These demonic entities walked on more than two legs, and some of them even had hundreds; some had wings, and others seemed to be standing in the air with nothing holding them up.
I swear that I saw some that seemed to be made of the light from the pyramid rather than of flesh, and beyond them there were more, but my mind could no longer hold the shape of all these things anymore.
Demons in the millions, and then demons that were not demons in the way the smaller ones were demons, but were something larger and harder to look at, and the tide of all of them was pouring out of the pyramid and across the valley and toward my town.
As if that was not enough, there was a loud groan and the sky shattered.
I do not know how else to describe it. The sky above the valley broke as long fractures ran across the blue of it, the cracks visible against the morning light, and through the cracks, something else was visible.
A red light pulsing at the same rhythm the pyramid had pulsed in, except that this red light was the size of the sky, and it was breathing through the cracks in the sky the way the pyramid had breathed through its black face, and the cracks were spreading.
Massive tentacles emerged from this cracked space that extended from the heavens to the earth; each of them, I suspected, could casually lift mountains.
I felt my mind beginning to break again, and it terrified me, because I suspected that if I broke a second time, I would never recover, that some fundamental part of me would be gone forever.
Then a voice came from the shattered heavens.
It was a voice that was every voice that had ever been a demon’s voice, layered together in a single utterance that was not a sound but a pressure on the bones of my skull, and it was speaking the demonic language.
They were speaking the exact syllables I had spoken with my own throat in the moments before my death, khaaz vel’tarakh, gorum sha’thrul, nargh thur’kazak, but louder than my throat had ever produced them and longer than any utterance my body could have sustained, and the words were filling the valley and the sky and the air I was breathing and the ground I was standing on.
The river was running with blood. I had not noticed when this started, but I was noticing it now. The water in the river that I had walked toward to find my father had turned red, the color spreading upstream rather than downstream, the change moving against the current with the deliberate quality of something that was not a natural process.
The world began to burn, and the demons inside the flame cried out in adoration even as the weaker ones turned to ash, and I had a distinct sensation that this was spreading all over the world.
What began in my small village was the trigger that was ending the world.
I wanted to scream, and then the sun above suddenly went out.
I was dimly aware that the disc was visibly extinguishing in the sky, as a massive mouth covered with tentacles swallowed the sun.
The morning light continued for a second after the source had ceased to exist, and then faded, and the world went dim as it no longer had a sun to be lit by.
The moon rose in its place, but the moon was wrong. The moon had four eyes the color of fire, and the moon was looking at me, and—
"Elric!"
My father’s voice, and it was coming from below the trees, from the riverbank where he was supposed to be tanning, and the voice was ordinary, and the voice was the only ordinary thing in the entire world, and I held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto a rope.
I blinked, and the sky was blue, the mountain was a mountain, the river was clear, and the sun was the sun.
I stood on the path with my heart hitting the inside of my chest at a rate that should not have been possible for a ten-year-old body, and the world was the world I had walked into, and there were no demons, and there was no red light in the sky, and the trees were the same trees they had been a moment before.
"Elric," my father called again, from the riverbank below.
I could see him now, standing at the tanning frame with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his apron tied over his work shirt, his hair pulled back the way he always pulled it back when he was working with hides, and he was raising one hand to wave me down to him.
His face was the face of my father and not a demon, and his expression was filled with mild impatience as he must have been waiting for me longer than he had planned to wait.
It was hard to get my dad angry, and I did not like it when he was upset with me, but he had not seen what I had seen.
The vision had been only mine. I stood on the path for one more second and tried to make my legs work and my legs eventually worked, and I walked down through the rest of the trees toward my father, and I held on to the sound of his voice the way I had held on to the names of the three charms in the moments after the demon had broken my title, because the sound of his voice was the same kind of thing, a name that anchored me to something that was real.
Mel had been right. I was definitely having one of my dreams.
I just did not yet know what it meant to be inside it.
But I could confirm one thing: my nightmares were not a mistake, and there were not thirty-one sky-fallen pyramids in this world; there was thirty-two, and it seemed that one of them had not fallen and had been here the entire time, and surprisingly, that golden inverted pyramid was behind my home the entire time.
"Tell me the name of God, child?"
I shivered because I had a bleak suspicion about what that meant.