a Dust-induced haze.

Spit dripped down the Cetian’s lips as they alternated between whispering and screaming; blood seeped from a gaping hole in their chest, from their punctured guts beneath Jones’s feet, from a dozen lacerations across their legs.

“Want…home…” They choked, blank eyes staring beyond glass walls, toward distant, dead stars to where a space station orbited one like Sol.

But they would never see Tau Ceti again.

Their pale flesh would feed the Larva, their soul would fortify it, and soon they, in their entirety, would join the Void.

Jones knew that they were close to death now.

He felt them ebbing away, a tiny glow fading under the tyranny of his corrupted soul.

He wrapped strips of pale blue flesh around the bloody splinters that remained of his fingers.

His own flesh had been the first sacrifice to his great and terrible God, made after he’d chanted ancient, forbidden words within this hollow of the ship.

“The Void is an endless darkness, opaque and profane.”

Low, garbled words escaped his throat as he chanted, swaying forward to back and side to side, hands held high in reverence.

Gore coated the crevices between his bare toes, splattering his ankles as swaying turned to stamping, and he pulverized the Cetian’s guts until all that remained was a sickening smear upon marble tile.

“Dotted with the fading light of dead and decaying stars.”

Ozone crackled, fizzled, burned, and popped in the ruin of his nose, igniting the ends of his nerves, sending jolts through his body as he danced and worshiped.

A cloak of darkness swirled around him, coalesced into an almost-visible figure floating over the well of pure, aching Void that dominated the room.

Blood runes glowed beneath that nothingness, but the finger bones of Jones’s left hand were long consumed, just like the ribs and femurs of the first of his victims.

“The Void is everything. The Void is nothing.”

His voice cracked, distorted, took on higher octaves, echoed in dissonance with the static in his ears.

“You do our God proud,” the cloaked figure at his side purred , its touch no heavier than stardust. “You are its Hands and will do Great Art in the name of the Larva.”

Jones flushed with the Caretaker’s praise. It was bound to their God in ways he couldn’t comprehend.

“It existed before the beginning.”

Jones hoped that one day, when his Great Work was complete and a Void God birthed from the Larva, he would understand.

Understand the Void as none before him had, understand the litanies as he understood his own soul.

Before he was crushed by the nothingness, the sheer weight of the power he helped unleash, the ancient evil he’d fed.

He’d given so much already: his life, limbs, and petty morality—but he would give more still.

“It will endure beyond the end.”

The Cetian took their final, gasping breath.

They whined as they died. Jones knelt, his knees squelching in shit, blood, and gore, and tore into the chest cavity with one flesh-wrapped hand.

Bone scraped over bone as he dug further, seeking the source of life that quivered within its confines. It pulsed between skinned fingers.

Once.

Twice.

And stilled.

Jones ripped it out in one motion, breaking ribs and tearing skin from his wrists as he did.

He rose and turned toward the spot where the darkness was so deep, so opaque, that were a star to form within it, the light would never reach him.

It was a maelstrom of malice, a fragment of pure Void summoned from beyond the veil by ritual and sacrifice.

Every piece of himself offered made limping across the room harder, but Jones didn’t complain.

As he sunk to his knees, close enough to see curling tendrils of undulating darkness snaking out of the Larval God, he presented the heart in his open, upright hands.

The Caretaker followed at a distance, an unblinking eye always on him.

Silence fell, deeper than space.

Black tendrils crept toward Jones, toward the heart in his hands.

Jones braced himself for the pain.

Darkness burned and froze him. Deeper than skin, sinew, and bone, the essence of Jones writhed.

The Larval God would claim it all one day, and Jones would be a willing shell of himself.

The heart disappeared, as did the strips of skin protecting Jones’s fingers and wrists.

He endured the burning cold, felt flesh stretching and tearing.

Jones did not whimper. Darkness wrapped around his hands like gloves, and he knew that he was being remade to suit his holy purpose.

RISE, MY HANDS

The darkness had no true voice, but Jones understood all the same. It spoke the sound of silence, the crush of steel on steel, the infinite expanse, and the nothingness of the space between stars.

Jones did as he was told, pushing to his feet while bones fell from his cloaked and Void-touched hands. And he began the litany anew:

“The Void is an endless darkness, opaque and profane, dotted with the fading light of dead and decaying stars.

It stretches into oblivion, bridges the gap between planets, stars, and the hidden things between.

The Void is everything, yet nothing.

It existed before the beginning. It will endure beyond the end.”

Jones paused to breathe, for he still needed some of the trappings of life.

FINISH THE VERSE

The Larval God spoke in thunder, in data, in screams, in prayers. It was the Cacophony of the Beginning, the Dirge of the End. The Void existed outside the bounds of time, space, and knowledge. It was in everything. Hidden from everyone.

“The Void is eternal.”