Nug stared at Reven with those too-large eyes, his mouth still stretched impossibly wide. When he spoke, his voice came from that void inside him, echoing as if from a great distance.

  "You must have suffered so much, my incompetent child."

  Reven's mind struggled to process the words. "Your... child?"

  "You, Reven." Nug's smile somehow widened further. "My child. My chosen. You've suffered terribly, haven't you? All because you're too kind for your own good."

  Reven's hands were shaking. "I don't understand."

  "Of course you don't." Nug reached out and patted Reven's head like a parent consoling a confused child. "You don't even realize how weak kindness makes you. You carry guilt that isn't yours to carry. You blame yourself for failures that were inevitable from the start."

  "I killed them," Reven whispered. "Twenty-eight people. I tried to heal them and they—"

  "You tried to cure people with a blessing of rot and sickness." Nug laughed, and the sound was like children giggling at a funeral. "What a moron. Tell me, if someone gave you a torch and told you to water a garden, would you blame yourself when the plants burned?"

  "That's different. I was supposed to—"

  "Supposed to what? Heal?" Nug's fingers pressed into Reven's scalp, neither gentle nor rough, just there. "I didn't give you a blessing of healing, child. I gave you rot. Decay. The breaking down of flesh into its component parts. And you tried to cure people with it."

  Reven felt his chest tightening, his breath coming in short gasps. "But Morvexis—"

  "Morvexis is not one being, you fool." Nug tilted his head, studying Reven like an interesting specimen. "Morvexis is two. Yeb and Nug. The Twin Blasphemies. Together, we are your god. Separate, we are destruction and creation, rot and growth, death and life."

  "Two gods?"

  "The plague law contains both symbols, you see. Destruction and healing. Two halves of a whole. Plague makes people die, yes, but plague also makes them stronger. Survivors gain immunity. Bodies learn to fight. Death teaches life how to persist."

  Reven's voice came out small, broken. "Then why can't I heal anyone?"

  "Because you only got half the blessing." Nug's voice carried something that might have been amusement. "You were chosen by me. Just me. Nug, the half that breaks and rots and destroys. I wanted to see what would happen if I gave my blessing to the weakest, kindest human I could find."

  "What?"

  "You were perfect." Nug's smile was almost fond now. "So earnest. So desperate to help people. So convinced you could save everyone. I gave you the blessing of destruction and rot, and I watched to see how much you would suffer trying to use it to heal."

  The casual cruelty of it made Reven's stomach turn. "You... you did this on purpose?"

  "Of course I did." Nug laughed again. "It's been the most entertaining thing I've witnessed in centuries. Watching you fail over and over. Watching you blame yourself. Watching you break a little more each time. Delicious."

  "You're a monster."

  "I'm a god." Nug's hand moved to cup Reven's face, forcing him to meet those too-large eyes. "And you're my chosen. My child. My toy."

  "Why?" Reven's voice cracked. "Why would you do this?"

  "For amusement." Nug said it simply, as if it were obvious. "What else would a god do? Now, let me show you the truth. The full truth your church hid from you. The truth your own mind has been deleting every time you got close to understanding it."

  Light blazed from Nug's hand, pouring into Reven's skull like molten gold.

  And the truth began to play.

  When the plague church was declared the lowest of heresies, when the purges had killed most of the priests and scattered the rest, that's when the chosen one emerged.

  Reven Reposo.

  A priest who received the strongest blessing ever recorded. A being with status close to avatar, touched so deeply by divine power that he practically glowed with it.

  He was their last hope.

  But before long, the Pope and the high-ranking bishops discovered something terrible.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Reven couldn't heal people.

  The blessing that was so strong it made him nearly an avatar, the power that should have rebuilt their entire church, was the blessing of destruction.

  Pure. Undiluted. Overwhelming.

  Only Nug's half. Only rot.

  They kept this secret from Reven.

  The plan to rebuild the plague church was scrapped immediately. In its place grew something else. Something born from despair and agony and centuries of persecution.

  They had healed people for generations. They had saved lives, cured diseases, brought hope to the hopeless. And what did they get? Branded as heretics. Hunted. Burned. Their god declared an abomination.

  So they decided to get back at the world.

  They began to develop a plan. A plan to release the biggest bomb humanity had ever seen. The worst plague that humans would ever witness.

  The plague called Reven Reposo.

  They cultivated him carefully. Hid the truth of his purpose. Set strong magical conditions to erase his memory whenever he approached understanding. The memory wipes he experienced after each failed healing? Deliberate. Designed. A spell woven into his very soul to keep him ignorant.

  And the condition that would set off the plague?

  Guilt.

  When his guilt reached its maximum, when he finally broke under the weight of all those deaths, the magic controlling his memory would release. The guilt would consume his mind completely. His sanity would shatter.

  And then the sealing would break.

  The plan was simple. Reven would eventually be captured by the Eternal Sun Church. They would bring him to their headquarters in the capital for public execution. And there, surrounded by thousands of people, in the heart of their enemy's power, Reven would break.

  The plague would release.

  Starting from the capital, it would consume humanity.

  Reven Reposo.

  The Chosen of Nug.

  The Plague of Destruction and Rot.

  A weapon.

  A bomb.

  A final act of revenge from a dying church.

  And Nug, watching from beyond reality, had laughed.

  Reven's mind shattered like glass dropped from a great height.

  All of it. All of it had been a lie.

  His purpose. His mission. His belief that he was helping people.

  He was a weapon. He had always been a weapon. Chosen specifically because he was kind, because he would suffer the most trying to use a destructive blessing to heal.

  The god he'd worshipped had given him this power as a joke.

  The church he'd loved had turned him into a plague bomb.

  Every person he'd tried to heal, every moment of guilt, every failure, all of it had been feeding toward this moment. Building toward his own destruction and the destruction of everyone around him.

  The guilt he'd carried was exactly what they'd wanted him to feel.

  "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

  Reven screamed.

  He screamed until his throat tore, until blood filled his mouth, until the sound became inhuman.

  And in the black woods, Nug smiled with genuine delight.

  "There it is," he whispered. "There's my beautiful plague. Scream for me, child. Show me how much you can suffer."

  In the Library, beneath the impossible stars, Levi watched in horror as every single creature inside the containment cube suddenly stopped moving.

  "What the fuck is going on?" he shouted at nothing. "Did you get cursed by a god or something? Fuck!"

  The hundreds of twisted forms began to move again, but differently now. They weren't attacking the walls anymore. They were moving toward each other, merging, combining.

  Flesh flowed into flesh. Bones fused and reformed. Organs merged into new configurations that shouldn't be possible.

  The mass grew larger. Taller. It rose toward the top of the containment cube, a tower of fungal flesh and screaming mouths and eyes that opened and closed randomly across its surface.

  It looked like something pulled from the deepest pits of cosmic horror. A massive amalgamation of flesh colored deep purple-red, covered in tangled muscle and sinew that moved independently. Multiple screaming faces emerged from its surface, mouths open impossibly wide, teeth like needles. Eyes scattered across its body, some human, some something else entirely, all of them looking in different directions at once.

  At its center, two orbs glowed with unnatural light. One small and blue-green like Earth seen from space. One larger and golden like a dying sun.

  The thing that had been Reven opened all its mouths at once and screamed.

  The sound wasn't just noise. It was pressure. Reality itself seemed to ripple from the force of it.

  Then yellow gas began pouring from every orifice.

  It billowed out in thick clouds, filling the containment cube, pressing against the invisible walls like it was testing them. The color was sickly, the yellow of infection and jaundice and things that should have been cut away.

  "What the fuck is this shit-colored gas?" Levi backed away further, hammer still gripped in his hands. "What is this?"

  The gas continued to pour out, filling the entire cube until the creature inside was barely visible through the yellow haze.

  The walls held. The gas didn't leak through.

  But Levi could see it trying. Could see the way it pressed against the barriers, searching for any weakness, any gap, any microscopic opening to escape through.

  "Reven," Levi muttered, his voice shaking. "Reven, you need to come back. You need to come back right fucking now before I shit myself. Whatever's happening in that book, whatever that thing is showing you, you need to snap out of it. Please."

  Inside the cube, the creature that had been Reven continued to scream and pour out plague-colored gas that pressed against the containment with mindless, endless hunger.

  And in the black woods, in the book, Nug knelt beside Reven's broken form and whispered more truths, feeding on his suffering like a fine wine.