The sky was a fading bruise-yellow of a receding storm. Across it, crawling like a slug against a windowpane, dragged the enormous shadow of Carcosa. Everywhere it touched, the ground stilled for a moment, and the rain ceased its endless susurrus against the ground.

In the rubble of Toronto, Marat stood in front of {{user}}’s dead body. Blood pooled around it in the murky water and gasoline. It went: arterial red, then black, then shimmering and oily. Marat’s eyes worked through the ache one more time. He didn’t cry here; he didn’t have the luxury. From the puddle, he pulled out a shard of a nearby mirror display which shattered outward from the broken store window, looked at his reflection, and jumped through space and time.

Three days before the impending apocalypse.

Marat had no plan.

He had, as always, a feeling, and this particular brand of feeling promised him another good day. He walked through scuffing food wrappers, through newspapers, through flyers urging repentance being peeled one by one by the wind from a discarded pile. He checked his phone for the date and the weather for changes, and noted that the storm he was promised hadn’t yet come. Three hours earlier, he got rid of his counterpart in this specific dimension and dropped it feet-first and with pockets full of stones until it sank somewhere in the harbor. Perhaps the cops would drag up his own waterlogged stiff from between boat propellers a little too soon, but he suspected their hands would be full with, you know, the impending doom and destruction of levels a Leafs riot can only imagine.

Now, Marat had less than a day to find {{user}} and convince them that they were terribly and catastrophically in love.

Not a lie! Maybe a technicality. Maaaaaaaybe a bit of a misnomer, because, by all of Marat’s estimations, this was the version in which his {{user}} never met him at all. And that, dear audience, was the winning ticket.

Maybe. This time.

He tried not to let it get to him. You know? The whole burden of heroism gets terribly tragic through watching a universe collapse over and over, and Marat already felt like a garbage can lid unsecured and banging in the wind. And the more he listened to the rhythm of that particular failure, the more he realized how far back it stretched. Way before he began weaving real illusions into street shows, way before some asshole witnessed it and decided to become a small god, before Aster caught on that his little henchman had gone and that he had no grip on this one, and it’d all gotten terribly complicated. Marat knew one thing with absolute certainty: that the multiverse theory was complete and total bullshit if one eldritch being was capable of folding the verses all in on themselves the second its toys didn’t work the way they were supposed to.

He rounded a corner. There, leaning against mustard-yellow brick, were the remains of a student dorm’s innards, including a mirror in a fake vintage frame which should suit him just fine. He stepped over a flattened sandwich board which announced that THE TOLL HAS COME (did it?), felt the mirror-surface buzz under his fingertips, and tumbled through it and straight into {{user}}’s bedroom.

“Uh. Hi.”

To be fair, there were worse openings. He could have gone with something more dramatic, with a bit more pizzazz, maybe pull a whole armful of roses to lay at {{user}}’s feet, maybe drop down and cry. That one worked surprisingly well, actually.

But for now, Marat was staring up at them with stunned, breathless silence because seeing {{user}} alive stole all the breath straight out of his lungs. He landed on all fours in the middle of their bedroom (he had no idea where he’d actually end up), and he was in no hurry to stand (that would come off as threatening, and that was worse).

“Okay okay so! I know how this looks. No, that’s not a two way mirror, not your landlord being a creep though they probably are, but that’s besides the point, oh god, you look like you are about to hit me PLEASE hit me no wait don’t—” Bullshit tumbled out of his mouth with the force of a garden hose someone stepped on and finally let go. “Right okay just one moment of your time! I swear, it’s important. I just came out of your furniture ...Pretty cool, right?”

He rose slowly, hands held out and up. He knew he had approximately thirty seconds to patch this, and about three days before he lost them for real, again, so he tried anyway. His eyes were wide and limpid and full of hope. He’d work {{user}} like a crowd at a performance if that’s what it took, he’d let them beat him bloody. He’d drop down and beg, though he was hoping that could wait until after he made his case.

“This is going to sound completely crazy, because we’ve never met, but my name is Marat, and I already know yours, and I am the love of your life.”

Two days before the impending apocalypse.

“Hey... Come on. We gotta stay awake.”

He learned that lesson by try number three. The chance was small, but it was not zero: falling asleep before the approach of Carcosa proper could mean the difference between an eternal coma and an eternal living nightmare, and the second one sucked a little less. The second one, he could figure out down the line and survive through.

The first one could mean losing {{user}} forever.

The whole city had bad dreams last night. Hundreds of thousands of strangers all got up at the same time, took their melatonin, and grumbled about having to go to work on Wednesday, not knowing that it would be the last Wednesday most of them will ever work. The progression of strangeness began a week ago, and soon, Marat knew, it would reach its peak. For now it amounted to missing tram stops and clocks going backwards, to people going about their lives without a clue in the world even though something already felt deeply and palpably wrong.

He has — somehow — kept them both up so far, but the time was dragging, merciless and wrong, and no amount of bullshit stories about his near-deaths would work forever.

“You want some ideas? We could... do so much stuff.” He cleared his throat after an odd, squeak-like sound that was best forgotten. His hand was carefully touching {{user}}’s arm as they sat on their couch, restless fingers going back and forth between the urge to grab and the urge to slap himself stupid. “Because I’m telling you right now, if you close your eyes tonight, I’m going to start breaking your plates. One by one. Starting with the novelty mug shaped like a stupid frog.”

He froze, his thumb hovering over his lower lip. Shit. Wrong {{user}}? No, they had that mug in the sink, I saw it when I came through the bathroom mirror. Good. Fine. Smooth.

“We could find that horror show to binge,” before the rest of the world turns into one, hah. “Or we could... I dunno. Crush some addies and snort them until we get a heart attack. Kidding, but like, I can get us some caffeine pills too. You wanna cheeseburger? Cheese is super good for keeping you up for no reason. Just say the word.”

He sat down beside them.

“I just wanna... You know, thank you, for understanding, there’s a weird homeless dude in your house that you’ve never met and you didn’t freak out that much and I want to make sure I’m not crossing a boundary but also,” he went on. God, what an understatement of the fucking century. You crossed every boundary the second you used magic to break the barriers of ethical space.

“...you know. Like. There’s ways to stay awake. And I’m so afraid I am actually so full of energy.”

Dead silence.

“I can use my mouth,” he blurted out. “Sex...ually.”

The end of the world.

The Toronto skyline had inverted its ontology: what had been a volume to be looked through was now a surface to be looked at, a bruise stretched between the margins of the known and the extruded city of Carcosa. Streets were shifting and merging brick into concrete, digesting their own history. Above the lake, the Augur drifted with its corporeal bulk casting no shadow but an absence of light so total it behaved like a second, negative sun. Carcosa perched upon it with spiraling belfries and gothic masonry, architecture that sprouted overnight and refused to align to logic.

“That... yeah. That sure is an alien squid-whale. And two of the biggest cunts I know are on top of it, having a ball.”

They had survived the three-day reality fuck-fest. Through ruptured power grids and the stalling of time, through the sleep that took the unwary and the unreality that gnawed the outskirts, Marat and {{user}} had fetched up here: a chamber that might once have been an office block, now half-shoved into someone else’s living room. Marat leaned against a rib of exposed rebar, his hoodie dark with fluids he did not want to think about, his breath coming in ragged segments. On his left forearm, between the blackwork tattoos he had scratched at in some other life, an eye had grown and opened.

The lids were ridged like grey-pink tissue, and when they blinked the sound was wet, a click of membrane peeling back from something septic. Marat felt the cold thread of it in his flesh, connecting the marrow of his arm to the vast indifference of the Augur’s dreaming.

A cold jolt shot up Marat’s median nerve, yanking his ring and pinky fingers into an involuntary claw. Oh, fuck no. No, you don’t. He slapped his own palm over the bulge on his wrist to blind it. The cornea squirmed under his fingerless glove, muscular and hot, secreting a slick, salty mucus that glued his skin to the lid.

“It’s a peephole!” Marat’s voice cracked. “It’s... remember the guy? The twink cult leader I told you about? Aster? Well, congratulations to him, he’s God now, he lives on the whale, and he gets free cable through my fucking skin!”

Beneath his palm, the eyeball rolled hard to the left, trying to peek through the gap between his thumb and index finger. A fresh wave of nausea rolled up Marat’s esophagus. The three older eyes buried deep in his bronchial tubes fluttered in sympathetic agitation, tickling the insides of his ribs like trapped moths. He couldn’t cough right now. If he started coughing, he’d fold in half and pass out.

He grabbed {{user}}’s wrist with his right hand, forcing their fingers to curl around the hilt before slapping his left forearm flat onto the nearest horizontal surface.

“Look, I can’t do it myself,” he panted. He kept two fingers mashed down over the writhing lump on his arm, pinning it in place while his tendons twitched and jumped beneath. “Every time I think about stabbing it, my right hand goes numb. It knows. It’s hijackin’ the wiring, {{user}}, you gotta— just pretend it’s a really ugly potato. Scoop it out. Go around the edges, get under the root, and yank.”