Some Hidden Corner of Everywhere and Nowhere at All, All Times & No Places, Right This Moment

[endsthegame]

The time the Auditors' efforts lasted could have been minutes, or could have been years. Seconds and centuries didn't count when you were outside of all things, and they were doubly ridiculous within the vast space of the multiverse.

None of that was important.

The important thing was that there was a place, somewhere in that mad hodgepodge of time and space, that had been Something.

And now it was Nothing.

It had been a long time since the Nothing had woken, though the Nothing thought not and knew not of such things - it was Nothing. It was Nothing, and it did what Nothings did: it spread, like a tiny inkblot, rolling ever-gently over Somethings that had been ignored, Somethings that were only Somethings in their own eyes.

Like a thick blanket of clouds it swept over the edges, and in its wake was Nothing.

[[ this is your very first dropped-mark-I post! feel free to establish your dropped character's demise in this post if you so please - there will be more opportunities over the next few weeks. ]]

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[likeguidelines.livejournal.com]

The only sign that Barbossa, captain of The Black Pearl--again--had ever spent time in Fandom was the addition of squirrels racing along the ropes. He strode across the decks of the ship like he owned it (which he did, according to the Code, where "finders keepers" was considered binding and Jack Sparrow should pay closer attention to where he left things he considered dear to him).

There was a call from the crow's nest: "Captain! Strange weather right ahead!"

Barbossa pulled out his telescope and braced himself against one of the cannons to look. "Hurricane?" he called. It was the season, after all.

"It's like nothing I've ever seen before!" the sailor called back. "It's as if there's naught in front of us but a few leagues o' sea."

There was a worried murmur from the crew and many reached for good luck talismans they'd picked up from a dozen different ports.

Barbossa scoffed. "We've been t' the end o' the world, ye lily-livered vagabond, and have released Callisto herself back into creation. What can possibly be so scary about a little darkness?"

Then he got a good look at it and felt his blood run cold.

He raced for the wheel and tried to turn the Pearl around. This was the fastest ship in the Caribbean, but despite her best efforts (and the crew frantically lightening her load, as everything that could be tossed was tossed overboard), the...whatever it was...was gaining on them.

Even though he knew it was of no use--you didn't get to be an old pirate without having a deeply honed sense of survival--Barbossa turned and drew his sword, snarling defiance at the...thing...as it surrounded his ship, erasing him, his crew, and the Pearl as if they'd never existed.

And starting now, they never had.

[way-black.livejournal.com]

The Rider put up a fight. That was the way of them, after all, ever since his father had come up with the bright idea to use mortals to do his dirty work. Insects. Scuttling, creaking bones on fire that would have been a joke, if Blackheart didn't know this one. If he hadn't done so many things alongside Johnny here back when they were students together.

No. No, this one was still a joke, standing there with his empty eyes, skin burned away. He wasn't the same Johnny Blaze, in any case. He hadn't recognized him when first they met in this world, and that had made Blackheart's job easier.

That had made Legion's job easier, after Blackheart had unleashed the souls of San Venganza, and had made them his own. Made Them confident. Made Them stronger. The world, the world's souls. All of it, his-Their-his father's inheritance for him, and he would take it now, while that flesh-and-bones nothing that was Mephitopheles' favorite pet watched helplessly from the sidelines.

But then it had gone wrong. There was something... something missing, like a blackness even darker than Their own, closing in around them on all sides. They had been distracted by it, by the Nothing, and somehow they were at the mercy of that devil's pet, of that Rider.

YOUR SOULS, the Rider had said, ARE STAINED BY THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT.

But Blackheart had no soul.

... No, but Legion had many. A thousand. A thousand souls and all of their sins, and as he looked into the Rider's eyes, as he felt those sins turning around again to lash at him a thousandfold, he found himself not fearing the Nothing that he knew was to come.

Nothing seemed like mercy, in the face of the penance that he had to pay. The few moments between then and the end were like an eternity of agony, like Hell itself turned against him and swallowing him whole.

And then, as the Nothing swept over Blackheart's tortured form, defeated and frozen and discarded on the ground by the Rider, that agony didn't matter anymore. And, really, it had never mattered in the first place.

[chasingsnitches.livejournal.com]

The last time Cedric had been to the Quidditch World Cup, he'd been happy. He'd been a Diggory. Now, though, now he was just Cedric. He was Cedric who'd once gone to Hogwarts and he was Cedric who'd once gone to Fandom High. He'd died and he'd come back but things had never been the same.

This trip was a luxury. Voldemort had long been defeated and Harry Potter was a champion but most of the world was still in disarray. Quidditch went on, though. You can never cancel Quidditch completely.

The crowd was loud and raucous, rooting for every single sweep and swoop made by one of the players on the pitch. Cedric had to admit that it was infectious and soon enough he was joining in.

A seeker shot high into the sky and Cedric followed his movements but frowned when the sight of the sky seemed off to him. There was less blue and more black. It was a dark, inky black the likes that even Voldemort couldn't attain. And it was growing.

Cedric frantically looked around, trying to see if anyone else noticed but the match was too intense and Cedric's shouts were being drowned out by the cheers. The Nothing continued to eat the sky and soon enough it descended onto the stadium.

In his last moments, Cedric thought of his father before those thoughts and Cedric himself were consumed. Quidditch couldn't be canceled but the Nothing could erase its existence from the very fabric of the Earth along with a stadium full of screaming fans and Cedric who no longer thought of himself as Diggory.

[honoraryphd.livejournal.com]

Somewhere deep within Castle Doom, a very unlikely machine made a noise. And it was a man completely unlike any other who had built the machine and knew what it meant: the world was ending. Or, rather, disappearing. This perfectly unique man had mere minutes before the anomaly arrived, but DOCTOR DOOM had no intention to go into the darkness without a fight. He grabbed a machine that, if finished, should have let him warp reality to bring the world under Doom's control, rocketing up to one of the castle's towers to set it up.

Minor modifications took an insignificant amount of time, for Doom's new purpose for the machine was much simpler than his ultimate goal. Rather than rewriting reality, Doom needed only to preserve it. Doom would save the world so that it would one day bow down to him, its savior. Its leader.

As the sky darkened, Doom addressed the looming Nothing. "WHATEVER HAS BEEN DONE, IT IS IN VAIN. THIS WORLD IS DOOM'S, NOW AND FOREVER. AND WHATEVER THIS FORCE IS, IT SHALL BE BROUGHT TO HEEL. SO. SAYS. DOOM."

Doom threw the lever to turn his reality machine on. Pure energy shot out from within the machine, a blinding light the likes of which could seemingly cancel out the utter blackness that tore apart the sky. But when it reached the darkness, it simply vanished.

"ACCURSED DARKNESS! YOU HAVE BESTED DOOM FOR NOW. BUT IF THERE IS ANY PERSON ON THIS EARTH WHO WILL RESIST YOU FROM WITHIN, YOU MEET HIM NOW. SUCH IS DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....."

[sneerkite]

The fact that Steerpike was still alive was something of a minor miracle. After Fandom, he'd made his way across the worlds, making use of the portal system to infiltrate government after government in search of one holding the fatal flaw that would allow his ascendance to power. And he'd finally found it.

The religion of the stick-like beings of the small island nation in the center of the purple sea prized self-centered tactics and underhanded politics. Steerpike's distinct talent for traitorous sycophantism had served him well here, and the elders of the society were gathering now to help him overthrow the ruling party. All he needed was one final show of strength, and their crown -- well, necklace of precious shells, actually -- would be his.

Then the stick-like beings across the island began to scream. Steerpike rushed to the door of the grand chateau in which the elders held their council, screaming to his allies for assistance, expecting to find an army. Instead, he saw . . . nothing. A great, roiling nothingness, a living absence of being scouring the purple seas and carving apart the chartreuse sands.

"No!" Steerpike cried. "No, not now! Not when I'm so close!"

But his protests were for nothing. There were no underhanded tactics to avoid the blankness rapidly sweeping down before him. Steerpike threw open his arms and screamed wordlessly into the expanding void.

And then he was gone.

[ella-obeys.livejournal.com]

Queen Ella of Kyrria remembered her time in Fandom fondly, and she would have kept in touch with those she'd known there if time and duties had permitted. But they hadn't permitted: Char was trying to modernize the kingdom, and Ella's work with her husband left little enough time for helping Mandy in the kitchen -- let alone letters to old school chums. Only Panto the parrot remained from her time in another world.

When the darkness came to devour her, she was on yet another endless state visit, a polite smile pasted on her face as she listened to the Duchess of Something-or-Other prattle on about how the king really must do something about the price of potato seeds next spring. She permitted herself the luxury of letting her eyes roam for a moment and rest on the fileds visible through the windows.

Dark clouds were bearing down, blacker than any storm she'd ever seen. It almost looked like they literally were blotting out the sky, though of course that was impossible.

"Something is wrong outside," she interrupted the woman. "I think we ought to --"

She couldn't finish the sentence. Ella was gone, as was the duchess, and with them all of Frell and Kyrria.