Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

“Why risk death? Because in their world, they live in the ruins they made, and they have no capacity to create anything new. They exist to destroy. Destruction is their only joy. That’s the condition to which they willfully reduced themselves when they achieved the complete depravity of the Nihilim. Because in their world nothing remains to be torn down. There’s only rubble and dust. They live in frustration and rage that can never be assuaged. What would it avail them to reduce the remaining rubble to dust, the dust to even finer dust? There’s no pleasure in that. Being immortal, they lack the power to kill one another or themselves. And so they yearn for this second universe, where so much remains to be obliterated, where there are people on whom to impose great suffering, so many waiting to be corrupted and killed—and so many who are already on the path to becoming Nihilim themselves. Having once been favored godlings, the Nihilim know a new creation exists, and they yearn to rise from their universe to ours and be among us, even at the cost of losing their immortality.”