My life, my name, my memories, my entire existence up until then had all been rendered meaningless with one quick and brutal swing of a blade. For most, death was an inevitable end—an unavoidable and inseparable part of life. Past that horrifying and inescapable threshold called death, all thoughts and consciousness cease to be and in the end, one's soul is left to drown eternally in a pitch-black sea of nothingness.
This I know, for it was my initial experience upon losing my life at the hooves of the Lunar Princess. Unaware and incapable of thought, my own soul was left to drift aimlessly in that black sea for what may have been eons or perhaps only a brief moment. It was a time I should not have been able to remember having lost everything that made me who and what I was, and yet I did and still do.
I still remember, and the memory of that time still makes me shudder with an acute sense of dread I had long ago thought I'd left behind. To recall one's nonexistence may seem an impossible and frankly absurd concept, but for those who have transcended that inevitable end called death and grasped a new life the impossible is very much possible.
To know what it is to lack an existence is a horrifying concept, one that even now I would be far more content without having experienced for myself. Were it not for the grace of the one that pulled me out of that nothingness and into a new existence, I would still be as blissfully unaware as a fetus yet to leave the womb.
That is not to say that I'm not grateful—far from it. I met and accepted my end with the faith that the truth I sought was somewhere beyond that end. I had once thought Chrysalis to be the sacrifice needed to reawaken the Dark Silent One but that was not the case. Her death at the altar, had it occurred, would be a boon rather than a hindrance.
So long as she died on that altar and the bells were rung, my task would be complete. In my incorrect thinking, it would hardly matter who had slain her. All I had to do was raise the amulet and summon the bells, but this was not true. The Mad Queen's absence, the appearance of the Royal Guard, Luna's intervention, and my death.
Not until my final moments did I realize that all had played out as it was meant to. Neither had Chrysalis nor Sound Mind abandoned me to my fate. Rather, it was simply not their time to appear. In the end, I was the one meant to be the sacrifice upon the altar. My destination—the gate at the end of my path could not be reached while I still walked among the living.
My second ascension was inexorably linked to the reawakening of Zushakon and Zushakon above all else was a god of death and darkness. If I was to find the gate that would lead me to the truth and my own awakening, it was only natural to embrace both for only in death could the faithful feel truly alive. And within my demise, I did indeed find the answer.
Within that endless nothingness, I was lost, but a deeper darkness found me and brought me back into being—its arrival heralded by the mighty beat of unseen wings. The sound, like rolling thunder in the absolute silence, was enough to pull my mind from the void. All at once, my consciousness was returned to me, and with it my memories of that very void from which I'd escaped.
Had I a physical form and lungs then I would have screamed. I would have screamed and screamed and screamed and I doubt I would have ever stopped for the horror of that memory. Stripped of my mortal flesh and left adrift as mere soul-stuff as I was, I could make no such sound. The only thing left to me was the all-encompassing terror of my predicament.
It was then that the winged thing prowling that interminable sea of darkness fell upon me. Even devoid of all physical sensations I could still feel its monstrous jaws close around me, but that was not the end of me. No, I was not sent back into that deeper void, but rather found myself in a nightmarish but not entirely unfamiliar place.
It was a place I had seen only at a glance within a distant dream. It was a place that practically defied description. In my tireless hours of research, I could only find a single reference—a small passage that did little to convey the complete and utter breakdown of reason and order that I saw then.
...and on its nighted throne does it dwell, awaiting in eternal repose within an abyssal domain far beyond time and space where reality as we know it cannot reach. That Outermost God whose perpetual slumber is forever accompanied by the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes...
Both Sound Mind and Discord had also alluded to that place and the unfathomable entity that dwelled therein. The Abyssal Idiot—the Daemon Sultan whose domain sat within the center of Ultimate Chaos. At that time I knew little of what either of them spoke of—no, what I failed to understand back then was the scope of what they had referred to.
In that domain, amidst the horrendous piping and loathsome drumming of those mindless tentacled abominations, was the truth I sought. It was all there in that dream, that vision that I saw a small piece of the truth and had not even known. This, however, was no small glimpse as seen in a mere vision, this was reality. This was far beyond and above reality.
This was the Center of Ultimate Chaos, and before me in all its unutterable and inexpressible hideousness was the creature who spread madness and chaos even as it slept its endless sleep, the Outermost God, Azathoth. I had never once heard its name but the knowledge was there as if it had always been.
I had no eyes with which to see and yet Azathoth's twisting and writhing and bubbling form filled my vision nonetheless—its size and shape of a caliber that could not be pinned down by the ponish language or any other. Its sheer presence seemed to radiate not only absolute madness but also blasphemous knowledge, for I learned far more than its name by simply being so close.
The fleeting nature of existence, the transience of life, the universe as I once knew it, nothing but a dream born of a sleeping god who is unaware that it is dreaming. That was the truth I'd been searching for this whole time. It was a truth I would have never believed had I not been pushed through the gate.
The gate at the end of my path was not an entrance but an exit—an escape from the neverending dream of the Blind Idiot God. Past that gate were Azathoth's domain and the true home of Discord and the Faceless God who had introduced itself to me as Sound Mind. He did not make himself known to me, but I knew the draconequus was there lurking somewhere in that Nuclear Chaos.
I knew he'd been twisted back into his true shape and rendered nothing but another mindless musician like the rest. It was a sad thing to be sure looking back, but Discord's fate was far from my concern. Pedestrian worries such as that could be afforded by a sane and logical mind. This unspeakable domain was an insuperable distance from concepts like sanity and logic.
They did not apply before Azathoth and his eldritch musicians and I was forced to cast them aside. Then again, my reason might have already left me long before Luna had taken my head. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to maintain any semblance of rationality with so much information pouring into my mind like an unstoppable torrent.
With no corporeal body to speak of, the sleeping chaos before me, and a nigh-infinite flow of knowledge assaulting my mind, I was lost in the throes of madness for I do not know how long. Time was irrelevant in this place—a single moment wholly indistinguishable from countless eons—but eventually another entity emerged from beyond the unlighted depths of Azathoth's domain.
It was a creature whose true form was of a transcendent sort of vileness not dissimilar to that of the great slumbering thing at the center of all this insanity. It was a form unfamiliar to me, yet I knew three of its many faces all too well. Just as it guided my actions as the affable psychologist, Sound Mind, so too did that selfsame creature guide the cult of the Hidden Ones as the Wandering Prophet long before my time.
Even in the very beginning back in the Crystal Cavern where it had all started, it had come to me time and again in the guise of that hollow-eyed doppelganger with the empty smile. It was always there, pushing me ever forward on my path. It was only now, in this abhorrent realm where knowledge and chaos flowed in an endless and unrestricted torrent, that I understood. Within this ineffable nightmare made real, I finally and fully understood what my journey meant—how it had been shaped by that creature.
He, or rather it, had finally shown itself for what it truly was—the Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep—and it had come for me. Through arcane methods I would only understand after the fact, the towering abomination was somehow able to salvage and restructure my thoroughly broken mind into something whole again, if irreparably and atrociously warped by what I'd now seen and understood.
It was Nyarlathotep who guided my twisted soul from the center of ultimate chaos and back through the gate once more into Azathoth's eternal dream. From there, with knowledge unbound by the constraints of order and causality, I passed through the endless black sea unhindered by the shadow of the Old Night and found my own way back to Equestria and the vessel I left behind.