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First an End

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I held my adoring gryphon tightly against my body. He crooned and rumbled softly against my chest, the smaller male conforming snugly against my front. Our wings were pressed against each other, and his soft feathers tickled my leathery membranes. His fluffy cheeks were nuzzling gently against me right under my throat, and the bottom of my muzzle responded in kind against the top of his head.

We were entwined, soul and flesh, and we would be mated until the stars tore us apart.

I rubbed his beak and gently pressed into it. He had blue marks on it, an enchantment which made it soft and malleable, and I checked with my finger-claws to make sure the spell was functioning fully.

The same enchantment was laid upon his talons, the hard yellow hide around his arms made soft as supple skin. My hands wandered over to them while my muzzle pressed firmly against my lover's certifiably squishy beak, and they caressed and held while we kissed.

I slowly nudged him towards our mattress, a simple thing made from what limited resources we had. We dwelled near the top of one of the towers in the wealthy district of our little home, Astra,

It was a little pocket of safety from the death outside. We've lived here for decades, and there was no leaving it, but I didn't want to think about that right now. This was my time to spend with Ryn, a respite from all the equations, theories, and research.

"You're tense," I heard him say.

"I can't be," I said, stroking the bottom of my snout along his ears. "I'm with you."

"Your wings are squeezing mine," he said oh so softly. "Really tightly."

I peeked at them to ascertain the truth and embarrassingly found him right. I let off on the pressure but kept him close. "Sorry," I said.

"It's okay. It's difficult, I know. I wish I could understand it and help you."

"Don't worry about it, love. You help me just by being here. I would've dived off the deep end long ago without you."

"Mmm," he rumbled, and then he let out a soft croon. "You're crushing my wings again, draggy."

I decided keeping them off of him was safer since I didn't seem to be able to control myself. "I'm sorry."

"Let me help you take off the tension," he said, and then I felt a hand glide along my side, slowly inching over my smooth scales towards my front, and then down.

Gods, I needed him. I needed him so badly. I was worn out from work, and I worked constantly to forget and ignore all the terrible things which happened before we came to Astra. But Ryn was why I still worked. I toiled everyday to save us from suffering the inevitable future, the past which would eventually catch up to us.

His gentle nudges and rubbing went all around my intimate parts, forcing my mind to relax to make room for pleasure and love. I let out a heady moan as he slipped a digit into my slit, the magically softened finger-talon coaxing my tool to come out. While he did that, his other hand slipped under me and fondled with my balls, teasing them and making me anticipate what was to follow.

We inched ever closer to our bed, slowly but surely making progress. Our hands groped and fondled while our breaths mingled in a swirl of lust. Our eyes became half-lidded, and then there was the bump of the hard mattress.

My little gryphon sat down and went straight for it. His magically malleable beak molded over my hardening cock, sealing it as tightly as a lip. I brought my hands down to caress his fluffy head and stroke his pointed ears, encouraging him to lick and service my thick shaft.

He was energetic, like always. We'd done it just yesterday, by universal standard time, but the morning took me away from him until I returned from work. It was always a fine reward for a hard day of research, and today was no exception.

For the moment, I let him go at his own pace. We both loved being sweet and sensual to each other, but we would tip over a certain edge at some point and absolutely ravish each other. I would hold him down and let my primal draconic instincts take over my body while he submitted to his larger mate...

But not yet. This was a preview of the tenderness which would follow the rough patch ahead, the cuddling and bonding I always wished could last forever. For now, I gently rubbed my hands around his head and shoulders, letting his beak bob slowly along my rigid length.

There was a familiar tingling in the air. Magic was at work, a minor spell being cast in the caverns of Ryn's mouth. My alluring gryphon knew a bunch of sexually charged spells, but this one was the simplest one and the only one necessary for me to make love with him. The warm wetness in his maw cooled considerably, coating my cock with a layer of extremely slick lubricant.

When he pulled his head back, I looked down and saw my member throb, the pink flesh glossed with lube. He rolled onto his belly and lifted his tail, swishing the fan of blue feathers on its tip in front of my muzzle invitingly.

"Come in big boy," he said enticingly. "Your little gryphy's ready for you."

Gods, Ryn knew how to turn me on. My cock tingled, and my brain struggled to control my actions, but still I resisted. I slid my hips forward, aiming my shaft into his hole, while my hands massaged his fluffy sides. I parted his tight entrance with gentle care, piercing his insides with all my love and passion.

He cooed as I delved into him, pleasure washing over both of us like a warm shower after an exhausting day. When my balls settled against his taint, just barely touching the backside of his fuzzy sack, I melded down along his back, pushing aside his wings, and slid my muzzle against the side of his beak, nuzzling it softly while my tongue flicked out and gave the softened surface a few swirls.

One of my hands drifted down as our bodies were nestled against one another. It found a firm pole which pulsed as I wrapped my fingers around it. I gave my gryphy's cock a few strokes and toyed with his ring of barbs. It made him wiggle underneath me, driving us both towards our animalistic lust.

With my hand still coiled around his cock, I pulled my hips back and started thrusting. The cool lube quickly warmed up even at the slow pace I was pushing into him, and pleasure flowed from our loins at a steady and enjoyable pace.

But we would want more. It was always a drawn out game, one we both savored. Who would ask first? I restrained and never hastened, because this time I wanted to hear him say it.

"Harder."

And that was the trigger. Pushes turned to shoves, thrusts turned to slams. I lifted my muzzle away, giving him one last loving lick before rising up to give myself more leverage, and then I drilled into my mate with everything I had.

His coos of pleasure transformed into loud squawks, music which burrowed into my head and gave the autonomic parts of my brain complete power over my flesh. Tens of millions of years of evolution, and this base instinct, this raw, primal need, would still not be denied.

Grunts, moans, and squawks filled the air as I unwound myself into my gryphon, my cock pounding into him while its little fleshy nubs ground against his prostate. My hand stroked along with my thrusts, and I could soon feel dabs of pre wet my hand, making it even easier to glide my scaly digits over his sensitive, barbed shaft.

My other hand varied from grasping his hips to holding his tail while my body marked him as my mate. He would bump back, especially harder as my knot started growing, and grind and tighten his muscled entrance against me. We were enraptured by each other, and we were swiftly bringing ourselves to the peak.

I went rougher and faster, but Ryn was experienced and could take all I had to give. Soon, my balls stopped bouncing on his taint as the distance between them grew thanks to the full inflation of my knot. I drove my knot against the gryphon's ass, opening it more with each thrust, but I didn't want it to yield this way.

After a few more hard shoves, I pulled my cock completely out. There was a yelp of confusion from below, but before Ryn could say anything, I enveloped his body with magic. With a quick flick of my wrist, I turned him onto his back, lifted his legs up to expose his tail hole to me once more, and then I released my magical hold on him.

I dove right back into him. One harsh thrust, relentless and determined--I would not turn back until I was fully into my mate.

Distracted by the pleasure of his walls clamping to resist my knot, I didn't sense Ryn's spell until it was too late. Electricity shocked me under my tail, lighting up every nerve in my prostate, and my eyes shot wide as the muscles within me contracted in response, preparing to fire off my load immediately.

I resisted the shock of magical pleasure as long as possible so that I could force my knot in before the massive surge of pleasure would cause my cock to erupt. I leaned, depending on the weak gravity to do most of the work, as my knees wanted to buckle and my brain exploded with ecstasy.

There was a pop, and a second explosion happened in my brain. This one destroyed any semblance of resistance I could've conjured, and bliss spread throughout my entire body as I spilled my thick seed into my loving mate, my knot tied and preventing a single drop from dripping back out.

While I roared, came, and smashed my muzzle down to lock against Ryn's beak, his body quivered beneath me. Shortly after my knot throbbed against and pressured against his little pleasure spot, he moaned in my mouth, and his ass started pulsing in time with my cock's creamy spurts.

I felt his barbed cock, now pressed tightly against my waist, try to jump as he moaned my name into my maw. Warmth blasted onto my belly scales and dribbled down onto his fur. My knees gave out at last, and I fell on top of him, keeping his cum smushed between our bodies while my knot kept my load inside him.

Wordlessly, we kept on kissing and cuddling, the worries outside swept away by our love. When my knot deflated and his seed dried, we washed up before returning to our bed, snuggling onto it together, wings and tails entangled in a beautiful mess of scales and feathers.

Before long, we drifted into a slumber together. A peaceful rest, but it would not last.

We were awakened by a loud sound outside, like a hammer slamming against a block of ice. We both got up in spite of our sleepy afterglow, and we walked slowly to our balcony. I pulled the balcony's red curtain away for just a single second, enough for both of us to see what was happening, and then I let the cloth drape back and block our sight.

Ryn squawked and clutched my arm tightly. "It's here," he said, his voice shaking. "It's found Astra."

"There's nowhere left for us to hide," I said, using my free hand to stroke the gryphon's arm.

There really wasn't. Astra was a small city hidden in a grain of powder scattered amongst countless others in a small snowglobe. The snowglobe itself was concealed within a marble on a planet full of marbles. It was held in a temporal stasis field too, so that it could only be found at one single point in time, one particular second. We'd been kept safe by this level of secrecy, but the dimensional mages, I one of them, knew we were only buying time.

Time was running out.

We couldn't bury ourselves any deeper. Shrinking like this was like running deeper into a cave. At some point, one would hit a wall and couldn't run any further. The laws of dimensional elasticity prevented us from shoving the city into another grain of sand.

I took another peek out the curtains. The city's outer force field was shattering faster than I'd expected. The Nightmare would soon overwhelm it and destroy us.

"What can we do?" my little gryphon asked.

I held his hands and stared reassuringly into his eyes, our love batting away the admittedly powerful fear threatening to surge through our minds.

We could not escape through time or space since the Nightmare was capable of traveling through both. Time travel was no longer even possible since Astra had locked itself into a single looping second, and the localized timeline couldn't be manipulated due to the massive compression involved. There was truly nowhere left in this universe for us to flee to.

In this universe was the key prepositional phrase.

There were others. Infinitely many. While the other mages had been studying and researching how to further dig ourselves into a smaller and stealthier hiding hole, I'd been looking for an alternative way.

My spell was barely tested. Only once, really, though it had worked. I'd stepped into a different universe once and came right back. The complex spell had utterly exhausted me, but it had been a success. I'd treaded on green grass in a natural world, living greenery which my feet had not touched since the Nightmare took my home world.

The feel of soil and life beneath my feet had brought back old memories of home before coming to Astra. I'd been a young little drakeling frolicking around the green fields. My father had wanted to stay away from the congested city life, so I had grown up in a simpler rural part of our world.

Life had been easy. My parents had both been powerful mages, and they'd been able to cast portals to travel to work on the other side of the world. That hadn't even been remotely difficult for them, given that they could craft way-gates which could teleport them across galaxies, and the same magical prowess had been passed on to me.

Our species had been born to a world heavily-laden with magic. Life force, some would call it, or mana. It's power that comes from one's soul and, like the name implies, expending all of it for a gargantuan spell can result in death.

Because we'd been so immersed with magic, we had little advancement in technology. As a result, my homeworld was one of the last to fall to the Nightmare. I'd always found that bit odd--the Nightmare sought to exterminate all life, but it prioritized targeting highly developed technological worlds and starships instead of planets teeming with what was practically a flaunting of the thing it wanted to destroy.

Despite our lack of technological devices, we weren't ignorant of the physical laws and sciences which made interstellar travel without magic possible. Magic of the magnitude that our people, the dragons of Teris, utilized pretty much required knowledge of advanced science and an understanding of how the universe worked. At its heart, magic was the expenditure of one's life force to manipulate sub-atomic particles.

I suppose even the Nightmare had a sense of irony, maybe.

By the time it had pierced the defenses of many neighboring galaxies and arrived on my world, the Nightmare had caused the sky to dim considerably. There were only the lights from natural stars, some of which may have already died long before their photons reached my home, and those were somber nights compared to those in my youth which carried all the twinkling lights of ships and space-faring life.

Nobody was sure where it had come from. Many scientists believed the Nightmare had emerged from experimenting with dark matter and energy, but only those who'd been consumed could possibly know.

Like my father had been.

The Nightmare is like an unrelenting blanket of shadow. A black fog, rolling unstoppably wherever life exists to make it not so. It doesn't destroy anything. It doesn't seem to affect matter in any perceivable way, but it does drain any living thing of all its life force and leave behind a perfectly physically unharmed corpse.

I was sheltered from its existence for most of my life. Even well into my adulthood, our society, our government and leaders, kept the oncoming darkness a secret. Off-world travel became more and more restricted, but that hadn't bothered me since I had been perfectly content with a quiet life living in peace with my parents.

Hence, it had come as a shock to me when one day my father returned from work and told us we needed to leave. I didn't understand him then, and neither he nor my mother would explain, but I could tell from their expressions that there was something dreadful coming.

I helped them set a portal up to Kreen, a world several galaxies further from the creeping shadow, and away we went.

Kreen was where I met Ryn. It was, like Teris, a world powered by mostly magic, and the indigenous gryphon population had skipped out on even lower technology like aircraft, preferring to live inside hollowed trees and other natural structures. We'd shared a roost with Ryn's family, and their incredibly jovial attitude made me forget about my home or why I was forced to leave it.

Kreen was an eye-opener for me since we had moved into a rather populated area. A dense, labyrinthine forest of tree-roosts made up, from what I could tell, the entirety of the planet aside from the seas, and even the oceans were populated by other creatures I had only read about. It was not until later that I found out they were all refugees from the Nightmare.

But that didn't matter, really. I spent nearly every day going out with Ryn, seeing the various bits of the universe that had managed to flee their way to Kreen, and we grew closer and closer to the point that we had stopped going out together--we were going on dates instead.

We flew around together. We walked through the forests and the underground cities together. We fell in love with each other.

He was my first and my only. I'd only known about mating in a scholarly way before, but Ryn was understanding and guided me through, the frisky boy. The little gryphon had turned me into the raunchy sexy dragon I was now, though even he and his alluring body couldn't distract me completely from my studies.

I was adept at advanced magic which I'd learned was actually impossibly difficult for most to even understand. I'd tried to explain something simple like how time didn't pass at the same rate for an object moving at a higher velocity or subject to differing gravitational force to Ryn, but the gryphon had merely shrugged when I delved into the mathematics. He and most of his kin were good at conjuring naturally occurring, easily observable things like fire and water, though a rare few could set up simple teleportation pads which were found at varying lengths around Kreen.

Over the years, my parents had spent less and less time at our tree home. I didn't know it then, but they were two of the best dimensional mages the living remnants of the universe possessed, and they'd been called upon to construct Astra.

They had tried to keep the Nightmare a secret. They'd tried to keep their work concealed. All so that I could be happy in ignorance.

The status quo was fine for a while, but then I started getting nosy. I wanted to know what was happening, why every day there seemed to be more and more people with every body shape imaginable from all corners of the universe kept packing themselves into the gryphon's world, and why they came stained with tears and panic.

I wanted to know why we had left our own home. My parents would not say, and ultimately Ryn was the one to inform me about the Nightmare. My parents had asked everyone I knew to be silent about the crisis, but it hurt my little gryphon to keep the truth from me enough that I was able to, regrettably, guilt him into telling me.

In my parents' defense, I could understand what they wanted to do. They believed, once Astra had been finished, that I could live without ever encountering the Nightmare again. But they hadn't counted on its ability to seek out life so relentlessly and so accurately, and now the world they had helped build to create was about to fall.

It was good Ryn had told me because my parents could not protect me forever.

We had a pleasant decade on Kreen before I knew the truth. After I understood the doom that was befalling the rest of existence, I was able to venture to the parts of Kreen neither my parents nor my lover would take me. Then I saw the true suffering of the refugees, the ones in the deepest underground living zones--food, water, and even air was in short supply.

And it was down there that news of the Nightmare was not outlawed. I saw videos of its progress through the galaxies and how it had stamped out trillions upon trillions of lives. It was there I'd learned it was estimated that Kreen would only be safe for another year before it too was eclipsed by the devouring shadow.

Ignorance had been bliss, I had to admit that. Yet, now I understood the desperation of the people all around me. As the months continued to pass, the lower parts of Kreen became more and more lawless and chaotic to the point that I dared not go down anymore, and news of the anarchy below could not be quelled from reaching our high roosts.

We were amongst the privileged. Ryn's family had been wealthy and owned the hollowed halls we lived in, in an ancient tree which had, with magical assistance, grown far above the clouds. My parents and their knowledge of advanced time-space compression enchantments, tools vital for the creation of Astra, bought us a place beyond the riots far below.

By the time the Nightmare arrived, there'd probably been billions of murders down where I would not look. Beneath my wings, they fought like insects while I studied to try and save them. It was a hopeless effort, but I wanted to at least try--if not everyone, then at least those I loved.

It hadn't just been the violence that made me stop going to the undercities. It wasn't just the poverty and the grief which drove me away. It was the hope I brought. Many who knew of my draconic origins from Teris also knew that either I had or was connected to people with the magical talent necessary to escape the end, the secret shield world the commoners heard rumors about but were not told the truth of. Astra was not a world, not by a long shot, and I couldn't bear to explain it to the hundreds of desperate mothers I'd encountered who'd begged me to take their babies to safety. My scales shone with hope I did not have, and I couldn't stand to see another face plead for a piece of that which I didn't have.

When the suns of Kreen went dark, when all hope was lost, my parents revealed the whole Astra project to me at last. I'd acted surprised, but Ryn had thankfully believed it was better for me to know.

It was good that I did know, for otherwise I may not have taken my studies as seriously as I had.

There were few worlds left where the Nightmare had not passed. Astra had been successfully finished on the eve of the last day Kreen would ever see. All had been prepared--a runner would take Astra, hidden in a bag of marbles, to another world prepared and stuffed with all the glass marbles the high mages could make.

A portal was set up to transfer top-class people into Astra, where life could continue existing. I could lament over how only the most important and wealthy were allowed to escape into the artificial hidden city, but there was no practical workaround: the common masses couldn't be saved. Astra was simply too small to wish otherwise.

It'd been an issue which had bothered me while I'd studied the magic my parents wielded. They'd sought to create a hyper-enlarged pocket of space-time in a tiny point of reality, but there were physical laws which prevented that technique from being able to shelter more people. I'd started thinking about alternatives ever since my first day in the undercity, and only now, decades later, did I finally figure out how to implement one of my first ideas.

In those last months before the fall of Kreen, I'd showed my knowledge of the Nightmare to my parents and pitched them the idea of moving to an alternate reality, one where life would not be extinguished by the dark.

My mother had been horrified that I'd learned the secret they'd tried so carefully to withhold from me, but my father had been more practical.

"It's a fine idea in theory," he'd said, "but there's not enough time for the research."

"What have you all been doing since the Nightmare emerged?" I'd asked.

My father, black like obsidian, shook his head. "First, we were trying to fight it. Then we tried to contain it. Now we're trying to hide from it."

My mother, white as lily, reached to my father's shoulder for support. It was the first time I'd ever seen them so fallible, so vulnerable. "We didn't want you to know. We didn't want you to live in constant terror," she said, and then she started whimpering against those shoulders which were already burdened with the weight of everyone's hope.

"Perhaps," he said, folding a wing over my mom, "if we can hide for a few more decades, we can find a way to cross dimensions."

I did it in two decades. I did it without my parents.

On the day Kreen fell, only the smartest and richest were granted entry to Astra. It was a day another several billion lives were stamped out, but I'd felt detached from all of that--I'd already understood then that billions had been killed on Teris when we'd left.

I know I sound heartless. I know I should have felt more, but I couldn't. Death was just something which was happening everywhere, something nobody knew how to stop. There was no time to mourn for the trillions killed by the Nightmare, not when there were still living beings to save.

Everyone had lost someone. It was my turn.

It started with my adopted family. Ryn's family was wealthy, but not enough to be granted life in Astra. They were only able to buy one spot, and it went to the one person they believed could support finding a solution to the Nightmare.

Somehow, I'd felt that I had condemned his family to death because Ryn had been chosen to be saved only because of me. But they'd been right--without his love and embracing wings to support me, I would have fallen to despair.

I had not lost my parents when the darkness fell. They were maintaining the portal to Astra and hence were the last to transport over. Deep beneath the ground, in a secret government bunker, they held the doors open and waited for every last possible life to find shelter. Outside, young gryphons and mercenaries were defending the bunker against the Nightmare under the pretense that they were to hold out until a new secret weapon could be charged and used to defeat the unyielding shadow. I never saw any of them again after I'd gone into the bunker.

My feelings were too far gone at that point to care about the people dying outside the bunker. I couldn't care at all anymore. Death was just happening, and I was all out of tears.

But my parents still cared. They kept the portal open to make sure everyone made it through even when the Nightmare pierced the bunker and flowed towards them like a river of darkness. Some didn't make it, but my father had tried to keep the gate open for as long as possible after sending my mom through. I was relieved to find him well after he came through and shut the portal behind him, but there was another heartache to follow.

For many months, we lived happily in our quarters near the research center of Astra. There'd been no evidence of it, but the Nightmare had nipped my father in the tip of his tail before he escaped. He slowly grew more and more mad until he could hide what happened no more, revealing to only my mother and I what had happened.

His secret became our family's secret. There had been no ceremony or splendor, but Ryn was family then too.

My poor father. He'd fought against the Nightmare on a metaphysical level, his soul a reflection of the universe's. The little piece of the blackness gnawed at him and consumed him over the months, driving him to insanity. Mom and I had to cover for him at the research lab, the excuse being that he was horribly crippled from terrible grief of everything that had transpired.

Ryn took care of him while we tried to simultaneously research quantum compression and find a cure for him. But the nature of the Nightmare was unfathomable, and with dark matter extremely difficult to obtain in Astra, we couldn't help him.

In the end of my father's struggle, Ryn had called us home. The strong black dragon who had been my dad could no longer recognize us. He was a hulk of bare emotion driven by impulse, and he screamed incoherently. Ryn was barely containing him with all his binding spells when we arrived.

"I can't hold him anymore," Ryn had said. "His thrashing's gone beyond my ability to recuperate since last week, I've been overexerting to keep him barely in one place."

My mother stepped towards her mate with caution, a light reaching towards darkness. "Cel, can you see?"

"See what?" I asked.

"His emotions are all out of balance. Try to manipulate the chemicals in his brain to settle them down. I will try to commune with him with the Korah techniques we have been looking at. Ryn, please keep him bound."

Ryn squawked and focused on the ethereal ropes surrounding my father. I closed my eyes and started mentally reaching into my father's head, using my life force to change the particles within.

Normal healthy people have natural firewalls against such intrusions, and members of my species were even more resistant to magical tampering, but my father no longer possessed any such protection. I easily crept in and waded through the simple matter, the masses of carbon, calcium, water, oxygen, iron, and so on, to find the neurotransmitters that were making my father mad.

I sorted the chemicals out onto an imaginary plane. There was a ton of epinephrine and norepinephrine, and very little serotonin and dopamine. These were the most important ones to balance out, so I set out to remix the combinations of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Despite the simplicity of what I was doing--breaking atomic bonds and forming new ones, it was a delicate task which drained me mentally.

I hadn't even noticed when my mother brought me into her communion. Evidently, my work had calmed my father enough to allow her to maneuver near him.

The Korah was a very spiritual species, and they'd sought to communicate with one's inner self. They wanted to find their souls so they could ascend to a higher plane of existence, one beyond the crude matter all known life existed in. Their magic went beyond mere telepathy and psychic interaction, which was why what came next was so devastating to see.

This particular technique placed our living essences, our pure life force, into a sort of astral plane. Some sillier scholars of the Korah called it the "soular plane," an utterly asinine joke which I clung to because of the horrible sight before me.

My father, a towering monument of a dragon for most of my life, was laying flat on the horizontal plane. Or rather, the shreds of my father's soul still remaining were resting on the invisible level. A clinical light shone throughout our communion, though my mother's pearly scales brought forth a warmer shade of white towards him.

There was only half his head left. There was a black abyss where the rest of his body should have been, a shadow far darker than his scales had been, but with the right light he appeared to be more whole than he was.

We approached, and his remaining eye strained to follow us.

"I am done for," my father said, half his jaw somehow spiritually working overtime to forge speech. "I tried to fight it, but it exists only to consume life. It is extremely good at it."

My mother reached out to touch him, but the jet black that was not part of him started to ooze towards her as if she was a magnet for the darkness.

"No," the remnant of my father's soul said. "Don't come any closer, or it will consume you too."

She frowned but retreated. "I won't leave you like this."

"It is over," he said. "There is no more life."

I hadn't realized it, but even my metaphysical eyes were blurring. "Why?" I blurted out. "Why does it want everything dead?"

His eye flicked towards me, and the remains of his face remained mostly expressionless. "They want to destroy all life because they hate matter. They think we invaded their realm, and now they want to eliminate everything which exists outside of their space, matter, waves, and etcetera. But that's not possible, so the Nightmare figured a different way. Annihilate all life, eliminate all possible observers, and the universe ceases to exist."

"But that's just a philosophical theory, isn't it?"

His eye started jerking violently, and then he screamed in that primal spine-chilling way which made me want to turn tail and run. "I--I can't, no more!"

White scales reached towards black, and I was too scared to stop my mother.

My once strong father found some hidden strength to recoil from her touch. "No! You need to send me away, portal me out of Astra, before I lose all control and kill all of you! Even though physically I feel fine...I, I can't stop feeling the urge to, from the Nightmare, kill everyone!"

From my mother, I saw not a single second of hesitation. Her right hand touched his remaining cheek while she hummed soothingly. In that moment, I was convinced that a miracle had occurred, and that my mother's angelic light had cured my father of the Nightmare.

I wasn't rational. I was afraid, and I had forgotten. All the hope that I had ever seen was worthless, its existence smothered under the corpses of all those who had clung to it.

My mind didn't want to see what was really happening. I saw my mother trying to help save my father's life, but the reality was that the oozing shadows were crawling onto her hand and devouring her spiritual arm, beginning the process of eating her life away just as it had done to him.

Her eyes were fixed upon my father's lonely one, ignoring the blackness creeping along her hand. She stayed with him like that for a long while, and I held onto hope for all that time.

The communion spell sputtered at the end of its time limit and snapped us back to reality. My father was there, his body whole physically but tattered spiritually, and my mother was staring coldly at her infected hand, watching the nothingness there.

"Now I understand," she said.

My father let out a horrifying roar. Ryn squawked just as loudly, and I could sense him pouring more effort into the binding spell. "I can't hold it myself!" the gryphon shouted.

I nodded and threw down my own set of immobilization spells to help him.

Through it all, my mom walked towards my father again. She flashed her left arm at him, opening a portal beneath him.

"What are you doing?" I yelled, half-crying.

Another roar, maybe of pain, maybe of rage, filled my ears. Energy started bubbling up around my father's hands, breaking the spells Ryn and I were setting on him. I focused on the ethereal manacles holding his hands in place, but they were starting to surge with explosive fire.

"It's got him," my mother said. "I have to get him out, or he'll detonate the whole place with the last of his life force. I'm sorry, Cel. I'm sorry we have to abandon you."

In my heart, I knew what she was doing, but I didn't want her to leave. "Mom! Please!"

"I won't leave him to die by himself." She grabbed a hold of his wrists and snuffed out the flames. "Hold on to Ryn, darling. Hold on to him and never let him go."

I cried out and tried to throw a spell on her to stop her, but she had already raised the curtain of the portal over themselves, the advanced dimensional magic easily slicing through the relatively simple binding spells Ryn and I had used.

If I had more time, if I hadn't been emotionally compromised...maybe I could've saved at least my mom, but it was not to be.

Without any fanfare, they were gone. Either my father had self-destructed and taken my mom with him, or he'd kept control, but there was nowhere they could go outside of Astra where they would not be lost to the blanketing Nightmare.

So that was that. My history, riddled with death. From then on, apathy was my default state of mind.

I couldn't save Ryn's family. I couldn't save my parents. I couldn't save anyone except one. Ryn was the only person who I could still feel with. I loved him, I really did. I would've let myself die for him, just as my mother did for her love. Without him, I'd never have recovered from my sense of detachment.

Now I might lose him too.

This time my hope was real. I made it myself.

There were several lines of research, but I'd never felt that any of them were workable. Compartmentalizing time and space even further was one of the most straightforward solutions, but it was always just delaying the inevitable. Most of the mages worked on that since it was what they knew, but I knew it was ultimately a futile effort. Others tried to break the fundamental laws of the universe to save it. They sought a way to force a temporal paradox to occur, to basically figure out a way to change a paradox into a stable time loop. They had high hopes to go back in time, stop the experiment on dark matter which brought forth the Nightmare, and ultimately save every life which had been extinguished. I'd dabbled a bit in that field, but I couldn't see it working out. Time paradoxes were law: they simply couldn't happen no matter what one tried. It was probably for the better too since otherwise there could've been endless time wars and impossibly complex timelines.

I'd chosen my line alone. Nobody in Astra understood how parallel universes worked as well as I did. But therein laid the problem: I'd forged a working portal to another universe, but it was only large enough for one, and there was no time for left for me to figure out how to safely transport two beings.

So I have to do it unsafely.

If we died, then better to die trying to live. If we survived, then...well, we would treasure our new lives forever. Together and forever.

The spell I created was like a portal, but with much more quantum physics involved, especially involving wave-particle duality and wave functions. It wasn't as simple as displacing a bounded mass spatially like teleportation, or temporally via time-travel (although both are intrinsically linked), and one had to think trans-dimensionally to even have a chance of breaking through the barrier between every reality.

One of the breakthroughs I discovered was dreaming. Dreams were a window to other realities, other dimensions. To lucid dream is to view a reality with conditions the dreamer can set. Coupled with a bit of quantum physics, the concept of traveling to an alternate reality could be made possible with the basic principle of dreaming.

Matter has infinite states of existence, and one state becomes the true state once it's observed. But dreams can be infinite, and sapient thought is beyond mere electric impulses and chemical reactions.

To observe, to imagine something, makes it exist somewhere. I had a better grasp of that now after hearing my father's explanation on the nature of the Nightmare. It is ability unique to life, much like magic, and now it was integral to preserving what life I could save.

Mine, I knew I could definitely do. Ryn, with all my strength, I hope. There was no time for anyone else.

"Cel," my little gryphon said, "we're going to die, aren't we? After all that running, after losing all our friends and family? I want to be in your arms when it comes for us, please?"

I breathed out, my warmth washing over Ryn's feathers. "We need to go. Now."

"Where?"

"My research lab. Quickly. We will not die today, not to the Nightmare."

"You've figured it out?"

"Sort of. I'll explain when we get there."

We slipped on our leggings, long skirts called hakamas, which were ancient pieces of clothing from a country that was on the first planet to ever generate sapient life, and then we rushed out of our balcony.

I didn't like teleporting inside Astra. Since real time was morphed and was always looping the same second, the normal spatial-temporal relationship, where an object has to have a definite three-dimensional coordinate tied to the fourth, time, was severely complicated. Porting out was an easier task, as my mother demonstrated, but a spell to move us half a mile to my lab would take longer to cast than to simply run there.

We could do even better. We soared down together, the artificial gravity in Astra low enough to let us fly for hours without tiring. We had done so before, circling around the city many times, but it was a reminder that even the little freedom we gained from the fake sky was limited. It was nothing like the skies of Kreen, with its alluring shades of green and nature, or of Teris, with its vast cityscapes and rural plains.

We tried not to look at the mages hovering up to reinforce the barrier. They were lost, just like the soldiers on Kreen. Like everyone else, really. But at least they were amongst the very last of the ones who would die.

If I had more time, I could have saved them. Maybe. I don't know. I didn't care. Ryn still did. I could tell because he was looking at them fly up to the edge of the shield layers. His eyes would fixate on the ones who were falling because he still felt bad for the dying. I didn't look at them beyond my peripheral vision, and drove on towards my research lab. When death reaped at a rate of billions around you everyday, you'd probably stop caring too.

Liquid darkness seeped into the outer layers of the city's shields. It wouldn't hold. There was no magic that could repel the Nightmare. After all, how could anything created by one's life force stop something which seemed focused on extinguishing life?

And yet Astra's stalwart defenders flew on up high, reinforcing the shields with all their might. I noticed sparks of magic being thrown at the blanketing night and thought perhaps another researcher had successfully discovered a way to strike at the Nightmare, but I didn't believe any such attack could exist based on magic alone, and technology was a lost art since the loss of the first worlds. No, it was more than likely desperation which drove the last defenders of life. After all, they had to do something. Life would not roll over and surrender. It would cling to any hope. It would fight where it could no longer flee.

I clung to hope. But my technique had worked, hadn't it? I needed to act swiftly, however, to modify the spell circle to be able to transport two lives. Theoretically, it was the same procedure as doubling the capacity of a normal transportation circle, but the whole concept had never been so simply mirrored throughout its entire creation.

I asked Ryn to put an invisibility spell over us. It was a strenuous task for him, but I needed to reserve all my strength to save us. We snaked through a side entrance to one of the many research buildings, all of which were emptying out. Some of the scientists brought out large weapon-like pieces of magitech, untested prototypes which had a miniscule chance of affecting the Nightmare. One of them might've worked. It was said that a specific beam of certain particles fired through a collider, mixed with dark energy, was blasted against dark matter to create the Nightmare, so maybe there was a one-in-a-million chance someone had figured out how to send them back to wherever they'd come from.

My odds were better. With the massive chaos happening all throughout Astra, nobody noticed us entering the building where my research lab was located despite the fact that Ryn's invisibility spell was rather sloppy and wouldn't have worked well on creatures with a better range of vision than the typical visible spectrum. The gryphon didn't understand the nuances of visible light and electromagnetic waves, so his invisibility spell was based purely on his will and his experience of vision, which meant any alien with better vision than he had would likely be able to see us.

We made it in to my room without being noticed. I flicked the light switch, revealing the carved granite tablet circle in the middle of the room, the centerpiece of my work. There was nothing but death outside, and this circle, painted with mathematical equations and formulas which might've looked like mystical symbols to the untrained eye, was the only chance we had to survive.

I whisked a handful of objects off of my workbench and started placing them into the eight small circles which ran along the edge of the stone. They were the big restrictors and categorizers, the rules which I wanted the spell to be bound to. After all, there were infinite universes, but you had to lay down some ground rules for which one to travel to.

The first rule was set into the circle already. It was a filter which would only select the first thousand local realities which satisfied the other criteria. The selection itself was still random aside from the rules since I hadn't worked out how to specify which universe I wanted to go to from the available list. The whole thing was incredibly convoluted, and adding even a simple filter which would make the randomizer never select the same universe twice was a headache to integrate into the spell, so it was devoid of many features a teleportation circle would have aside from the standard safety ones such as gas displacement upon arrival, altitude tracking, and matter-momentum stability.

I started setting the items in my arm down, the first one the most important. A piece of black tourmaline, a dark stone to represent the Nightmare. I mentally flicked the switch to set the circle to exclude any destination where the Nightmare existed, and then I laid down the rest of the items.

"I need you to lace the room with explosions," I said to Ryn while putting down one of my scales to exclude us from being transported to another reality where I also existed. "If the Nightmares figure out how to travel to different realities, then no life is safe."

Ryn nodded. "Okay. Destruction magic. My specialty."

"Trigger it to blow everything up as soon as something breaks in," I said.

"How long is it going to take? What if it burrows in here before it's charged?"

I laid down a brown feather to exclude a reality where there was another Ryn. "I need five minutes to pour my life energy into the spell circle." I sighed and added, "If I don't do it fast enough, then, Ryn, I love you, and I hope we'll spend our afterlives together."

"I love you too," he said faintly but resolutely.

I tried to give him a reassuring smile under the circumstances, and then I tore off a piece of my hakama and put it into another rule circle. This one would ensure that my general knowledge of history in this universe would remain applicable to the destination one, with the first intergalactic species to evolve being humanity billions of years ago. They were the first and, along with all subsequent life, didn't evolve the ability to use magic until far later, relying on only technology to reach the stars. Their home colonies, along with the forty-second Earth, were thus the first to be wiped out by the Nightmare since magic was almost non-existent in their origin cluster. But that wouldn't happen where Ryn and I were going.

The other circles already had simple defining variables painted in them, such as the gravitational constant or Planck's constant, to ensure the destination universe would follow the physics that I was already accustomed to. The rules were set, so I started charging up the circle by pouring my life force into it.

Ah, but first it needed a slight modification.

Okay, maybe not so slight. The circle was drawn for one person, and now I needed to squeeze in room for two. I had to squeeze in a standing zone for Ryn somewhere which wouldn't interfere with the transfer of energy and the whole input-output process. There was no time to analyze for the most optimal location, so I grabbed a green marker and drew a triangle for him to step in somewhere I thought was least congested.

This was sloppy work, but there was no time to do any better. I set my palms against the input zone and started filling the circle with magic.

The paint glowed as energy hummed through the circle. Brighter and brighter, as power diffused throughout the tablet and filled it with a capacitor-like storage of mana. This was the easy part--the stored energy would rev up the spell, but then it would be up to me, the metaphorical battery, to keep up the energy flow in transit.

"Five minutes," I said.

At the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw my gryphon rushing to carve red symbols into the walls, his claw searing an explosive spell set to go off at his will. His form of spellcasting was more primitive than mine: where I would have written chemical combustion balance equations, or possibly nuclear fusion equations, though I doubted I would ever have the mental capacity to fuel destruction on such scale without weeks of preparation, he drew more symbolic images like suns, fireballs, and fireworks. Oddly, his primal expression of his life force made him far more efficient at blowing things up than I was, and I trusted he could disintegrate the room and leave nothing behind.

"One minute," I said, eyes shut and focused.

I heard him shuffle faster, and then there was quiet. "I'm done. Tell me when."

"Ten seconds. Step inside the green triangle."

He did so, and then he waited.

"Okay," I said. "It's going to phase us out of space-time, that's when you trigger the explosions. There'll be no turning back, and either we'll die in fire or burst out of this universe alive."

He nodded. "I'm ready."

"I'm going to initiate the transport. Wait at least fifteen seconds to make sure we're completely out of phase."

"Okay."

I closed my eyes and gave him a quick peck on the beak before I pulled the trigger. A sharp jolt of energy fired out of my body, emptying the reservoir of mana already inside the circle, and sent us careening off into another dimension.

Starlight flowed across my mind. The magic drained me, and I fell into a soft slumber. I dreamed of cool oceans teeming with colorful fish and corals, of ships above sailing across the night, of a sailor pointing his navigational sextant at the stars, of a distant twinkle hundreds of light-years away emanating from a starship, a technological marvel I've only read about, in the vaster ocean of space.

I dreamed of life. It prevailed. It flourished.

But something nagged at me. There was static filling my ears, a buzz which some part of me realized had been there for a while but had grown in intensity. The volume increased until the dreams stopped, and I opened my eyes.

Fire. There was red flame seeping into the circumference of the spell circle, and I could feel the heat trying to reach us through the phase-shift. Red turned to blue, then to violet, and I saw the edges of the tablet begin to disintegrate.

"It was here," Ryn said, his eyes timid but fixed on mine. "The blackness was bleeding through the walls. I destroyed the room, but I was only on fourteen seconds."

I nodded reassuringly at him and swept my hands, which felt as heavy as a pair of rocks, to scan the circle. "It'll be okay," I said, forcing my vocal cords to function. "The metaphysical junction worked, and the spell integrity is holding."

The initial conditions were complete, so I safely stepped out of my transport zone to sort of fall into a hug with him. I felt the heat recede as the phase-shifting completed, and so I resigned to peace in my lover's arms while the circle drained me of my life force.

But then there was a jostle. I jolted to attention and looked down.

This was bad. A crack was forming right through the diameter of the circle. The heat from the fire must've caused extensive thermal stress before we escaped. I cobbled together my remaining strength and held the tablet together, but it wasn't a simple matter of maintaining the structural wholeness of the stone--I had to provide a conduit for every split flow in the markings, and this utterly drained me.

It was making my head throb, and if I used too much of my strength, I would faint and we would land in some place between dimensions, a place where physics might not even exist and where we would both surely die.

I had to let something go.

But everything was necessary! I couldn't stop maintaining anything, but I needed to before I collapsed from the power load.

Oh, but there was one thing. There was only that one thing, the survivalist part of my brain said to me. I didn't want to listen, but I had to.

Hold on to him. Hold on to him and never let him go.

I tried. I tried so damn hard, but I couldn't hold the spell together. I didn't have enough strength, and the whole circle was starting to unravel. I needed to keep it glued together. We would both be safely transported if I let myself do it, but I would have to stop maintaining the linking force between my triangle and his hastily drawn one.

There was no choice. I had to cut the tether.

Our bodies were metaphysically tied to the green triangles, as it was laid down in the set of initial conditions. I held on to Ryn as hard as I could, my hands clutching hard enough to pull off feathers, but it was a futile effort. He was going to be lost, potentially a thousand universes apart from me, but he would be alive. There was still hope. I could find him. I _would_find him.

The light began to fade, and my arms began going through his body as if he were phase-shifting. He was not knowledgeable about the magic, but he had enough wisdom to know what was happening.

When the light was gone, the tablet splintered in half as its spell was complete, and we started drifting towards two new lights on opposite sides of us, pulling us apart.

With the last of my strength, I cried. "I'm sorry. I tried. I love you. I don't know how long it will take to find you."

Ryn reached out but could no longer touch me. With a smile, he said, "I'll wait for you, love. Please, don't let yourself be alone."

My eyes closed involuntarily, and sleep came.

---

---

In a realm of blackness, there were a group of spheres which were, unaccountably, blacker than the darkness surrounding them. They hummed with voices, vibrations which another approaching creature heard as words.

"Something is wrong."

"Light matter still exists."

"It cannot be. We have terminated all observers and returned to our realm."

"Yet the intruding particles, forces, and waves persist."

"We have deleted the universe, have we not?"

The creature, covered in black scales yet brighter than anything else in this muted dimension, made itself known. "We believe we have the answer," it said.

One of the spheres, larger than the others, moved slightly towards the creature. "Why do you return to the Nether wearing that decaying flesh?"

"We will make it live again."

"Are you malfunctioning?"

"No. We devoured this one slowly. We had no choice but to terminate without haste, for we were few and its resistance strong. We have seen the inner workings of its mind. We have a probable reason as to why the outer matter continues to exist."

"Explain."

"We have accessed this one's memory cells. It has a progeny. This one and its family unit were among the most adept manipulators of its origin dimensions. It is possible the offspring of this observer has successfully pierced the Shell and traveled into the multiverse."

"Impossible. The energy required to cross universes is infinite."

"Yet these beings appear capable of doing so. The theory of this one's progeny involves the process of dreaming."

"What are dreams?"

"They are images generated by arbitrarily igniting neurons. This being, along with every other observer outside the Nether, requires a periodic life cycle known as sleep. During sleep, the creature's limited electromagnetic wave sensors, what it calls eyes, engages in rapid movement while dreaming."

"You must elaborate concisely. What does sleep, dreaming, and neurons have to do with the multiverse?"

"The progeny believes the images are not generated randomly. It believes they are insights to universes beyond the Shell." It thought to itself, should we explain the imagination? It is infinite what the beings can think in their otherwise limited minds. These creatures are fascinating! I--we must know more!

"Impossible. They do not possess the infinite energy necessary."

"Nevertheless, was the offspring terminated in the pocket environment? Description: like this flesh, but silver in general color. Hair color cyan to blue. Optical sensors are light bl--"

"Desist. No matching observer was terminated in the hidden environment."

"This one's memory cells say it has progeny. We can confirm this one had a compatible reproductive mate." It wondered another thought, why had the white one let itself be terminated by this one's own ejection of life force? Granted, we had been in control of it by then, but why did she--it refuse to believe that when all signs pointed to the contrary?

"No matching observer was terminated in the hidden environment. Remove yourselves from the observer."

"Has its memory not proven useful? Have we not directed you to the location of the hidden environment without suffering further loss of temporal procession?" It thought again, and it wondered why there seemed to be another voice, no, many voices in the creature's head, thinking and yelling. It demanded things of them, like nourishment, sex, or what to feel about the leading sphere. Hate, yes, that's what it wanted it--them to feel.

"This insight is approvable. Very well. Commence research on this progeny immediately."

"Oh yes," it...he...it said. "We shall hunt it down and complete the termination of the outer realm."

Another voice screamed at them, yelling at them not to kill the creature's offspring, but they ignored it. Yet it was incessant, constant, and could not be ignored for long.