Demonic Devourer ch. 131 (Patreon)

[Author's note: I'm not fully recovered. Just had a plane ride back home that is really exacerbating my concussion symptoms. Going to a doctor soon, likely. Hope you enjoy. Brainpunch coming soon, hopefully.]

In this nothingness is all of existence—yet again, a paradox. Though I am well acquainted with those, it takes me longer than I’d like to understand this emptiness we exist within, kept alive by our Tautology and our weapon and nothing else.

The system is gone, I realize. Rather than the framework that understands and categorizes our power, there is simply nothing. Our authority floats freely through the nothingness, and it takes everything we have to even keep it close to us.

Even if the system was fading away in the last moments of the dying world, it is undeniable that it still played a major role in serving our skills. With it gone, the bulk of our power has gone from solid to liquid, and it is only through great effort that we can keep it in a shape that resembles what it was before.

Without the skeleton of the dead gods putting our skills together, there is just raw power and nothing to direct it other than what passes for divinity here.

This is, I realize, the primordial void—except I clearly never understood what the void truly is, because this is nothing like the dreamlike ocean of broken unreality and eternal instants that we floated through. Instead, there is nothing except what is not; it is inherently contradictory.

If my nullspace gives a taste of reason breaking, the void is the full course. While I can break the concept of causuality within my power, concepts as a whole appear not to exist within the void. At best, they’re a dissolving, blurry slurry. Things like time and space are irrelevant here.

We, too, risk disappearance. With the power we keep holding onto, though, we can define ourselves, draw the lines to contain our existences.

For now, at least.

I give up trying to wrap my mind around the entire expanse. The void that all of creation is built upon is inherently incomprehensible, and even as it changes, altered by the weapon, it stays the same. It’s a contradiction beyond even me, and though I may overcome it some day, that day is not today—or what passes for today in this timeless place, at least.

Instead, I narrow my attention down to the threads that I can comprehend. The world, collapsing away… and the path that the Unbreakable Mortal Spirit carves from its corpse. Though we may have left a dead universe behind us, it was not always dead.

The weapon is incomplete. It is only half of the god-slaying tool it once was, and the other half is stitched together with the dying breath of the angels that the fae created. Even if it was fully intact, this weapon hasn’t been used in a thousand years. If my understanding is right, it might not have ever been used.

There is little that I understand about the weapon. The fact that it pulled us beyond the breadth of the world we were in is miracle enough, and to my surprise, I don’t need to encompass it with our power to keep it existing. Its conceptual weight is enough.

Still, the void is a cruel, unforgiving, incomprehensible place. Adrian is unconscious, and I can detect Sierra’s worry that he will never wake again if we don’t leave immediately.

We need to return to reality. Though we can survive here for a time, living a life in this nothingness is no life at all.

And I still have a god to kill.

Direction, question, I send to Sierra.

Unknown, she replies. Sound is too difficult for us to maintain, and there is no medium that we can pass it through, so we stick to the divine communication.

Okay. Neither of us are capable of using the item properly—at least, not in a way that allows us to direct us through this impossible space. We conceptually do not possess the correct alignments to handle it—it is the concept of waves that powers it, and Adrian’s the only one of us who has it.

Even though the man in question is unconscious, he’s still holding the weapon, and it’s still working. At least, I think it is. It thrums with power, forcing pieces of the void to remain real, to stay consistent. It pulls the thread of the dying world and unrolls it, revealing a path through its history.

If this weapon does what I think it does, then at full strength, it would send us down that path; but as it is, all it can do is create it, not guide us. With how conceptually strange this absence of a world is, even having the weapon isn’t enough to keep track of the path.

I could try killing Adrian and taking it from him, but that isn’t a sure bet, and it would be kind of sad to come this far with a companion—one that Sierra likes, no less—just to fail at stealing his power.

I leave it as a last choice. Instead, I draw on the cloud of magic that we’ve managed to hold close to ourselves.

It’s rougher, more primitive than anything we could have managed while operating under the structure of the system, but it is power and authority nonetheless.

Nullspace: Paradox.

Normally, activating my nullspace is like ripping a hole in the world, but there’s no world to tear apart now. Instead, it’s like I am becoming one with the contradictory nothingness.

Impossibility is mundane here, after all, and all I’m doing is introducing my particular flavor of it to the void.

The shift is perceptible. As my nullspace expands, it’s like my magic is settling on the same frequency as the void. My senses attune, and rather than drifting through the abyss of the void, it feels as if we are swimming through it. There becomes a true sense of direction, which doesn’t seem like a lot—but in this sea of nothing, anything is a boon.

Our Tautology flares, the three of us stubbornly clinging to existence with the stolen magic of the strongest beings to walk the planet and the remnants of the gods that once oversaw it, and we continue on.

Sierra activates her nullspace seconds after I use mine, and the truth of our existence reaffirms itself.

My nullspace is suited towards impossibility, but Sierra created hers within the primordial void. I bring contradiction; she brings balance.

And so, the fuzzy, blurry edges of our lives sharpen. Our magic falls back within the boundaries of our skills, and our authority reshapes itself into… not quite what we were before. That’s impossible, with the system gone.

Amidst our twinned nullspaces, Adrian wakes. I’m not sure if it’s my Paradox giving us a lucky causality break to heal him or Sierra’s Balance returning his consciousness to him along with the true shape of his life, but he wakes, and that’s what’s important.

Direct us, we tell him at the same time.

Adrian flinches. The raw force of our words is too much, especially in this space where nothing is certain, and I can actually see him begin to disintegrate.

We both pull on our nullspaces, and in a flash, Adrian is whole again, but it’s a sobering reminder of how mortal our partner is.

He doesn’t have the Titan communication, and sound doesn’t propagate within the void, but Adrian is in the 300s. Even if level is a moot concept here, he still has that power associated with him, and through it all, he has kept the concept of waves.

That concept is, right now, the defining characteristic of his existence, and he understands what must be done.

Even if he can’t speak through sheer force like we can, Adrian attempts a precursor to it. He can’t get across actual words, but with all the will he has, he shares with us his concept, and he pours it into the Unbreakable Mortal Spirit.

The item still doesn’t take us anywhere, but with Adrian active, it begins to guide.

Within the void, we are still capable of travel, and so we do, following the threads extending from the world we have left behind.

That thread is crumbling. It has also been recently traveled, if the presence I sense is any indication.

Sapphire.

She’s influencing the past and creating a new present. In the process, she’s consigning a world that we’ve escaped to nonexistence.

I wonder, briefly, if that means that the three of us, whose existences began not so long ago, will cease to exist as well, but we have broken free of the reality that binds us, and we follow it back, back, and back. The weapon in Adrian’s hands pulses with infinite power, and with every passing second, the shape of the timeline becomes clearer.

At some point, the Moon part of the weapon must recognize its other half, because I lose control over the direction of our descent, and from the surprise emanating through our bond, so does Sierra.

We tumble faster and faster, guided only by the weapon Adrian wields. I try to judge where, when we are, but it’s a tough job, especially when the knowledge I have of the world comes from memories made from people born long after the period the weapon is sending us to.

What I do know is that with the hasty, jury-rigged solution we used to enable its usage, the weapon isn’t going to allow itself to be controlled. Adrian struggles to even hold onto it, even with our nullspaces and Tautology giving him the best chance he has, and neither I nor Sierra can direct what it’s doing.

I think it might be following its sibling.

If I could grimace, I would. I would have liked more preparation. If the Unbreakable Mortal Spirit is a weapon that can travel through time, a decade before Sapphire’s choice would be perfect. Unfortunately, it does seem like the two halves do not want to be separated across years, and so we’re going to land in the same time.

Fine then. We’re just going to have to adapt. Quickly.

Time passes. In the void, that could mean a couple of nanoseconds or a thousand years. To our perception, it’s both. Neither. Perception is a lie, anyway, so I pay it no regard.

What I do pay attention to is the sensation of the world rapidly approaching. I sense reason at the border of my existence. Consistent, logical reality.

The world-thread is solid here. It’s taking everything I have to keep my nullspace and our existences together at the same time, and I prepare for the impossible task of breaking into a reality that doesn’t want to be broken—and then the Unbreakable Mortal Spirit spirals us straight through.

For an instant, a gaping wound opens in the world, and we find ourselves reborn within it.

The border between us and the solid, real plane thins, then shatters like glass.

#

Once again, we fall.

The weapon, inasmuch as it could be called a weapon when it never directly did any damage, is inactive now. I can feel the lack of power emanating from it. Opening a hole into this world must have been the limit of the weapon. A thousand years of storage, and that’s all that was left.

I don’t have time to be disappointed, because we did not return to this world at its surface.

Judging from the fact that I can make out the curve of the planet, we are several hundred thousand feet above its surface and rapidly falling.

This isn’t a problem. I reach for Crimson Storm, which will have us down to the surface with our momentum cancelled out in under a second—and I find, instead, shapeless, formless magic.

Fuck.

Power, question, I communicate, thankful that I’m still capable of doing that much.

“I don’t have any of my skills!” Adrian shouts, barely loud enough to be heard around the wind. “Shit!”

We’re in the past, Sierra replies. Primordial. No system.

She’s right, I realize. The weapon just threw us who knows how many years into the past. Assuming we’ve landed in the same time as Sapphire, we’re at least at a time before the fall. That means over a thousand years in the past—and, more importantly, a time before the gods only existed as skeletons to hold up the magic in our world.

We have so much power attached to us. So much authority. That hasn’t changed, thankfully. We haven’t regressed at all, but we no longer have the framework to use our skills from.

This is within acceptable bounds, I think—I hope. We’ve created skills from nothing, before. Now, the two (or maybe three) of us simply need to do it again, this time without a system guiding us.

Sierra must be thinking along the same lines as me, because she starts reshaping our authority immediately. I join her.

It’s harder than it was with the system, which doesn’t surprise me. There’s no pre-existing framework for us to mold ourselves into. That means we have more freedom, but actually operating with our magic is going to be much, much more complex.

Overall, I say this is a net benefit. If we weren’t actively falling to our deaths, that is.

Something as refined as, say, Crimson Storm or even Sierra’s faster-than-light Vector Magic combination is not going to be possible within the time we have remaining.

But Sierra is a godsdamned genius when it comes to authority, and as we fall, she helps me shape a basic movement skill. It doesn’t work like the skills did, not exactly. Rather than attune our mana to a certain type and shape it, trusting the system and our authority to do the rest, she shapes our authority into a frame. Our magic serves to fill it up, fueling it.

Activating it will only take a spark.

I don’t know how she’s intuited the mechanics of the magic so fast, but I sense her activate the new magic—

[INTEREST]

In this instant, I experience a fraction of what Adrian must have felt when we spoke directly at him, because unlike the Titan speech, which I have learned to tolerate, this struck me like a physical blow, striking me straight in the soul.

“Oh.” Sierra seems like she’s almost forgotten we’re falling. “Oh, wow.”

“What the fuck?” Adrian shouts.

Who are you? I ask.

In lieu of an answer, the sky around us and the planet beneath us disappears.

#

We stand in a vast expanse populated by massive, undulating crystalline structures. Powerful magic ripples through the space, tinged with a flavor I have yet to taste.

This is a nullspace—or, at least, that’s the closest concept I can assign to it.

Except nullspaces have an end. The Titans are limited in power, and that includes Sierra and I. Even if we enter our nullspace instead of Manifesting them, they’re not infinite. This, though… it seems like it never ends.

“Sierra,” Adrian says. “We made it to before the fall, didn’t we? Is this…”

“It might be,” Sierra replies grimly. “Be on your guard, Evelyn.”

“I always am,” I say. “What am I on guard for?”

[QUERY]

Whatareyouwhyareyouherehowareyouhereyouareinthewrongageyouaredifferenthowwhywhatwhoyouarenotsupposedtobehere—the message is, once again, an order of magnitude more overwhelming than the Titan-speech.

Sierra clicks her tongue as the last piece of the puzzle slides into place.

There is one being that I know is stronger than the Titans. I know, because they came from it.

“On guard for that,” Sierra says. “A god.”