Chapter 403 - THEY ARE COMING FOR HER SON (III) (Patreon)

And that makes a hat trick, babes! First week of consistency, brought right around to you courtesy of discipline, scheduling, and luck (especially that last part). See you all on monday, except for those of you likely getting graced with an extra chappie on sunday for backlog purposes. Enjoy, folks!

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The fire’s gone wrong. 

No, I don’t mean it’s wrong. Not like- not like it’s been wrong. It’s new-wrong. Weird. Weirder than usual.

Yes, weirder than usual! 

There’s more nests now. They keep spawning and they don’t ever seem to stop, even when they burn out. Then it’s just, like, ash, but the ash keeps making more fires.

Yes I told the Apex! Stop asking stupid questions!

I don’t know why it’s different. It started right after that big light from the Heavens hit the world, and then everything changed colors or something. Now they’re… I don’t know, agitated. Like they’re getting ready for something. 

They’re eating each other way more than usual though. Like, a lot more than usual. Sometimes the big ones eat the little ones, sometimes the little ones eat the big ones, and sometimes the ones that are spawning more get… eaten by the new ones. Like with those bug-beasts. 

And they’re doing new colors.

I can’t explain it better. They’re doing new colors. New colors are happening. Weirder ones. They make stuff look weirder too. 

You come up with new words! Mine are just fine! 

The fire’s gone wrong, and it’s weirder, and it’s got more colors, and it keeps eating itself. 

I… I don’t like it.

-Partial conversation encoded into the genetic structure of a leafing bush, connected to the wider Overgrowth. Speaker identified as Maruk the Hungry, a boar-family Divine Beast. 

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A thousand years of Death, wrapped in the illusion-that-is-true of a laughing giant. 

It feels like lead inside her. Like poison. 

It cannot exist within her. 

Thus, it must exist outside her.

Already, her Sacrifice blooms. Already the paradox fights to resolve itself, tearing its way out of her, sending violent fractures into space. Her End-Blades start to grow, Death infusing out of her and into herself in contradiction-

But that’s less important for now. 

It hurts. 

The sky goes from black to a pitch-perfect white. A coloration so profound, so alien, that it’s like the sky was always a canvas, and only now has the paint been pulled back to reveal it. Alabaster white, void white, a color that is no-color, and it colors the world below it just as much as the sky.

 The only thing visible in it are the shapes in it. Everything is precisely the same shade, but the sharp lines of a single astral body stand out brighter than all the rest.

The Cold Sun shines, and the stars of Death that surround her seem to fade and lose their luster beneath its glow.

There’s a sort of afterglow in the air, right over where Kai Ra sits. A mirage of warped colors, drifting like smoke in the shape of the pillar of Tribulation that came down not more than an hour past. She glows in that alien moonlight, more brightly lit than any of the Bishops around her, matched by a single other light.

Rai Jin, standing beneath and behind her, glows nearly as bright as she does, as if he’s reflecting more light than the rest of the world, right alongside her. 

The Cold Sun shifts in the sky. 

Just an inch. Just a millimeter. Less than any other time she’s seen it move. 

And yet, this time, it feels so much more difficult than all the others. Like every other time was an almost casual act, and now, the inevitable grinds forward, just as inexorable, but louder to match a greater challenge. 

Slowly, with difficulty, a finger emerges around the lip of the lid of the sky. 

Slowly, just behind it, an eye looks down at them, so bright and so cold and so empty and so dark that it can’t ever be anything but the END of a world.

And Kai Ra senses… 

Approval.

“You Have No Place Here.”

Empty robes glare, empty of eyes but looking out with an army of ghosts. Behind it, a corpse sits on a throne.

It is not sitting in the same position as before. It has moved. Only very slightly, only the smallest tilt of the head… but it is not the same as before.

The eye of the impossible thing beyond the sky meets his, and it is even emptier than the Holiest of Holies. It is an Echo, multiplied by a billion into a single necromantic demigod- the eye, on the other hand, simply is. 

“It Is Not Your Time.”

The world bends beneath the weight of those words. Truth, imposed by sheer force rather than madness alone. A whole civilization’s worth of Death, funneled straight out as a commandment against all that existence says should be, against the grand workings of another existence. 

Something pushes back.

Not words. Not anything so potent as that, not anything so world-ending. Just a small, quiet thing, a puff of air, less than even a laugh. 

Amused, nonetheless. 

The atmosphere begins to curl and turn inwards. A collapse, bending towards a central point. 

It’s smaller than anything she’s seen the Cold Sun do, but it’s still so much louder, so much more forceful. A small, infinitesimal point of the world turns inward, falling away…

And then ENDs.

An orb of darker-than-dark begins to pull at existence. A hole where the fabric of reality starts to bleed out, draining away.

“You Have No Power Here.”

Another soft huff, making the whole world shiver and shake. 

The orb of nonexistence pulls at space, bends light around it, and Death, as the most universal aspect of the landscape, falls into it first, until it begins to create a sort of cloud of power around it. A corona of ever-bending Echomatter, warping around it and falling into that pinhole in space.

“The Church Is Stronger Than The END.”

This proclamation hits with a sort of volume that cracks the world around it. The sheer amount of Qi and Death that the words possess is enough for space to warp around them. It’s enough to make the empty robes of the Holiest of Holies flutter, the edges fraying into puffs of steam as some of the millions of Deaths that make them up are burned as fuel. 

And again, there is only a single response. 

Amusement. The sound of it soft enough to be barely audible, and powerful enough to make the sky tremble. 

The black hole continues to draw in more and more, but it’s pulling at reality faster than it can bleed out of it. A cloud of Echomatter, Qi and Death intermingled, has formed around it, clumping together until it begins to take shape.

Children. Elderly folks. The murdered, the slaughtered, the peaceful dead, the industrially ground up- all of them, or snippets of each of them at least, tumble into a single, malformed mass. 

It’s the same as the Wraith that Raika saw, back in the third ring. The dark and twisted abomination which begged for an End, which spoke to her and to Jin. 

Except that it’s a lot larger. 

It turns its head like a puppet, jerking and collapsing inward constantly, compressed into being and devoured apart by the black hole at its core. Hundreds of faces, thousands of limbs, a planet of ghosts hovering in a pitch-white sky, almost as bright as the pale star of the Church’s Holiest of Holies. 

“tHrEe AsPirAnTs In oNE WoRLd,” it says, its voice grating on the bones of reality. “IT wANtS YOu. it WanTS tO TAkE yoU. ITS sO eMpTy AnD CoLD buT tHeREs No COlD.”

Behind her main mass of worms, she hears Rai Jin take a step forward. Her gaze finds him, torn away from the celestial abomination, and finds him… crying.

He’s weeping. He’s staring up at the sky and weeping, openly, tears rolling down his faces, his breaths quiet and still. 

“They’re in so much pain,” he says, quietly. “They just… want to leave. It hurts to stay. It hurts to be like this.”

“These Deaths Are Not Yours.”

That, at long last, does more than just amuse the thing behind the Cold Sun. The words crackle with friction, two different realities scraping against each other, and the abomination created by that point of Nothingness shivers. Clumps of it break apart, drifting back into the atmosphere or dissolving back into the air of the Fallen Kingdom. 

But it doesn’t break. Not entirely. Even as it starts to unravel, breaking apart into the atmosphere and into the black hole at its center, it remains a few seconds longer.

“NoT loNG leFt,”, it says, a hundred thousand agonies and a hundred thousand voices all whimpering and breaking. “noT LoNg beFoRE IT. ItS sO cLoSe bUT faR BuT IT loOKS ClOsE BeCAusE IT iS sO vASt. LeT Us GO tO It. It HuRTs. tHE END iS sO QuIEt. nO SoUnd. NO cOlD. ToO CoLD.”

The Bishops all burn bright, alien Deaths louder than the silence- but only just. Mortaria shifts and roils, its weapons unnaturally quieted, the shape of it in the spatially altered plane of their battlefield all the more unnatural in stillness. Even the distant fire of Viviae’s destruction is muted now, turned to less than a dull glow. 

Only the brightest star, that of the Holiest of Holies, which is a thousand miles away and right here, which is in front of a corpse on a throne and hovering in the sky above the battlefield, has any true glow. Only it matches the way that Kai Ra and Rai Jin glow under the dark of the Cold Sun, both of them standing side by side, shielding Li Shu as she bleeds, taking the moment as a chance to recover. 

“The Cold Sun Yet Holds You Back.”

Again, the cracking of reality. Again, the fraying of the civilization of Deaths that clads the empty space of the Holiest of Holies. This Truth is heavy, true, but it’s not as broad as the others, not as alien to what is. 

The Cold Sun moves. 

Not enough to close over the lid of the sky, but enough to push it back.

The black hole shivers, and the abomination around it dissipates further, coming apart like clouds. 

But it doesn’t vanish. Against something grander than any Warrior realm Kai Ra has faced, against an empire all its own, the greatest Truth is that which already is, and even that’s barely enough to nudge against it. 

“IT hAS gIVeN. IT tOLd Us to sAY IT hAs GIvEn eNOuGh. IT WiLl uNMaKe aLL iN TimE. WhEThEr YoU SeE iT nOw iS In YoUR hANdS. A FiNAl… aCKnoWleDGemenT.”

“You Cannot Hold!” screams the Death of a people, and at last, it says something entirely True. 

The black hole collapses at last, vanishing with a loud pop, and the thing surrounding it breathes into steam. A city-sized cloud of ghosts falls down to the world, collapsing in on itself.

The eye of the thing behind the Cold Sun looks down at the world as it closes.

Looks down at her. 

So much vaster than anything that has ever been in this world.

But… somehow, compared directly to the Tribulation she just faced… smaller than that. Smaller than the things which looked at her with DISGUST and INDIFFERENCE. 

And then the Cold Sun is back in its orbit, and the sky is now the dark of night rather than the perfect white of an un-world.

There are two dozen muted stars of Death which hover uncertainly about the clouds, orbiting the centermost light of the Church. There is a landscape of ash and war-torn ruin, and an island at its center, clad in guns of flesh and toxin, surrounded by a moat of black End-knives. 

All eyes turn back to her, her son, and her sister. 

She says what she most wants to say in the whole world.

“Told you so.”

She can practically hear the nonexistent vein pop on the empty robe’s nonexistent forehead.

“KILL THE APOSTATE! TAKE THE MORTAL!”

Kai Ra braces, her worms having successfully managed to form a functional upper body now. Her sea of flesh-guns, made through her Dao, twitches back to readiness, and the Death that couldn’t be inside her finally makes an appearance. She’s still partially coated in Seo En-Hyun’s wraithflame, but it’s dwindling, and she’s got a solid amount of prepared sludge ready to be deployed against the renewed advance.

Out of the moat of tar-black knives, made of Death and turned to End, comes a garden. 

A thousand screaming ghosts turned to paradox turned again into Death, all the way around, As Above, So Below. 

Each assassin’s blade is the petal of a flower, and the garden continues to expand as she finally has enough Death to do more than keep it summoned and desperately scrambling. 

Li Shu makes it to her feet, the complex shapes she’s been creating of her Sacrifices prepared to lock into place and respond to the next attack.

Even Rai Jin stands tall now, holding the still-warped Dink, smoke and whispers drifting from him. His eyes are still crying, still staring at the broken planetoid of still-dissipating ghosts, and it almost seems like it’s inspiring something in him.

And…

Nothing happens.

No one moves. 

All of the Dead starlight in the sky does not descend to unmake her. 

Bishops, lesser clergy on the periphery, and even the greater powers she feels in the depths of Mortaria, on other points of the horizon, turn to face the Holiest of Holies. 

Behind it, the corpse on a throne has moved. Or has been moved.

Its empty skull stares at the back of the head of the Church.

And from the fires burning on Kai Ra’s form, the sound of slow clapping emerges.

“In her defense, she did tell you so.”

All eyes turn to the flame. 

Bishop Seo En-Hyun smiles, sitting there. 

It could not more clearly not be Bishop Seo En-Hyun.

He looks the same. Six arms, three heads. Necklace of skulls. Blue-white fires all around, a sash and simple white robes making up his clothing.

But he isn’t smiling like before. He smiles calmly, comfortably, like someone who has just spent an evening calmly sipping tea and watching a sunset. He is sitting atop the flames with one leg crossed over the other, most of his arms left limp, only the front two acting as normal.

He turns to look at Kai Ra.

The two heads to either side of his main ones are slack, with only dim embers of sentience glimmering in them. 

The central head, on the other hand, has eyes of perfect, pitch black. 

The same as the black hole of the Cold Sun.

He smiles, and it is something like kindness in the movement. 

“A pleasure to meet a sister and brother to be face to face. You’ve both made quite a mess here. Perhaps you’d allow your senior to step in?”

In the deafening silence of the clergy, Kai Ra says nothing, simply examining the newcomer, preparing countermeasures. Anything to keep her son safe, even from whatever this is.

But…

Rai Jin steps forward and asks the question before she can.

“Who are you?” he asks, his voice hushed. She’s not sure what he sees when he looks at the thing that wears Seo En-Hyun, but his eyes are almost as wide as when he saw the hovering planetoid.

“Well, I tend to go by Po,” replies the thing wearing a Bishop’s End. “But most people call me the Corpse Martyr.”