Chapter 2216 (Patreon)

ToC: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23899958

Okay, three chapters to finish off last week! I seriously feel like I've written this fight three times, hahaha.

Programing note: due to Thanksgiving, THIS week will five chapters. The aim is to do three more tomorrow and Wednesday, then the rest Friday/Saturday.

The Prophet sat alone in the cave, the luminous waters of the scrying pool releasing their soft blue light across his face and the walls behind him. The surface remained entirely smooth, yet the movement within the depths kept shifting the radiance. His mouth-eyes pressed their limits together in disappointment, seeing how far they had fallen in the last week.

Ever since the Prophet had made the decision to deviate purposefully from the pattern, considering their inclusion in some sort of reproduction of reality, he felt sickened. He bore this responsibility. And even if it was what he believed to be correct, it didn’t make it easier to accept, spiritually. Purposefully, he walked outside of the light. It seemed better to do so than volunteer more information than necessary to Nether King Hungry Eye. But now, as events continued to spiral completely beyond what had been ordained…

This is the fickle world they would choose, rather than embrace the light? Chaos organized around narcissism?

The pool flickered and began to dissipate; footsteps in the distance caused the Prophet to lose his concentration. Annoyed, he pushed himself back and said prayers of contrition until the acolyte arrived.

The figure bowed. The Prophet could tell it was a being long serving in their base, due to the horrid smell wafting off of his unwashed robe. “The Sovereign of the Breathless Vigils has ambushed Nether King Hungry Eye. Agents are in the area, but the clash is powerful enough that we cannot ascertain how events are developing.”

What is your game, Nether King Hungry Eye? The massive eye on the Prophet’s face bulged, torn between fury and confusion. Why do you insist on sewing chaos at every turn? Perhaps you are not the dangerous one, but it is the figure you will report to when you leave this reproduction. Perhaps they seek to understand how we respond to twists in the plan… I cannot waver. Not now.

“I have heard your report. You may go,” Very quickly, the Prophet snapped up out of his reverie. He spoke sharply when the acolyte didn’t immediately leave.

Still, the acolyte remained bowed and released his nausea-inducing smell. Tension was obvious in its hunched body when it spoke. “Prophet… I do not wish to intrude, but you understand how serious this situation is. Without our intervention, the secondary plan will not come to fruition. The moment of opportunity will pass. And with Elhume’s failure, the primary plan, although it is known the Arbiter would not concede to our demands, does not have any hope of working. Their mistakes will drag us down with them, out of the light. I do not wish for my immortal soul to be forsaken just-”

The Prophet pressed his eye closed and saw the acolyte's death. When he opened the eye, so it was, with the body collapsed and blood frothing from his open mouth. His organs had twisted themselves to pieces with such force most of the mucous membrane all simultaneously tore.

The Cult of the Savior preached absolute obedience. It was good to see that remained true, despite this individual's unacceptable boldness.

Although the Prophet understood why doubts would have wormed their way in, despite the rigorous recruitment process. After all, he now led the flock away from the plan, in the absence of a true source of light. And he was mortal, fallible. Weak, even. Theoretically, he might have been corrupted.

A shadow detached itself from the wall. “The acolyte deserved a harsher death than that, Prophet. For daring to speak out of turn.” The shadow resolved itself into a leather-skinned Elephantine, its long tusks sparkling brass. For a second its long tongue unrolled itself, stretching even longer than its thick trunk. Then it flashed back into its mouth, after plucking up the slightest taste of blood. “However, this attitude is not uncommon amongst the rabble. The flock is not happy. This is outside the plan and they understand nothing but fear and light.”

“This is not the time spoken of, in the plan. We are in a recreation, Scythe. I have told you this,” The Prophet responded firmly.

Scythe shrugged. “Their casual impudence is only going to get worse, too. Because the Nether didn’t have as many quick victories as predicted, some of the deeper territories within the Nether Lands are going to send forces to become involved in the wars. Those that long resented the Arbiter’s influence. Unlike the prophecy, the Aetherlands will not have time to develop slowly. They need power now. And if they find it, the Universe Soul-”

“You would endanger our eternal paradise in reality to show lipservice to the light in this reproduction?” The Prophet demanded. “Knowledge gleaned here is relevant to the outside world. We must do our part to protect our secrets. We all are aware this is a war. To lose is to be forsaken.”

Again, the Scythe’s only response was to shrug as the details of its body began to fade. Soon, it was a long shadow on a stretch of wall spattered with blood. “The monster in the East is growing too fast. And should it gain absolute control within this reproduction… well, I suspect it won’t have any difficulty climbing back into the universe. The unknown threat we have encountered here is dangerous, I suppose… but the light saw this being. The light arranged for it to be eliminated. This is known.”

“It is known,” The Prophet responded sourly. Its eye continued to bulge as it searched the water for an answer.

*****

On the battlefield between the two powerful fighters, an impossible event unfolded. With so much taken along with its name, the image’s desire became the most determinative factor in its capabilities.

And it desired nothing so much as to truly exist.

The blood globule on the wolfman’s arm popped like a thousand balloons being skewered by a whirlwind of needles, all sharp points and abrupt violence. One minute it pulsed with the story of the nameless being seeking to spread its wings and be born, the next it was all particulate and spatter. As the shape vanished, a void formed in its place.

The void was a possibility born of a desire no longer limited by a name.

He stood, staring at the wolfman, feeling the surging anticipation from his image. But a split second later, it was the hunger that expanded the most quickly, drawing on the deepest portions of his emotional sea to consume everything in the area around its fragile birthplace. Enough dense Nether to suffocate a powerful warrior from His homeworld vanished, gulped up. The wolfman stumbled backward, a huge chunk of muscle torn out of his arm in the process. The void howled, unstable and ravenous, the noise piercing through even the strange underwater texture of the wolfman’s domain. The name suppression clearly groaned, but managed to stay in place.

Vague hands and claws and feathers flickered in the area around the void, the first attempts of the image to actually experience ‘birth’. However, He felt all of that surging momentum begin to falter and grimaced; the egg might have hatched, but his image didn’t know how to transition across the void to reality. And if it missed this chance-

Focus, we have time to find the correct shape. This won’t even take half a moment. He closed his eyes, even though the wolfman’s defenses had been broken and he had a direct line for an attack. The moment of birth… can mean a lot of things, depending on the sort of being this wants to be. But we don’t need to answer every question right now, not considering the ambiguity of the image- we need is a concrete thread to form the central spine of the birth. An aspect that has changed.

And the easiest option… is creating a heartbeat.

The void that had been an egg of blood hummed, just on the edge of collapsing, all the strange benefits it found by riding its role to an egg vanishing. Because He could provide a nudge. Because what this image needed now was a sign. A way to hold onto the meaning of this moment.

More and more Nether drained out of the area, depleting rapidly despite the dense waves of energy both He and the wolfman released.

The Wolfman took another half step backward as the suction increased, but began to recover his balance. His muscular body moved in slow motion, adjusting to the sudden threat. A seed of darkness pulsed at core of the void, a legitimate manifestation in the world for the image. What came next was the heartbeat, ominous and powerful.

He had expected noise and fury, speaking to the size of the being that could have such an endlessly deep stomach. A dragon’s heart, the rumbling, continent-shaking contraction of a being beyond mundane understanding.

What came instead was an extended pause in the image’s howling, a soft and velvet silence. It was almost light, like the hand of a friend on your shoulder.

Within the Wolfman’s domain, the stark silence was likely more exaggerated than it would have been otherwise. And probably the image’s devouring of so much of this domain’s energy in its initial appearance had affected it. But in those moments where he expected the thump of a pumping heart, there was instead total stillness. A rigid contraction of want and need, squeezing against existence.

That hand on the shoulder turned icy and suffocating.

The heart ‘beat’ released the silence of death and emptiness, all that the image had been trying to escape but couldn’t. It was the designation of a heart that didn’t exist, or at least not in the shape commonly associated with hearts.

It was the silence of a pine forest shivering on a night without wind, hoping not to attract the attention of a stalking predator.

The howling resumed, more and more pieces of the opponent’s ability being devoured. The seed of darkness stabilized and grew less hazy and liquid light as the image stabilized. Another pulse of oppressive silence erased all other activity, allowing the image to take more bites of the world. Its presence bubbled and stretched as it reached out for a concrete shape. It hissed and spat, eyeing the body of the wolfman with envy.

His chest ached from housing the shifting image, from fueling its transformation, for housing it while it so rapidly began to approach a version of itself prowling through existence, capable of acting independently. He wanted to continue his assault but simply swayed.

The wolfman’s eyes narrowed. Around the Nether being, a dense storm of Nether arrayed itself into a particular pattern, suppressing the efforts of the image. However, the breadth of the image continued to expand. From its original foundation, it now grasped and took from the world to build itself a new life.

The heartbeat of silence pressed close, eager to escape into reality. Blurred shapes undulated around the edges of the growing darkness, the shadow cast upon space before the image stepped through the threshold. While his image continued to shoulder its way through the restrictive layers of Nether, He dodged sideways to avoid a few half-hearted blasts of concentrated Nether from the symbols. As the image moved through the dangerous transition, His ability to move returned.

This time the ‘beat’ arrived like clouds falling from the sky like withering flower petals.

The world stalled briefly as the image’s heartbeat grew stronger. Even He felt stranged paused and stifled by the being beyond existence being birthed in between the two combatants. Floating there, partway through a movement, they all seemed like the tableau of a snow globe, before being shaken.

Then motion and sound came slamming back, more huge bites taken out of the name suppression the wolfman wielded. The Nether being unleashed an echoing growl, one that resonated with the low thrum the symbols continued to blast out. Meanwhile, around the condensation of the void, two tiny, ugly little blobs popped into existence. They mimed surprise with the swirling formation beneath them, then pretended to play trumpets, heralding the approach of something truly vicious into the world.

He tightened his grip on his spear and shot forward in a gap between two Nether blasts. Finally, he had recovered enough to aim to inflict some more damage. Edging around the swelling presence of his image, He aimed to strike while the wolfman busied himself with layering Nether.

The silence came again, the enormous weight of the swelling image freezing them all. For fully two seconds, nothing moved. It was a silence that He even remembered when he escaped the Dungeon and returned to his planet. It was the silence of seeing a world that looked similar to what you had known, but with its peace ripped out and tossed off a cliff.

The power was obvious. But the image continued to devour more energy, engorging itself. He felt his heart sinking, observing the way the image inflated with this small foothold. If you keep just devouring and inflating yourself like this-

Apparently, the wolfman saw the same weakness as He did, because just as He launched himself forward with his spear raised, the Nether Ritual tightened into a noose around the amorphous shapes of the image and the two ugly little heralds. All at once, the Nether not yet devoured tightened into a garote.

The image began to howl, the desperate sound of an animal with its leg stuck in a trap. The foothold wavered and collapsed. Which left the image partially stuck between here and there, so busy building up its heartbeat that it became nothing but a heartbeat. It had transformed, perhaps, but remained tragically short of what it desired. Pain and sorrow mixed within the image as it struggled and thrashed, but the moment had already passed.

He narrowed his eyes, careening toward the distracted Wolfman and ran him through. His other two images surged forward, crashing into his foe’s body-

-and suddenly Randidly Ghosthound was back, his emerald eyes glittering, only a few inches away from the scowling Enmya. With an expression of Willpower, he suppressed the pain in his Soulspace and gathered back the disappointed and agonized pieces of the Stillborn Phoenix back to himself.

Randidly barred his teeth. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”