_ _ _Hiiro

  The sky was bleeding. Bim was screaming. There was a hole in reality and something was coming through. It was all too big to grasp. Too insane for me to wrap my head around.

  I'd known Bim wasn't human but I'd never expected anything like this. What was I even looking at? Her? Her father? The devil cops? I didn't have the scope of reference to even begin making informed guesses.

  Bim was screaming a wordless blood-curdling shriek from everywhere at once. The piercing, sourceless sound turned my veins to ice and left my nerves raw. It sounded like she was being tortured along with every single bat in Hell and a few million tonnes of steel for good measure.

  It was the sound of Treu taking care of her.

  I may not have seen the bigger picture but I knew that much. I could barely feel the magnetic tugging on my heart but it was there, faintly. The blood star was like a black hole in reverse, trying to quash me into the stone while every step felt twice as difficult as the last. I was repelled by this new aberrant thing but there was nothing that would keep me from saving Bim.

  I wasn't the only one affected by the blood star. The crowd had scattered with fatal panic that put their earlier efforts to shame. I caught glimpses of helicopters warring to regain control so they could set down or stay aloft; planes tumbling through the air, firing at everything as they went. Soldiers and mercs skirmished through the alleys and streets as they fled the falling star, entire buildings toppling into the walkways that'd been so fiercely contested minutes prior.

  No one spared me a second's notice as I ran towards the danger, a lone unarmed man racing against the falling sky. My blood was boiling. My heart pounding and legs pumping with desperate strength. I wasn't fast enough. If I made it out of this alive, so help me God, I'd quit smoking and take up jogging. So long as I reached Bim, so long as I could just save her!

  The enormous black star touched down a half kilometer ahead of me with all the weight of a feather, a swirling dome of smoky-crimson gently cupping a portion of the city. It was monstrously, massively, mind-bogglingly huge, devouring everything for kilometers and flattening its surroundings with a slow pulse of irresistible force. To my left and right the smoky crimson dome dominated half the horizon beyond the fresh rubble and ruin.

  The hellsphere made a sound, somewhere between an explosion, a retch and an earthquake. It was agitated, the swirling tendrils of oily black just under its skin writhing faster and faster. There was a wash of inhuman heat that stank of melted rubber and burning meat.

  Then the air around the dome went fuzzy with dark specks that came raining down, too fast to avoid. That I should live or die by random chance seemed absurd but there was nothing for it. I pressed on, throwing my life to the cosmic dice on the gamble that I could reach Bim before it was too late.

  I wondered if this was how it'd looked just before Bim scattered a mountain unto the city. Specks in the distance that struck down as boulders bigger than skyscrapers. They were scattered at random, propelled by impossible forces that should have destroyed them by fatal acceleration alone.

  One of the specks grew to full size in a blink. It struck the street fifty meters ahead of me, half-splattering on the sprawl of cobbled bricks. Two seconds and eighty meters later, it finished toppling end over end in a splay of twisted limbs.

  It was a body. Charred black, mangled beyond all recognition from its terminal impact. I think he was a man, possibly a soldier who'd been inside that nightmare I was headed for. I didn't spare him much thought. I couldn't waste a second on anyone else right now.

  Bim was somewhere in there and I was going to save her. That was all that mattered. It was a fool's plan, equal parts insane bravery and lovestruck insanity but it was all I had. Treu was taking care of her. That meant that somehow, I had to take care of him before he could manage. There were more burnt bodies the closer I got to the dome's edge, hundreds if not thousands of them. I wouldn't end up like them! But… just what was Treu doing to her in there?

  "I'm not doing anything to her."

  I spun on the voice, arms wreathed with killing flames I hadn't thought to summon.

  Treu was digging equipment out of a giant metal coffin half-buried in an impact crater. Armaments bigger than I was tall, talismans and trinkets that made my teeth itch, and long scrolls of crumbling papers burning at the edges like incense, all came together in a growing heap. There was a tall poleaxe of silvery metal standing at the crater's lip like a standard, the blade's edge inscribed with sigils so fine they gave the weapon a wavy, acid-etched look.

  All of which paled in comparison to the armor Treu was wearing. Treu, an inhuman monster that had walked unflinching through months of gunfights in naught but tee-shirts and cargo pants, was wearing a hulking dreadnought of power armor. It was similar but different from the designs used by the mercs; it wasn't any less armored but the thick limbs were longer and less stocky by comparison. How anything with vaned limbs thicker around than my torso could look almost spindly was a mystery but it did. His armor was lean and lethal, and still Treu slotted more firepower home, adding to his walking armory.

  Each forearm sported inbuilt thick-bored pistols. His thighs had a pair of curious beam rifles fastened to gimble mounts so he could fire them from the hip. Treu's waist was thickened by ordinance and munitions. Flickering shadows drew my eyes to the drones floating high over his head. Four stubby wing/arms were folded at his back, each ending in a cannon of some kind. Then there were the rifle and halberd that would occupy his hands once he decided to charge into hell. Once he decided he was ready to take care of Bim.

  Treu, already a monster of a man, was armored and armed with enough hardware to make any gun-totting merc envious. He was so beyond the idea of a highly-trained weapons expert it was ludicrous. Treu was a living weapon clad in the pinnacle of human and probably alien technology. I had a broken arm half-healed and nothing but what was left of the clothes on my back as they were consumed by my spreading flames. It didn't matter.

  I charged him.

  Three steps later, I hit the ash-strewn ground completely paralyzed— my entire body cramped like I'd grabbed a live wire. His gaze hadn't so much as graced me. I thought I'd seen the big bastard flick a finger but I wasn't sure if I really had. I tried to curse Treu but all that spilled from my lips was an agonized groan as my bodily functions gradually returned to me.

  "I said, I am not doing anything to your precious Devil. Yet." Treu enunciated with haughty condescension. "The time is not right for me to strike. What you are seeing is… Well, you wouldn't understand the details, but think of this as your precious Devil warring with herself for control much as she's done before. This time however, the creature you know as Bim will cease to be."

  "No!" I growled, fighting against my failing body to rise.

  "Yes." Treu stated factually before waving a flippant hand at the burning corpses clustered nearby. "Even now she clings to these disgusting remembrances of you to retain her individuality. The remainder of this Abomination is rejecting her— and by tertiary extension you. In a few more minutes it will have completely erased your existence from all thoughts and what remains of your precious Devil will be ripe for consumption. Failing that, It will destroy her out of hand."

  "How do we stop It?" I asked, finally regaining enough motor functionality to crawl to my feet.

  "There is no stopping It, not indefinitely. That is the parts of your beloved Devil she left behind to come to this plane. An insatiable hunger, a relentless force of will, Its entire being composed of desire to devour and know. That is a creature utterly incomprehensible to your insignificant mundane mind. A creature seeking to devour the wayward daughter you led astray. What you are seeing is your fault. We do nothing. I am preparing to resolve the situation."

  "How!?" I demanded, dreading the answer.

  Treu spared a single eye to glare down at me with contempt. He didn't answer save to heft another weapon into its hardpoint and wrap another smoldering scroll around his silvery halberd. All the while, he was smiling in anticipation.

  "No! You can't." I protested.

  "Oh I assure you, I most certainly can." He sneered with perverse delight.

  "There has to be another way!"

  Both reptilian eyes snapped towards me. Hatred flared across his face but there was something playful about it too. Treu was glad this had finally happened, a patient hunter rewarded by sighting his target, and I was standing in the way of that. Treu was going to take care of Bim, and so help anyone who thought they could stop that.

  "No, there doesn't." Treu sneered. "Save your pointless bravado for someone who cares, Hero. You can do nothing but delay the inevitable."

  Was that all I'd done in the past when Bim was lost within herself? I thought back to the first time, just after the rollover. I couldn't remember doing anything special. I just remembered something like a flower in bloom imploding back in upon itself, then at the heart of all that writhing, slithering, undulating, rigid wrongness, I remembered Bim seeing me through hundreds of eyes. She had seen me, looked into me, known me with an intimacy that made my heart weep. For the first time in my life, I truly felt like someone saw me as I was and accepted me flaws and all.

  The second time, when she'd rescued me and nearly destroyed herself in the process, hadn't been so easy. I hardly remembered that chaotic night through all the fighting and the pain and loss. It was all flashes. Bim floating in the air like a vengeful goddess. The living cancer she'd spawned trying to heal a man at my request. The soul-rending agony in her eyes as I called her back from the abyss. The devastation of Crucibab, the palace under siege, Zoe's death— all of it my fault. I couldn't let that happen again! Even if I couldn't stop it… Even if I was only delaying the inevitable, Bim was worth every second.

  "Fine, I'll do it." I said, sound more confident than I felt. "…Any advice on how to do that?"

  Treu shrugged his weapon-clad shoulders. "I've no interest in temporal solutions, only permanence. Regardless of what you attempt, I will end that creature's farce of an existence. Permanently."

  I tried to ignore the comment. I couldn't let it come to that. I wouldn't let him hurt her no matter what. I followed my heart and pressed into the nightmare dome. Everything went alien as I crossed the threshold from a very real warzone into an unreal hellscape.

  What was I, this fragile fleshthing to stride so boldly into the unknown? A kindred spirit? A threat? Something else entirely? This flesh-bound slave of time intruded, it bore the attentions of a Cosmic God and it persisted? A champion of the Mortal Minds? An Outsider? A fellow Monster? It came to this existence and endured intact?

  Human minds break so easily yet you do not? You are… a curiosity.

  I was falling! I hadn't even blinked but I'd missed the moment when everything vanished. I had the faintest recollection of seeing myself from the outside. A haunting memory of Bim calling out to me from somewhere far away.

  I was floating in an empty void of total blackness that wasn't dark. I looked down and flinched when I saw myself and the ashy remains of my clothes still here. Wherever here was…

  There was no light but it wasn't dark. No ground and I wasn't standing on anything but I wasn't falling anymore. No sign of any planet or stars but I could still breathe. There wasn't anything here except for me. It simply was. As was I.

  There was Nothing.

  I didn't bother trying to wrap my head around it. I knew I was so far into the unknown that I'd never make any sense of what I was experiencing or seeing or feeling. It was all so utterly alien that even the sharpest human mind didn't have a prayer and I was a long way off from even that much. I was somewhere I had no right to be and somewhere in here Bim needed me, that was all I had to know.

  I tried walking. It felt like I was but I wasn't moving, not that there was anywhere to go. I spoke and my words barely reached my ears, like I was in a room too big with air too thin for an echo. I reached for my inner flames and tossed a fireball into the void; it flew straight and true for a distance that had no meaning until it burned itself out.

  I looked everywhere, even did a full three-sixty left-right first, then up-down. There was nothing here! It was completely disorienting. I thought I was standing on a wall looking down but my ears couldn't tell if I was floating or falling or what. I tried running but the universe was a treadmill I couldn't touch. My legs were moving but I wasn't.

  How the hell was I supposed to find anything in all this!? If Bim was in here somewhere then why couldn't I see her? It's not like she could have hidden behind anything. If she was here then I should be able to see her on the horizon. There was nothing here, except for me. I was so far out of my depth it wasn't even funny.

  "Bim! It's me, Hiiro!" I screamed into the void.

  There wasn't even an echo.

  How the hell was I going to find Bim if she wasn't here?! Was there even anywhere in here to go? And if I did see her, how would I reach her when I couldn't move? There had to be a way!

  No, there didn't. I could practically see Treu sneering down on me. Unbearable prick or not, he was the expert. He knew things I couldn't even imagine. Sometimes there was no way out. Sometimes

  you just died, alone and helpless. Sometimes, you were only delaying the inevitable and it really was pointless. I slumped down as the revelation hit me.

  No! It couldn't end like this!

  "BIM!!! Where are you!?" I screamed into the void.

  The void didn't have the courtesy to scream back.

  I ran full tilt, going nowhere fast for minutes on end. There was nowhere to go. There was only Nothing.

  Not like this, anything but this! I had to save Bim. I leaned further into my stride but it made no difference. I couldn't even tell if I was pointed the same way I'd started. Running wouldn't solve anything. I sat down, surprised I could do that much in this empty void. I should have been sucking wind, a sopping mess on the verge of collapse, but I wasn't even sweating.

  Maybe I had died. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I wasn't dead just yet. All I had to do was wait a few days to starve and I'd know the answer for sure then. Bim didn't have days for me to rescue her, I had to keep going! Assuming time still worked like it was supposed to here. Assuming I'd know when I should be getting thirsty or sleepy or hungry. I didn't feel any of those right now and try though I might, I couldn't recall if I'd been thirsty back in the plaza before everything had gone to hell.

  I should probably get up, but I didn't see much point. It's not like I could keep moving. That put me at something of a loss, like all I knew how to do was keep moving forward and without that… That was life, wasn't it? I was always trying to put something behind me while chasing something just up ahead without ever catching it. Now that seemed so mundane, so ridiculously futile, but I guess life was too.

  I knew I still had to find Bim. I had to do whatever I could to help her; it's just that there wasn't a lot I could do right now. I tried to lie down and sprawl about, but without a floor I just found myself standing again, now with vertigo. I sat back down and scratched my head. I couldn't move on, so thinking my way out of this was basically my first and last resort— which meant I was royally screwed.

  I shouldn't be sitting here wallowing in pity and thinking about myself like this. It didn't matter if I was dead or not, Bim needed me! If I couldn't save her than Treu would… well I didn't really know what he'd do, but it'd be bad. I mentally kicked myself over and over again. Get up you lazy bastard! Figure it out! Save Bim!

  Instead, I just sat there in all the Nothing and thought.

  All our time together and I still barely knew anything about Bim. I should have focused more on her. Shouldn't have been so stubborn, so awkward, so damned weak! I should have told her I loved her sooner. Maybe if I had, things wouldn't have ended up like this. Maybe then I wouldn't be dead or dying or alone. It was selfish, but I thought it wouldn't have been so bad if Bim was in this void by my side. No one should have to die alone.

  Something brushed against my skin.

  I would have jumped right out of my bones if I could actually move— I still flinched but it just wasn't the same. I looked everywhere and there was nothing, right where I'd left it. But I knew something had been near me. I swatted my good hand around, feeling for invisible cobwebs. Nothing, no surprise there. I scratched my brain and really put it to work feeling like it was the first time I'd done so in a long while.

  Something I could feel but I couldn't see it or touch it… Magic?

  I reached for my inner flames and let them run amok over my skin. I scanned over every inch I could. There was something here, I knew it, but the flames gave me no answers. Princess might have seen something I didn't. Bim could have figured it out. Hell, I'd take Treu right now if it meant getting a second opinion from someone who actually knew how all this magic crap worked.

  But me? I wasn't some all-knowing wizard. I called the flames and they answered. I felt the heat and drank it in. When I wanted something spooky done, I threw fire at the problem and let it do its own thing. I didn't have the slightest how any of it actually worked. I was never really controlling it, more like steering it to the right ends.

  I could try burning my way out of this place. No, that was stupid. This place was empty for one thing and even if I could burn literal nothing, there was a good chance it'd take way more energy than I had to spare. I could always kill myself trying as a last resort if I got desperate enough, but I wasn't there yet. Assuming I wasn't already dead. Assuming I even could kill myself in here. Still… I felt like there was something to the idea. Me, fire and nothing, it was like the start of the worst joke in history.

  I lobbed another idle fireball into the distance, watching it intently. It was hard to tell how far it went but it burned for a good thirty seconds before snuffing out. I hadn't played with random fireballs before, I didn't know if that was better or worse than what I could do normally. I pieced it together as best I could.

  I was in a void but there was air I could breathe. It wasn't much but that was more than nothing. Could I use the air as kindling? Weren't there bombs that used air as fuel? Princess would know, half the mercs probably knew the answer but I could only guess. Fuel-air bombs sounded like something I'd heard before. If I burned up all the air I needed to breathe, what would happen then? A minute, maybe two, to die knowing I was a damned stupid fool. Assuming I didn't kill myself before then.

  Damn it all! I wasn't a planning sort of guy. Most my thinking was done on instinct, I was all guts and spine. How did Leeroy do it? I could think of a dozen people smarter than me. Not that that did me any good since I was the only one here! How the hell was I supposed to do anything in this place?

  "Dammit!" I snarled in feral rage.

  The void didn't reply. I don't know why but that pissed me off. I felt the killing heat surge up inside me, begging to be cut loose. All I had to do was surrender to the chaos boiling up inside of me. If I would just accept my fate, the flames would send me to oblivion and that would be that.

  I teetered on a knife's edge while my blood boiled. Solitude on one side, Oblivion the other. No way back, nothing but hope for a way forward. I didn't know what to do! Was there even anything I could do or was I already too late?

  "Why am I always too weak to protect anyone? Bim… Just once, I wanted to save you."

  Something brushed against my skin, like the push of a magnet or something with a static charge passing nearby. I didn't try to grab it this time. Didn't fight it.

  "Is that some part of you, Bim?"

  The electric sensation didn't dissipate. I let it do its own thing; my silent companion as I ruminated on the brink in this stygian void. All the while, the killing heat within built to its fateful terminus.

  "I hope it is you Bim. I'd feel like a real jackass if I was pouring my heart out for some other girl." I mused with a solemn dry chuckle. "I'm sorry, Bim. Just once, just once I wanted to be the one to save you. You deserve that much. I guess I wasn't man enough to pull it off though. I wish I was as strong as you are, brains, confidence, magic. You're brave enough to jump into the unknown every time without regrets but me, I've spent my whole life looking back. If you were here, I know you'd have figured out a dozen different ways to bust out of here so you could come rescue me like you always do. But not this time, eh? Some battles you just have to go it alone."

  My entire arm was engulfed in the magnetic tingling by now. I pictured Bim holding my hand and the thought made my heart weep. I steeled my voice. I was man enough for that at least.

  "I don't want you trapped in here too, but damn it if I don't wish you were actually holding my hand. Why couldn't you just let me love you, Bim? Even if we're different, even if you could never love me back, is it really so bad to have someone out there who cares about you? It would have killed me to do it, but I always knew you were too good for me, I would have let you go. I know you couldn't stick around forever. You had to go back to whatever that 'next life' is sooner or later. If you didn't, how would we meet up on the other side?"

  I gave the phantom hand at my side a gentle squeeze. In my mind, Bim squeezed my hand back. The thought gave me a little strength, small comfort though it was. I closed my eyes to keep the tears from falling even though there was no one around to see. When all else fails, a man still has his pride.

  "I'm sorry Bim. This is all my fault. If I'd never left Intatenrup chasing you, you wouldn't be falling apart right now. I can't imagine what kind of Hell your going through because of me. Because I'm just a stupid fragile weak human. I know there's no way I can stop Treu or this stupid Nothing. Maybe I'm just a damned fool thinking impossible thoughts— for playing at being your hero. I know I'll probably get myself killed trying to make a difference, but I'm still going to try. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Even if I do die, well, at least I'll see you on the other side. Maybe I'm just an idiot but I'm the idiot that fell in love with you Bim. I guess I'll be seeing you soon then."

  I rose to make my pointless final stand, but the hand interlocked with mine tugged insistently. I opened my eyes and through a mist of tears, she was there.

  Only… this wasn't Bim. I could have been looking at Bim's younger sister, her features less defined and still filling out. This familiar stranger was no more my Bim than the burnt copies I'd passed were the real me, but she had her eyes and I saw a spark of her in there.

  "Bim?" I croaked in a hoarse whisper. "I don't-"

  "Yes/No. Kind of? No time." She spat, words flying in a blaze. "No time at all! I'm just a copy of a copy so far down the line I'm practically human. Hiiro! I love you, She loves you! She loves you so much it's literally killing her. B?????u???n????e????? is killing her/me."

  Bim's younger clone winced, clutching at her head as pain racked her mind.

  "Tell me what to do!" I commanded. The young clone stared at me, confused. "How do I save Bim!"

  "You don't." She said with absolute certainty. "There is no saving her. I'm a dead woman walking on borrowed time, but since I'm going to die anyway I wanted you to know. You helped me experience things I'd never know without you. You will be a part of me until the very end. These final minutes together mean more to me than I could ever express. This was always the cost, moments with you or eternity without. I tried to find another way, to fight fate but you and I are inevitable and I will always chose you. I don't regret my choice, not for a single doomed instant. I love you, Hiiro."

  "I love you too, Bim."

  There was so much I wanted to say, so many things she needed to know. Bim's face was convulsing in agony but her eyes held mine and I knew she felt the same. There was no time left for us to find the words we needed. There was no time left to do anything but hold each other and wait for annihilation.

  I wrapped her in my arms wishing there was something else I could do. She was so small right now. Bim had always been taller than me before. I buried her deeper and deeper in my arms, desperate to shield her from what we both knew was coming. It was a noble gesture but I wasn't a hero, I was only human. If love was enough to save her, Bim would have lived forever, but that was a fool's impossible dream.

  The end was coming.

  I'd charged into Hell in her name and all it got me was a few more seconds to hold her in my arms. I cherished each and every one, dreading that the next would also be the last. I couldn't let myself be afraid, couldn't bring myself to think about what would happen after. There was only the woman I loved in my arms for one tragically beautiful moment after then next. The sands of time slipping away from my desperate reaching fingers.

  I tried not to think at all, to simply be present in our final moments, I was reminded of holding Zoe-Esther as she'd died in my arms with a confession on her lips. Was this all I'd ever be? The man who let one woman after another slip through my fingers because I was too weak to save them. Zoe, Sophia, Shenhua, the girl I'd strangled, those shipwrecked survivors I'd ate to save my own sorry skin all those years ago. If I lost Bim too, I'd never be able to live with myself.

  "No! It can't end like this. I refuse! Bim, you're the smartest woman I know but you're wrong. You have to be! There has to be a way I can save you!"

  "I wish there were, Hiiro. There's no time left. B?????u???n????e????? knows I'm here."

  As soon as she'd spoke that abhorrent name I could feel Its attention trawling over us. I felt myself being crushed under Its scrutiny, an entire ocean of persecution bearing down on my very being. My mind was driven out of my body under it's weight. I was a ghost staring down at myself vainly shielding Bim's clone.

  The void around me looked nothing like it had to my normal senses. This place was like a massive archive of thoughts and impressions all being scanned and sorted and filed by a thing like a cube with fifty-four blank faces. The many-faced Archivist was ripping open Bim's mind, tearing out dozens of moments simultaneously for review. I saw them too, an hapless witness be chance proximity. Only I wasn't just seeing Bim's memories I was living them, all of them all at once just as the Archivist was.

  Some It accepted without incident: scribing in a blue grimiore, appreciating the historic significance of a painting, wondering at the molecules that composed the scent of a flower. Most memories weren't so cut and dried. Treu mutilating Bim in the seconds after she'd realized his betrayal. The numbing poverty of the mind that came with being severed from her native plane and the portents of doom that came upon reuniting with it. Months of tactile abrasion from existing in a dimension so geometrically mundane. Crushing isolation. Physical anguish. Mental duress. Weeks of hardships assailed me in a single second, compounding into a cataclysmic turmoil that should have killed me as the Archivist sifted through days and weeks and months all at once.

  It would have shattered me if not for a single beacon in all that churning storm. Me. The Hiiro that Bim had been drawn across dimensions and between stars to meet. In all this unknown chaos and suffering I was some small measure of certainty propping her up each time she stumbled. Hundreds of moments together were pulled to the fore, though it wasn't all bliss and easy breathing.

  I was the only good thing that hadn't been taken from Bim yet. It soured every tender look, every gentle caress, every brief reprieve that wasn't abject misery to her had that dark cloud looming over the horizon. Because I was a mortal man.

  I lived entire weeks of Bim's life in those instants looking through her eyes, knowing her thoughts and experiencing the world in that curious, inhuman way she did. She was everything I'd thought she was and so much more. She was a crippled goddess in a strange plane so utterly alien in its geometric mundanity. She'd been tortured, deceived, violated and she had learned how miserably powerless being human really was; she'd also come to know about companionship, small moments of happiness made all the brighter by dark contrast and above all else she'd discovered the sublime bliss of love, and every single second of every day she'd lived in terror of having that used against her. Of having me taken away.

  The Archivist couldn't parse the bad from the good. It couldn't tear the hope Bim had felt for a future with me from the fear of losing me one day. Couldn't rend the pleasure of her body against mine from the abrasion of a coarse, euclidean existence. The Archivist didn't want these vile sensations tainting its pool of knowledge. It cast these memories aside seeking uncorrupted samples, understanding spared from the tainted blight of such blasphemous sensations yet it was impossible! Life was sweet and sour all at once without any clean lines to distinguish the two and to a being like the Archivist that was unacceptable.

  The Archivist reached its verdict. The vessel calling itself Bim was beyond reclamation, entirely unfit for reassimilation. Such corruption was only fit for extermination lest its cancer spread unchecked.

  Suddenly I was falling! In a blink, I was returned to the void of Nothing, back in my own body again. Bim's clone still wearing a brave face for me as she trembled in my arms. There was no point, I'd seen enough to know it was a front but a woman has her pride. She was supposed to be an immortal demigod yet her death was barreling down on us. The end was coming for every last shred of her being.

  "Hiiro," she said voice quivering. "You can't die here. You have to save yourself."

  "No!"

  "Yes! You have to live for me. If B?????u???n????e????? annihilates you here you'll-"

  "I'll have the same fate as you, Bim. I wouldn't have it any other way. You and Me. Always and Eternally."

  We weren't alone anymore. The Archivist was here too, filling the void on all sides at once. The blank-faced cube was gone, replaced by a crisscross cage of undulating watery eyes connected by a matrix of teeth the maddening color of learning and destruction and devouring. It was the mirror image the living cancer from my nightmares, an interconnected lattice that formed shapes I didn't even know the names of while thousands of eyes glared down on us.

  "Just once I wanted to be the one to save you Bim." I whispered breaking from our embrace, a raging inferno alight in and all over my body.

  "I know. Hirro. Just save yourself, that'll be enough."

  "No!!!" I growled, opening myself to the killing heat. "Both of us or neither of us. I will never abandon you Bim and like Hell is anyone or anything ever going to take you from me."

  I'd never truly controlled the flames before. Fire had never been mankind's slave. Ever since the beginning, we'd had an uneasy partnership. Fire demanded respect, discipline and fuel. In turn, it was humanity's greatest ally though ever a volatile one. We never dominated it, we were just steering it to the right ends. I was going to save the woman I loved, no matter what.

  The Archivist attacked in a constricting prison of gnashing teeth, and an explosion of flame raced out to meet it. The very air ignited as fuel for a detonation that would have killed a planet. The void became a star in fusion, incinerating the Archivist's bared fangs and flash-boiling its eyes.

  It howled beyond anguish. It had known of pain without ever experiencing it. I set to task educating this immortal creature. Everything was burning, consumed in the inferno. Even my unnatural flame-retardance wasn't enough to keep my skin from igniting like wax, yet the burning torment seemed removed and far off.

  The air was spent, I couldn't breathe the poison atmosphere I'd created! I and I alone was drowning in toxic soupy miasma. I needed more heat! Minutes at best, seconds at least. There was nothing left to burn!

  The Archivist reformed, compacting in on itself, altering its composition and presenting less surface area for me to blast. It had already learned! There was no way I could outsmart a creature like that. All I could do was fight in a poisoned void with nothing to burn. Nothing between It and Bim except for me.

  That was it!

  I spared a glance at Bim, so small in my shadow. There was so much I wanted to say. I recalled her words that had forever changed my life. I'd seen inside of her head and at that moment I'd have given anything if it meant she could do the same. I didn't want my final actions to get lost in translation.

  I saw it in her eyes, those perfect golden windows into another life. She understood, and that would have to be enough. In her light I would burn eternally.

  The reformed Archivist launched its next barrage of teeth now aimed at me instead of Bim. I was a threat, the bringer of Pain. Hundreds of needle-sharp teeth lanced into me. A fresh hell of icy agony stabbed into me everywhere at once.

  Shock obliterated all thought in an omnipresent flood. I was already dead, my brain just couldn't process it. Instinct took over and my spine gave my final command. All that I was, all that I am and all that I ever would be, became fuel for the galaxy's biggest pyre.

  My soul went supernova in a blinding final flash.