The world fractured into impossiblity.

A myriad of stark colors.

Nero's consciousness fragmented, scattering across dimensions that had no names, no boundaries, no logic. He existed and didn't exist, was everywhere and nowhere, trapped in a space between thought and oblivion.

His body didn't feel like anything anymore.

There was no sensation of flesh, no awareness of bone or blood or breath. He had become something abstract, something that observed without eyes, that experienced without form.

Time meant nothing here. Space meant nothing. There was only the endless procession of images, each one seared into whatever passed for his mind.

An endless stretch of pyramids, each one enormous beyond comprehension, their bases stretching to horizons that curved into the endless north. The structures were made of stone that gleamed gold in light that came from no sun, their surfaces covered in the same alien runes that had adorned the skull. They rose toward skies that were simultaneously day and night, their tips piercing clouds that bled colors Nero had no names for.

At the base of the largest pyramid, thousands of beings knelt in perfect symmetry.

Their faces were hidden, pressed to the ground in poses of absolute supplication. They did not move, nor did they did not breathe.

They simply existed in eternal worship.

The vision shifted, and Nero saw what they worshipped.

A throne of pure gold sat atop the pyramid, so massive it would have dwarfed entire cities. Upon it sat a figure that hurt to perceive, its form wrapped in light and shadow that fought for dominance. The being wore a crown adorned with the horns of an ox, great curved things that spiraled upward like grasping fingers.

The figure turned its head, and for a moment, Nero felt its gaze fall upon him.

He would have screamed if he'd still had a mouth.

The vision shattered.

New images flooded in, each one more terrible than the last.

Entities of impossible geometries clashed in voids between stars. Beings made of pure light locked in combat with creatures that were absence given form, that were the very concept of darkness made manifest. They tore at each other with weapons that were ideas, that were prayers and curses made solid.

The battles stretched across eternities, never ending, never beginning, always occurring in the space between moments.

Nero watched armies of angels fall from heights beyond comprehension, their wings burning as they plummeted through layers of reality. He watched demons rise from depths that had no bottom, their forms shifting and changing with each ascending motion.

This was war on a scale that dwarfed human understanding. This was conflict between forces that had shaped existence itself.

The scenes shifted again, and Nero found himself suspended above a wasteland.

Barren earth stretched in all directions, cracked and grey and utterly devoid of life. Bones littered the landscape in such quantities that they formed dunes and valleys, an entire geography made of death. The skulls of things that might have been human once stared up at skies choked with flies.

The flies were everywhere, so numerous they formed clouds that blocked out what little light remained. They buzzed with a sound that might have been words, might have been prayers, might have been the screaming of countless souls trapped in their endless swarm.

His mind shifted once again.

Fields of clouds stretched beneath feet he no longer possessed. The clouds were white and pure, untainted by anything resembling corruption. They glowed with gentle warmth, with light that promised comfort and peace and an end to suffering.

Beings of perfect beauty moved through the cloudscape, their forms radiating grace and harmony. They sang hymns in languages that predated speech, their voices creating melodies that would have driven mortal minds to transcendent madness.

This was glory. This was magnificence. This was everything humanity had ever hoped divinity might be.

And it was a lie.

Nero could see the cracks in the perfection, the subtle wrongness that lurked beneath the beauty. These beings were as trapped as those in the wasteland, just in a different kind of prison. Their glory was gilded chains, their magnificence a cage.

The visions kept coming, faster now, blurring together into a cacophony of images that threatened to tear apart what little remained of Nero's sense of self.

But through it all, one phrase echoed in the depths of his fragmenting consciousness.

The Age of Gods.

The words repeated like a mantra, like a prayer, like a curse. They branded themselves into whatever substrate his thoughts now occupied, burning with the same intensity as the Mark of Mephistopheles.

The Age of Gods.

A time before time. An era when perhaps, beings of unimaginable power had walked the earth, had shaped reality according to their whims, had been worshipped and feared in equal measure.

Nero had seen mentions of it in the books he'd found in the Elkerling settlement, fragments of history that spoke of ages past. But those texts had been sanitized, edited, stripped of any real understanding. They had spoken of gods in abstract terms, as concepts rather than realities.

This was different.

This was truth, raw and unfiltered and utterly horrifying.

'Could all this perhaps be...' Nero's thoughts struggled to form coherent patterns.

The Mark had absorbed something from the runes, had drunk deeply from knowledge carved into divine bone. And now that knowledge was being forced into whatever vessel Nero's consciousness had become.

Could it be he was seeing the past? The Age of Gods as it had actually existed?

His mind tried to sort through the images, to categorize and understand, but it was futile. There was too much, and it was coming too fast, and none of it made any sense according to the rules of reality he'd grown up with.

The visions began to fragment further, losing cohesion.

Nero felt himself being pulled apart, his consciousness stretching thin across the impossibility of what he was experiencing. He tried to hold on, to maintain some core sense of self, but there was nothing to grip, nothing solid to anchor himself to.

He was falling.

His mind tumbled through a spinning void, a space that had no dimensions but somehow still had depth. There was no up or down, no left or right, just endless rotation through darkness that pressed in from all sides.

Nero desperately tried to cling to something, anything. He reached out with senses he didn't have toward objects that didn't exist, grasping for purchase in a realm that operated on rules completely alien to his understanding.

But there was nothing to hold.

He fell into the maw of nothingness, that hungry void that existed between all things. It opened wide to receive him, and Nero knew with absolute certainty that if he disappeared into that darkness, there would be no return. He would be dissolved, his consciousness scattered across dimensions and never reformed.

This was death.

Not the death of the body, but something far worse. The death of the self, the annihilation of everything that made him him.

The void rushed up to meet him, or perhaps he rushed down to meet it. The distinction was meaningless.

Nero screamed without sound, fighting without movement as he prayed to the gods for salvation.

And then his eyes snapped open.

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