Christopher Sincere Pride did not tell Caryse Souellet that she was ready.

He did not tell her she possessed talent.

He did not tell her that what waited beneath them could be defeated.

He did not even tell her she would survive.

Caryse was barely into her teens when Sincere brought her beneath the background of creation, and perhaps that was the first cruelty of the lesson: there was still enough childhood in her face for uncertainty to remain visible. Her hair had been tied into pigtails. Her clothes were ordinary. Her eyes still carried that particular irritation children possessed when they had become accustomed to being extraordinary and had not yet discovered how little extraordinariness meant to the things Sincere considered worth teaching. She stood beside him where the last explanatory surface of creation had already ended, and beneath them waited something that did not resemble an abyss so much as the precondition that allowed an abyss to later become thinkable. There was no proper darkness below. Darkness had already arrived too late. There was no emptiness. Emptiness required differentiation from content. There was no absence. Absence required a prior expectation of presence. The catacombs beneath them were pre-conceptual only because every available word was already apologizing for having attempted description.

Sincere looked down.

Caryse looked at him.

He pointed.

“Other side.”

Caryse waited for the rest.

There was no rest.

“What is down there?”

Sincere's expression barely changed.

“Things you can't beat.”

That got her attention.

Not because Caryse believed herself unbeatable.

She was too young to possess that kind of stupidity.

What disturbed her was Sincere's tone.

He had not said things you aren't strong enough to beat yet.

He had said it as though beating them was grammatically malformed.

Caryse looked back into the pre-abyss.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Make it across.”

“How?”

Sincere finally turned toward her.

“Don't let anything down there tell you what you need to be in order to continue.”

Then he pushed her.

Caryse fell.

There was no sensation of descent.

The catacombs rejected the usefulness of descent before she could complete it.

She struck something.

Then the idea that she had struck something was taken from her.

Pain remained.

For the first several moments, Caryse could not determine whether her eyes were open. The distinction refused to stabilize. She pushed herself upward, palms scraping against a surface that became stone only after her skin had already been injured by it. Her breathing sounded too loud. Somewhere beyond her, something answered with no sound at all.

She walked.

The first corridor rearranged every relationship she used to understand walking.

Caryse moved forward and encountered her own previous footsteps waiting ahead of her.

She turned around and found no previous position from which those footsteps could have originated.

She tried retracing her route and discovered that retracing had been included inside the original route before she attempted it.

She stopped.

The corridor continued her movement without her.

Caryse felt herself being carried toward something that had not approached.

Then every pathway vanished.

Not closed.

Not erased.

Pathway simply became irrelevant.

The Deus was present.

Caryse did not see it appear.

She understood immediately that appearance would have been beneath it.

The first thing her senses rendered was an enormous humanoid presentation armored in surfaces that seemed to carry starfields, nebular radiance, voids, celestial fire, and worlds whose total histories existed only as minute visual residues along its body. Multiple arms extended behind it. Each appendage was too deliberate to be decorative. They were not additional limbs in the biological sense. They were presentations of unrestricted actuality, each capable of expressing acts that lesser orders would have divided into creation, destruction, preservation, inversion, transcendence, negation, authorship, causality, possibility, impossibility, actualization, abstraction, contradiction, self-annulment, restoration, and everything for which even those words were only lower approximations.

Where its head should have been, a black aperture burned inside blue and violet radiance.

It possessed no face because the Deus did not require personality to dominate the chamber.

Its existence was already too complete for personhood to add anything.

Several hands surrounded a luminous sphere.

Caryse looked into it.

That was her first mistake.

The sphere contained no miniature collection of concepts.

It carried their maximal potentiality and maximal actuality.

Every manner in which IS could ever acquire significance.

Every manner in which IS-NOT could ever annihilate significance.

Every maximal actuality of ontology.

Every maximal potentiality before ontology could become actual.

Every architecture of logic, contradiction, paraconsistency, many-valued determination, reflection, Noesis, actus purus, narrative causality, unmanifest silence, manifest be-ness beyond maximal complexity, and every collapse through which the distinction between these might cease mattering.

Everything visible inside that sphere had already been taken to completion.

Then taken beyond the relevance of completion.

And the Deus holding it was still not exhausted by what it held.

Caryse understood this without anyone explaining it.

The understanding entered her because the Deus could make understanding occur.

Then the Deus enacted the first act.

Caryse ceased to have ever been born.

There was no attack.

No movement.

No flash.

One unrestricted act, and the historical continuity called Caryse Souellet had never acquired actuality.

The chamber contained no memory of her childhood.

No lineage connected to her.

No thirteen-year-old had ever been brought there by Sincere.

No Sincere had ever selected her.

No conception had ever preceded her.

No counterfactual contained the possibility.

No impossible history preserved an alternative.

The Deus did not merely erase Caryse.

It exercised every act by which Caryse's presence, absence, possibility, impossibility, memory, anticipation, narrative potential, anti-narrative potential, and transfictional residue could all become equally inapplicable.

And Caryse screamed.

She screamed from within a history in which there was nobody present to scream.

Her body returned.

Not because she resisted.

The Deus actualized her again, but she stepped beyond necessity of actualization to remain.

Then actualized every possible Caryse.

Every impossible Caryse.

Every Caryse whose existence violated the principles supporting the prior Caryse.

Every Caryse who could exist only if contradiction were fundamental.

Every Caryse who could exist only if contradiction were impossible.

Every Caryse defined by every name she might ever accept.

Every Caryse defined by every name she might reject.

Every Caryse without a name.

Every Caryse for whom namelessness itself became identity.

They manifested throughout the catacombs in numbers too structurally obscene to function as quantity.

The Deus enacted again.

All of them became one Caryse.

Again.

One Caryse became all of them.

Again.

Every difference between them became absolute.

Again.

Every absolute difference became a false appearance generated by one indivisible actuality.

Again.

The history in which Caryse entered the catacombs became fiction inside the mind of another Caryse.

Again.

That Caryse became fiction inside another.

Again.

The readerly vantage by which either could be distinguished became another internal construct.

Again.

The authorial vantage became derivative.

Again.

Narrative and anti-narrative were made equally provincial.

Again.

The distinction between what occurred and what did not occur was withdrawn.

The Deus did not tire.

It could not tire.

Fatigue belonged to unrealized capacity meeting expenditure.

There was no unrealized capacity here.

Every act was already available in indivisible completeness.

Caryse collapsed.

The floor disappeared before she touched it.

The concept of falling was rewritten so that she had always been beneath the point toward which she fell.

Her body inverted.

Not anatomically.

Definitionally.

Her interior became exterior.

Her exterior became a lesser expression occurring inside what had once been interior.

The distinction collapsed.

Then returned.

Then collapsed in every possible and impossible order simultaneously.

Caryse tried to think.

The Deus enacted every thought she might use before she completed it.

She tried to reject the Deus.

Her rejection appeared already contained inside the maximal actuality of rejection.

She tried accepting it.

Acceptance was already there too.

She tried becoming indifferent.

Indifference manifested within the Deus's complete actuality as easily as opposition had.

She tried imagining herself beyond it.

The Deus actualized the imagined beyond, every beyond beyond that beyond, every recursive transcendence, every maximal escalation of transcendence, and every domain in which transcendence itself no longer possessed explanatory value.

All of it appeared inside the sphere.

Caryse stared.

For the first time since Sincere had begun training her, she experienced genuine helplessness.

Not weakness.

Helplessness.

There was a difference.

Weakness implied insufficient power.

This had nothing to do with insufficient power.

There existed no power Caryse could obtain that mattered.

If she became transfictionally meta-Omnipotent beyond maximal complexity, that actuality could be enacted.

If she became greater than that, the relation of greater could be enacted.

If she abandoned greatness, abandonment could be enacted.

If she transcended every structure of action, the transcendence and the absence of action could both be enacted.

If she became impossible to affect, that impossibility could itself be made actual, negated, preserved, exceeded, contextualized, rendered fictive, restored, and folded into a higher order whose total expression remained available without effort.

Caryse finally understood what Sincere meant.

Things you can't beat.

Tears ran down her face.

She hated him.

The Deus actualized that hatred in every possible degree.

She hated herself for crying.

The Deus actualized that too.

She became proud enough to stand.

Every maximal actuality of pride unfolded around her and consumed the motivation.

She became afraid enough to run.

Every route of fear, flight, survival, escape, concealment, transcendence, and preservation was already open in the Deus before she took the first step.

She tried courage.

The Deus held courage.

She tried rage.

The Deus held rage.

She tried emptiness.

The Deus held emptiness.

She tried Transfictional Nothingness.

The Deus was apophatic even to that. Possibility, Nothingness, and Totality in their most absolute interpretation were still lesser expressions in relation to what confronted her.

Caryse curled against herself.

The Deus continued.

It enacted all acts.

Not sequentially.

Caryse experienced them sequentially because she could not yet survive their indivisible actuality without translation.

Every injury she could receive occurred.

Every injury impossible for her to receive occurred.

Every recovery followed.

Every recovery was prevented.

Every death completed.

Every death was reversed.

Every state beyond death was entered.

Every state beyond the relevance of death was exhausted.

Every identity she could build around suffering was generated and consumed.

Victim.

Survivor.

Martyr.

Prodigy.

Chosen Child.

Failure.

Sincere's heir.

The girl strong enough to endure Deus.

The girl who was not strong enough.

The girl beyond strength.

The girl who rejected strength.

The girl whose rejection itself became strength.

Each title appeared around her as an ancient predatory axiom.

And each axiom fed.

They tore memories from her not because memories were vulnerable objects, but because the very relation between memory and ownership was edible to them. Caryse remembered her name and something consumed the property by which the remembered name referred to her. She remembered Sincere and something devoured the teacher-student relation. She remembered why she had entered and another axiom consumed purpose. She tried holding onto the fact that she wanted to leave.

Want became a title.

Escape became destiny.

Survival became archetype.

The axioms ate all three.

Caryse remained inside that chamber for what she experienced as months.

Her hair matted.

Her fingernails split.

Her voice became hoarse despite there being no consistent physiology through which hoarseness needed to persist.

The Deus remained exactly as it had been.

Untired.

Undiminished.

Unchallenged.

There was no progress against it.

That became the cruelty.

Caryse kept looking for progress.

Every attempt assumed an argument.

I am getting closer.

The Deus contained closer.

I am learning.

The Deus contained learning.

I am becoming capable.

Capability.

I will overcome this.

Overcoming.

I refuse to lose.

Loss.

Then I won't compete.

Noncompetition.

Every idea generated another relation.

Every relation gave the Deus another relevance to her.

Caryse eventually stopped crying because she had no emotional structure left through which crying could still describe what was happening.

She lay on her side.

The sphere turned between the Deus's hands.

Maximal potentiality.

Maximal actuality.

Everything it held remained wholly itself.

Nothing had weakened.

Nothing had been disproven.

Nothing needed to disappear.

Caryse stared at the Deus.

And something small changed.

Not in it.

In her.

She stopped asking how to overcome it.

The Deus enacted a totality in which Caryse had already lost.

Caryse did not resist.

The Deus enacted a totality in which Caryse had already won.

Caryse did not accept.

Both totalities remained perfectly actual.

Caryse pushed herself upright.

The predatory axioms moved.

One attempted to fix her as THE ONE WHO ENDURED.

Caryse stumbled.

The title bit into her.

She screamed again.

This was not effortless.

She had understood something intellectually and immediately converted that understanding into identity.

The catacombs punished her for it.

Blood ran from her nose.

She fell again.

Days passed.

Perhaps weeks.

The Deus enacted all acts.

Caryse kept failing.

Every time she thought I am becoming something beyond this, she had recreated hierarchy.

Every time she thought this cannot define me, she had made definition relevant through refusal.

Every time she thought I do not need power, she had defined herself relative to power.

Every time she thought I am beyond the argument of power, she had turned beyondness into a position inside the argument.

The Deus did not teach her.

It simply remained absolutely what it was while her own habits tore her apart.

Eventually Caryse understood that there could be no statement.

No declaration.

No inner sentence.

No triumphant realization.

No higher state she could occupy.

The Deus could remain Deus.

Pure transfictional actus purus.

Absolute actuality beyond maximal complexity.

Prior to every hierarchy, distinction, limitation, possibility, impossibility, narration, authorship, readership, negation, affirmation, and attempt to exceed it.

Caryse did not need to alter any of that.

She stood.

The Deus enacted her destruction.

Caryse was destroyed.

She stepped.

The Deus enacted that there had been no Caryse to take the step.

No Caryse had existed.

The step remained.

The Deus enacted that the step was impossible.

The step occurred without requiring possibility.

The Deus enacted every actuality in which the step had already been contained.

Caryse did not require the step to be outside those actualities.

The Deus enacted every actuality in which Caryse's passage depended upon Deus.

Caryse's passage ceased requiring dependency to be either true or false.

One foot moved.

Then the other.

The Deus remained absolute.

Caryse walked toward it.

Everything that could happen to stop her happened.

Everything that could not happen to stop her happened.

Every total act.

Every non-act.

Every contradiction.

Every maximal transfictional actuality.

Every passive state.

Every active state.

Every state beyond the difference between passive and active.

Every causal termination.

Every acausal termination.

Every possibility of removal.

Every impossibility of continuation.

Every authorship by which the scene could simply be written otherwise.

Every readership in which Caryse never made it across.

Every grand meta-narrative in which Sincere never selected her.

Every transfictional negation by which Caryse was removed before selection itself could become applicable.

All of it occurred.

Caryse kept walking.

Not because she resisted any of it.

Resistance had finally become unnecessary.

Not because she ignored any of it.

Ignoring would have been another relation.

Not because she had become more powerful.

Power had ceased being the argument.

That was the difference.

The Deus operated through maximal power because maximal power was available to it without restriction.

Caryse no longer operated through the proposition that power adjudicated whether she could continue.

The Deus could enact every act.

Caryse did not need an act unavailable to Deus.

The Deus could encompass every countermeasure.

Caryse did not need a countermeasure.

The Deus could precede every pathway.

Caryse did not require pathway to possess authority over traversal.

The Deus could stand prior to every distinction between container and contained.

Caryse did not need to become external to it.

The Deus could remain eternally uncollapseable because collapse itself was too low to apply to Deus.

Caryse did not collapse it.

She stepped beyond the necessity of Deus to her continuation.

And the Deus remained.

Completely.

Perfectly.

Absolute.

Nothing about it diminished.

That was what made the moment horrifying.

Caryse passed beside something that could actualize all acts and did not need it to fail.

She had not risen above Deus.

There was no above.

She had not gone around Deus.

There was no around.

She had not escaped the reach of Deus.

Reach was still part of the argument.

She had simply ceased requiring the relationship in which reaching her determined whether she continued.

Caryse walked.

Her knees were shaking.

She vomited.

She kept walking.

The first Deus remained behind her, holding maximal potentiality and maximal actuality as though nothing had happened.

Because nothing had happened to Deus.

Something had happened to Caryse.

The second Deus waited farther in.

This presentation was different.

A crystalline radiance floated between several hands, carved through with impossible statements and maximal abstract relations. It held the complete actuality and complete potentiality of every structured abstraction represented there, every totality describable through those relations, every self-embedding, every contradiction, every impossible equality, every collapse in which distinctions such as member and totality, empty and complete, lesser and greater, map and mapped could cease functioning.

Caryse's body reacted before her mind did.

She started shaking harder.

She knew now.

Knowing made it worse.

There would be no shortcut.

The first Deus had not been a boss she had cleared.

It had broken one dependency.

This one would find another.

The second Deus enacted all acts.

Caryse disappeared into them.

Months began again.

A third Deus waited beyond that.

Then another.

Then another.

Each presented a different maximal actuality within its hands.

One carried a sphere containing grand principles whose maximal potentiality and maximal actuality saturated every relation of ontology, Noesis, logic, actus purus, manifestation, unmanifest silence, causality, and their transfictional negations.

Another held what appeared as an Absolute whose symbolic expressions contained not merely completed abstraction, but the total authority through which completion, incompletion, quantity, transcendence, totalization, and every attempt to exceed totalization could become relevant.

Another possessed nothing recognizable in its hands at all.

Caryse learned that the absence of an object did not mean the absence of maximal actuality.

That Deus held unmanifest silence without holding it as content.

It enacted without movement.

Caryse's identity dissolved so completely that for a subjective span she could not reconstruct why there needed to be a difference between herself and what had consumed her.

She almost failed there.

Not because the Deus was stronger than the previous Deus.

The notion of comparative superiority did not properly reach what they were.

She almost failed because Caryse was tired.

Actually tired.

Not philosophically tired.

Not cosmically tired.

Thirteen-year-old tired.

She missed food.

She missed cleanliness.

She missed lying somewhere safe.

She missed being allowed to possess a name without interrogating whether the name had jurisdiction over her.

She missed Sincere even while hating him.

At one point Caryse sat against a surface that had no obligation to remain a wall and cried for him.

“Sincere.”

Nothing answered.

She said it again.

“Sincere.”

The catacombs consumed the name.

Caryse covered her face.

“I can't do this.”

An axiom descended.

THE ONE WHO CANNOT.

Caryse felt it attach.

She screamed and ripped at nothing.

The title had no physical body.

Her fingers tore her own skin.

She could not get it off.

The Deus enacted the complete actuality of failure.

Caryse became every failure available to herself.

Every road ended there.

Every possible future returned to the chamber.

Every impossible future failed to establish another outcome.

Every transfictional escape became another authored artifact internal to what the Deus already exceeded.

Caryse lay there.

And she wanted Sincere to save her.

That was when she finally understood what he was actually doing.

Sincere was not training her to defeat Deus.

He was breaking the part of Caryse that believed succession meant becoming Sincere through another route.

If Sincere entered the catacombs, this would end instantly.

Caryse knew it.

That knowledge had poisoned her training from the beginning.

She had been subconsciously trying to discover his answer.

There was no his answer.

Sincere could end the problem because Sincere was Sincere.

Caryse's task was crueler.

She had to become Caryse without using Sincere as the measure of what Caryse needed to become.

She sat up.

Slowly.

The title THE ONE WHO CANNOT remained attached.

Caryse did not remove it.

She walked with it.

The Deus enacted failure.

She failed.

She walked.

The Deus enacted impossibility.

Continuation became impossible.

She walked.

The Deus enacted that walking itself required an underlying actuality supplied by Deus.

Caryse walked without disputing that actuality.

The Deus enacted that this too was already internal.

Caryse did not require externality.

The Deus enacted that there was no distinction by which Caryse could claim transcendence.

She stopped claiming transcendence.

One step.

Another.

Another.

Her breathing hurt.

Her feet bled.

Her eyes had hardened months ago, not into fearlessness, but into the kind of quiet concentration that appears when someone has suffered long enough to stop dramatizing the suffering to themselves.

Another Deus.

All acts.

Caryse broke again.

Then rebuilt nothing.

She kept moving.

Another Deus.

All acts.

Another month.

Another collapse.

Another lesson stripped of every triumphant word that might convert it into identity.

Another Deus.

Caryse no longer asked whether she was stronger.

Another Deus.

She no longer asked whether she was beyond.

Another Deus.

She no longer asked whether what she was doing counted as transcendence.

Another Deus.

She stopped caring whether Sincere would call it success.

By the final stretches of the pre-conceptual catacombs, Caryse moved differently.

Not faster.

Beyond the necessity of presence, grand meta-narrative, and change had never been what the lesson required.

She moved without requesting permission from the relations through which movement was ordinarily adjudicated.

The Deus remained everything they were.

Pure actuality.

All acts.

All maximal potentiality.

All maximal actuality.

Prior to the necessity of hierarchy.

Prior to the necessity of negation.

Prior to the necessity of narrative and anti-narrative.

Prior even to the lower distinction by which something could describe itself as prior.

Caryse passed them.

Not above.

Not beneath.

Not outside.

Not through some larger order.

Beyond the necessity of the argument.

When she finally emerged, Sincere was standing where he had been.

Caryse fell onto her hands.

She stayed there for several minutes.

Sincere did not help her.

Her white hair was filthy and matted across her face. One eye had swollen. Her knees were scraped raw. Her clothes were torn. Her hands were trembling so badly she had to close them into fists before she could stand.

Sincere watched.

Caryse slowly rose.

She looked at him.

There was no smile.

No pride.

No triumphant declaration.

Sincere looked behind her.

The catacombs were still there.

So were the Deus.

They had not been erased.

They had not been defeated.

They remained absolute, uncollapseable, untouched, still containing and exceeding every lower actuality that had ever attempted to describe them.

Sincere looked back at Caryse.

“How'd it go?”

Caryse stared at him.

Her lip twitched.

Then she punched him in the face.

Sincere's head barely moved.

Caryse's knuckles immediately hurt.

She clutched her hand.

Sincere started laughing.

Caryse glared at him.

“I hate you.”

“I know.” He said.

“You left me down there.”

“Yes.” He said.

“They killed me.”

“Yes.” He said.

“They made it so I was never born.”

“Yes.” He said.

“They did things I don't even know how to explain.”

“Yes.” He replied.

Caryse's eyes narrowed.

Sincere finally stopped laughing.

For several seconds, he studied her.

Then he asked the only question that mattered.

“And?”

Caryse looked back toward the catacombs.

One Deus remained visible in the distance.

Its hands still surrounded the maximal potentiality and maximal actuality of what it carried.

Nothing about it had become lesser because Caryse survived.

Nothing about Caryse's passage converted Deus into something beneath her.

She understood that now.

Caryse turned away.

“And I still got here.”

Sincere smiled.

Not broadly.

Barely.

But Caryse saw it.

That was enough.

She walked past him.

She had entered the catacombs believing Sincere needed her to become powerful enough to succeed him.

She left understanding why he had chosen her instead.

Sincere did not need another person who could possess the greatest power.

What he needed was someone who could stand before the maximal actuality of every act, have every available route of victory stripped away, have every identity she used for psychological survival consumed, have every possible and impossible countermeasure already contained, have even transcendence denied as an escape route, and still discover that none of it had ever possessed the authority to determine whether she continued.

Caryse Souellet had not become greater than Deus.

Deus remained Deus.

She had learned something Sincere required from whoever would one day succeed him.

When power became absolute, she did not need more power.

When actuality became maximal, she did not need a greater actuality.

When all acts were already present, she did not need one final act outside the set.

When transcendence itself had become another contained relation, she did not need another beyond.

She could step beyond the necessity of asking the question.

And for the first time since Sincere had chosen her, Caryse began to understand what kind of monster he intended to make her.