Immortal in the Force. Chapter 20. What Entropy Cannot Unmake. (Patreon)

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.

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“The Lord of Light and the Great Other are not gods in any sense men understand. They are forces of nature wearing the faces of gods. One is fire and life and heat. The other is ice and death and the long, cold dark that waits at the end of all things.”

Melisandre of Asshai

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There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

There is no fear; there is power.

I am the Heart of the Force.

I am the revealing fire of Light.

I am the mystery of Darkness

In balance with Chaos and Harmony,

Immortal in the Force.

Je’daii Order Code

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Essos, Qohor

Year 299 AC (After Aegon Conquest)

Raevan

The axe fell with the weight of collapsing stars.

He had stopped blaster fire and deflected explosions that could level city blocks. He had caught a volley of a thousand crossbow bolts and sent them back to their owners in a single breath. He had held the structural integrity of a burning tower together long enough for three hundred people to evacuate.

None of that had prepared him for this.

The moment his kinetic barrier met the descending axe, the Force around him screamed. Not in the sense he was accustomed to; the sharp, intuitive warning that preceded violence from living minds, but a raw, primal recoil, as though the Force itself flinched from the contact.

The weapon didn’t resist. It didn’t push back against his power the way a battering ram or a falling boulder would. It simple… continued descending, absorbing the telekinetic energy he poured into its path like a stone drinking water. He doubled the output. Then tripled it.

His boots ground into the cracking cobblestones as the pressure difference between him and the weapon carved a visible crater in the plaza stones, tiles shattering outward in a ring around his feet.

The axe slowed. Then stopped, the blade hovering less than two meters above his skull, trembling in the air with the effort of tens of thousands of invisible hands pressing against it.

For three heartbeats, the only sound in Qohor was the quiet, crystalline crack of spreading black ice and his own measured breathing.

Then the avatar looked down at him with those twin voids of pale blue fire, and Raevan felt something that he hadn’t felt since his previous life’s darkest hour.

He felt small.

He kept the barrier locked and used the fraction of his attention he could spare to probe the entity before him. Every living thing in the Force cast a shadow: a presence, an imprint, the subtle warmth of consciousness and biological life. Even the stones and trees carried an echo of the Force’s passage through them.

The Great Other was not there.

He probed harder. He had touched the minds of men and beasts and even simple insects at the edge of perception. He had felt the ancient echo of the ysalamiri’s Force-void in academic texts from his previous life. He had once, briefly, brushed the consciousness of a creature so alien that its emotional signature was incomprehensible to him.

This was different from all of those things.

The avatar standing before him was not simply absent from the Force. It was a negation of it, a space where the Force actively refused to exist, where the fundamental energy binding all living things together simply ceased, the way warmth ceased at absolute zero.

Reaching into it was like pressing his hand against an open wound in reality.

He pulled back immediately. He would not make that mistake again.

The barrier held. The axe did not descend further. Stalemate.

Raevan changed his approach.

He released the upward-pressing barrier and redirected the energy sideways in a single explosive burst, deflecting the axe’s trajectory enough to buy himself two seconds of lateral movement. He rolled to the right, came to his feet in a fluid motion, and threw his right hand outward with the full, focused fury of Dark Side Force Lightning.

The violet-white arc tore across the plaza with a crack of superheated air, striking the avatar square in the chest. The lightning was not the restrained, precise thing he used on regular opponents. He poured everything available into it, enough to melt stone walls and stop a man’s heart through six inches of steel plate.

The bolt struck and spread.

The avatar didn’t flinch. Didn’t scream. Didn’t burn. The lightning crackled across its surface like water running across oiled leather, arcing between the writhing strands of living darkness that made up its body, and dissipated. The pale blue voids in its skull rotated down toward him, and Raevan had the distinct, nauseating impression that it was curious.

It was studying him.

He had never in either of his lives been studied by a predator before. He had always been the apex. The realization settled into his chest with the cold weight of genuine danger.

He shifted strategies without hesitation. Lightning was energy in motion; this thing devoured energy. Something more fundamental, then.

He reached out with Force Drain, the darkest Sith technique in his repertoire, the ability to siphon the raw life energy from living things and convert it to raw Force power. Against any living organism, it was devastating. He opened the channel toward the avatar.

And immediately closed it.

The sensation lasted less than a tenth of a second, but it was enough. The Drain found nothing to pull from, no life, no warmth, no biological energy. Instead, the open channel reversed. For that fraction of a second, something cold and immense and ancient began pulling back through the connection, not life force but the opposite of it, a current of absolute entropy that wanted to flow into him as easily as cold water flows into a warm room.

He shut the ability off so fast that his hands shook. That was the single most dangerous thing he had done in either lifetime.

The entity, apparently satisfied with its initial assessment, raised the axe for the second blow.

This time it didn’t bring it straight down. It swept it horizontally, a scythe-cut at waist height that covered the full width of the plaza. The arc was too wide to simply step away from.

Raevan threw himself upward, Force-enhanced leap carrying him three meters off the ground, the axe blade passing beneath his feet with a sound like a glacier cracking. The air pressure of its passage slammed him back-first into a wall on the plaza’s edge, cracking the stone behind him.

He pushed off the wall before the dust settled, landed badly, compensated, and raised both hands to catch the follow-up he knew was coming.

The avatar reversed the axe on its backswing.

The pommel, the butt of the weapon, came back the opposite direction, and Raevan’s kinetic barrier caught it a half-second late.

The impact threw him sideways. He rolled, came upright, and it was only then that he felt it.

His left hand was cold.

Not the cold of the winter air. Not the biting chill that had descended on Qohor when the entity manifested. This was a deeper cold, a stillness spreading from the heel of his left palm upward, quiet and absolute and alien. He looked down.

The back of his left glove had been grazed. The leather had not been cut. But the skin beneath it had been touched by the pommel, and the effect was propagating upward from that point of contact as methodically as frost creeping across a windowpane.

He watched his left hand’s fingers stop moving.

Not from injury. Not from pain. There was no pain. They simply stopped being part of him. The Force-connection to that tissue was not severed, it was erased. He reached for that part of his body through the Force and found the same void he had sensed in the avatar itself: a small, growing island of unmade flesh where the Force refused to exist.

He had perhaps thirty seconds before it reached the wrist. Another minute before the elbow.

He acted without allowing himself to think about it. Hesitation was the luxury of people who had options.

He drew the Valyrian steel blade from the scabbard at his hip with his right hand, turned the edge inward toward his own forearm, and cut.

He did not use the Force to do it. Whatever the Great Other had left in his hand, he didn’t want to create a connection between that and the blade he still needed. He simply cut, with the mechanical precision of a man who had spent three lifetimes mastering violence, just above the wrist where the visible frost-line of grey had not yet reached.

The blade was sharp enough that it was almost painless. Valyrian steel parted flesh and bone as though they were warmed butter. He stepped back from the falling hand and clenched the cloth of his sleeve against the arterial spray.

The severed hand hit the cobblestones. The frost-line continued spreading across it, and by the time it lay still, the skin had turned the color of old bone.

He allowed himself three seconds. Exactly three.

He had used Revitalize dozens of times now, on soldiers, on his apprentices, once on a dying child in Ny Sar whose survival had been useful to him. He had used it on himself to purge fatigue and clear battle-fog. The technique was second nature.

He directed the healing current toward the stump of his left wrist.

The Force didn’t reject the attempt. It simply found nothing to work with. The way water cannot fill a vessel that has no floor, the healing energy passed through the wound site and dissipated into the air. He tried again, more precisely, narrowing the channel to the cellular level he had learned to target. The Force slid around the stump as though the injury did not exist in the same physical reality as the rest of him.

He lowered his arm.

He had his answer. He would not spend more time on it in the middle of a fight.

The avatar had paused again, tilting its skeletal head at the small figure that had just casually cut off its own hand and continued standing. The pale blue voids watched him with something that felt almost like consideration.

Raevan thought.

He had attacked it with Dark Side energy. He had attempted to drain it. Both had failed or backfired. The entity was not alive, not dead, it was the negation of the axis between them. The Force, in all its forms, was fundamentally a force of life, of energy, of the organic rhythm of existence. He had been trying to fight the void with things that were defined by their opposition to the void.

He had been trying to fight darkness with a bright candle. That was the wrong approach entirely.

The entity was absence. It could not be harmed by any application of the Force directed outward at it as a weapon. But it could, perhaps, be displaced by a sufficiently concentrated presence of the Force directed outward in every direction simultaneously.

Not a weapon. A sun.

He had never attempted what he was now considering. He had balanced Light and Dark before, that was the foundation of the Je’daii path. But he had always alternated between them, wielded one and then the other in sequence, a conductor switching between instruments.

What he was contemplating now was not balance. It was unity, holding both the serenity of the Living Force and the burning hunger of the Dark Side simultaneously in perfect, unresolved tension. Not canceling each other out. Not blending into something gray. Two opposing notes played at full volume until the resonance between them became something that neither could produce alone.

He had no idea if it would kill him. He had no idea if it was even physically possible for a single consciousness to contain both at full power without tearing itself apart.

He decided that was a problem for the version of himself who survived the next thirty seconds.

Raevan planted his boots against the fractured stones, closed his eyes for exactly two seconds, and pulled.

He pulled everything. He reached into the living current of the Force, the quiet, vast warmth of the planet beneath him, the pulse of thirty thousand living men on the streets beyond the plaza, the slow exhale of the Great Forest whose roots stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. He felt all of it, every thread, every bright point of life within his range, and he held it.

Then he reached the other direction, down into the old, cold furnace of the Dark Side, into grief and fury and the compressed weight of two lifetimes of war and loss and ruthless survival. Into the memory of his mother funeral and the promise he had made over her body. Into the decades of carrying an awareness that he was alone in this world in a way that no one around him would ever fully understand.

He held both.

The Force detonated.

There was no other word for it. The air around him superheated in a perfect sphere, stone and metal and black ice vaporizing in an expanding ring of pure kinetic and thermodynamic energy. The pressure wave flattened everything within fifty meters, and the light it produced was not fire, it was white, absolute, the color of a star’s core, so bright it cast no shadows because there was nowhere for the dark to hide.

The avatar staggered.

He had not thought that was possible, but he felt it in the Force: the first real resistance he had met, a distortion in the pattern of that vast, ancient negation, the way a shadow distorts when a bright enough light is brought close to its source.

He channeled more. He pushed the resonance outward not as a weapon but as a presence, a declaration of existence so overwhelmingly concentrated that the void of the entity could not maintain its coherent form within it.

The avatar’s shape began to fail.

The living darkness that made up its body lost integrity at the edges, the writhing mass coming apart where the resonance pressure was strongest. One of the great sweeping horns cracked and collapsed. The pale blue voids in the skull blazed momentarily brighter, then began to dim.

Then the voice entered his mind.

“Impressive.”

It was not what he had expected. There was no fury in it, no desperation. It was calm in the way a deep ocean is calm, surface stillness over something that had no bottom.

The avatar’s dissolution continued. The remaining form crumpled, sank, disintegrated into black vapor that the Force-resonance was already scattering into nothing.

“You are stronger than I was told you would be, little Je’daii. Though I expected nothing less from the one who returned.”

Raevan let the resonance sustain itself at a lower burn, scanning the plaza for any secondary manifestation. He found nothing. The entity had no physical presence left in this world, only the voice still echoing against the inside of his skull.

“This was a test?” He said it aloud, because speaking helped him maintain the clarity he needed while the resonance still burned through him.

“Everything is a test,” the voice replied, and he heard genuine amusement in it, ancient, cold, patient beyond his capacity to comprehend. “You are a new variable in a very old equation. I wished to understand the scope of you before the true game begins. Now I do.”

The sky above Qohor began to lighten. The terrible artificial night was lifting.

“You sacrificed thousands of people to run an assessment.”

“I sacrificed nothing. I consumed what was offered to me freely by those who serve my purpose. Their faith is their own. Their deaths belong to them.” A pause, and in the pause Raevan felt the withdrawal happening, the way a tide pulls back from a shore, leaving the sand wet and exposed and emptied.

“We will meet again, little spark. When the Long Night comes, the walls you have built will be the only walls that matter. Prepare well.”

And then it was simply gone.

No dramatic exit. No final burst of power. The last traces of black vapor on the plaza stones stirred in the returning wind, and then settled into ordinary ash.

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Essos, Qohor,

 The Gatehouse Archway

Year 299 AC

Ser Jaremy Rykker

He had never, in twenty-two years of service across two wars and four military campaigns, prayed. He had made offerings, as a proper knight should, a coin for the Smith, a candle for the Warrior. Rote gestures that most men performed out of habit rather than faith.

He was praying now.

From the top of the gatehouse archway where he had taken shelter with forty other soldiers, he had watched Prince Raevan face something that his mind simply refused to categorize. The sky had been wrong. The cold had been wrong. The creature had been wrong in the way that a man’s reflection moving independently of its owner was wrong, a fundamental violation of everything he understood about the world.

And then.The light.

He had turned away instinctively, thrown his arm across his face, but the brightness had passed through his closed eyelids and left ghost-images on his retinas that still burned minutes later.

When he had looked again, the plaza had been half-destroyed, the creature had been gone, and the prince was standing in the center of the rubble.

Still standing.

He was the first to move. He hadn’t decided to move, his legs carried him down the shattered stairs and into the plaza before his conscious mind ratified the decision, and he was aware that the other soldiers followed, perhaps for the same reason: the prince was alive and standing, and in the wake of something like that, proximity to the man felt safer than distance.

He saw the arm when he was twenty meters away. The clean stump. The cloth the prince had wound around it with his right hand, tight and efficient, as though it were a minor inconvenience to be dealt with before moving on to more pressing matters.

He stopped. The men around him stopped.

Raevan turned to look at them, and Jaremy met those burning violet eyes, and the prince’s expression was the same it always was before a battle: the measured calm of a man who had already accounted for every variable and made his peace with all outcomes.

“The city is ours,”  Prince Raevan said, his voice carrying its usual resonant clarity across the ruined plaza. “Begin the consolidation protocols. I want a count of our casualties by nightfall and the temple district secured by dawn. No looting beyond what I have previously authorized.”

He paused.

“Is that understood?”

The men, Jaremy included, pressed their fists to their chests and answered.

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Essos, Qohor

Year 299 AC

Raevan

The city was his. He allowed himself to acknowledge that much.

He stood in the ruined center of the grand plaza as his army moved through the streets of Qohor around him, the sounds of organized conquest filtering through the smoke, orders barked, the distant clash of steel where pockets of resistance still held, the steady rhythmic thud of his soldiers’ boots on the cobblestones.

Morven and Vorkhyn arrived within the hour, their faces carefully schooled into neutrality that didn’t quite hide the question they were both asking. He told them what had happened in eleven words.

“The Great Other. We will discuss it fully at camp. Tonight.”

They accepted this. They had learned, both of them, that when he gave an answer in fewer than fifteen words it was not an invitation to expand the conversation.

He looked at the stump of his left wrist.

He had healed broken ribs and shattered arms in the field during the battle for Pentos. He had used Revitalize to restore a soldier whose heart had momentarily stopped after a blow to the chest.

He had expected, somewhere in the quiet certainty of his own capabilities, that if he were ever gravely wounded he would simply heal himself.

He spent twenty minutes, methodically and without hope, attempting every approach to the wound that his considerable knowledge of the healing arts suggested. The Force remained oblivious to it.

The stump was not infected, not bleeding; the cut was clean and the blood had already stopped on its own. The physical injury was ordinary, in the technical sense. But wherever the Other’s weapon had touched his flesh, that tissue had been removed from the pattern of the living world in some way that the Force had no language to address.

He would not get it back.

He catalogued the implications with the same methodical precision he applied to logistics or tactical problems. The left hand’s absence would cost him in a dozen small ways over the coming months, grip strength, weapon work, gesture-based Force applications that relied on both hands simultaneously. He would adapt. He had adapted to far worse in both of his lives.

What concerned him more was the knowledge itself.

The Great Other was real, operational, and apparently capable of manifesting avatars of that scale in the physical world given sufficient sacrifice.

It was not a Force user in any recognizable sense. It operated entirely outside the system he had spent two lifetimes mastering. The skills that had made him the most dangerous single combatant in the known world were, against it, either useless or actively dangerous to attempt.

He had won today. He acknowledged that precisely and without inflation. He had won because he had been creative enough, fast enough, and willing enough to pay a significant permanent cost in exchange for forcing it to withdraw.

It had withdrawn. Not fled. Not been destroyed.

There was a substantial difference.

He considered the entity’s parting words. A test. A deliberate, costly, theatrical assessment of what he was capable of. It had sacrificed thousands of lives and the entire population of the Black Goat’s priesthood not to stop him, not to kill him, but simply to take his measure.

Which meant it was still deciding whether he was a threat worth eliminating, or a variable worth watching.

The answer to that question, he suspected, depended entirely on how useful he proved to be when the true game, whatever that was, finally began. The entity had spoken of the long night, of walls, of preparation. It had not done so idly.

The Great Other operated on a timescale that made human ambition look like a child’s afternoon game, and it had taken the time to speak directly to him.

He filed that away. He had learned more from those parting words than the entity perhaps intended him to.

He looked up from his stump to the city around him. Qohor’s walls were still intact. His banner flew from the gatehouse. His soldiers were processing prisoners in the broad avenue below the temple steps.

The forge district, that irreplaceable, singular forge district where the secrets of Valyrian steel had survived the Doom of Valyria intact, was, according to the last report from his scouts, undamaged.

He had won the battle of Qohor.

He had also learned, at the cost of his left hand, that there was a player in this world’s game who did not operate by any of the rules he had come to understand. A player who was, at minimum, curious about him.

One who had called what happened today a test, and had implied, with the bored confidence of something that had watched empires rise and fall for millennia, that the real test had not yet begun.

He would need to rebuild his understanding of the Force’s limits from this point outward, starting with an honest accounting of everything he did not yet know. He would need to learn what the Great Other was, where it came from, and what it wanted, not from legend and speculation, but from primary sources.

The Citadel’s archives. Asshai’s restricted texts, once he reached them. Whatever the shadow-binders and glass candle scholars had recorded and quietly buried.

And above all, he would need to find a way to strike at something that existed outside the Force entirely.

He turned away from the plaza and walked toward the forge district.

There was work to be done.