"I worry for him, you know. I worry he's not quite who he once was."
The pain was excruciating. He could feel each and every cell, separate from each other, most destroyed. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure if there was a cell left or if he was feeling the pain that accompanied Nothingness; it was often hard to tell the difference. In one of his cells, he willed himself to regenerate, and cells began coming into existence. They did not replicate, for this would imply that there was some sort of biological process involved. It was the magic that he had invented, and promptly, out of greed, destroyed, that built him from nothing, or perhaps very little, into something more.
The Immortal Wolf flexed his paw; it was the only body part he could feel. He suspected it was currently his only body part, but that was up in the air. She - ‘No! - he knew, from many ages of experience, that his constituent parts very much required their central nervous system to be reconstructed. Really, this was always a mystery to him. If he could think and feel without a brain and without a soul, then why did he need his nervous system to control his body? There was more to the Cruel Magic that permeated his entire being and twisted him into his current, truly immortal form, but he knew nothing of it. He suspected he may have still had a soul. Then again, beings with souls died. When he died - if it was death; perhaps he was equivocating in implying that death and his oft-rediscovered state of nothingness were the same or similar at all - he experienced Nothingness. Oblivion.
He would give anything to be able to experience Something after death. Nirvana; Heaven; Hell, even, or some sort of reincarnation in the form of Samsara. Every time he came back from Nothing, a part of him died. He could feel it. His soul had not existed for a long, long time, not since he had gone from Fraezen, World-Soul of She-Who-Ruled and son of the Eldest Daughter, to Gilgamesh the Archmage, to the Wolf, renowned as he was across the inner circles concerning defence across Aezilan. He had toyed with the idea that, perhaps, his soul was simply buried under the suffocating Nothingness that stalked him even after reconstruction, clouding it from the vision of magic and technology alike, but such an idea was optimistic. Mortals could be optimistic, have hope in their temporary lives. The Wolf was not allowed such luxury as hope.
Through a million lifetimes, the Wolf had experienced it all. Spitting upon the ground on which the primordial ooze gurgled away, betraying his own mother, The Eldest Daughter. At some point, he had led a cult that worshipped him. A fledgling separatist movement, and then a nation. When the Deerfolk began their colonisation of all that was Aezilan, he had been there, even taking part as a different being.He had been there when the Deerfolk became the Once Great Deer. He had been an integral part of it, in fact. He had been there at the Shattering of Asgard. The banishing of the corrupted Aspect of the Moon; he had been there, too, hidden. Even at the birth of the Lady in Lavender. Nothing had satisfied him. A part of him was hopelessly empty, something he knew, but could not recognise in its entirety. He chased after something to sweep away Nothing, but the Nothing embedded itself further.
As the Wolf flexed his slowly reconstructing jaw, he found that the idea of him being an addict to something as a mere concept was a humorous one. Of course he was addicted! No creature who had experienced Nothing and come back would not be! No creature who lived empty would not be! He knew how often this addiction led to him being branded as insane across Aezilan, a point of fear for even the Aspects. “Insanity, they call it,” he muttered, his voice a gurgle of blood and miscellaneous parts of viscera, “I am so much saner than I wish myself to be!”
The Wolf was silent for a moment. “Oh…” he said, voice low, “my voice has returned to me. How thankful I am to you.” It was sarcastic. Taunting, almost. How could he not act as such? He had wished for immortality and received some facsimile of immortality; he had received unreality. Cogito ergo sum was meant to be a transcendental argument, one in which only it could be possible. Proof that he was real. Did it apply if he wasn’t even sure he was thinking for himself? He had embraced Nothingness so often, so unwillingly, so disgustedly, that there was no possibility of it not having seeped into his body and brain - if he still had it, and he wished he did, his soul, too. The relationship between him and Nothingness was almost personal, now. It had some sort of sentience; he had no idea to what extent, but it was a terrifying possibility that even in immortality he was not in control of himself. That his thought was just Nothingness putting on a new face.
He supposed, perhaps, that then he was still real. To a lesser degree than once, but he lived on at least as a simulacrum of what he once was. It was… better than nothing. He was not as stable - ‘Still sane, but unstable,’ - as he had once been, nor intelligent except at his most lucid which was rarer and rarer outside of oblivion, nor was he kind or humane at all, but he was. In some form. He could only hope that the Nothingness at no point deigned to take that away from him.
In his youth - relative to his current age, but it would’ve been old age to even Celestia - he had come up with an idea that had terrified him. A simple argument that did not, even now, seem flawed to him. It went as so: the Wolf, once Fraezen, had managed to construct immortality for himself. Thus, there was infinite time available to him. There was a non-zero chance that he could die - as far as he knew, it was physically and magically impossible, but this made the idea of his death only contingently false - but, stretched over eternity, a non-zero chance became a one-hundred percent chance. It was not logically impossible that, perhaps, he would die anyway; ‘he’ as the Wolf, stripped away by Nothingness, or even perhaps one day he would be put down for good. The idea of his own death was not a logical impossibility. At the time, he had wished it was. Now, the argument comforted him, so long as his death involved his soul passing on. For this, he needed a soul. He prayed to no one in particular - ‘For whom may I pray to?’ - that he had one. If his death involved being wiped clean, made a tabula rasa by Nothingness, then…
There it was! His brain. It had finally been reconstructed. The process always slowed down when it reached the complex, neuron-dense brain; the most complicated part of his body. The rest of his head was essentially trivial to reconstruct. As the process completed, he could feel Nothingness take a firmer grasp on him than it had before. It was such a slight difference, but he felt it. He always felt it. His muscles rippled, his neurons fired, his paws tensed against the ground. The path to Eos was a long one filled with many traps. He wasn’t sure how long he had been travelling, obliterated and sent to Nothingness so many times over, but this was important. This was more important than he had ever been; and he, the one who had invented immortality, as cursed as it was, was a very important deer - ‘No!’ - wolf.
The problem with being reconstructed was that, each time, he became unsure of his identity. Fraezen? Or was he Gilgamesh? No! He was most definitely Fraezen. This was not a problem with his sanity, it was his stability. There was a difference. There had to be a difference, because if he was insane, then he would find satisfaction in eternity. He would not have intelligent thought, not even rarely. He would not be so empty. So unsatisfied. The Wolf was sane, for he was a miserable, self-aware addict; and who else could be saner than a miserable, self-aware addict? He had to be sane.
Gilgamesh - ‘Fraezen! Fraezen.’ - began to tread forward once more. With each step, the thudding thoughts in his brain began to dissipate as if they were never there. He had been reconstructed entirely, so his lucidity was fading quickly. The less he was physically made up of, the more he was mentally capable of; in other words, the less he was, the more he Was. An odd thought. Perhaps that was why he was often so uncaring about joining Nothingness again; for even if only temporary, it was unfathomably painful, even after he had been drawn back into more concrete reality - if Nothingness could be considered reality at all. Unreality, perhaps. Illogic and unreality. Perhaps it was because at least he was lucid for a little while. The trade-off - the corruption of Nothing in exchange for temporary lucidity - was, subconsciously, considered worth it. Logic said that it wasn’t; he was less himself and more Nothing each time, suffocated under the ever-increasing Nothingness. Logic had no place here.
He idly picked up his greatsword that had been left at the place he had originally triggered the trap. An incomprehensibly powerful blast of hellfire had sent him flying backwards and had kept pounding into him until naught was left - a feeling he knew all too well. He slid it into his sheath and sighed. He should’ve known how to avoid the myriad of traps that presented themselves to him in his journey to Eos considering that he - ‘Fraezen? Fraezen.’ - had been the one to originally design them.
The air bubbled and he quickly leapt at it, grabbing at nothing and landing in the dirt. He growled at his empty paws before standing back up and turning, hackles raised. “What is your quarrel with me,” he said from in between grinding teeth sharper than a wolf’s should’ve been, “what is it? I am an innocent being! I only do what I must! It is all so that I may repay my debt to her!”
It was silent. He calmed his pounding heart down and smoothed his fur; it was nothing. Just another audio-visual hallucination. He turned from where he had seen it and shook his head, beginning to move forward once more. In a moment, he had sped up into a sprint, paws pounding against the dirt, each impact of strong muscle and strong bone against compact ground sending some dirt flying. The dense forest around him blurred into shades of green and brown, splotches of pulsing red dotting the scenery. Remnants of the Once Great Deer. Just thinking about them made him grimace; the hubris of their species was the only great thing about them.
A triggered trap launched a spell at him from the treeline; for the moment that he saw it, he could see the matrix that held it together, see its purpose. The nodes of the spell called out to him, and it impacted him harmlessly, spreading itself around him before fading into nothing. It was a spell designed to cause the defender to go insane. Such did not actually matter to him. He was the one true immortal; on Aezilan, indeed, and he suspected across the worlds. This rendered him immune to such spells. That, or Nothingness had taken its toll on him, and he was not as sane as he thought. An entirely different breed of insane that he had never seen before - which was saying much. There was not much the Wolf had not seen before.
These thoughts ran themselves through his mind subconsciously before disappearing. As he was now, there was less Fraezen and more of the Wolf and his consuming Nothingness. There wasn’t enough in him to process those thoughts while he ran; only enough to recognise that the spell would do nothing to him. For any other being, that wouldn’t have mattered so much. Processing information in this kind of situation in such a nuanced way is, after all, a very complex process. Fraezen considered such beings pitiful. The Wolf did not care.
Another trap. From the ground below, a living mass of viral spores ejected themselves. He could read them on the genetic level, knew that they would kill him and tear him into nothing before becoming sterile. He tried - oh, how he tried - to dodge, but there was little to be done. He stumbled and collapsed, feeling his lungs fill with blood and pus, arrhythmia begin. His brain slowed down, but he sped up. The Wolf burning away, his eyes illuminating the grass faintly with the green that he knew signified he was free. Fraezen.
His body began to disintegrate, and he felt Nothingness once more. He hated this. It hurt eversomuch. At least he could be truly conscious again - at least for a little while. His maw, almost the only thing remaining, pumped out a grin. “While… these… nuts… are in your m-mouth…”
Those were his last words; at least, they would be for a little while. The effect of being forced into something one was never meant to come back from would repeat, and the Wolf would embrace Nothingness no matter how much Fraezen did not want to.
