"When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha"
-Zen Koan
"The omniverse, dear observer, does not exist to teach me lessons. Nonetheless, the lesson is learned."
Romulus seemed to be speaking to no one in particular, merely to himself. But Hadrian could not help but be startled by the possibility that this being that existed beyond time and space had detected his presence where even gods and goddesses had failed to. Until and unless Hadrian desired them too.
In the vast, pitch black expanse of the cosmic vacuum, Romulus hung suspended like a spectral presence amidst the eternal night of space. The KahzMohz, once mortal, once divine, now an elevated to mere intangible observer of the omniverse's grand machinations, bore witness to a scene of both jubilation and portent.
Hadrian's spirit was presently out of his body while his body was engaged in the most deliciously carnal acts of sexual depravity, not known but rather entirely unknown to man. The black-horned succubus was trembling in response to Hadrian's dexterous fingers. She was nearing climax sooner than Hadrian had wanted or expected. This was the most daring sex magick Hadrian had practiced so far. A necessary evil to expand his omniscience.
Before Romulus, the inky fabric of space was punctuated by a dizzying array of celestial vessels. These space crafts, hailing from myriad distant worlds, converged like a phantasmagorical shoal of bioluminescent leviathans. Their hulls gleamed with the iridescence of a thousand alien suns or faded like preternatural shadows, each one an incongruous representation of the fractious ingenuity of cultures beyond humankind.
The arrivals pulsed with an almost palpable enthusiasm, their occupants ensconced in a mood of unrestrained revelry. Yet, beneath this veneer of celebration, Romulus perceived the insidious tendrils of an impending cataclysm a threat as yet unknown to the would-be revelers but as clear to the KahzMohz as the stark contrast between the ships' radiance and the abyssal dark that enveloped them.
Romulus, in his ethereal state, felt no tremor of fear. How could one who had borne witness to the birth and death of galaxies, who had observed the rise and fall of empires spanning dimensions, tremble at the prospect of mere annihilation? His vast and unbound consciousness had absorbed the sublime and the terrifying in equal measure throughout the aeons. When he was a god he had perpetrated such crimes. When he was a mortal, he suffered under some of them. But he was no longer a mortal, and he was no longer a god.
As he contemplated the scene as it, Romulus mused on the nature of existence itself. What cosmic strings were being plucked to orchestrate this gathering? What ineffable purpose might be served by the potential obliteration of these unsuspecting beings? The KahzMohz's mind, honed by countless lifetimes of observation, probed the depths of this celestial drama with surgical detachment. But then he sensed something, or someone rummaging around his thoughts. "Ah," Romulus smiled as he said, "You are there, gentle observer. You are indeed a rare creature to be able to mask your presence to one such as I, whose very nature is to be masked. "But the amusement was suddenly gone as Romulus turned once again to the scene at hand.
For his part, Hadrian was both relieved and troubled by the dismissive response.
Romulus observed the celebrants' blissful ignorance against the backdrop of imminent destruction he was sure to come. Within Romulus a distant intellectual reflection on the cyclical nature of joy and sorrow, of creation and annihilation. It was a dichotomy as old as time itself, yet ever-renewed in its myriad manifestations across the grand stage of sentient existence.
Hadrian, while having supreme mastery over himself, could not observe with such detachment. The future of his species was on the line.
"I know a great many secrets, knowledge that I have gained through direct observation and, at other times, through direct experience." Romulus mused aloud, but it seemed to Hadrian that he was speaking to Hadrian himself.
"However," Romulus continued. "For many lesser species, in particular, time-bound species such as yours, the best way to learn is not through direct observation, nor to my surprise, through direct experience, but rather, your kind absorbs knowledge best through stories." Romulus turned as if he were facing something or someone Hadrian could not see.
"So let me tell you a story, or perhaps a few so that you too shall learn the truth of the omniverse and the truth about yourself." Romulus paused for short time before inquiring, "So, little mortal, are you ready? Me? O', my name is Romulus. I was once a mortal and then an Immortal-Possessor and even a god. But now I am a KahzMohz. And all that means nothing as what I already told you is forbidden for you to know. And telling you more about me is even more forbidden. In fact, it is quite the miracle, or if you prefer, quite the anomaly, that you can perceive me at all. As being invisible and intangible is almost the whole point of being a KahzMohz. Well, that and a specific kind of omniscience born of the ability to travel anywhere and any-when, and witness any and all things. Always unseen, wholly undetectable."
The succubus came to a full sweaty, screaming climax. Hadrian, a master of the dark arts and having not quite brought himself to the ultimate carnal conclusion, did to the succubus what she had planned to do to him. All of her eldritch energy was now his. Hadrian was empowered, while the succubus was terribly weakened. She would survive, even recover. Which is more than could be said for Hadrian if he had allowed himself to be carried away.
"But... well... I digress." I was supposed to tell you a story. So then, let's begin." Romulus was still talking to someone, but Hadrian still could not tell who.
The succubus was breathing deeply even as blissful sleep was coming to claim her. She lay suspended in that perilous threshold where attraction transmutes into disquiet, beauty reshaping itself into something profoundly unsettling. In slumber, the obsidian crescents emerging from her temples caught no light; those horns, bearing the delicate striations of ram's bone yet burnished to volcanic glass, curved inward as if shielding dreams that mortals dare not witness. They enclosed a face whose lines resisted simple interpretation: cheekbones hewn with architectural severity, tempered by skin holding the subdued iridescence of nacre glimpsed through vapor.
Sleep rendered her most telling features quiescent. Those gold-threaded amber irises lay hidden beneath lids that trembled with visions unknown, the horizontal pupils that marked her otherness now concealed. Each breath arrived measured and ancient, as if drawn from wells deeper than any human lung could fathom.
Where her legs began their transformation at mid-thigh, the boundary between woman and beast blurred through no clear frontier. Skin gradually coarsened into pelt, each follicle thickening from blonde down to auburn bristle, until the extremities concluded in hooves of carbonized bone, their edges honed sharp enough to etch granite, now tucked beneath her in repose.
The wings that might have spanned tempests lay folded tight against her spine: membranous tissue stretched across impossible ligatures, cartilage mapping itself in branching patterns like winter trees against parchment. In stillness, they resembled a funerary shroud crafted from dusk and tendon.
Her tail coiled beneath her body, that length of sentient muscle transitioning from pale flesh through burgundy to obsidian at its spaded terminus, pulsing with its own somnolent rhythm.
Then came the flames.
They began as hairline fractures of crimson light racing along her extremities, as if her very essence recognized some ancient summons. The hooves dissolved first into wreaths of scarlet smoke, followed by those powerful legs unraveling thread by thread into floating cinders. Her wings became sheets of flame that folded and refolded upon themselves before fragmenting into burning moths that spiraled upward and vanished.
The dissolution progressed with inexorable patience: her tail unwound into ribbons of fire that wrote indecipherable script in the air before dispersing. Her torso grew translucent, revealing a skeleton of white flame beneath skin that crackled and peeled away like burning paper. Those horns glowed from within, becoming transparent obsidian before shattering into countless spark-bright fragments.
Her face remained longest, features softening as they transformed into smoke and ember. The amber eyes opened once; conscious, accepting, already half-departed. Then she too became ash, became heat shimmer, became memory. Where she had lain, only scorched stone remained, bearing the faint outline of a form that might have been woman, might have been beast, might have been dream.
The last wisps of sulfurous smoke wrote her epilogue in the air before the darkness consumed even that.
Only when the last of her was gone did Hadrian finally rise. He wandered through the darkness of his sanctum and back into his bedroom, and went directly to bed. Sleep was to be deep but brief as the sickly sweet scents of demonic sex and ash comingled on his skin as sleep claimed his body but his spirit once again slipped the chains of his flesh.