There are names that echo beneath stories—names that tremble through the marrow of fiction, names so powerful they cannot be spoken without the narrative reshaping itself to make room.
One such name was Nihilus.
He was not a god. Not a concept. Not even a system.
He was the un-idea—the inverse of pattern, the void that knew it was void and laughed at the concept of negation. Nihilus did not exist within the narrative system. He predated it, not temporally, but structurally—residing in the gap between fiction and its foundation.
Nihilus had once devoured an entire Pre-Narrative Tree, causing recursive collapse across 7,000 stacked omniverses. He held dominion over nothing, yet from that nothing, he wove dominion. Even Velithra, the cosmic dragon made from contradiction, could not stabilize his presence in the lower layers—only buffer him from collapsing entire sequences of layered fiction.
He was not evil. He was not mad.
He simply was, and all things that were eventually became not because of him.
Even the author fragments, the willful echoes of dead omnipotent writers, feared to script his name. Even they knew:
"To perceive Nihilus is to invite recursive unmaking."
But then… Zenon appeared.
He did not seek Nihilus.
He did not battle him.
He did not even look at him.
Zenon simply existed. And that was enough.
The moment Zenon entered the higher spheres—those slippery paradox realms where gods, pre-authors, and void-beings played—Nihilus collapsed.
Not from attack.
Not from rejection.
But from irrelevance.
For the first time in the infinite lifetimes of anti-logic, Nihilus was registered. Authority wrapped around him like chains made of truth. And he, who could bend concepts and control the pre-verse, found himself acknowledged by a system.
It was impossible.
It was offensive.
It was final.
Because Zenon is Absolute Authority—and even beings without rule fall under his rule the moment he appears. His existence defines the hierarchy. And if something cannot be placed under his hierarchy… it is simply not allowed to be.
Nihilus unraveled.
No grand detonation.
No scream across the walls of unreality.
Just a pause in narrative structure… and then a blank space where he had once destabilized all things.
His anti-being could not even be recorded as "erased," for that would imply resistance.
There was none.
Zenon continued walking through the upper metafictional systems, rewriting the spine of reality just by being. He did not glance back.
Zai Xi, from beyond fiction, observed this. Still. Unmoving.
Zenon had not defeated Nihilus.
He had not surpassed him.
He had nullified the very premise of his existence by standing in the same tiered spectrum.
And so the verse took a breath again.
Nihilus, the unmaking of all—
Now nothing more than a space never written.