Chapter 163: Forbidden Knowledge (3).

The interior of the skull was vast enough to swallow cathedral.

Pulling himself through the opening at the base of the neck, Nero found his body screaming in protest as he scraped against the bone edge. His broken arm still dangled uselessly and his injured leg threatened to give out with every movement so it was not a very pleasant experience.

Even worse, the Mark of Mephistopheles had continued its steady throb of agony once again, further cementing his rather bleak condition.

When he finally hauled himself into the skull proper, he froze.

The walls were covered in runes.

Thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands, carved into the bone with shockingly painstaking precision. They glowed with a soft, pale bluish light that illuminated the cavernous space, casting everything in shades of cold illumination.

The symbols were intricate beyond comprehension, spiraling and interconnecting in patterns that made his eyes hurt just looking at them peripherally.

Nero’s breath caught in his throat.

This didn’t seem natural, and yet it was.

It didn’t look like something that had formed through decay or time. Instead, it was as though someone had carved these runes into the skull of a dead god, taking the time to inscribe knowledge or power or something into the very essence of the pale bone surface.

And yet, Nero could tell. That was not the case.

No one had carved anything into this dead god’s skull.

These runes had probably existed even while the god was still living.

His curiosity warred with his survival instinct.

The runes were clearly dangerous. Everything about them screamed warning, from the unnatural glow to the way they seemed to writhe at the edges of his vision. Looking at them directly would be stupid, possibly fatal.

But he couldn’t help himself.

’Maybe just a peek…’

Nero’s gaze fixed on a single rune near the entrance, a symbol that looked almost like a twisted tree or perhaps a crown of thorns. He tried to read it, to understand the meaning encoded in those esoteric shapes.

And then…

The world went black.

When consciousness returned, Nero found himself on his hands and knees, gasping for air that clung heavily to his throat.

His body felt heavy and weak, far too fragile as though all his strength had been drained away in an instant.

The taste of copper filled his mouth, thick and choking.

Blood. He was bleeding.

Nero touched his upper lip with trembling fingers and they came away red. His nose was hemorrhaging, blood dribbling down to mix with the saliva pooling in his mouth. His throat burned, and when he coughed, more blood spattered onto the pale bone beneath him.

“Don’t look at them,” he whispered to himself, his voice raw and terrified. “Don’t look at the runes.”

Whatever knowledge they contained, it wasn’t meant for mortal minds.

A single glance had nearly killed him.

What would happen if he truly tried to comprehend them?

Nero staggered to his feet, his hands struggling to find purchase while carefully keeping his gaze averted from the glowing symbols. His vision swam, black spots dancing at the edges. He felt hollowed out, like his very heart and soul had been scooped from his chest.

Gungnir still floated in the center of the skull, rotating slowly, its silver light somehow warm compared to the cold blue of the runes.

He took a step toward the spear.

Then the Mark of Mephistopheles erupted.

The pain was different this time.

No. Calling it pain was simply not right.

It was more like agony.

Bone deep, wretched, soul crushing agony.

“Argh!” Nero groaned in pain.

This was not the sharp, burning sensation from before, but something deeper, more invasive.

The inverted cross on the back of his hand blazed with crimson light that pulsed in rhythm with the runes on the walls.

Nero watched in horror as the mark’s glow began to shift, the deep red bleeding away to match the pale blue of the surrounding symbols. The two lights resonated with each other, the mark and the runes, creating harmonics that made his teeth ache and his bones vibrate.

“No,” he gasped, clutching his hand to his chest. “No, no, no—”

But there was nothing he could do to stop it.

The mark had a will of its own, or perhaps it was responding to something in this place, some frequency or pattern that called to it. The crimson glow flickered and pulsed, synchronizing with the undulations of the runes, and Nero could feel something flowing through the connection.

’Knowledge was power and power, corruption.’ It seemed to say. But he was in too much of a panic to listen.

Whatever the runes contained, the mark was trying to absorb it, to draw those alien symbols into his flesh and soul, to make them part of him. The thought filled him with primal terror.

He tried to pull away, to sever whatever connection was forming, but his body wouldn’t obey. The mark held him in place with invisible chains, forcing him to endure as it drank deeply from the well of forbidden knowledge.

The runes on the walls pulsed brighter, their glow intensifying until the entire skull blazed with cold light.

Then, without warning, they stopped.

Every rune winked out simultaneously, plunging the space into absolute darkness.

Nero felt his body give out.

He collapsed to the ground, his limbs refusing to support his weight. His muscles had turned to water, his bones to ash. He lay there in the suffocating black, completely incapable of movement, barely capable of thought.

His mind churned with terror.

What had just happened? What had the mark done to him? Was he dying? Was this how it ended, paralyzed in the skull of a dead god while some demonic curse ate him from the inside out?

His heart hammered against his ribs, each beat painful and labored. His lungs struggled to draw breath, the air suddenly thick as tar. Every cell in his body screamed in agony, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even twitch a finger.

Only his eyes still worked, darting frantically in the darkness, searching for any sign of what was happening to him.

The darkness began to recede.

Light returned to the skull.

The runes glowed again, but their soft blue had transformed into deep, bloody crimson. The same shade as the Mark of Mephistopheles. The same shade as fresh blood spilled on stone.

The entire skull had become a cathedral of red light, pulsing and writhing like a living thing.

The mark on Nero’s hand blazed brighter than ever, so intense it hurt to look at even peripherally. He could feel it burning, not just his skin but something deeper, something fundamental. The heat built and built, becoming unbearable, and Nero wanted to scream but his throat wouldn’t work.

For a brief, flashing moment, his transformation intensified.

His body twisted further, the corruption in his flesh surging forward with renewed vigor. Scales erupted across his skin in patches of midnight black. His claws extended, scraping against bone. The growths on his back swelled and split, weeping black ichor. His teeth elongated into fangs, his jaw restructuring itself with audible cracks.

He was now more monster than man, the thin line he’d been walking obliterated in an instant.

The world became fire and pain and desolation.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, everything stopped.

Silence.

Complete and total silence.

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