How do you a kill a God? You whisper it’s name to another God.

I was 5 when I first heard this. I still had a family then. Divine knowledge seeps in through the chassis of dreams. My divine informer lay in a bathtub, body flattened out by the gently swirling waters, his skin a thorough purple. He spoke to me from inside the water as it turned purple, then blue, then green.

Everything in our world has a true name. Everything. Animals, objects, planets, gods, stars. To learn it is to have complete power over it. To whisper it to a god, is death.

I saw him a year later again. This time, the bathtub was empty. The waters sparkled beautifully, like a rainbow had dissolved in it.

Every God is a beast. An untamed animal. To speak it’s name is to tame it. To speak another’s name is to feed it.

It no longer spoke to me – it was like it had planted the idea in my mind, and it had grown into an entire realization.

To scream it’s name into the heavens is to invite it. Invite it to feast. But careful what else may hear you.

I didn’t see him again for a long time.

I was born in 1998. Since my birth, a void has followed me. At the age of six, my mother, father and childhood home vanished. I checked into the local library that was a few miles away, and it was like they’d never existed in the first place. Names gone from the database. Names gone from the borrower’s card, stuffed into back of the books. Funny little comments, doodles they’d made in the pages of whatever they’d been reading together at the time while I used to protest from the foot of the sofa that books were public property, all of those gone, pages in pristine condition.

At the age of twelve, my foster home vanished. That was when I learned that when I lingered in a place for too long, the void would devour it. It was a tall, beautiful home sandwiched between two other government offices. When I came back from school, it was gone. Deleted. The two offices were pressed next to each other, a single fence separating them like there’d been no foster home between them, ever.

At sixteen, the man I love vanished. He’d known about my condition. We’d travelled from town to town, sleeping in cars, breaking into homes. We were careful. The void still ate him. It didn’t eat him like it ate the others, simply yanking them out of existence, pushing together the space that surrounded them. It ate him slowly, painfully. The void was the void - it couldn’t speak, it couldn’t do anything but eat, but it seemed to me like it enjoyed eating him. First, I watched his past disappear. He’d act confused when I called him by his name. “My name’s not Ethan.” His hometown changed about five times over the course of the next few days. Our inside jokes no longer made sense to him. I knew what was happening to him but I said nothing. I didn’t hold him tighter, nor did I whisper reassurances into his ear. I simply acted like everything was normal, right up until the day he disappeared.

One day, I opened the back of the van and saw him lying on his back, utterly still except for his twitching fingers. His face was gone, annihilated. I went out to a diner by myself, ordered a big meal, ate for about an hour and left without paying. When I came back, his head was gone. His fingers still twitched. Five days later, he was gone. I’d held his hands in mine for about three days, then gone to take a piss in the woods. He was gone, like the corpse of an insect that’d been picked up by the wind and swept into some pore of soil that no human would ever see in their lives.

I stopped talking to people after that. Just like that, I’d done half of the void’s work for it, severing all my connections to civilization.

I learned to be content. I almost learned to be happy. I stole a phone, stole a laptop, learned to observe the world from afar. I learned how to play the guitar. When I was 23, I helped deliver a baby in a crackhouse and learned the value of human life, and it made feel powerful. Like I was standing right before the void and telling it to fuck off.

Everywhere I went, I tried to leave a trail. It became a little compulsive hobby of mine. Etching my name into the walls of crumbling crackhouses, vandalizing family portraits, leaving my stories on online message boards where they were obligated to take me seriously. Sound familiar? The luxury of forming a story was something I took lesser and lesser for granted, the more time I spent in the madness of the other reality. We'll get to that soon. The other reality. It became my way of cobbling together my sanity. Everytime I returned, I wrote. Like a prisoner leaving tally marks as time sweeps through him like a tide.

One night, I had a dream.

I was walking on an ocean. The night was starless, pitch black. There was a hole in the ocean where the water turned to steam and space warbled and screamed, atoms decimated and turned to dust. I walked into it, and saw everything. My parents, beautiful, untouched, floating through the expanse. My lover. His older brother, his father, his mother, all frozen in time. Houses, objects, things even I didn’t recognize. These were things the Void had managed to erase completely, even from my mind. Friends, movies I’d loved, the names of toys I’d played with as a kid. I tried to touch them, caress their faces, but my hands passed right through them as though they were holograms.

I asked the Void why it tormented me like this, and The Void spoke to me for the first time.

It told me I was an accident of cosmic proportions. That I was never meant to exist, and my being itself was one big cosmic mishap. The universe was a faulty machine. Every second, elephants materialised out of thin air, breaking all logic, tumbling from the sky, then popped back out of existence a second later, and everything in the world was in symmetry again. Holes opened in thin air, then closed again. Fully-formed humans with lives and dreams and families faded in and out of the fabric of existence. The void made sure everything was in equilibrium in this broken, limping excuse for a reality.

What was I? A mistake nested within a mistake. I had emerged into this world, congealing from some rogue pool of atoms, my head stuffed with stories, the world stuffed with my delusions. Houses cropping up where they weren’t supposed to be, loving parents with a loving child where there was supposed to be nothing but silence. My resistance to being removed was mutilating this reality, stretching it to it’s limits, erasing all the wrong people from existence. If I surrendered myself, let the Void consume me, everything would be returned to it’s right place. My lover, to the home he’d run away from to be with me. My parents, to whatever lives they’d had before I’d speared into them.

Death was not so bad, the Void said. Life was a selfish, wicked thing, inventing illusion upon illusion to keep itself alive. Life was a parasite, sinking it’s pincers into miserable meat machines, splashing unfeeling, inanimate objects with envy, anger, desire, a sick crippled thing that’d arisen out of the unlikeliest of chemical situations. Whatever lay beyond life was beautiful, it promised. It sang to me the fatally beautiful song of Silence. The silence in places where no human has ever been to, forests where trees fall by themselves, caves that had never felt the embrace of light, planets that rotated serenely about their axis past all human sight.

I woke up, shirt glued to my chest with sweat, brain pounding so hard that it felt like my skull was being bashed in. There wasn’t really much of a decision to make here. I’d fled from the Void all my life in fear of what it would do to me if it ever caught up to me. I’d fled from the Void out of a quiet, simmering rage at this ridiculously unfair curse I’d been dealt in life. The Void had found me, explained my place in this broken universe to me.

I think I was ready to leave.

I stepped out of the house, tiptoed over all the broken glass on the patio and walked up to the edge of the pool. I could feel The Void making it’s way towards me and it still had a day or two to go. I sat at the edge and dipped my feet in the water, savoring the coldness, letting the sensations consume me. I stayed there until I could no longer feel my legs. When the sun came up, I limped back to the house and slumped down on the sofa. I was feeling nihilistic today, so I knocked over a big frame with a photo of the house’s occupants - two daughters who looked my age, dressed in modest blue gowns, a single father looking proudly into the camera.

Like a poorly-baked cake, the universe split. Two layers peeling away from each other, the father’s head split in half, daughters separated by a cosmic gulf. I felt my own skin unfurl and fall away, leaving nothing but a pulse of consciousness, naked, exposed. I was gripped by a vulnerability so intense, so painful that it felt like a knife pricking every inch of my soul. Well, this is what felt like to be erased. To be prostrated before a supernova, every atom tingling with a discomfort beyond words.

Time didn’t seem to have any meaning here, but a thought washed upon me, water lapping at an orb of sentience.

I was still very much alive. Very much… existent.

Colours flowed over me like a gentle stream. A new sensorium grew within me, nothing like that chamber of sights and sounds and smells and that other sixth thing that I was so used to.

A palace resolved itself from the blackness. Seated upon a throne was a thing, a body composed of ideas, a deer mask grown within it like a mutation.

“I traveled to your world far too many times. I had to wear a face, for every entity there wears a face. Stars, apes, worms, all possessed of their own brilliant faces. I can’t seem to take off my face anymore. A punishment, perhaps, for wandering into places I should not have.”

The deer-king wavered like a mirage. It’s acolytes were gathered beside it. Each was an idea of it’s own, but the deer-king was everything. The singularity. The accumulation of all the knowledge in the world.

“What is happening?” I asked. Curiosity. Confusion. Panic. An entire melange of thoughts, sweeping through the world, causing it to waver like a flag in the wind.

“You will not survive for much longer in here, so I will make this exchange quick. We exist in a reality bordering yours. A superstructure of ideas and feelings and information. It seems a deity from within the darkest depths of this structure has slipped into your world, latched onto you like a parasite and is using you to lure in easy prey.”

A mental image speared towards me. It struck me like thunder, and I saw the Void, and I knew it’s name.

“It cannot exist without a host. When you have cemented yourself in another’s mind through remembrance, it will consume them, erase their information from the fabric.”

Yes. That made sense. That was why I was always spared.

“The beast has tired of you. As a lure, you have become ineffective. It has chosen another infant at random as it’s new host. Someone you knew, someone you remember. A baby brother, a niece maybe. I cannot tell.”

I could. A memory that I had etched too deeply into my personality. I knew now that a personality was a luxury I could never afford.

“Hence, it asks you to walk knowingly into it’s maw. To devour you, find that infant in your mind, latch onto them.”

“So everything it told me was a lie? Everything?”

“It did not completely deceive you. Yes, you were an accident. You blinked into existence one day, complete with a family and a past. Your reality is ugly, unstable. There are gaping holes, glaring inequalities. Your universe dragged in the beast to restore equilibrium.”

An acolyte stirred beside the deer-king. Another pulse of information struck me so hard that it splintered my mind.

The universe makes errors sometimes. However, this is the core idea we were born with. The first idea…. that there are no rejects, no half-products in any reality. Everything that exists here is meant to exist, however flawed it’s birth. You are one of His Children. Yes, your emergence into the world was a cosmic accident. But you are meant to stay here, live out whatever life you have before you now and contribute to this frantic, never-ending dance of cause and effect that unites everything in this universe. Even your bones, your scattered ashes will live on in their humble interactions with the air and the earth.

“I see you’re fragmenting. We will remove the Beast from your mind, but it will require something to be amputated. Your eye, perhaps. Now that you know it’s name, the Beast will pursue you forever. A name is a dangerous thing. A name is something that can be whispered to other predators, predators with hungers that eclipse entire realities. Seek them out.”

Several acolytes crowded around me, and we melted, sublimated into a thought. A transaction. Something was to be cut out. I saw something small flit into the thought, staring at me from behind a dog-mask.

“Who are you?”

It scampered away.

When I awoke, everything burned. Flames blazed within my eye sockets. They itched, they pounded, they burned. I clawed at my face, felt blood ooze down from my empty eye sockets.

The pain receded after a week. My other senses grew stronger in a generous mental compensation, and smells and sounds intersected in my mind to form hazy pictures. The Void had not found me yet, but I could hear it’s screams ripple through the world. It puppeteered something, some lesser monster, still deadly enough to raze mountains,. Without me, it would starve. I just didn’t know how long it would take.

I left the house a day later. The deer-king had left me with two gifts, one for each eye. One, it’s name. It was an intangible thing, unsayable, unthinkable - it was useless if I couldn't say it, apparently, but it was etched into my mind nevertheless. Two, another name. Silas Enright.

I traveled for a few years after that, continent to continent, country to country. I traveled to places of worship, centres of science, asked the people about Silas Enright and hungry deities from beyond this plane. I learned to be inconspicuous, making my presence as forgettable as that of ants crawling beneath the cracks in the pavement. Cultures, sex, identities, all of these fleeted by like dust motes. Sometimes, I’d lingered in the mind of someone I’d laid in bed with or someone I had questioned, and I would hear the Void squeal in joy as it found them. I regretted those, but quickly grew desensitized. I had to. Such was this life. I came to find beauty in impermanence. The joy in watching things bloom and things die as quick as they came.

I faced no threat from anything other than the Void. Everytime a person cornered me, mouth foaming, knife in hand, eyes brimming with the hope of a hunger soon to be satiated, I’d simply uncover my eyes. Whatever they saw underneath scared them more than any tragic deformation could. In the darkness of my orbits, they saw something from beyond this world. Every language has a word for the eldritch, for things so evil that they have to be addressed by one or two syllables, snatched from the lexicon of babies rolling around in their crib. When they saw the twin voids in my head, they screamed those words and fled. Another generous gift from the deer-king.

The last time I met Silas Enright was in a ghost town on the outskirts of Mexico. I needed to meet the deer king again. I needed more to go on. Four long years of running and thieving, and I had gotten no closer to finding anything. The deathly touch of the cartels had swept through this area, displacing life as thoroughly as the Void erased it. I sat in a canopy bed, surrounded by disused clothes, emptied drawers, picture frames. Strangely intact bathroom door. Dead leaves blew in from the window. A stash of stolen psychedelics sat in my lap.

I got high to the sound of abandoned objects rattling in the wind.

I met Silas.

“Hi,” I said. I could see him. I could see in my dreams.

“Hi,” he said. He was a cadaverous excuse for a man. His eyes were gouged out. A bathtub lay overturned behind him.

He licked his dried lips. Fungus decorated them like a beautiful sundress. “I’m a hologram. Parts of me exist here. Things the beast would normally erase.”

“Why did the deer-king want me to find you?”

He winced at the mention of his name.

“The deer-king! I wish I could tell you more, but I don’t actually exist. I’m a hologram, with a very limited amount of information. So I will tell you what I can.”

In the periphery, I saw the man in the dog-mask peek at me from behind the veil. Then, he was gone. Whatever.

“Did the Void come after you too?” I asked.

“Yes. I survived It. There was an organization who dealt with aberrations like this, and they helped me. They ran tests on me and we learned a great deal about the beast. We knew we’d vanish, so they released rogue transmissions into the psychosphere. Like this one.”

I wanted to ask him something, but the harder I looked at him, the more he started to look like an actual cadaver.

“The organization no longer exists. Taken by the Void, all except one. He’s somewhere else now. Barely even a ‘he’ anymore. You might have even seen him… he’s not very discreet. Living in two realities will destroy your sense of stealth, apparently. Gosh, and we sent him to spy on them. Aren’t you going to ask me what we learned?”

“Sure,” I said. Fungus webbed Silas’ body.

“The Void has pursued people like us since the dawn of time. Infest and bait. Infest and bait. Over and over again, throughout the centuries, since the first cosmic catastrophe emerged. There are cosmic accidents so severe that the universe refuses to even acknowledge them. Cause, effect, fate, all these things phase through them like the wind. They’re invisible, even to the Void. We call them the Orphans. If you’ve found this transmission, it means I found them.”

Silas walked towards me, touched my temple.

I saw the place in my mind. I knew where to go. There were no directions. I had to traipse a very specific chain of cause and effect to get there.

Silas stepped away from me, tendrils of green and brown sluicing his cheeks.

A deep sadness caught up with me. Somewhere, I sat in the bedroom of a dead girl, her body coming apart like sand in a bathtub that stank of death and lust, within a rotting organ of a rotting city.

“Will people always die? I don’t want them to. I’m so lonely. I can’t keep running away. I can’t keep slicing humans out of my life. I want to smile at them, shake their hands, fall in love with them. What did you do? How did you survive?”

He said nothing and blinked out a moment later.

I stood alone, in a vast white expanse.

The world flickered, and I was on the floor, draped in curtains and drool and tears.

***

I biked for two days. On the afternoon of the third day, I was stopped in the countryside. The men asked me to hand over my traveling bag, When I didn’t budge, one of them kicked me off the bike. For the next five minutes, all I could smell was grass. A gun was pressed into my back – the tip was sharp, slippery.

At this point in my journey, I was consumed by a lethal ennui. Maybe it was wandering that ghost town for two days, hearing whispers in the air, footsteps in empty buildings, speakers that burst into life and played strange songs before going silent again, the howl of the Void in the distance. It was here with me in the country.

Behind me, the men were discussing undressing me and using me for target practice.

What was the point of all this? Self-survival seemed too uncompelling of an answer to me. Years ago, evading the Void had sparked some twisted satisfaction in me – I felt smart, cunning, powerful. Now, with the solution before me, it all seemed so futile. I’d survive the Void. So what? Could I ever return to normal life?

One of the men said they’d already had their fill with the last couple. The other men agreed.

No. A normal life wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted the Void to scream. To beg for mercy. Ridiculous, but if there was even a slight possibility of it, I’d take it.

We should dump her with the couple in that old building, one of them said. The others chorused their agreement.

I was pulled to my feet. One of the men pushed me backwards, told me to empty my pockets. I did. They’d seen all they need to see. Rifles raised in unison. Faces sweating with excitement.

The sun turned red. The sky turned red. There was no way I could know that, but I did. The men wheeled around, firing at each other, emptying bullets into each other’s faces with feral joy. Two of them were ripped to shreds, but it seemed like they’d already used up most of their magazines. I watched one of the men take his rifle and smash it into the side of a man’s head, bashing it in until it was a soft, mushy mess on the ground. Another one kept stabbing at his throat with the blunt end of his rifle until his head fell off his neck.

The violence was so quick, so savage that the lines of smell and sound snapped and twirled in my mind and I could barely comprehend what was happening. At the end of it, one man stood. He stumbled towards me, choking on a stolen pendant that someone had tied tightly around his throat.

His hands shot up to his face.

A burst of blood.

Eyeballs at my feet.

“Good afternoon,” he said. The ring on his throat grew redder.

I said nothing.

“Unfortunate. I intervened. I cannot stay here for too long. The beast is only a few nights away from you. Have you found the predators yet?”

“I found Silas Enright.”

The deer king paused, eyes bulging. Blood poured evenly from the ring in his neck.

“How do you know that name?” he finally said, reaching for something in his belt.

“It was in my head. After you visited me,” I said, backing away. His hands were circling a knife.

“No. NO. NO!” he screamed. An eye bulged so hard it fell from his socket. “YOU FOOL!” he shrieked, rushing towards me, knife raised above his head.

I stumbled backwards uselessly, landing hard on my back. The knife missed me, but he slammed into me, blood from his neck spurting onto my mouth.

I watched him raise the knife again, bring it downwards in that fatal arc.

A blur of motion. Something gray. A rock smashed into the side of his head so hard that his face seemed to change shape. There was no blood, only an earth-shattering crunch.

I pushed him off me, heard something scurry past me and towards the body. The thing in the dog-mask smashed his head to a bloody pulp with the same rock.

Sweat poured over my face in sheets. The clusterfuck of violence had obliterated whatever internal antenna I used to see, to think. It was so hot.

Dog-mask grabbed my hand, helped me up. Its body wavered like it wasn’t supposed to be here.

It took me deep into the forest, to an abandoned house. It gave me its eyes, and I saw the peeling walls, the bullet holes that pocked the walls, the dead couple that lay beneath the floorboards.

“You put the name in my head,” I said.

It looked at me, nodded.

“You’re Silas’ friend. The one from the organization.”

It did not respond.

A strange light filled the room. Reality cleaved. Clutching my hand, dog-mask walked into a palace. The floor felt odd – it was smooth, polished, but all my feet felt was a wetness, like I was wading through a swamp. The world shimmered, stretched, snapped. Unstable.

For the first time, dog-mask spoke.

“Where do you think we are.” It’s voice was robotic, each letter a different intonation, a different accent.

I looked around again. The deer-king was slumped over his throne, his belly touching the ceiling. Beneath him, his acolytes writhed, moaning and screaming, embracing each other in an orgiastic trance.

“How…” I started.

Dog-mask pointed to a deep, dark pit in the ground, much like the one I’d seen in that dream with the Void so many years ago. Matter flew upwards from the pit, away from…

I craned my neck.

I stared down into space, planets and stars crumbling, disassembling themselves and reappearing at the rim of the hole.

“They’re cannibalizing our reality,” Dog-mask said.

I looked back at the Deer-king and his acolytes. They were enjoying themselves so much that they hadn’t noticed we were here.

“The only thing that was stopping them was the Void. It trimmed the edges of their universe, eating away at any information that grew past the edge, making sure it didn’t overflow, making sure it didn’t eat away at ours.”

Everything wavered. For a second, we were nothing but colors and ideas, then it stabilized and we were staring into the hole again.

“Our universe is surrounded by nothingness. It gives it shape, traps it. Whatever the thing they expelled, it’s their equivalent of nothingness. It’s the anti-idea. The antithesis to everything that exists in their reality.”

“They expelled it. We don’t know how, but they found a way to excise it from their reality, and now it’s germinated in ours, inhabiting the only common dimension we have. But we can only feed it for so long, and they know it’ll eventually come back to them. That’s why they want you to kill it.”

“Take me back,” I said.

‘What?”

“Take me back. I need to think,” I said.

“This… is the only place I can communicate with you.”

I took a long, hard look at him. Sight was a premature thing in this world. I saw his mask, his empty eyes, a green aura.

“You were human once.”

“Yes,” he said.

“How long have you been here?”

“They don’t have a concept of time here. Up until recently, at least.”

I believed him. He paused for a massive amount of time until speaking again.

“They sent me here to spy on them. To learn a name, a very important one. Put me in a deprivation tank, filled the water and my bloodstream with psychedelics. Silas tells me that body’s gone, dissolved in the water. That’s how long I’ve been here. I remember nothing from my past. Not even my name.”

I nodded. It was hard to think through all the moaning in the background.

“So, what? You don’t want me to kill the Void?”

“Not in the way they told you to. You bring down things from the higher planes, you’ll tear our universe in half. That’s what they want – to drag in the carcass, run it through the shredder, assimilate everything we have into their world. With no Void to stop them, they’ll grow forever, no cosmic death in sight.”

“What do you propose we do?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer. I was exhausted. Tired of this little cosmic tiff.

“Silas said he was developing a virus. A piece of data so potent that if it came into contact with their universe, it would corrupt everything. Destroy them for good. He went missing when he went looking for the Orphans, and I can’t seem to find his location, which is quite surprising – I’m literally omnipresent.”

“Omnipresent? How does that work?”

Something in the air changed. I turned around, looked at Dog-mask. Colours roiled in his empty orbits.

How do you a kill a god? You whisper it’s name to another god.

How do you become a god? You learn the name of the universe.