THANATOS VS Nofuqus Given

The green mist rose from the floor of the underworld like the breath of something sleeping, and THANATOS walked through it, and the mist did not dare to part.

He had come because a throne must be answered for, and something small and wet had been laughing at the edge of his domain for three days. The scythe named Thanatos rested across his shoulder, its curved blade drawing slow spirals of spectral light out of the air, and the bones beneath his feet clicked and settled like subjects bowing.

Then the laugh came again — high, breathless, wet — and Nofuqus Given stepped out from behind a pillar of black basalt that had not been there a moment before.

He was a man the color of a latrine floor. Dark, viscous matter coated him head to toe, dripping from his chin, his elbows, the waistband of his white briefs. The wall behind him was already splattered with the same substance, as though he had erupted from it. He threw his arms wide.

"Ooooh, the BIG one! The big stone daddy with the big shiny spoon!" He doubled over, cackling, and a wet guttural sound escaped him. "You came all this way to scrape me off the floor? Buddy, I *am* the floor."

THANATOS did not slow. His voice came like tectonic plates grinding against one another, distant and without weather.

"You are filth. Filth is removed."

He swung. The scythe passed through the air where Nofuqus had been, and the spectral blade carved a trench three feet deep into the basalt, green fire pooling in the wound of the stone. Nofuqus was already elsewhere — not faster, exactly, but *misplaced*, as if the world had simply agreed to let him be somewhere funnier.

"Removed! Removed!" he shrieked, delighted. "You hear that, floor? You're getting removed! Everybody wave goodbye to the floor!"

He hurled a fistful of himself at the titan's helm. It struck the horned metal and clung, steaming faintly, and THANATOS did not wipe it away. He did not need to. He simply advanced, and the ground cracked in a ring around each footfall, and the green mist swallowed the stench whole.

This was the truth of the battle, and it revealed itself slowly, the way all true things do: the titan could not be made to care.

Nofuqus tried again. He dove forward, arms open, not attacking but *offering* — Certainty-Proof Absurdity, a suicidal embrace meant to catch the descending blade, to swallow it in grease and filth and convert the enemy's certainty of victory into paralysis. It was a beautiful trap. It had worked on gods. He screamed with joy as the scythe came down.

And THANATOS did not strike.

The blade stopped a hand's breadth from Nofuqus's chest, and the green light of it illuminated every drop of the man's coating, and the titan simply — stepped past. One enormous boot came down beside the trickster's ankle and the basalt floor did not crack so much as *surrender*, folding into a shallow crater. Nofuqus stumbled, off-balance, his trap sprung on nothing.

"Wh—" he began, and for the first time the cackle faltered. "You're supposed to *stab* me. That's the whole bit. You stab, I hug, you get gross, I win, everybody laughs—"

"You mistake me," said THANATOS. "I am not a certainty that can be proven false. I am the fact that outlasts argument."

He brought the scythe around in a wide, slow arc — not at Nofuqus, but at the ground. The blade sheared through the basalt in a full circle, carving a ring around them both, and green fire leapt up from the groove in a wall of spectral flame. The mist thickened. The bones of the underworld rose.

Nofuqus lunged again, desperate now, trying to close the distance, trying for Sticky Triumph — a grapple that would lock the titan in his own victorious posture forever. His filthy hands found THANATOS's gauntlet, and they *clung*, and something in the armor's joints began to seize, grit entering servos that had never known grit, an endless siege of filth against immortal metal.

For a moment — one moment — the titan's arm did not move.

Nofuqus's wide eyes went wild with triumph. "GOTCHA! Gotcha gotcha gotcha, you big dumb—"

THANATOS flexed.

It was not a struggle. It was a decision. The armor did not fight the filth; it *outlasted* it, as bedrock outlasts rain. He raised the arm anyway, dragging Nofuqus up off the ground, the man dangling from the gauntlet like a soiled rag. Then he brought the scythe up in his other hand and laid the flat of the spectral blade against Nofuqus's chest.

"Your joke," THANATOS said, "is that nothing matters. Mine is that everything does. Only one of us can be right, and I have all the time there is."

He pressed. The green energy flared, not cutting but *searing*, burning the viscous coating away in sheets of foul steam, and beneath it — beneath all of it — there was nothing solid to hold. The filth that made Nofuqus what he was, that armored him, that clung and corrupted, was being unmade to the last greasy molecule. He screamed, and the scream turned into a laugh, and the laugh turned into a wet gurgle, because he could not help it. He was the joke to the end.

"You win, you win," he wheezed, even as his outline dissolved into the green fire. "But you'll never get the *smell* out, big guy. Never. It's in your seams now. Forever. Ha. Ha."

"Yes," said THANATOS, without inflection. "It is. And I will not notice."

The last of Nofuqus Given came apart into the spectral flame and the mist drank him. The wall that had been splattered went clean. The crater in the basalt cooled, and the green fire in its ring dimmed to embers, and the underworld settled back into the silence of a throne room that had never truly been disturbed.

THANATOS lowered the scythe. The bones beneath his feet clicked once more, and were still.

He did not wipe the gauntlet. He did not need to. He turned and walked back the way he had come, and the mist closed behind him like a sentence ending.