Zero is a number too

Jonathan's boots scraped against the cold stone as he stumbled up the spiral stairs of the Clocktower's forbidden wing. Each step sent minor jolts of pain through his exhausted legs. The wound on his side had reopened, warm blood seeping through his makeshift bandage and staining his shirt. Every footstep echoed like a death knell, bouncing off the rusted walls like curses of the damned.

*Fuck, this hurts worse than I thought.*

In his right hand, he clutched the Sinewbound Grimoire – what he believed was the second piece of the Perfect Arithmetic – its pages stitched with actual human sinew that still felt disturbingly moist to the touch. The cover wasn't leather as he'd first thought, but something worse – skin that hadn't quite forgotten it once belonged to a living being. The runes etched across its surface glowed with a sickly orange light under the flickering Hue-lamps, casting grotesque shadows that seemed to move with a purpose of their own.

The air hung thick with the stench of decay and corruption. Something rotten lived in these walls – not just physically, but something that had seeped into the very stone over centuries. It smelled like wet earth, old blood, and something else Jonathan couldn't name but that made his stomach turn. At his hip, the Righteous Dagger pulsed with temporal energy in time with his heartbeat, its metal teeth sunk into his palm like a vice, drinking his blood with eager thirst.

"You shouldn't hold it that tight," came a voice from behind him. "It'll take more than it needs."

Behind him, Roche the Adept – once a penitent of the Order of the Veiled Scepter, now bound to Jonathan by shared purpose and shared nightmares – guarded the landing. His face was a map of old scars and fresh wounds, one eye milky white and blind, the other sharp and alert, darting at every shadow. Roche's blade hummed with temporal frequency, its edge shimmering with an otherworldly light that sliced through the darkness like it was cutting reality itself.

"Can't help it," Jonathan grunted, pausing to catch his breath. "Fucking thing has a mind of its own."

"They all do," Roche replied softly, his voice like gravel in a tin can. "That's the problem, ain't it?"

The silence between them grew oppressive, heavy with the weight of their mission and the knowledge of what failure would bring. Jonathan could hear his own heart pounding in his ears, a desperate rhythm that seemed to echo through the stairwell.

"We can't fail now," Roche rasped, wiping sweat from his brow with a filthy sleeve. "The consequences would be... hell, you've seen what happens. What they did to Ytlid. What was left of him."

Jonathan's mind flashed to Ytlid's remains – not a corpse but something worse, a body turned inside out, organs still functioning, eyes wide with the horror of eternal suffering.

"Don't," he whispered. "Don't talk about him, we're on a mission and this is important, Don't bring up fallen... Ehmm.. comrades."

He snapped the Grimoire's clasp shut with trembling fingers, the sound echoing through the hallway like a bone breaking. "We hide it. Let no faction take it. No resurrection, no summoning. We can't let that happen again."

"You really think we can stop it?" Roche asked, a hint of desperate hope in his voice. "You think we're enough?"

Jonathan stared into the darkness ahead. "We fucking have to be."

In the hall beyond, a sickening chorale built: the clack of distant boots, the downbeat of heavy hearts, the whispered prayers of the desperate and the damned. They were too late. Someone else had come for the Grimoire.

A scream cut through the stone – human at first, then something else entirely, something ragged and broken and wrong, affirming Jonathan's worst nightmare. The sound of flesh tearing, of bone breaking, of something being remade against its will.

"Shit," Jonathan hissed. "They've started the ritual."

Jonathan and Roche exchanged a glance, their eyes locking in a moment of perfect understanding. No words needed – they'd been through too much together, seen too much horror, lost too many friends. They knew what was at stake.

"Ready?" Jonathan asked, already knowing the answer.

Roche spat on the ground and readied his blade. "Born ready to die, just didn't think it'd be today, I wonder would he'll be as rotten as this city?."

Jonathan and Roche raced down the landing, their footsteps pounding the metal in a desperate rhythm. The hallway seemed to stretch endlessly before them, walls dripping with moisture that looked too red to be water. Ancient murals hung from the walls, depicting scenes of agony and torment that seemed to move in the corner of Jonathan's vision.

They burst through the rotting wooden door at the end of the hall, splinters flying as they crashed into the chamber beyond. There, at the summoning dais, a rival Order of the Nightglass watchman knelt in a pentagram drawn with black blood, the Grimoire flew violently out of Johnathan's grip, floating in front of the heretic chanting the final invocation.

Blood dripped from his eyes and ears, his skin gray and tight around his skull like it was shrinking. His eyes were wide with fever, his voice rising to a crescendo of madness.

"By the fate of decay, I summon thee SOLAS!" he screamed, the final words of the incantation tearing from his throat in a spray of blood.

Jonathan's insides turned to ice. "No, no, NO!"

He roared and leapt across the dais, his body a leap of time fueled by desperation and terror. He slid in beside him, their blades clashing with the watchman's in a deadly dance of metal and Sickly green energy. Steel rang as they fought, the sound echoing off the metal walls like screams of the damned.

"You idiots!" the watchman shrieked, his voice no longer entirely human. "You can't stop what's coming! SOLUS demands completion!"

"Shut your fucking mouth!" Jonathan snarled, swinging wildly.

Roche's blade parried a rune-silvered strike, the force of the blow sending shockwaves through his arm that cracked bone. He grunted in pain but didn't falter, driving forward with a counter-strike that opened the watchman's cheek to the bone.

"Jonathan! The book!" Roche shouted, blood spraying from his lips.

Jonathan caught and smashed the Grimoire shut against the thief's face – sinew and bone rasping on skin – the sound wet and obscene like meat being tenderized. The watchman collapsed, his skull caved in on one side, brain matter and blood oozing between the pages of the ancient text. His body twitched and spasmed, mechanical fingers clawing at empty air.

Jonathan yanked the book free, gore dripping from its edges, but the ritual had already ignited. The runes in the dais flared crimson as a vortex of sickly light roiled above the sealed hatch. The air crackled with energy, the smell of burning flesh filling the chamber. Time warped around them: gears in the walls slowed to molasses, then snapped back in jagged jerks that made Jonathan's teeth ache. His vision blurred, reality itself seeming to warp and bend.

"Shut it down!" Jonathan screamed to Roche, his voice hoarse with desperation and fear. "! Cut the flow!"

"I'm trying!" Roche shouted back, his face contorted with effort. "It's too strong!"

Roche hurled his blade into the dais, the metal biting deep into the stone with a sound like a soul being torn in half. It cleaved through bone and rust, but the vortex only shuddered, widening like a wound being torn open. From its heart, shapes emerged: twisting limbs of shadow, eyes like drowning suns, mouths within mouths within mouths. They fell upon Jonathan with the hunger of the void, their touch like ice and darkness.

"Get off me!" Jonathan howled, slashing wildly with the dagger.

The creatures made noises no living thing should make – wet, bubbling sounds that mimicked laughter. One latched onto Jonathan's arm, its touch burning through his sleeve and into his flesh. He screamed as his skin blackened and peeled away, exposing muscle and bone beneath.

Jonathan slashed the Dagger, each strike etching sacrificial glyphs in the air that burned with blue fire. The creatures dissolved into screams that echoed in his mind rather than his ears, but the vortex pulsed, expanding like a living thing hungry for more.

"Jonathan!" Roche cried, his voice thin with pain. "I can't hold them!"

Jonathan turned to see Roche pinned against the wall, shadowy appendages wrapping around his throat and limbs. His eyes bulged, face turning purple as he fought for breath.

"Hang on!" Jonathan staggered toward his friend, but the floor beneath his feet began to crack and splinter, reality itself breaking apart.

Roche raised his gauntlet with trembling fingers, unleashing a temporal pulse that stuttered reality like a skipping record. A tentacle of darkness recoiled, hissing like a snake dropped on hot coals. But the vortex bucked against the pulse, crowned with infinite hunger, growing stronger by the second.

"We die here," Roche whispered, turning to Jonathan. Blood leaked from his eyes and nose, running down his chin in rivulets. "It's too late."

*No. Not like this. Not after everything.*

Jonathan's chest burned with defiance and desperate rage. "Then we end this."

With the last of his strength, he staggered to the center of the room, every step an agony as reality itself tried to tear his body apart. He raised the Dagger high, its blade drinking in the light from the vortex, growing darker rather than brighter.

"Jonathan, what are you—" Roche began.

"Remember me," Jonathan whispered, then stabbed the Dagger into the dais's heart – a chunk of fractured bone and Hue-crystal that pulsed like a beating heart. The vessel shattered in a gout of black ichor that sprayed across Jonathan's face and chest, burning like acid. The sound was like a thousand screams all at once, a chorus of agony that threatened to burst his eardrums.

Reality fractured.

Jonathan and Roche were consumed in a wave of blinding arithmetic – fractals of bloody equations marching across the world, numbers and symbols that made sense for a breathless moment before slipping away like smoke. The Clocktower imploded inward, stone and gear collapsing into the dais's eye, then imploding into nothingness. The world turned white, pure as unpainted canvas, so bright it hurt to look at but there was nowhere else to turn. Silence sang, a deafening quiet that was almost palpable, pressing against Jonathan's skin like a physical thing.

Am I dead? Is this what death feels like?

Jonathan and Roche lay on the blank expanse, the Grimoire clutched in Jonathan's bloodied hands. He looked at its leather cover, feeling its warmth like it was alive, then felt its spine dissolve beneath his fingers like sugar in water. The Grimoire vanished – letters unmaking themselves one by one, the pages unraveling like a thread pulled from a tapestry. The words, the knowledge, the secrets – all gone, lost in the void.

"Roche?" Jonathan called, his voice sounding strange in the emptiness. "Are you there?"

No answer came. Jonathan tried to turn his head, but his body felt wrong, disconnected, like he was trying to move limbs that no longer belonged to him.

Around him, the white bled into boundless black. Stars wheeled into view, but not stars as he knew them – these pulsed with malevolent light, colors that had no name in any human language. Titanic shapes loomed at the horizon: eldritch behemoths yawning with black voids for mouths, their presence compressing sanity into shards. They moved with a terrible grace, bodies that defied geometry, limbs that bent in impossible ways.

*This isn't real. This can't be real.*

Jonathan's mind reeled, his grip on reality tenuous as spider silk in a hurricane. He felt his body tearing apart, his cells unraveling like threads from a rope, his consciousness spreading thin across the infinite darkness.

An unfathomable voice sounded, its tone like a crack in the fabric of reality: "YOU ARE BUT A DIGIT."

The words echoed through Jonathan's mind, a mantra of madness that threatened to shatter what remained of his sanity. They weren't spoken in any language he knew, yet he understood their meaning perfectly.

"No," Jonathan whispered, his voice small and lost in the vastness. "I'm more than that. I have to be."

"INSIGNIFICANT.

TEMPORARY.

A ROUNDING ERROR IN MY PERFECTION ."

He screamed to rid himself of the insanity clawing at his mind, but the sound that came from his throat wasn't human anymore. It was a jumble of numbers and equations, theorems that explained the universe and proved it meaningless in the same breath.

The voice echoed back, its form rippling like a mirage before him, taking shape as a being of pure mathematics – angles that hurt to look at, curves that made him want to claw out his eyes. His despair meant nothing to this thing, this entity of nothingness.

The creature's maw opened, a galaxy-spanning hunger that threatened to consume him whole. Inside its mouth, Jonathan saw other worlds, other realities being digested, broken down into their component parts and absorbed.

*This is it. The end of everything.*

Light snapped.

Jonathan reeled as time jerked backward, the sensation like being pulled inside out through his own navel. The world rewound, the threads of reality unraveling like a spool of yarn dropped down stairs. He stumbled, his feet moving in reverse, his body unmaking itself and remaking itself with each passing moment.

Suddenly, he stood at the base of the Clocktower stairs – Roche gone, vanished as if he'd never existed. The wound in Jonathan's side was fresh again, blood soaking his shirt. The world reversed around him: stones leapt onto walls, windows reassembled themselves from shards, torches hissed back into flame. The air filled with the scent of smoke and ozone, the smell of burning flesh and hair that made him gag.

"What the fuck is happening?" he gasped, clutching at the wall for support.

No one answered. No one could hear him. The world moved in reverse around him, but he alone moved forward, trapped in a bubble of normal time within the backward flow.

Jonathan tumbled down the spiral, each step unwinding time's thread further: the shattered dais reknit itself, the rival watchman rose unharmed with his skull reforming, the Grimoire reclosed itself with pages unmarred by blood. He reached the Clocktower's base as villagers stumbled backward through the streets: merchants un-nailing exploded vials from shop doors, acolytes screaming backwards from crypts, boneflies reversing into carcasses that sealed themselves shut.

"Make it stop," Jonathan whispered, hands pressed against his temples. "Please make it stop."

The scene was surreal, a dreamlike quality that made Jonathan's head spin. He felt like he was trapped in a never-ending loop, reliving the same moment over and over but in reverse, helpless to change anything. His mind reeled, his grip on reality tenuous as cobwebs in a storm.

Jonathan's arm undid its graft, flesh knitting free as he crumpled on the Whorl Market floor – ash to bone, bone to earth, earth to nothing. He felt his body dissolving, his cells unraveling like threads from a rope. The world around him grew dark, shadows deepening like a well with no bottom.

*I'm being unmade. Like I never existed at all.*

He tried to scream, but no sound came. He tried to move, but his limbs refused to obey. The darkness claimed him, swallowing him whole.

Then... nothing.

Jonathan jolted awake with a gasp, chest heaving under a full set of arms. Cold sweat drenched his body, his heart hammering against his ribs like it wanted to escape. He blinked rapidly, trying to orient himself.

He was in the alley from the beginning. The same fucking alley where it all started. Bloody Moonlight cut through his vision, casting an eerie red glow over the scene. The living dagger and Grimoire lay sealed in his satchel by his side, each humming faintly with a sound like distant screams. His body was whole, unscarred – as if none of it had ever happened.

"No," he whispered, running his hands over his chest and arms. "No, no, no. This isn't right."

His fingers found his side – the wound was gone. The graft was gone. Everything was gone. He was back at the beginning, as if time itself had reset.

*Am I going insane?*

Jonathan stumbled to his feet, silence stretching in every direction. The alley was exactly as he remembered it – the cracked cobblestones, the faded sigils on the walls, the smell of piss and desperation. He remembered nothing after hiding the Grimoire in the Clocktower. Yet every echo of that arithmetic horror pulsed behind his eyes, a reminder of the terror he had faced, the things he had seen, the cosmic horror that waited beyond the veil of reality.

He looked at his reflection in a cracked puddle: unscarred, whole, younger than he remembered being. The image stared back at him, a stranger's face that he didn't recognize. He brushed his palm over his side again – no graft, no wound. His breath steadied eventually, his heart rate slowing to something approaching normal.

"What the fuck happened to me?" he murmured, staring at his hands. "Did any of it happen at all?"

Ahead, the alley led to the broken cathedral where he'd first found the Grimoire. He reached for the satchel, feeling its weight like a promise – or a threat. The Grimoire and the dagger were still there, waiting for him to unlock their secrets once more.

*It's all happening again. I'm trapped in some kind of loop.*

He stood there for a long moment, paralyzed by indecision. He could walk away. Leave the satchel in the alley, walk out of the city, never look back. Start a new life somewhere far from here, far from the Grimoire and its terrible secrets.

But he knew he wouldn't. Couldn't. Something pulled at him, drew him forward like a fish on a hook. The Arithmetic had its claws in him now, and it wouldn't let go so easily.

Then he turned, decision made. "I remember," he said, voice cracking in the stillness. "Everything. And I will begin again."

*This time, I'll do it right. This time, I'll save them all.*

He stepped forward into the moonlit street – the first step of a journey already lived once, yet brand new. The truth of time's arithmetic burned behind his eyes, and he would solve it or be lost forever. The blank world awaited its witness, a canvas waiting for the brushstrokes of his destiny.

"Roche," he whispered into the darkness. "I'll find you. I promise."

As he walked, the shadows seemed to deepen, the darkness growing thicker like fog rolling in from a poisoned sea. Figures moved at the edges of his vision – not people, not animals, but things that existed between the cracks of reality. Jonathan felt like he was walking into the abyss, the void waiting to consume him whole. But he didn't look back, his eyes fixed on the horizon ahead.

*One foot in front of the other. That's all I can do.*

"Hey!" a voice called from the darkness. "You there! With the satchel!"

Jonathan froze, hand moving to the dagger at his hip. A figure emerged from the shadows – a young woman with wild red hair and eyes too old for her face. She looked familiar, though Jonathan couldn't place her.

"Do I know you?" he asked, fingers tightening around the dagger's hilt.

She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Not yet. But you will."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," she said, stepping closer, "that time isn't what you think it is. It's not a line. It's not even a circle. It's... something else."

Jonathan's blood ran cold. "Who are you?"

"A Number." She glanced at his satchel. "You've got something that doesn't belong to you."

"It belongs to no one," Jonathan snarled, suddenly protective of the cursed objects.

That's where you're wrong." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small object - a brass key with strange symbols etched along its length. "This belongs with that." She nodded toward his satchel.

Jonathan stared at the key, something stirring in the back of his mind. "What does it open?"

"Not what. When." She held it out to him. "Take it. You'll need it when you reach the Hollow Gate."

The Hollow Gate. Why does that sound familiar?

His hand trembled as he reached for the key. As his fingers closed around it, images flashed through his mind: a massive gate of bone and brass, a chamber filled with clockwork horrors and rotting faces screaming for liberation.

"Hell," Jonathan gasped, staggering backward. "What the fuck was that?"

"Memory," the woman said softly. "Or premonition. Hard to tell the difference when time folds in on itself."

"You're not making any sense," Jonathan growled, though deep down he understood more than he wanted to admit.

She smiled again, sad and knowing. "I don't have to. You'll understand soon enough." She turned to go, then paused.

"Oh, and Jonathan? When you find Roche... don't trust what he tells you about the Arithmetic. He doesn't know the whole truth."

"Wait!" Jonathan called as she melted back into the shadows.

"How do you know my name? How do you know about Roche?"

Her voice drifted back, fading like mist in the morning sun:

"Because I've seen how this ends. And it's beautiful and terrible. Now to relive this day for another decade, Tudules!! Saviour, see you another Today."

Jonathan stood alone in the moonlit street, the brass key heavy in his palm. The world was a mystery, a puzzle waiting to be solved, with pieces scattered across time itself.

He pocketed the key and continued walking, each step carrying him deeper into darkness and closer to answers.

Behind him, the puddle in the alley rippled, though there was no wind. In its reflection, a figure watched - not Jonathan's reflection, but something else, something with too many eyes and a mouth that split its face in a grotesque smile.