The Maw of Baughust | Chapter XXIII
The parrot’s form, it turned out, was a container. A shell. A shape small enough for mortal eyes to bear, holding something vast — something that could not be looked at directly, something that existed on a level of reality that mortals were not meant to perceive. The blue feathers peeled outward, and behind them was everything — a kaleidoscopic fractal of royal-blue feathers suspended in perpetual, simultaneous explosion and implosion, a form that was every form and no form, a presence that was everywhere and nowhere, that was the space between atoms and the void between universes, that was the thought that preceded all thoughts and the silence that followed all sounds.
Mortals looked away. Gods bowed their heads.
And every being on that battlefield recognized it, each in their own way.
The Hypothetical Creator. Nullified Null. The Conceptual Sea. The One. God.
But one name rose above all the rest — its true name, the name whispered by his followers in Level 274, the name written in ancient diaries, the name of the thing that indoctrinated with a touch and no-clipped through reality and had always, always been more than a bird:
Jerry.
A world of Gods and Monsters.
