The angel lady tried to reach forward to pull Grey out of the waters, but her hand passed right through him. Her eyes were wide in shock. Never could she have expected that Grey would be so reckless.
Maybe she was too used to speaking to people like they had a modicum of decorum and understanding, but she hadn’t been clear enough with Grey.
When she was speaking earlier, she was referring to how the waters might be used if you took a drop, two, or three at a time. Even a mouthful was way too much.
Dunking your entire head in wasn’t just a death sentence. It was like walking yourself into the depths of hell and letting the devil himself chain you. The chains would be forged from the coldest ice, and you would be tormented for whatever length of existence you had left.
The largest problem was that those waters froze everything. They were so cold that atoms around it couldn’t even convey it to the surrounding world. That was all to say that the cold was so self-contained that the temperature around the waters felt utterly normal.
It was said that heat always flowed toward the cold. But when the cold reached beyond a breaking point, existing beyond means that physics could even begin to decipher and comprehend, even heat ceased all flow.
This was all to say that Grey wouldn’t just die a horrible death, he would experience every second of that death as though it had slowed to an infinitesimally slow crawl.
From their perspective, Grey would die in an instant.
From Grey’s perspective, that instant would stretch to the very end of the universe itself, existing in a span of reality where time itself was frozen to silence, where even the seconds could not tick by properly.
What was that if not hell? What was that if not the worst hell imaginable?
A tear fell from the angel lady’s eye. It was all her fault. She was to blame for this.
She was the adult in the situation but she got pulled into Grey’s antics and jokes, so much so that she forgot to treat the matter with the seriousness that she should have. She chose vague diatribes about what the rebirth waters were instead of being straightforward.
It was said that when the gods cried the skies darkened and stormfall came. The entire world itself would be somber along with her.
But she had long fallen from such grace. She was no goddess any longer. Maybe the only gods that were left in the world were the fakers who thought they could get away with using such titles.
All she felt now was a hollow pain, a pulsing inadequacy for her own failure.
This was all her fault. It was all her—
Grey gasped, his head snapping out of the waters, his teeth chattering.
"FUCK THAT’S COLD!"
His body vibrated, his lips turning a burning shade of blue. The tips of his fingers became frostbit and his veins only turned bluer and bluer. His hair, already as white as could be, frosted over and he radiated such a chilly might that it looked like a cloud formed over his head to sprinkle down a snowfall.
He blew out a breath and an icicle took shape in the air, tumbling down and hitting the waters.
The vibration of Grey’s body grew wilder, matching the pulsing coming from Prometheus.
"Not enough!" Grey said.
Then he bent down and ducked his head in again, taking another greedy gulp.
The angel lady was completely stunned.
"... What the fuck..."
If her husband was here, he might have uttered the same words. Not just because of what they would both be seeing, but because of the fact his wife had uttered something so vulgar.
Those that knew the angel lady in her prime knew that she was the pinnacle of decorum. Even the snipping joke she made was as tame as it could have been given the situation of a youth staring at her breasts so brazenly.
Any other god in her position would have smited Grey to death.
But this... was truly too inconceivable.
The only explanation for this...
"No... there’s no way..."
Grey gasped for breath again, pulling himself out. His body shook, and this time the tips of his fingers were so black it looked like they would fall off any moment now.
"Just how big... is your soul...?" The angel lady mumbled. It looked like she only half wanted Grey to answer, and half didn’t want anyone to. Maybe the answer might kill her for good.
"No time for talking. Busy evolving." Grey said.
With that, he dunked his head in again.
Grey stayed for longer this third time than any of the first two times combined, and by the time he finally did pull himself out once more, entire limbs had gone black. The only color in them at all were the blue veins that kept pulsing with a radiant light beneath them.
Grey’s veins were turning such a bright blue, in fact, that his irises were tinting violet. They beamed like lasers through the darkness.
But no matter how sinister and glaring his eyes were, his body looked like it was suffering the worst sort of necrosis. How could anyone survive something like this?
If he dunked his head in again, it wouldn’t just be his limbs that went black, the necrosis would reach his heart.
At that point...
Grey jumped and the angel lady’s eyes went wide.
Grey belly flopped into the fountain of death. The waters were far deeper than the fountain made it look. Even with as large as the fountain was, the waters were even deeper than that, and soon the angel lady couldn’t even see Grey’s body anymore despite how clear the waters were.
"GREY!"
In the far off distance, Amunet and Thi Lan were just watching, shell shocked. The moment they saw the angel lady cry, they knew that something was very wrong.
But what the hell had Grey gone and done this time?