A certain being drifted through an abyss that was incalculably dark and utterly devoid of any and all things save for itself. There was no direction, no walls nor ceiling or floor, just an infinitely expansive void of pitch black in all directions. The entity had been there for what felt like an eternity, yet at the same time it could tell neither if it had actually been mere moments after it had awoken in this void or if it had been there for years beyond counting.

Time and space had no meaning here. What good was time in a place where such concepts were a second could be a year and a year could be a second? What good was space in a realm where a single step could take you thousands of light years away while trying to travel said distance intentionally might only let you travel an inch despite exerting all the force needed for the prior distance?

Thus, the entity stood still, waiting for something to happen. Every so often it would feel a kind of pull, but not in any one of the three main dimensions. The pull would come from some direction that did not exist in the world it once resided in, and therefore the entity could not fully fathom which way it was being occasionally pulled towards. And yet, despite how foreign the sensation felt, the entity did not mind it at all. It was akin to an abstract sense of longing mixed with a bizarre feeling of nostalgia, something both completely alien and yet remarkably familiar.

But even when the tug came at its strongest, there was nothing that the being within the void could do about it. Aside from trying to remember what it was and where it had come from, there was not much that the entity could do in this place. There were no forms of entertainment here, just infinite nothingness and the occasional non-three-dimensional tugging at its form.

The entity was paradoxically both slowly and quickly losing its sense of self, and it wouldn’t be long before it simply ceased to exist as anything but a mindless, empty husk floating through a sea of blackness. The tides were against it, and every moment was one where it lost a bit more of itself to the vast oblivion that surrounded itself.

This was not the oblivion that one of those that the entity had faced condemned his victims to; no, this was something different. It was a void, yet it was not a void. Perhaps calling it a void was not fully correct, then? The place was a paradox crazy enough that it was fit to be a prison, yet the entity felt that it could leave this place very soon. All it needed to do was desperately hold on to the last glimmer of who and what it once was, and then, if luck was on its side, it would be able to get out of this black, infinitely expansive box and go…

Go where? Do what? It could not really remember what it was supposed to do and where it was supposed to go. Even its own name seemed to be ephemeral, like a word on the tip of one’s tongue that you could remember that you knew but also could not speak. Every moment that passed brought more of these issues, and the entity would have been more worried, but it could not really even feel anything in this place, as though even its feelings and emotions were being drained away from it by this dark realm.

Perhaps it would be easier to simply give in and rest eternal in the void. Maybe it should just throw in the towel and accept that it had no chance of escaping, let alone doing so with any of its own identity intact…

Yes, that would be acceptable. Just close your eyes and-.

“You are supposed to be the main character of this story, dear Kain. Why then do you want to cease to be? I thought you were supposed to be the strongest, most indomitable being on Mortis, yet here you are just giving in and letting the absence of everything take you like a lamb to the slaughter.”

The entity, Kain, opened his eyes in the void as memories came flooding back to him. He turned in the abyss and saw the grand trickster and utter anomaly that had put him in this place by his own volition standing there, leaning up against a streetlight with a newspaper in his(?) hands. How there was a lit streetlight or a newspaper here in Kain’s prison of the mind was not something Kain wanted to know, but the anomalous weirdo from beyond the universe was there nonetheless. Yes, Lord Wolfenstein, the living(?) Deus ex Machina with a penchant for being a living(?) meme was there inside the abyss within Kain’s mind alongside Kain himself.

“Not going to say, ‘thank you’ to me for snapping you out of that state for the, what, thirty-sixth time in the past two months?”

Kain tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth.

“Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. I guess it does not matter if you can’t reply, because we’ve had this discussion before. I estimate you’ll go through this entropic loop another ten or so times before your body has fully acclimatized to the limits that we both agreed had to be placed upon you.”

Lord Wolfenstein turned the page of his(?) newspaper and then shot a glance at Kain, who was still trying to say something, anything in order to ask when he would be free of this place.

“Ah, don’t worry. Your treatment is actually going quite a lot better than anyone could have hoped. It probably has something to do with the fact that Lizard Lips has effectively turned the entire former realm of Ititlis into a perpetually cursed realm of the dead and undead combined with how you are still seated on and in that flying city, but who really knows? After all, that flying city was supposed to channel power to and from the owner of itself, and you did fully transform it before you went to bed.”

Kain tried to close the distance, only to find himself even further away than before. Lord Wolfenstein folded up his(?) paper and opened a door that Kain had somehow not noticed before.

“Anyways, I’ve got quite a lot of things to do in order to prepare for what is to come. As for how long it will take before you arise from your deepest dream? Well, my guess is another few weeks after this chapter gets scheduled and maybe a week or two after this chapter is written. But who knows whether or not the idiots doing late night road work will stop blocking off sections of the road that they aren’t actually working on or not? Not me, that’s for sure!”

Kain tried to ask what LW meant by that, but before he could do so he realized that he was once again left alone in the infinite nothingness around him. He did not know how many times that LW had pulled him from the brink before, but based on what LW had said Kain really had only one thing to say in this situation despite the fact that he could not speak.

“Aw, shit. Here we go again.”