I was sure the stage curtains were about to ignite in wide, roaring flames, but then something strange happened to the fire. Its green hue paled and it narrowed into a tight, twisting pillar, as if being suctioned mightily from above. My eyes followed it up to the place where the chandelier no longer was.

It had become a place where all no longer was.

“Spurg’scnduim!”

A vast swirling pit of absolute nothing bloomed, portal-like, across the theatre’s ceiling.

“Behold,” Epistola cried, “the Daemon Sultan! He has slumbered through the long and dreary day of our pitiful existence, but now is the twilight of the universe! Now shall he awaken!”

Vik and two of the other cultists descended upon me. Brutal hands grappled over my tortured body, pulling the chains from me, tearing me off of the hand-truck, lifting me high into the air above the tub. The briny water within it churned as if boiling with rage.

“AZATHOTH! SPURG’SCNDUIM! Y’HAH!”

And with that final cry of “Y’hah,” I was thrown into the water. Vik, stronger than I ever thought, held me by the throat, preventing me from rising. I struggled and thrashed for the first few seconds, but quickly realized… there was no point. No reason left to survive. All my instincts abandoned me then, just as Riley had, just as everything that ever mattered to me had. I let the terror and the water consume me forevermore. It was over. My life… ended.

~*~*~*~

Don’t lean over too far Andi, sweetie… Don’t you know if you go too far, you might fall in? If you fall in, we’ll never be able to get you back…

Never…

…Never be able to get you back…

~*~*~*~

As I felt the last faint glimmer of my livelihood evanesce into the dark emptiness of the waters, Vik’s hand released my throat, and a very different hand reached down to encircle my shoulders. It lifted me up out of the darkness and into a new light.

I expelled what felt like very real water from my lungs, but as I looked up through my soaked hair, I beheld a vision of that which I knew had to be a dream.

Riley.

He gazed into my bleary eyes with those brilliant, green spheres of light—those spheres which reflected the eternal beauty of the cosmos, and everything beyond it.

Was this what the afterlife held for me? Oh, if I had known I would be so blessed, I never would have fought my end!

But then as my eyes focused, two details grew clear that told me at once—I was still alive and very much in reality.

The first was the look I began to recognize in Riley’s eyes. The dark, simmering look of cruel contempt that had always filled them in the first days I’d known him.