Epoch of Erasure [Ch. 1]: Stain of Envy
Pride confronts Envy in a brutal clash that shatters reality. The real story begins now.
Welcome back to the 7 Series, my ongoing interactive dark fiction project. If you're new here, this marks the beginning of our transition to grimdark storytelling.
This is 7 Series: Part 2 - Epoch of Erasure.
You can find Part One of 7 Series HERE.
No playlist this time. Instead, I’ve attached the mini ‘trailer’ I made.
*Disclaimer: This was the result of approx. one hour wrestling with Canva, a tool I'd never touched before. No ‘AI function’ was used (or harmed) in the making of this video—just my ignorance and sheer will.
🔞 Content Advisory
Please be advised that the nature of the narrative shifts significantly from this point forward. Prior content may be considered introductory compared to the intensity of the material ahead. We are moving beyond unsettling themes into explicit grimdark territory.
This chapter contains graphic depictions of violence, significant body horror, severe psychological distress, trauma, grief, and betrayal. Reader discretion is strongly advised. This content is suitable for mature audiences only.
Proceed with caution. The safety nets are removed.
What You Missed – End of the World Influencer (Parts 1–8)
The world didn’t end all at once...
Or maybe it did.
A podcast host named Adam missed the whole damn thing, actually.
But Adam wasn’t just a man with a mic.
He was Pride—one of the Seven, divine forces fractured by time, betrayal, and something even gods couldn’t name.
Through the ruins, he chased a truth he couldn’t fully remember.
He met ‘allies.’ Lost them. Was hunted by monsters.
All with the woman he loved: Alex.
And then he lost her.
Violently.
Unforgivably.
In those final chapters, Adam began to remember what he was.
He remembered how he ended up ‘Average Adam.’
And when Alex died, something inside him broke open—
Something ancient.
Vengeful.
Divine.
Now, Pride is awake.
And he plans to restore balance
—the only way that he knows how.
Sacrifice.
Where we left off last time…
I take a single, deliberate step forward. The ground cracks further under my boot. My voice drops to a final, chilling whisper that rolls over the ruins like distant thunder. The raw power about me coils visibly, arcing like black lightning through galaxies yet to be born. Annihilation. Absolute.
“Bear witness to the epoch of your erasure.”
Welcome to the Epoch of Erasure
Thalia, Elliot, Selene… predictable cowards, they dissolve like phantoms caught in a searchlight. All except Victor—Envy.
This…corrosive green-black miasma coils around him like sentient smog, bleeding from his hands, now contorting into shapes of raw, grasping hunger.
He eyes me with the cold assessment of a butcher examining meat. He sees the drain. He sees the way my flesh trembles, threatening to slough off the bone. The way my human vessel is actively rejecting my own being.
A wet crack echoes from my femur as I shift weight.
Victor sneers. It sounds like wet gravel churning in a wound.
"Still posturing, Pride?” Fuck, even the way he says posturing pisses me the hell off. But I can’t even manage a grimace. “Even when you're literally falling apart?"
He glides unnervingly smooth over ground that visibly putrefies beneath him, the stone softening to a grey, fungal mush.
The shadows around him coalesce into siphoning tendrils – things that writhe with a need to absorb. His eyes, fixed greedily on the unstable energies leaking from the cracks in my skin, burn with a billion years of festering resentment. Very on brand.
"All that power... and it's rotting in you. Wasted on pathetic sentiment, trapped in this leaking, decaying mortal shell."
The energy bleeds from his form, pooling around his hands like liquid voidstuff. The very air around him curdles into something tangible, reality groaning under the pressure of his focused malice.
The scent of rot intensifies into a physical thing, a pressure that I can feel actively coating the back of my throat with the taste of liquefied flesh and grave dirt.
"Imagine what I could achieve with it."
Every nerve feels flayed open and scraped raw by the defiance trying to burn its way out of me—a pathetic squeak against the hurricane; finding the strength feels like trying to sculpt a supernova.
I try to command reality, to assert my presence, anything; a desperate, pathetic attempt.
I squeeze my eyes shut, praying to whatever god will fucking listen—momentarily forgetting that I am the god here—try to solidify the weeping pavement, to force the foul air into a crushing wall.
The ground shudders, a web of bleeding fractures spreading outwards, but the effect collapses instantly, smothered under Victor’s presence.
The backlash feels like hooked chains digging through my skull, ripping apart something fundamental. A thin trickle of black, viscous fluid leaks from my ears.
My vision fractures into screaming geometries, searing retinas dry—ready to crack like old parchment. Useless.
Worse than useless.
Damaged.
Victor laughs that ugly, grating sound echoing with the hollow, slurping hunger of his Sin. Pathetic.
He doesn't just attack; he unleashes.
With a simple gesture, the very ground beneath me sloughs away like wet flesh—revealing pulsing, fungal growths underneath.
A wave of nauseating entropy washes outwards, actively unravelling everything in its path. Nearby ruins groan and dissolve into dripping streams of decay.
Simultaneously, vectors of pure negation—visible tears in the fabric of what is, like flensing knives—lash out with a sharp hiss of displaced air, trailing tendrils that leeched color and sound from anything they neared.
I throw myself sideways, rolling through grit, shattered glass, and something soft and unpleasantly organic.
One vector of unmaking misses, striking a collapsed concrete pillar behind me. It implodes into a slurry of screaming atoms, leaving behind a negative space that radiates absolute cold.
Then the whispers—maddening, contradictory truths clawing at the edges of sanity. A psychic scream replaces the lack of sound, vibrating in my teeth.
As I scramble, another wave of entropy washes over me, sinking its teeth bone-deep. My cells feel like they are actively revolting, turning to grey sludge from the inside out.
Movement becomes an agonizing crawl through invisible tar.
"Is this the might of Pride?" he mocks, voice dripping with a contempt thick enough to choke on. "This mewling, broken thing?"
Raising a hand, a chunk of nearby twisted steel fused with concrete and—wait, is that bone?—lifts into the air and flings forward with impossible, silent speed.
Desperate, broken, I somehow manage to focus, pushing out with raw, bleeding will, trying to impose order. The wreckage slows, visibly straining against my command for a fraction of a second, the air around it crackling… before my control shatters like glass under a sledgehammer.
The wet snap of bone echoes in my chest cavity on impact, followed by the sickening gurgle coming from my lungs, flooding with blood. I sprawl, coughing up more dirt than fluid.
Decaying energy pulses outwards from the impact, necrotizing the flesh. I watch, detached, as the skin on my torso blackens and cracks around the impact zone. The scent of rotting flesh somehow overpowers every other scent in this godforsaken hell hole—or what’s left of Earth.
Pain lances up my shins – fractures spiderwebbing through the bone, mixing with the spreading cellular dissolution.
Before I can even drag a gasp against the dust and the taste of my own blood, Victor is on me, and a suffocating, crushing pressure pins me down; pressing the air from my ruined lungs, grinding broken ribs deeper.
One of his hands, coated in that corrosive green-black sludge, presses against my chest, directly over the shattered sternum. It burns. It infests.
I can feel my soul tearing apart, strand by agonizing strand, the concept of 'self' becoming thin and malleable. My skin blackens, splits, and weeps foulness under his palm.
"Yesss..." he hisses, his face inches from mine, eyes burning with fraudulent, triumphant greed.
"The power you hoard, the power you defile. Mine."
The psychic static behind my eyes intensifies into a roar like grinding glass shards against my optic nerves. The draining sensation deepens, pulling energy, pulling meaning. Pulling pure potential.
"All this time... squandered on pathetic attachments... on flesh that rips and rots..."
My muscles tear, spasming uselessly against the entropy bleeding into me like embalming fluid. Movement is a distant memory. The vectors of unmaking around him writhe closer, hungry mouths carved from nothing.
"But I appreciate you holding on to it. I know its value.”
He presses harder, grinding my shattered sternum. The world tilts into a grey, screaming haze. More of my strength, my being bleeds away.
Envy is finally touching the power he craves, drinking it down like a man starved.
He thinks he's already won. He’s bleeding me dry like slaughterhouse refuse…
No… not like this… not after…
Memories of Alex slam against my already pounding skull, the last thoughts of a dying man.
“You’re such a baby.” I tease, my hand finding her arm and pulling her to me.
“I’m a baby? You were practically fetal. Crying like a kid who lost his mom in Walmart.”
Her voice is sharp, smug, perfect. She hits me with a flawless impression: “H-h-hello?
Like watching a master at work.
I swallow. “Hey, God’s wrath, or Freddie Kruger? Which apocalypse are you picking?”
“Shut up,” Alex murmurs, her voice shaking but edged with a smirk, “I’d definitely choose Freddy.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out as a shaky exhale.
Alex steps in front of me, sharp and solid. “Okay, there are space witches. That’s cool and all, but if you think we’re about to follow some cloaked stranger spouting vague mystical bullshit without receipts, you’ve got me confused with some YA protagonist from 2012.”
“You look like shit,” she groans, voice barely there.
I don’t answer, not out loud. Just yank her into my arms without thinking, hold her tight.
I bury my face in her hair, pressing my lips to the top of her head. Gotta know she’s still here, still solid after whatever messed-up side-show Thalia showed her.
“I know,” I mumble, voice low, trying for teasing, trying to cover the shake I feel starting. “Shocked you even came back to me. Sexy space witches and all.”
If she were here right now, she’d probably call me ‘dramatic’ or ‘cringe.’
God, I miss that.
The despair hits, a suffocating blanket that tastes like vomiting hot ash.
His taunts, the chilling dissolution spreading through my limbs, the absolute, humiliating failure.
Me. A failure. Broken. Beaten by…by him?
By petty, whining Envy? The universe’s ultimate participation trophy?
This...this cosmic joke of a god?
The naked, slobbering want in his eyes as the unmaking energies pulse flicker—a flicker of absolute arrogance. He pauses to relish in his victory—but my focus narrows.
The knife. Just out of reach. Near Alex, in the debris, catching the eerie green light like a shard of hope. Simple steel. Mundane.
An insult.
Victor lunges again, siphoning energies converging, his entire being narrowed on the final, ecstatic act of consumption. His concentration is absolute, his arrogance a tangible pressure – his core less guarded, exposed.
Ignoring the screaming agony in my chest, the torn muscles, the spreading rot, I move. Fueled by pure, undiluted spite and the image of Alex's lifeless face burning behind my fractured vision.
Pure, animal instinct overriding the broken machine. I dive low; a desperate, tearing scramble across the filth – fingers somehow closing around the solid weight of her knife's hilt despite the numbness.
I surge up – fast, low, brutally physical – just as his concentration wavers, sensing the unexpected motion. His eyes widen, not in fear, but in disbelief.
Too late.
With every last shred of ruined strength, grief, and nihilistic rage, I drive the blade upward, plunging simple forged steel into the heart of his shape—putting everything I have into willing this motherfucker to die already.
Something fundamental screams in rejection.
His features warp into a mask of agony and disbelief. He looks down, incredulous, at the simple, almost pathetic blade, then up at me, incomprehension warring with incandescent fury.
A choked, discordant shriek tears the air – the tearing of dimensions, grinding screech that causes nearby stones to liquefy.
My eardrums feel like they turn to glass and shatter, hot blood now pouring down my neck.
His form ruptures, exploding outwards in a geyser of boiling, corrosive shadow-stuff and half-formed, screaming things made of pure green whatever-the-fuck. Viscera that isn't viscera splatters the ruins, sizzling and corrupting whatever it touches.
He claws weakly, unraveling violently, undergoing rapid, horrifying mutations – eyes bubbling into a liquid, limbs twisting – before collapsing into a steaming, stinking pile of unidentifiable biological ick that continues to twitch.
Gone.
Sort of.
The stain of Envy still remains.
A heavy, diseased silence slams back in punctuated by the faint pulse of my vision.
Gravity reasserts its claim and I collapse, hitting the pavement. The impact sends fresh waves of agony through my shattered body. Every nerve screams, every muscle fiber feels shredded.
The taste of my own blood and something indescribably foul fills my mouth. The knife—Alex’s knife—clatters from numb, trembling fingers, landing in the spreading pool of fluids.
I can't gasp; my remaining lung feels scoured raw, bubbling uselessly. Utterly spent. Broken.
Alex… her stillness beside me is a monument to my failure, her cooling form contrasting to the boiling remnants of the fight. The victory tastes like ash and bile in my throat.
My eyes close, the lids feeling like sandpaper over burst blood vessels, before snapping open again. The variable. Still there. Still silent.
After all that...
The universe remains indifferent, the rot continues—
And I still have to fucking babysit.
And so it begins…
Alright, huddle closer, you survivors clinging to the edge (or maybe you just took a wrong turn—happens to the best of us). We need to talk. Specifically, about how badly you screwed up.
Because while you were catching your breath, nursing those questionable life choices that landed you here, everything went sideways. Spectacularly.
Yeah, turns out your guide through the apocalypse? He's Pride incarnate—less 'deadly sin,' more cosmic entity with a serious PR problem.
And let's just say he’s been through a lot.
Cosmic entities, brutal betrayals, a love story pulverized under a space witch's heel – Tuesday, basically. And he christened this whole damn mess the "Epoch of Erasure."
Catchy, right?
So here you stand. In the ruins. The air tastes like dirt, tinged with the ghost of regret. The kind that hits you right before the first punch lands, and you realize you're about to eat pavement.
You scan the wreckage, searching for any sign someone else made it. This place... it's alien. Unfamiliar. And the silence? It's not empty. It's listening.
We're listening.
This isn't a game anymore. No pilot episode fun. The dark stuff is here, claws out, and now?
Now, you decide how this story ends.
Your first real choice in the Epoch of Erasure:
(A) Chase the God: Go after Adam – Pride, whatever he is now. He's radiating power enough to fracture reality and probably nursing a grudge the size of a dying star. Maybe you just have a death wish. Or maybe this ass hole should put things (and people) back where he got them!
(B) Fade to Black: Screw him. Screw it all. Cling to the ground, to the need to breathe. Become the 'final girl' (gender is irrelevant in the apocalypse). Survival is a solitary hell anyway.
Decision time. Think you can handle chasing a god (A), or is fading into the background noise more your speed (B)? The results are hidden until Part 2 comes out.
Tell me why you made your choice in the comments. Let's see who's still standing next time.
If you enjoyed the ride (or just want to see what fresh hell comes next), consider supporting the architect of your suffering.
Until the next story is written in blood & shadows,
—Your Narrator
Fading to black has become tedious
God chase. Fuck it. Great writing, and your prolific!
Also, maybe it would be interesting if you narrated small scenes, and I reply my actions, then you elaborate based on that. I wouldn't mind doing that as a game master of sorts. Idk just crossed my mind.