“You’re acting quite high and mighty for somebody who just got beaten up into another dimension,” said Madness with a snarky chuckle.
The Simurgh looked at him expressionlessly. “And you are acting quite inappropriately for somebody who is no longer connected to his domains.”
Madness frowned. “What do you mean? I can still…” He froze. His frown deepened. He began speaking but they were not words that I could understand. He snapped his fingers. Tapped his head. He even began to hum a tune and danced a little jig in the middle of the white void, which confirmed to me that this dude had totally been a little crazy even before he came to this world.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to piece things together. Madness did not respond and the Simurgh ignored me. Based on the context, I decided to check something. I snapped my fingers, expecting to freeze time, but nothing happened. I felt my heart begin to race. “We can’t use our domains?”
The Simurgh scoffed. “Your domains? They were never your domains, they were mine! Of course you cannot use them in this place. This is my home, my Nothingness. You have no power here.”
“But Madness was able to fight you in here when he first came to this world, wasn’t he?” I pointed out.
“The arrival of this outsider was the most unfortunate coincidence that ever happened to this universe,” said the Simurgh with a strange curl of its beak. “While severing my domains—a mistake which I have regretted ever since—this entire universe was sent spiraling through the void and for a brief moment, it overlapped with your world and took in this fool. Somehow, before that moment of overlapping universes was over, this madman took over many of my domains and sent me spiraling into my own physical world. Can you imagine that? A prisoner inside my own false reality! It was like being stuck inside a mirror, and only being able to see your own reflection in the mirror at the same time. If he hadn’t taken over the domain of Madness, I would have been the one driven insane by that sensation!”
I frowned. “Are you saying that Madness came to this world by accident and that he was only able to beat you up by accident as well?”
“Of course!” said the Simurgh, confidently. “Do you think that bumbling idiot over there could defeat me if the stars, no, the universes hadn’t aligned against me! He was able to exist in his own overlapping reality even while using the domains from this world. I could barely use my own abilities at the time. It was a miracle I managed to get out of that battle alive!”
I noted the Simurgh’s words since they suggested it could be killed after all. I had no idea how, but it had to do with domains and being beaten up in the Nothingness. “Wait, if all of that is true. Why were you afraid of Madness getting the book of Annihilation? If he can’t hurt you in this world now that the universes aren’t overlapping, then couldn’t you have let him come here and then beaten him up and taken over his domains?”
The Simurgh blinked. “Of course. Letting a wild boar like him into my sanctuary was unacceptable!”
I narrowed my eyes. “A small price to pay for achieving your desire to reunite all of the domains. No, I don’t buy it. There’s a reason you didn’t want us coming here. You haven’t even attacked us at all. If we were truly helpless in here, you wouldn’t be stalling us with this explanation.”
“You do not know anything, outsider,” said the Simurgh, raising its voice a little.
“It has to be something related to our domains,” I said, scratching my head a little dramatically while keeping an eye on the increasingly nervous Simurgh just in case its reactions gave something away. “You brought me in here back when I didn’t have any domains. You wouldn’t have done that if you had thought I would have been able to threaten you at all. Indeed, you probably could have sent me back to my world at any point, but chose not to do that because you wanted to use me against Madness. But after I took over the domains, you couldn’t risk bringing me here again. But you did. Once I threatened you enough in the physical world, you chose to Annihilate me to send me here. Only, it wasn’t a perfect Annihilation. I still control my domains.” My eyes widened. “That’s it! I can still control my domains!”
The Simurgh’s expression paled, which was a strange sight to see on a bird. Its feathers were standing on edge and it had gotten much closer. “Whatever you are thinking, you better stop or else!”
“Or else what?” I said with a chortle. “If you wanted to strike us down, you would have already done so. But if you tried to use any of your own powers, you would reveal everything. We still control our domains but cannot use them to attack. You were very careful with the way you used your power of Annihilation because you didn’t destroy our bodies at all! We are still there in the other world, all you did was disconnect us from the physical world for a moment! If you truly brought us here, all of our domains would start floating freely again. But that isn’t because of Annihilation. It is because of this space! In the Nothingness, nothing exists! Not the domains, the ability to control them, or even our own separate identities. We have consciousness in here, because that is how we are experiencing the Nothingness, but none of us can claim a domain in here.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You are rambling!” said the Simurgh, quickly.
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“Am I? Or am I pointing out something dangerous but true? You felt safe bringing me here before I controlled a domain, because I would have no idea how to control a domain back then. Even if all of your domains were up for grabs, I would have no idea how to take them for myself. But after I took over the temporal domains, that changed. Now, you couldn’t risk bringing me here. Or at least, you couldn’t risk keeping me here for long. You sent me here so you could take a break and incapacitate my physical body while fighting only Madness. But since you accidentally sent him here too, you had to rush in here before he figured out the true nature of this place and what it would allow him to do!”
The Simurgh’s eyes widened and it turned its gaze away from me. “You—”
“Oh, you finally caught on, huh? Guess that bird brain runs faster than you’d think,” said Madness, being uncharacteristically rude towards his ‘beloved.’ Madness had one of his hands up in front of him with a little book floating over it. “Thanks for the distraction, Cas.”
I smiled. “Any time. Is that it?”
Madness smiled. “Yep! The domain of Annihilation. Perfectly separated and under my control.”
“But I thought the entire point of this place was that you couldn’t claim domains in here?” I said.
“Oh, you can’t claim any domain forever,” said Madness as the book disappeared from over his hand and reappeared over the Simurgh’s head. “See?”
The Simurgh glared at the two of us as the domain of Annihilation vanished above its head. “You insolent outsiders! That does not belong to you!”
“Yeah, well, right now, it doesn’t belong to you either!” said Madness with a chuckle. The book disappeared after he was done. “Oh, well I guess it’s yours now.” The book reappeared. “Nope. Mine!”
The book kept ping-ponging away between the two of them, with both of them narrowing their eyes and keeping their mouths shut as they concentrated on keeping the domain under their control.
“Since you only sent our consciousnesses in here and our bodies are still intact down there, that must mean we will return at any moment now,” I said aloud, not getting a response from either of them. That was okay. I was mostly just trying to distract the Simurgh. “You might not even know how long we will be in here. You were in a lot of pain when you decided to send me here. So now, all you can do, is try to control the domain for as long as possible, so that when we get sent back to the physical world, we don’t take the domain with us. An inelegant solution but I guess there isn’t much else you can do. Like a game of hot potato except you wanna be the one holding it at the end. But you see, my dear bird brained friend. You seem to have forgotten something important.”
The Simurgh glanced over, which made it clear that it hadn’t forgotten about this possibility at all. It was merely helpless to stop me.
I smiled, raised a hand in front of me, and joined their game of hot-potato. “Since the domain seems to stay with each of us for about the same amount of time, the two of us together are more likely to end up with it than you on your own. A little bit of math, not even worth mentioning, except for the chance that it might scare you into doing something dangerous. Just in case you had a trump card you hadn’t shown yet. Hmm. No? Nothing? Well that’s a bit of a let down. Can’t believe that this is the way this story is about to end. Ah well. All’s well that end’s well.”
The book of Annihilation landed on my hand. I blinked. My stomach lurched. I felt an overwhelming wave of nausea overcoming my head.
I opened my eyes. I was lying down in the middle of a crater, staring up at the gloomy night sky with no moon or red star in sight.