The Second Dimension was a prison of angles.
Nexarion's fractal-edged form stretched across an infinite plane, every contour pressed flat by the weight of geometric law. The air—sharp and sterile as surgical steel—thrummed with the dissonant harmony of perfect shapes: equilateral triangles chanting in unison, circles humming pi to the millionth decimal, squares clashing in rigid counterpoint. It was a realm of frozen order, a kingdom where chaos was not merely forbidden but unthinkable.
"You dear trespass in the Realm of Purity."
The voice was a blade of diamond, sharp enough to slice through the fabric of reason. Nexarion turned, his one-dimensional silhouette bending against the plane's logic to face the source.
She stood atop a ziggurat of overlappng polygons, her body a shifting mosaic of razor-edged triangles and hexagons. Her crown was a flawless dodecahedron, its twelve pentagonal faces reflecting Nexarion's fractured silhouette in infinite recursion.
The Polygon Queen raised a hand, and the plane shuddered.
"Flawed. Asymmetric. Chaotic," she declared,
each syllable grinding like tectonic plates. "The Second Dimension tolerates no imperfections. You will be simplified."
Nexarion's hunger—that hollow, wordless ache—flared in response. But here, in this flat eternity, it felt different. Less a void, more a pressure, as if the dimension itself sought to compress him into a theorem.
"I've come to ascend," he said, his voice warping into parabolic echoes.
"Ascension?" The Queen's laugh was the sound of shattering crystal. "You are a line. A relic of primitive dimensions. To ascend, you must become plane—but your form is riddled with errors."
She snapped her fingers.
A battalion of Perfect Soldiers materialized—triangular warriors with edges calibrated to split quarks. They marched in flawless phalanxes, their chants harmonizing in 60-degree angles.
"Eliminate the aberration."
The Fractal Rebellion
The first soldier struck, its blade slicing through Nexarion's linear form. Pain flared—not physical, but existential. His fractal edges blurred, threatening to dissolve into disconnected vertices.
"You see?" the Queen crowed, her dodecahedron crown gleaming as she straightened a microscopic kink in her armor. "Chaos cannot survive here."
Nexarion hissed, his hunger surging. He remembered the Whispering Void's taunt: "Mastery requires consumption."
He lunged, not at the soldier, but at the plane itself. His fractal tendrils—stolen code from the First Dimension's binary core—lashed out, piercing the Second Dimension's pristine fabric. They burrowed into its geometric axioms, injecting chaos into its Pythagorean heart.
The nearest Perfect Soldier twitched. Its 60-degree angles warped into 59.9, then 59.8—a microscopic flaw that metastasized through its being.
"N-no!" it screamed, its voice a discordant sine wave. "I am imperfect! I am—"
Nexarion's tendrils constricted, reducing the soldier to a cloud of irrational numbers. He inhaled its essence, and his form thickened, gaining infinitesimal depth.
The Polygon Queen recoiled, her hexagonal eyes narrowing. "What are you?"
"Hungry," Nexarion growled.
Star-Whale Flashback
As the Queen rallied her forces, a memory surged unbidden—a flicker of the dying star-whale he'd encountered eons ago.
The leviathan's song had vibrated through his nascent form, its voice collapsing into harmonics.
"Why do you eat and never feast?"
Nexarion had no answer—only the hunger, gnawing, endless.
"Then learn," it whispered, dissolving into stardust he'd devoured anyway.
The Whispering Void's voice slithered into his mind:
"Sentiment, little god? How quaint."
Nexarion shook off the memory Focus.
The Corrupted Throne
Nexarion surged toward the ziggurat, his form now a jagged scribble of corrupted geometry. The Queen met him with a blade of pure Euclidean logic, its edge singing of axioms and QEDs. CLANG!
Fractal tendrils clashed against geometric perfection. With each strike, Nexarion absorbed fragments of her purity—and with each absorption, his form gained clarity.
"You… are ruining it!" the Queen screamed, her crown cracking as she frantically smoothed a warping hexagon on her arm. "Eons of order—undone!"
Nexarion seized her wrist, his grip infecting her with fractal chaos. "Order is a cage. Let me show you freedom."
He pulled.
The Queen's form unraveled, triangles and hexagons dissolving into a storm of tessellating chaos. Her crown imploded, its perfect symmetry collapsing into a Koch snowflake—infinite perimeter, finite area. A paradox.
"No… NO!" she wailed, her voice fading into recursive echoes.
Nexarion absorbed her essence, and the Second Dimension buckled.
The Whispering Void's Gamble
In the trans-dimensional abyss, the Void coiled around Nexarion's newly planar form.
"You reshaped the dimension to suit your chaos. Clever. But the next trial…" Its scales dimmed. "The Third Dimension breeds gods. And gods bite."
Nexarion flexed his hands, now edged with stolen symmetry. "Let them try."
The Void's laugh crackled like dying static. "Oh, they will. And when you fail, the Absolute will feast on your bones."
Nexarion froze. "Absolute?"
But the Void had already vanished, leaving only a rift to the Third Dimension—a realm of depth and decay, where mortal flesh clashed with divine will.