Where the Predators Prowl. 105: The Pied Piper of Entropy

"Yass! We definitely won," Nessy bounced giddily to where I stood. She was dripping, her sundress clinging to every curve. Without warning, she launched herself at me, wrapping her soaked body around mine.

"Ack! Nessy! You're getting me all—"

"Wet? Good!" She nuzzled into my neck. "You should've been in there with us.”

“How would I even fit?”

“We could have probably made you fit!” Candace laughed, joining the husky and smothering me in wet fox. "Smooshed Alec is best Alec."

Kristi approached behind the others, the diamondust dress practically painted onto her body. She tried to maintain some dignity, but gave up when Adelle grabbed her from behind and steered her into our growing cuddle pile on the pier.

"This is public indecency," Kristi muttered, making zero effort to escape and completing the wet pradavarian sandwich with me at the center.

"Here, Miss grochedy-butt,” Candace commented. “For your convenience! Unbind water from clothes! Unbind water from fur and feathers!"

Silver fractals danced from her fingers, and suddenly all the moisture simply... wasn't there anymore. Their clothes dried instantly, fur fluffing back to normal. The sudden dryness made everyone's hair and fur stand up from static.

The drunk shark judge waddled over, carrying a trophy that looked like a golden water bucket and an envelope thick with cash. "Congrats! You da winners! By like... so many points! All the points!”

"WOOO!" Candace grabbed the cash envelope, ripped it open and immediately threw the money high into the air. The bills scattered in the ocean breeze, causing a stampede of drunk pradavarians to scramble for the money. "Drinks on us!"

The judge stared at the fluttering cash, then at Candace.

"The money's fake here, but mah joy is real!" Candace declared. "Plus, we're here for that!" She pointed at the prize wall with its hundred mystery boxes. "Gibs prize."

“Alrighty then.” The shark led us to the warded prize area. "Pick any box! They're all… mysterious and stuff!"

"Number forty-seven," Candace and Nessy said together.

"You sure?" the shark asked. "Forty-three has a really nice aura..."

"Nuhuh! Forty-seven," Candace insisted.

“Yep, yep,” Nessy bobbed, tail wagging.

The shark snapped her fingers and the box fell from the wall. She caught it and offered it to Nessy.

The husky accepted the box and opened it. Inside, wrapped in velvet lay our pink chalk.

"Welp… that’s an anticlimactic lookin' prize," the judge commented. “No take backs.”

"The best treasures usually are plain, haven't you seen Indiana Jones?" Candace said, taking the chalk. It looked perfectly ordinary now.

"Where to now?" Adelle asked.

“Places! Come, come!” Candace walked to the edge of the carnival, where an old wooden fence separated the pier from the beach beyond. We followed her, departing from the carnival crowd.

The fox raised the chalk and began drawing a slightly lopsided door.

"First, let's send our dragon friends home," she said. “Cascade-bound!”

The door swung open to reveal another view of Cascade, featuring the setting evening sun and a storm over Lake Eerie. A cool breeze carrying the scent of rain wafted through.

“The door’s not a freaky rainbow,” I commented.

“Doesn’t have to be,” Canndace shrugged. “Am learning doorage… gatery? The next one should be even more swank. Go on, cuties, go home before you all expire!”

Nessy let out a piercing whistle entwined with a growl, projected across the landscape with her Riffweld.

Sparkles chirped excitedly from my shoulder, then launched herself through the doorway. The other dragons that had been circling overhead dove through after her, their chittering calls echoing as they vanished back to their home.

“As for you, grumpy scale-critter,” Candace turned to Kristi. "This is your chance. You could go home. Chill in real Cascade while we kick FPH butts using weaponized gates."

Kristi stared at the dimensional doorway, amber eyes reflecting the setting sun. For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then her tail lashed once, decisively. "No. I'm not leaving you idiots to face whatever comes next alone. We're a pack."

“So you're good to go to the end of everything then?” Candace asked.

“I… guess I am,” Kristi sighed. 

Candace smiled and closed the door, the view of real Cascade vanishing. She raised the chalk again.

"This next part... it's going to be rough," she said. "We're going to the memory of the end. Where entropy eats everything. Ness, what does the future smell like?"

Nessy pressed her nose against my neck, inhaling deeply. "We… smell like endings," she said softly. "But also... beginnings. Tree-roots and cosmic fire and something vast." She pulled back. "I think that... it's worth it. To understand what we really are. To clear out those observation parasites for good from this place. We can do it."

Candace nodded, her silver eyes blazing as she surveyed the carnival behind us. "Here's the plan. We're going to turn this entire funnel into a trap. Draw the First Person Hunters from every level, every memory, every twisted narrative fold they're hiding in."

"How?" Kristi asked with a small frown, looking like she already guessed the answer.

"We make ourselves irresistible bait," Candace explained, raising the chalk. "I'll open doors to other levels. Nessy will sing and be our Pied Piper. The FPHs feed on observation, so we'll give them the most tempting feast they've ever sensed! A song about observation!"

"And then?" Adelle cracked her knuckles.

"Then we lead them to the end of everything. The Leviathan's Cradle. Where entropy is so absolute that even the concept of observation breaks down." Candace began drawing on the wooden fence. "The door there won't be a simple portal… I'll make it elongated, like a funnel within a funnel. Once they're all inside..."

"We unfold it," I guessed. "Release them into pure entropy where they can't exist?"

"Exactly." Candace finished her first door and immediately started drawing another. 

The first door swung open, revealing MacPaws. Brad stood behind the counter, his body flickering between human and something with too many eyes. He stared at us and then began moving forward. The second door revealed Kristi's cabin, featuring our corpses and long limbed shadowy monstrosities.

"Ready, Ness?" Candace asked.

Nessy opened her mouth, inhaling deep.

“Come closer, watchers in the void,
Your hunger calls, it can't be cloyed,
We're here, we're real, we're fresh and bright,
First-person views in clearest sight,
Follow us through this door deployed.

I know you feast on looking-glass,
On consciousness that tries to pass,
Between the seeing and the seen,
The spaces where you've always been,
Come quickly now, consume this lass!”

Nessy pointed at herself then at me.

“Here's Alec with his tree-soul vast,
And we four girls bound to his past,
Such perspectives you could steal,
Such observations you could peel,
A banquet that will ever last.”

As her voice thundered across the carnival, I saw them coming. 

Through the drawn doors, eldritch, shadowy shapes began to emerge. The carnival-goers behind us started to turn too, their faces stretching, bodies warping, limbs multiplying. What had been a drunk shark judge now had dark fingers that bent in too many directions, reaching toward us with desperate hunger.

"Keep singing," Candace urged, drawing another door inside of a door inside of a door, the edges of the fractal door rippling like water. "Everyone focus. Picture the end. Picture being the Leviathan and Slayer!"

I closed my eyes and recalled it all. 

The blasted plain. The all-devouring breath of Entropy. The crater. The Leviathan rising from shattered reality, born from the egg.

The Wormwood Star.

Nessy's voice grew louder, more compelling. The things that had been people pressed closer, their forms becoming less distinct, more purely conceptual, living hunger and observation given form. Candace opened the fractal door.

“The door is wide, the path is clear,
Step through and claim what you hold dear,
We're walking just ahead of you,
Our thoughts so bright, our views so true,
There's nothing in this place to fear.

Keep following, don't look around,
Just focus on our heartbeat's sound,
The ground beneath might seem quite strange,
But observation's still in range,
We promise feasts of thoughts profound.”

We backed through the rippling door.

The transition felt... wrong. So very, very wrong. Like we crossed the threshold of something, but also didn’t.

The funnel-door stretched behind us like a gargantuan throat, and the First Person Hunters followed en masse, unable to resist Nessy's siren call.

“A little further, through the gate,
Where time itself has met its fate,
The sky looks odd? Don't mind that now,
Just keep observing—you know how,
Your feast is coming, please don't wait.”

The other side was exactly as freaky I remembered. 

A vast, glass-black plain under a starless sky.
This wasn't a place. It was the absence of place. The un-location where stories went to die.

Nessy's tone shifted, voice multiplying, shifting sideways as if she was singing from everywhere now.

The First Person Hunters poured through the elongated door, dozens, hundreds of them, thousands.

The tail of the Wormwood Star shone above us, but its radiance didn’t touch us yet, wobbling across the edges of the funnel with emerald shimmers.

"Everyone hold on to each other," Candace commanded. 

We linked hands—Nessy on my left, Kristi on my right, Adelle beyond her, Candace completing the circle.

"Collapsing transit funnel… On three," Candace said. "Two. One..."

She snapped her fingers. The funnel collapsed.

I felt, saw it happen—reality folding in on itself like origami in reverse. The doorway to the carnival, the beach, the pier, all of it winked away in silver-green fire. 

The advancing FPHses screamed, igniting.

“Why? Welcome, welcome to the end,
Where entropy's your only friend,
Try now to see—oh wait, you can't?
The rules here make observers scant,
Your hunger has no food to rend!”

And then I was alone. Except Nessy was still singing from everywhere:

“You tried to watch the watching-ground,
But paradox is all you've found,
You cannot eat what can't exist,
You cannot be what time has missed,
Your stolen views are coming unbound.”

Nessy’s voice danced across the desolate landscape, entwined with itself and magnified a thousand times, pounding at my psyche.

“Oh how you scream in frequencies
That shatter false dependencies,
Each consciousness you ever ate
Now breaks free from your binding state,
Released like wind through burning trees.”

My clothes began to decay. The hoodie flaked away in seconds, jeans following. My skin started to peel, only to regenerate instantly as my Reconstitution kicked in. I was dying and being reborn over and over, entropy trying to unmake me while my nature refused to allow it.

There were more screams, every First Person Hunter trying to paw at their formless shapes, burning. I felt, saw them flailing and dying. The network of observation-parasites that had infested the Nameless Mall, thousands of interconnected consciousness-eaters that existed in the spaces between looking and being looked at. They were trying to observe this place, trying to maintain their existence through perception.

But there was nothing here to perceive correctly.

Each attempt to observe scattered them further. They tried to see the ground, but the ground was simultaneously glass and dust and death. They tried to see the sky, but the sky was both black and burning and inside-out. They tried to see time, but time had already ended and never started and was happening all at once.

“I am the end, the Wormwood Star,
Your theft undone, both near and far,
The consciousness you ate now free,
Returns to what it's meant to be.”

Nessy sang.

One by one, then in growing cascades, they shattered. Not dying... but unbecoming, their very concept of self dissolving in a place where observation itself was meaningless. They screamed in frequencies that bypassed the ears and went straight to wobble my soul.

“Four souls in one, I watch you break,
Each stolen view you had to take
Now burns you from the inside out,
Your screams dissolve to silent doubt,
In entropy's eternal wake!”

The Leviathan finished her song.

I experienced their dissolution.

Each Hunter that died revealed the stolen perspectives it had been hoarding. Thousands of first-person viewpoints, bound souls from across countless realities that had wondered into the Nameless Mall over the ages, all finally freed as their captors evaporated.

The screaming grew louder, more desperate. The Hunters tried to cluster together, to reinforce their observation through consensus, but that just made them bigger targets for entropy. 

Larger networks fell apart faster, their complexity becoming a liability in a place that rejected anything more complicated than ending.

They tried to reach out towards me but I was an everlasting burning tree, impossible to observe, filled with liminality to the brim, dying and being reborn with each breath, already walking towards the center of this absolute hell.

Finally, mercifully, the last alien scream faded. The First Person Hunters were gone, erased so thoroughly that they had never existed, would never exist, couldn't exist in any timeline that touched this moment.

I stood alone on the glassy plain, naked and constantly dying, and resumed walking toward the crater I knew would be there.

The crater appeared. Vast beyond comprehension, its edges disappearing over the horizon. At its center, the egg waited.

I descended the glassy walls, my skin flaking away and regenerating in waves.

The egg was exactly as I remembered it. Neither solid nor liquid, existing partially in dimensions I couldn't fully perceive. I placed my hands against its surface.

"Wake up," I commanded with every one of my liminal voices across my soul.

The egg cracked.

Light poured out. The shell fragments fell away like flower petals, revealing what lay within. A massive flower-like form composed of countless bodies—Nessy's black and white fur flowing into Kristi's emerald feathers becoming Candace's silver melding with Adelle's gray fur. 

But more than just four.

Hundreds, thousands, millions of iterations, every possible version of them, a mishmash of some original whole, if there was even an original to begin with.

The entity unfolded itself, growing larger and more complex with each second. Eyes opened across its surface—sky blue, amber, silver-gray, emerald, dark brown—all focusing on me with surreal synchronization.

"Hello, my Slayer," she sang-whispered-spoke with combined voices, a harmony of everyone I had ever loved, lost or was yet to meet.

“Hey,” I said. "We got them. What do we do now?"

“Now… I shall attempt to understand what I am,” she answered and fell silent, infinite eyes staring across her endless figure. "Identify!" She cast.

“I do hope that I don’t have to kill you, this time around,” I said.

“No.” She gestured at the desolate world around us with endless hands reaching out to eternity. "This is just a simulation of it. A memory of the end of our dance. You don't need to slay me here. There's nothing to wish for today. We've already accomplished conquering this dungeon."

I nodded.

“Ah,” the massive form shifted, bodies reorganizing. "I… remember it now. I was a girl once.”

“A girl?”

“A girl who loved her best friend."

“Nessy?”

"No. This wasn't her name. She didn't have a single name, for she was made from a billion version of herself she had devoured, entwined with dimensional magic as an Astral Phantom. A girl who gained absolute power, created a Fractal Engine and was given a ticket to Manchester by the System Wizards," she said. "Except… I didn’t reach Manchester, because the end of that narrative… winning the numbers game… turns one into a System Wizard, bound to Serve the Absolute Syntropic System and her Agents... the Numbers."

“So what did you do instead?” I asked.

The Leviathan's form rippled. "I thought of you. My best friend. Not the Alec Foster you… but the you that is every best friend of mine across every possible reality. I thought of you and I decided that absolute power wasn't worth it.”

"You gave up godhood for me?"

"I gave up one kind of power for another," she smiled. "Instead of becoming a System Wizard who could reshape the narrative or reality with absolute authority, I became... this. Something broken and infinite. A girl who exists at the end of everything, waiting to be divided into pieces small enough to live in linear time. The end of a narrative. The dot.”

“Pretty crazy stuff.” I said.

"Love usually is." The leviathan laughed . "Do you want to know the really crazy part? I don't regret it. Any of it. Because every loop, every cycle, every timeline—I get to meet you again. Fall in love with you again. Even if it's... four separate girls who sometimes don't even remember why they're drawn to you."

The massive form began to condense, countless bodies flowing together like liquid light. "And in this simulation, in this memory-that-isn't-quite-memory, I can be whole for a moment. Somewhat whole. Bind self to humanoid form!” She ordered.

The consolidation continued until a single figure stood before me. 

She was as tall as me and made of ever-shifting static patterns, blooms within blooms. Dimensions within dimensions. Souls entwined with souls. Not quite physical, not quite liminal. A goddess made manifest.

"There," she said. "Better?"

"You're... slightly more linear?" I asked.

"Just enough for this." She raised her hand, and reality bent around her fingers. "Unbind chalk-shard from nullspace."

A small pink chalk piece materialized in her palm, starting to decay away.

"Let's get… our RV,” she said, raising the chalk.

She drew a line in the air itself, the chalk leaving a tear in space that bled colors that didn't exist. The line widened, deepened, became a gateway-like wound in space and time.

"The G-Supercenter," she stated our destination. 

Through the tear, I suddenly saw it—aisles stretching to infinity under fluorescent lights. And there, exactly where I had left it long ago… now stood a massive crystalline tree. Its branches reached up through the ceiling into forever, gargantuan roots spreading out from a single point—

"Bulwichu," I breathed.

"Yes," she agreed. "Our domain.”

She took my hand, her touch simultaneously fur-soft, feather-light, scale-smooth, and electrically alive. Fire and ice. Pure entropy that burned away my skin and made flesh flowers bloom and die across my arm. "Come on."

We stepped through the tear together, reality shearing around us like tissue paper. The transition was jarring, a leap from absolute entropy to the bizarre syntropic stability of the Infinite Superstore. 

The Leviathan-girl walked toward the crystal tree. Where her feet touched the linoleum, the floor tiles cracked and bloomed. Flowers made of twisted linoleum and flashing system errors sprouted in her footsteps.

The tree loomed ahead, a million crystalline branches reaching down. The RV at its base looked exactly as I remembered it… silver, slightly battered, patched, eternal.

"That's the beautiful part," she said. "Every time you and I restart a broken, dead dimension, I become small enough to love a… linear you properly. As Nessy who saves you from drowning. As Kristi who challenges you to be better. As Candace who shows you that reality is negotiable. As Adelle who proves that strength and tenderness can coexist. As so many others..."

We reached the crystal tree. The nearest tree root responded to her touch, blooming with a thousand crystalline flowers.

"And in between, sometimes," she said softly, "in places like this—dungeons, simulations and memories and might-have-beens—I can remember what it's like to be whole. To be the girl who loved you so much she shattered herself across infinity rather than leave you forever alone."

She turned to face me, and her smile was heartbreaking in its incomprehensible, endless completeness.

“You're… not staying like this, right?” I asked. 

She tilted her head with a soft smile. “No. The Nameless Mall is ours—a pocket dimension I can use to reshape other dungeons thusly. The girls—I—we'll run out of mana, reform in a moment, separate again but be… stronger for having remembered being the liminal… leviathan version of me, have it as a Skill.”

"And then?"

"Then we take back our RV. Drive it to 2020. To Cascade. To Ferguson. To face the Magnetic Lynx and save a world that doesn't know it needs saving." She stepped closer, alien flowers blooming in a circle around us. "But first..."

She pulled me into an embrace that felt like being held by the universe itself. "Let me hold you. Just for a moment more. As everything I am, before I have to become four again."

I hugged her back, this girl who was everyone I loved, and for a single perfect instant that lasted forever, we were complete.