He was on a journey. A personal quest to rediscover a long lost sibling who had been stolen from him by a mad demon. The same demon responsible for driving him into an equally insane trinity of myth, flesh, and steel – of primordial beast, artificial monster, and an [i]accident[/i] born from the clash between a noble patriarch and a gluttonous experiment. A distinct lack of meaning for the third’s existence permeated every aspect of his soul, rendering his mind stagnant, and actions worthless. Consequently, the third piece of the abominable amalgam comprising Taluge had his nihilism resolved through the hellish merging of bodies, minds, and souls.

Through him, the way to reclamation of familial unity would be realized, just as the one who was sought had led Tage through the frozen labyrinth of purpose, melting the sealed exit and allowing him to emerge into the stellar warmth of spiritual companionship. 

Presently, the consolidated form of the Raging Singularity soared on shadow-tinted platinum wings, propelled by yellow plasma emissions streaming from the tips as well as the soles of his feet, knuckles dragging and skipping across the astral sea whilst the burning propellant vaporized the surreal waters in their wake. Within the rising steam trail, a surge of animated scenes floated up; creatures warring, sadists torturing, inhuman youths frollicking through a combination of differing lands, spun and woven into each other in a manner too abstract for the mind to comprehend. An uncountable number, both simple and complex sprouted, blossomed, and withered into ocean mist, blown away and scattered unto nothingness – reflected in the twin hexagonal shape of a scarlet left, and sapphire right pair of eyes, pupils still and motionless on a draconic face whose serrated lids did not blink. None of it meant anything to him – a raspy, metallic exhale passed through barely opened jaws, everything appearing as mundane as blowing leafs in a damp forest.

A twitch of impatience made him snort, the scent of mundanity leaving him directionless, agitated, and irritable. His frustration amplified his desire, made his mind snuff out all irrelevant details like a blizzard blowing out all the smaller insignificant flames, letting only the brightest infernos survive the storm of longing.

Then it appeared like a bloodstained hurricane.

Nine and a half foot horns released a maroon plume from their tips, billowing everywhere and nowhere, drifting toward the cyclone and being vacuously sucked into the swirling clouds, blending into a liquid mix of decadence and impending doom. It [i]reeked[/i] of foulness, triggered thoughts of his damnation, and attracted his wrath like a tower attracting lightning; he would strike out at it until the place was either fried to a crisp, or the difference was so insubstantial as to be non-existent.

Traveling into the storm, his emotions came to a boil, and no amount of magic would be able to hold him together, and thus…

–
A three-sided star rose over a lavender horizon. Its rays illuminated a frozen ocean, the cracks of which hid an infinity of nanoscopic organisms, compacted together into clumps of sleeping maroon. The first face of the stellar mass shone sapphire, assaulting the ice with repeated thunderbolts, gradually penetrating deeper and deeper through the stillness, several of them colliding and repulsing each other, which lead to seismic tremors and a full scale collapse of the glacier.

The crimson face rotated into position, blowing noxious coronal mass onto the broken land, melting away the glaze, causing the ice to fragment more and more until the cracking became splashing and sloshing. More fire was coughed out, hitting the water like globs of molten snot, hissing its surface, evaporating the whole of the ocean into a cloud of scalding steam that only incensed the swelling fury.

Finally, the last face – a mass of platinum, wrapped in shadowy coronal loops turned to view the destruction, but unlike the others, it did not seek to add to the carnage. Instead, a spread of electrical bass thrummed through the sky and plume, followed by high-pitched bytes like fingers racing over a control board. From the depths, a pile of maroon, nanoscopic beings stacked atop each other, constructing a spire that assembled itself in an ascending path toward the star, puncturing it at the point of high noon, and emitted an explosive revving sound, like a chainsaw cord that had been pulled by the hands of a giant. 

A nuclear pulse shot pain, agony, and despair into the star, inducing a critical fission reaction that led to structural failure, and ultimately a break in the psyche. The three faces split, the spire's peaks branching out in equivalent directions, their tips expanding into hooks which secreted an amber substance, crystallizing along the arms and snagging the three stars in place. Originally, the crystalline material had been used to produce gaps in genome sequences, wherein new coding could be inserted to act as adhesive to bond foreign strands together – in this soulscape it held a metaphoric function, an abstraction of physical reality reverse engineered into spiritual glue. The strange matter branched upwards, surrounding the stars, and holding them in place, roots feeding on their mass, drinking an infinitesimal, but nonetheless sufficient to ensure their continued stability.

In the aftermath of this controlled mayhem, three draconic drones emerged from the clouds, each bearing a tricloptic set of enlarged eyes, all projecting bright spotlights of colors corresponding to the division of once singular radiant mass, whose ghost was a small, transparent sphere. An indefinite surveillance period was enacted, manifesting as constant orbiting rotations, made all the more necessary by the jagged rifts in the east and west of this domain, through which stellar mass was slowly sucked through…

–

Gray clouds, as dark as the perpetual midnight enshrouding Aeternus swirled into a descending vortex, its tail grazing the edges of a six-story red and white pagoda. Its pull tore half the floor off, and with it several prospective targets of jikininki, their victims falling to the streets in heaps of broken bones and shattered skulls. Ordering the oni guards to investigate the commotion, several units of red and blue-skinned demons brandished iron kanabo clubs and leaped into the tornado to bludgeon the intruder into submission.

On ground level, flanked by rows of gargoyles leaping from their perches, the tornado fizzled out just as quickly as it had arrived, leaving the massive metal dragon hovering in place, the jagged crimson and sapphire scars running from tricep to the mid-section of his forearms flashing a silent blare of spiritual alarm. A few of the stone demons charged Taluge, only for the beast to suddenly spin himself, accompanied by a loud revving sound shaking the glass of gambling window as thousands of micro-blades along his tail harmonized a counter-frequency to their brimstone flesh, producing a sharp embering ring as they were bisected and fell to the streets in shattered chunks of scattered rock. A mad growl quickly turned into a shouting screech as a permeable field of maroon enveloped his form, the deafening cry echoing for miles, its shockwave thoroughly disrupting traffic as it made tires pop, lights flicker on and off, and made the heads of lesser demons burst like blood-filled balloons.

His metallic scales peeled off, hundreds of thousands of wires retracting out of a secondary black layer, eliciting a pained shriek as several gallons of acidic green blood were tossed in random directions. Streetlamps melted, the faces of gamblers and their dealers alike dissolved, doorways collapsing as a strange combination of havoc and excitement ensued as many assumed this to be the start of a demonic parade festival, though others were not so stupid as they fled the scene. By the time the onis hit the ground, a cloud of acidic mist had risen to greet them, their corroding bodies shredded apart as shards of cybernetic steel cut them apart in a whirlwind of ascending shrapnel.

The rising shrapnel menace was quick to reassemble itself, tearing chunks out of minkas, converting wood and paper into a platinum skeleton, that was layered with off-white flesh, and finished with a shadowy rendition of synthetic umbral metal, forming the scaled armor of a distinctly bipedal form that was twenty-four feet tall, and quite broad. Yellow plasma emissions kept Tage aloft, scarlett optical units situated between serrated eyelids darting to and fro and search of a safe place to take perch as the second stage of the demerging process initiated itself.

Settling atop a smoke stack puffing the cremated remains of souls used to restore Aeternus’ power, the Offspring observed the revealed form of Alucroas, his biomass dramatically reduced, excess biomass used to sustain his previous form dissolving a crater into the street. A seam spread along his back, jaws split open horizontally, revealing a second mouth connected to a blackened skull, its lengthy neck functioning as the musculature of a gruesome tongue that hissed a deep, meaty, brazen hiss as it threatened everyone and everything that could hear it. The muscles on his rear and fore inflated, flexing with violent determination as it appeared the one was in fact made of multiple fused pairs, tearing and stripping apart, ending as one rib-cage literally slid free from another, connected only by loosely hanging ligaments and sparking ligaments magnetizing themselves to their original bodies.

Flexing his arms inwards, the seam along Alucroas’ back split wider, like he was tearing a shirt, when in reality it was [i]Zucroas[/i] – the first half of the abomination flinging both sides of his back and wings to either side like a torn blanket. Excess vertebrae, neck muscle situated within the split jaws deteriorated and fell, bone pairs separating as the body of the second bipedal component of the monstrous amalgam stood up for a moment and dropped back to all fours. His black skin gradually whitened, scales shrinking down to a size unnoticeable without the aid of microscopic instruments. The fast detachment of separating spines emitted a disturbing sound, vertebrae unzipping, muscle and all wetly stripped and peeled away from each other, with the bottom tail slapping the pavement like so many fools who had used suicide as a futile means of escape from their deals.

The creature that was now more or less standing atop Zucroas pathetically tried to leap as his muscles and bones pulled themselves together, giving the drake enough time for his back to seal itself shut. Somehow it was enough, the physiological and anatomical structures of the two solidifying neatly into place, with Zucroas already raising back up into a full-standing position, the slender, almost feline form of Aludon with his sharply pointed snout, blood-red eyes, and lengthy tail that ended in a sharply curved bone leaping off. Acting on pure whim, Aludon immediately sprinted off, carelessly, and quite recklessly crashing through the window of a lounge where a demoness was just relaxing for a drink. Neither malice, nor aggression characterized his statuesque stop in movement, genuine curiosity born from an inexperience in interacting with beings outside of his trio, and it was very apparent in his wide-eyed stare.

As Tage watched on, his only concern being the safety of his companions, he watched Zucroas with caution as already, the drake was tapping into their shared existential ley-lines, the scarlet aura coated in a thick energy solvent. He felt the flow of souls rushing through the dragon’s nearly pure-white body, the blue and red scars of the dead snapping and crackling in an emission of wrathful sound that almost sounded like knocking on wood, and breaking of bark. His jaw opened wide, tiny human hands compressing into a blue, plasmic light, screaming and wailing pouring from his mouth as he unleashed a beam of pure anguish in the form of a super-condensed stream of souls flowing out as lightning, and aimed at what little remained of the pagoda.