The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

On an island crowded with trees so impossibly tall that the crowns of some of them could not be seen at all from the ground below, the stillness of night settled over sands as black as charcoal, making their appearance look dim and unbearably dark, and the light of the brilliant white moon hanging in the sky fell upon those sands without leaving behind so much as a single reflection of any kind at all.

Every few seconds, living creatures could be seen moving somewhere within the island’s interior, though calling them living creatures was barely accurate — some of them were missing whole parts of their bodies, limbs or mouths or entire heads, to the point that the sight of them could drive terror into the heart of any ordinary human being who happened to lay eyes on them.

There was even an enormous deer standing roughly five meters tall, running at blinding speed between the trees and over the slopes and down them again with a smoothness that had no equal, and in the very next moment it leapt and began to run through the air itself, as though it had a ground of its own that it used to run across empty space.

But the strange thing was that whenever it leapt, something resembling a small plateau appeared beneath its hooves, and the instant it stepped onto that plateau and left it behind, the thing began to lose its color — no, its very existence seemed to have been summoned for no other purpose than to be stepped on by the deer, before it withered and vanished as though the appointed hour of its passing had come.

And while the colossal deer went on leaping through the air across fragments of plateaus that surfaced and faded beneath its hooves.

There were two sharp yellow eyes watching it as it leapt through the air like that, tracking it with an extreme focus that never broke for a single stride, but what was far more terrifying was that those eyes had looked small from a distance, and yet as the deer sailed above the very trees that those two eyes were running between, the deer looked as though its entire body barely amounted to the circumference of those two yellow eyes alone.

Which meant that... the circumference of those eyes was somewhere past five meters.

And in the next moment.

The two yellow eyes lunged suddenly toward the deer in midair, and it seemed the headless deer sensed it somehow, because it began to change direction — but not in the ordinary way any animal would.

Instead, its very existence began to have the manner of its movement accelerated, its legs starting to move faster than they had a moment before until their speed reached the point where they blurred into nothing, and its body began shifting instantaneously from where it stood to other places entirely, one after another in a rapid, unbroken succession, as though it were enacting a predetermined future rather than choosing each movement for itself.

As though it had picked one specific path and then pushed destiny into carrying it down that course, without having to take a single further step of its own.

But to the deer’s surprise, the two yellow eyes that had been behind it right up until it accelerated itself were no longer behind it at all, having vanished and begun to come at it from the front.

And in an instant.

CHOMP!

Two fur-covered jaws shot up into the sky and shut their gates around the colossal deer without leaving the faintest trace of it behind, accompanied by an immense sound of crunching bone that confirmed the raw power of that jaw which had just risen into the night sky, devouring a creature that was terrifyingly strong in its own right.

And while the creature with the yellow eyes stood among the trees swallowing its prey.

The pupil of an eye appeared in the sky above it without warning, taking the moon’s place, and that colorless pupil looked directly down at it for one single moment.

And that alone was already enough.

Because the creature with the black fur suddenly began to age, visibly and unmistakably, its fur shedding onto the ground with nothing to hold it back and its yellow eyes narrowing as though they too were growing old, and even its powerful jaw was losing the fur that covered it at a tremendous rate, the teeth inside that jaw soon following after — teeth that reached four meters in length — dropping onto the black soil of the island one after another.

And it did not stop there, because the same thing happened to the whole of the rest of its body until the flesh itself began to wear away at a frightening speed, leaving the bones underneath it to start showing through.

The process continued until the yellow-eyed creature lost its existence entirely, and then it left behind something five meters tall, and headless.

The headless deer that had been sitting inside that creature’s mouth only moments ago rose up off the black ground onto its hooves with perfect calm, and then it turned toward the exact spot where the corpse of the yellow-eyed primordial wolf had disappeared, and a mouth surfaced on its neck out of nothing at all, and then it spoke:

”Glory to the Taboo of Justice. Until the Final Tiding arrives.”

The words came out of the mouth on the neck of that malformed, headless deer in a deep and booming voice that set the trees all around it shaking and sent their leaves scattering to the ground.

Then the mouth vanished once more and the deer went back to leaping through the air across the island exactly as it had been doing not long before, and with its return the colorless eye in the sky disappeared and the true moon came back to hang where it belonged, in its beautiful, spotless white.

...

Meanwhile, inside Evernight Palace, in a nightmare that had gone on for three nights so far.

There was the sound of footsteps moving so fast that they seemed less like walking and more like an outright sprint through the corridors.

And that was exactly what it was.

Because Aldric was running through those corridors, swerving right and left away from every intersection while he panted, snatching at his breath with difficulty with every passing second as he clutched at his right arm — or rather, at what was now his right shoulder, since his right arm could not be seen anywhere at all, and only his bleeding right shoulder remained where it had been, while he ran on trying to find anyone he could call to for help.

He had been badly shaken the moment he saw the blood pouring out of him when his arm was cut away, and he had broken into a run immediately after that, and it had become clear that even though these were nothing more than temporary spirit bodies given to them in this world, they still carried within them all the fundamentals of any ordinary body back in real life.

And so Aldric had decided to beg for rescue from the first person he came across, someone to save him or at the very least buy him time against that blood-soaked lunatic with the two axes who was hunting him down.

But shockingly, there was no longer a single person to be seen anywhere in the palace.

Even the mirage servants and the palace’s guests could no longer be found anywhere at all, as though they had been swept out of existence along with the last breath of air from the night before.

Old Aldric had left his room that morning trying to find the rest of the survivors so he could confer with them calmly, laying out the evidence that would prove his innocence before the Traitor while hunting for evidence that would somehow pin the accusation on the Killer, though he had realized soon afterward that this was impossible once he remembered the rules of this nightmare.

And that was when he ran into him.

The Traitor.

The Traitor with the two steel axes, the one who had killed the fifth person the previous night and caused their numbers to shrink by two people in a single night instead of one.

’FUCK!! We were too close! We were so fuckin CLOSE!!’

Aldric was screaming inside his own head as he ran through the corridors, hurling everything he could get his hand on behind him into the path of his pursuer, still hearing those footsteps at his back closing in on him more and more with every second.

He was being hunted with lethal intent by a man carrying two bloodied axes in his hands, a man who had attacked him the instant he laid eyes on him without sparing a thought for the consequences, and the strange part was that he had gone for his arm instead of his neck as the very first thing he aimed at.

...So was there a reason for that?