I grit my teeth and tried to push on, every step accompanied by blistering agony. My body was tearing itself apart, the human parts fighting with the slyk parts for supremacy where there had been harmony. The creator was trying to claim me for itself. The oil it had made might have been formed from the memories and bodies of long-dead Celaura, but the creator was what formed from that oil.

My elbow popped, and I felt my forearm dangle uselessly. I almost vomited from the sound alone, but there was a surprising lack of pain. It was almost a relief to no longer feel that part of my body. Realization hit me like a truck. If I was having this much trouble…

“Mortician!” I screamed over the sounds gnashing in my head. Jun whipped to look at me, her body heaving with every painful breath, but if she said anything, it didn’t make it through. “Do you feel it too?”

A heaving sob broke the noise. Like a gunshot at a parade, all of my mind seemed to go quiet for the shortest second. I looked back to see Okeria leaning over Mortician, looking around in a frenzy as he summoned and dismissed countless metal contraptions. Mortician wasn’t moving. Their arms were hugged tightly around their stomach, screaming and sobbing in the truest pain I’d ever heard or felt. The creator was tearing them apart. Reclaiming all the work we’d done.

Something in me screamed in pain. My joints popped all at once, threatening to leave me limp and useless on the ground. But this was me now. I needed to think of this as my body, not a modification to it. The oil was me. I was the oil. The pain flared ten times over as my steps faltered, but before the sled could catch up to me, something clicked.

This wasn’t a little struggle. The creator wanted Mortician. It didn’t give two shits about Jun, Okeria, Keratily, or even me. It didn’t want to let go of the power and memories Mortician possessed. Just because they couldn’t access them right now, it didn’t mean they didn’t have the strength of all the slyk titans and even a dead Celaura god inside of them. They didn’t have access to any of it. But I had access to them. I was the Envoy who brought them into the fold. That had to mean something.

The oil in my body froze like ice. No pain. No feeling. I turned to look at the creator, summoning that feeling of being a conduit between Mortician and The End that had come when I’d first met them. It was a borrowed power that, the moment I touched it, I knew wouldn’t follow me outside this hazard. Mortician’s connection to the physical bodies of the slyk titans would sever the second we left. The creator wouldn’t have a hold on us. But we wouldn’t have a hold on it, either.

“Sebastian?” Mortician weakly murmured, their armor broken and flowing off of them like slag from a crucible. I couldn’t bring myself to look at their face, knowing the pain and confusion I would see in it. “What did you do?”

“Something I’m not sure will work.” I whispered, my words cutting through the air like shards of broken glass. Okeria and Jun both tensed up, turning to me with their attention completely enraptured. “Mortician. I need your permission.”

Mortician sputtered, turning to look at the looming death that suddenly felt… far away in my mind. Like I was looking across a completely impossible distance and seeing it perfectly. “Our permission for what?”

“For your everything.” I replied. I saw the shudder run through their body, and I felt my stomach sink at the fear I was instilling in them. “Please don’t hate me. I just need us to survive.”

“This… this isn’t hatred.” Mortician whispered. “This is the person we felt draw us from the depths of nonexistence. The person we trusted with every single mote of our being. With every single precious memory; every single hatred we hold within us. You are the only reason we exist.”

They took a deep breath, and only then did I look down. To see a young gold-tinged face with hair the colour of spun gold. They had the eyes of Jun’s people. Their flesh wasn’t oily at all. Mortician was the last Celaura, brought to life from a mixture of The End’s power and the creator’s oil. And in that face, I saw only love and appreciation.

“You gave us everything. We will repay in kind.”

//NO.

I stepped forward. My words carried the weight of all that had been forgotten. Of the being cursed to remember them forever. But… no. It didn’t see that remembrance as a curse. It cherished every single soul that had been forgotten by all. It alone knew how many people died back on Earth. It remembered our culture, our highs, our lows. Our precious memories. Our shameful hatreds.

//THERE IS NOTHING TO REPAY.

I felt the weight of the countless Celaura souls locked inside of Mortician. They were not struggling. They were happy to finally have a real end, a real rest. Somewhere to be remembered. Someone to remember them. But there were a select few souls in there who weren’t going to go quietly. I’d spoken with one of them already. I raised a hand, feeling the hazard coil around my fingers like putty. The creator was a manifestation of nothing. The hazard was built around the end of the Celaura. There was nothing but empty oil and dusty stone here any more.

//RETURN FOR A MOMENT, PLEASE.

//THEN YOU CAN REST FOR A WHILE.

The hazard trembled. I felt something breath gently next to my ear. Mortician looked up at me with absolute awe and admiration, and I couldn’t help but feel I needed to fulfill them. I skimmed through all the names written within Mortician’s existence, the billions of names taken and used to rebuild something that didn’t remember them. One shone a black-tinged gold. Another gleamed a brilliant rainbow. A third was the colour of cosmic ice, so black and cold that I could barely stand to glimpse at it. And a fourth crackled like captured lightning. There were two more, but one of them was currently active, and the sixth I couldn’t comprehend in the slightest. That had to be the fourteenth god.

They were all Mortician. None had rejected the coalescence. Amidst the miasma of names, only six were Mortician Slyk.

//THERE IS ANOTHER HAZARD, EXISTING IN HARMONY WITH THIS ONE.

//I’M GOING TO CHANGE THAT.

I opened my interface and swiped over to my core screen, then thrust my hand into the oily, petal-y blue and white whirlpool. The creator didn’t control the hazard. It was a product of it. But nothing was truly in control of the hazard itself. Which meant it was ripe for… consumption. A warning met my action, and it spoke using my voice.

//WARNING; NO POTENTIAL WILL BE GAINED FROM CONSUMING THE BARRIER BETWEEN (DREDGED SWITCHPORT) AND (THE OILSEA). CONTINUE ANYWAY?

“Oh, that’s going to do some damage.” Mortician laughed, then covered their mouth with their hands. “Um… we’ve been trying to suppress those thoughts…”

“Well, don’t.” Jun chuckled. “Be yourself, Mortician. We’ve seen how bad an influence Seb’s been on you, but we still love him anyway. So don’t worry about us hating you.”

{Yeah. If they don’t hate me, there’s no way they’ll hate ya.} Okeria chimed in as the world unraveled around us. {Look at Sebastian there; he’s pulling two hazards together ta make sure ya get out of here whole and healthy.}

I felt a smile tugging at my lips even as my core drew away all the potential I’d stored up. It wasn’t going quite as I’d expected, but as I watched my core do its work, I finally realized what was happening. The End was working through me. Mortician had given me permission to work with the oilsea and the dredged switchport. The sky blackened, a curtain of flowing night falling over everything.

//MATERIALS ABSORBED.

//CORRUPTION INITIATED: DREDGED SWITCHPORT AND OILSEA CONSUMED TO CREATE A NEW HAZARD.

//STAURA PERMISSION REVOKED. CELAURA PERMISSION INITIATED: NO GROUPS WITHOUT A CELAURA WILL BE ALLOWED WITHIN THIS HAZARD IN THE FUTURE. CURRENT INHABITANTS WILL NOT BE REMOVED.

//HAZARD RATING RECALCULATION INITIATED.

//WORKING… WORKING… WORKING… COMPLETE.

//CORRUPTION COMPLETE.

//OIL-SOAKED SOTR CREATED.

//HAZARD RATING SET TO 22.

//HAZARD CEILING SET TO ???.

I stared at the creator, now just a few feet away from us, with the hope that it would disappear completely in the corruption process. The oilsea overlaid on top of us in an instant, coating everything in an oily sheen that somehow let us see through it, but the creator was very much still there. Buildings and monuments appeared out of the ruins around us, still very much in disrepair but not reduced to rubble as they had been. I took a deep breath and tried to muster The End’s power again, but it was completely gone. I’d destroyed my connection to this place by corrupting it.

But that had been enough. Because something else came with the oilsea.

I felt a spectral breeze brush past my shoulder, and a glimmer of gold dust went along with it. It rushed for the creator, and just before it slammed into us, the sky was filled with slyk. One slyk. One slyk that had returned to its body for one last time to let us make our escape.

“Skies above…” Jun murmured, her head locked on the monstrous form of the stingray above us. “It’s–”

Before she could say anything, the ground erupted in oil and stones. The creator shrieked in pain as the stingprey’s titanic tail slammed down on it, shoving it down into the ground with indomitable insistence. Then came the rest of the slyk. In what was so much faster than anything that huge had a right being, the stingprey lowered itself down and wrapped its limbs around the creator. The thing’s oil solidified as the stingprey dug in, giving it something to hold on to as it ripped the creator limb from limb.

I could barely take in the scene of absurd violence. Chunks of oil flew this way and that as the currents from the stingprey just moving threatened to throw me off my feet. Claws slammed into the ground, kicking up stones that floated in thin air–well, then oil–before they were whipped away to distant lands. I’d expected the fight to be one-sided, but I hadn’t expected it to be this… visceral. The creator screamed, legs helplessly scraping against the stingprey’s much harder carapace, and then silence.

I gulped as the creator’s ‘head’ floated lazily through the oil, carried on a much stiller current now that the stingprey was still. Lines of prismatic electricity shot out of the thing, grasping like tentacles for something; anything to hold on to. Yet it couldn’t touch the oil around us. It might have had jurisdiction over the oil in the switchport, and even the oilsea, but this new hazard belonged only to the long-dead Celaura.

A collective silence passed over our group as the stingprey lifted its tail, revealing a mile long gash in the ground that was at least as deep as it was long. Its oil glowed with a golden tinge, the same one that Mortician’s armor did, and I could feel it looking at us as it rose up and up until it was only the size of a mountain in the sky.

“I… I think we’re done.” I managed to say, all of the confidence that had come with The End’s authority gone with the birth of this new hazard. Gold streaked away from the stingprey, over my shoulder, and back to Mortician. “Where’s the exit, Okeria?”

{...A mile that way.} Okeria said with a weak gesture in the direction we’d been running. {Sebastian… that thing… I’ve…}

Jun cut Okeria off with a shaky laugh. “Seb told us about it, but I thought he might’ve been… I don’t know… exaggerating?”

“No exaggeration needed.” I said solemnly, watching the drifting titan make it’s merry way to wherever the fuck it wanted to go. “If Mortician can ever get that strong, we’ll be unstoppable.”

“All of us.” Mortician agreed with a nod. “Nothing will stop us.”