Chapter 448 – When An End Came To Town (Patreon)

I figured we needed a little intermission and decided to flip a coin about it. It came up heads. This is what I decided to do with that!

__________________________________________________________________________

“In a land that has endured the passage of thousands upon thousands of years untouched by the fear of dissolution, we stand at a moment singular and unlike any other. In the face of the Great Enemy, which we have designed ourselves singularly to stand against, moments before the battle is to commence, we are cast asunder and divided. 

“What annals shall be written of this time, so fraught with frightful changes? What tales will be told of this final chapter of our home and culture, save that we will lose all that we have gained in the blink of an eye, cast down by sheer chance and bloody-mindedness? Long have the chronicles foretold of the trials and tribulations that would arise before the promised time, and deep in our bones, from cradle to grave, have we felt the divine pull to stand and endure such slights. Yet now, my brethren, we find ourselves singularly embroiled in a conflict not of our choosing, pulled from our moorings to be cast adrift by the arrogance of the few in the face of the wisdom of the many and the One. For the first time in memory, within less than six centuries, there have been two exiles from our order, who yet share our beliefs and embody that which we believe should be embodied, taken to an unnatural and cruel absolute. 

“We have lost great power to the Enemy now. We have prepared the mantle for the entrapment of the arch-foe, and yet have found ourselves disturbed and misdirected away from our goal by the treasonous few. 

“For the third and perhaps, hopefully, potentially, last time in our storied history, we face what fools and simpletons are confronted by in every waking breath of disorganization. We face what has brought about the downfall of that gilded lie to the west so many times, what has cast the mindless wilds into endless chaos evermore, what has kept the fools on high who believe themselves immortal from attaining anything like the lasting peace of a cool embrace.

“We face a schism.”

–Sermon given atop the Pulpit of Rest by the late Bishop Agresius

____________________________________________________________________________

The palace is a grand affair. Sitting atop a shining hill, it overlooks a vast section of the city below, hundreds of thousands of buildings sitting in its shadow. While its light pales before some of the other structures in the center of the city proper, it is still a star in the land’s shape. Gilded with gold, it’s embossed with twisted sculptures of marble, manifesting as inhuman figures, long-dead abominations and transformed weapons of war, while carved and covered in pale, dried vines. Their dehydrated flesh takes on a purplish hue that paints the palace in its color, acting as paint from afar, while their mummified leaves rustle in winds that cannot be felt by any without the right understanding of its nature. Surrounding it, going out for miles, is a garden, equally mummified, perfectly preserved in perfect states of decomposition that elevates the beauty of the flowers, the hedges, and the mazes they form.

It has stood in this way for approximately seven thousand years. In all that time, it has been added to only twice, and it has been modified from its original design only once. 

Tonight, those modifications are faced with a trial.

To those with eyes to see, that shining palace on the hill begins to truly glow. To those who use said eyes to witness such things, it grows so bright that it may blind, exuding a density of energy that could kill those weak enough and unprepared enough to be so unlucky as to be too close. 

Like a star in an inverted sky, it glows an off-white of spectral potency, imbued with untold years of the energy of existence and flavored entirely with the history of itself. The history of millenia, of stasis, of survival, and above all of Death.

That light spreads from it. Hidden patterns in long-dead roots and the placement of even the smallest pebbles of the garden suddenly illuminate, filled with essence shaped to purpose. The shapes formed are so intricate as to be indecipherable to all but the one who created them, existing in three dimensions and stretching through time into the fourth in places. Moments held in perpetuity flicker in and out of being like switches on a circuit, completing and unmaking the patterns in sequential patterns, making the nearly cellular-scale artistry transform from moment to moment. 

The ground trembles. The nearest buildings crumble to ash beneath the forces imposed on them. The air hums with the repeating voices of the long-dead, chanting and speaking and intoning and magnified by the arrays in which they exist forever and beyond. Reality itself begins to bend inwards at the pressure expressed, at the sudden pearl that has formed within the detritus of existence itself.

The shining hill shines in truth, and in an instant, the entirety of the palace separates itself from the city, vanishing into a self-referential bubble of existence.

A hand reaches out of the dark. 

For a millisecond, the palace was gone. A millisecond after, the crater left behind by its departure is filled back in as its existence is thrust back into the shape of what is, causing a minor earthquake in the city. More buildings crack and crumble as it returns, thrust violently back into the earth it so completely escaped. Hundreds of millions of patterns of arrays stutter, safeguards upon safeguards ensuring that nothing is broken or even harmed by the transition, but they strain nonetheless. 

The night sky looks down upon the city, shaped ever so much like a body fallen in Death, and remain as unblinking as ever in the face of the shining palace. 

Things from OUTSIDE watch as the lights of that splendid, long-preserved place rearrange themselves, forming a dizzying number of sequences and an almost infinite number of combinations therein, struggling to fulfill their purpose. Minute modifications transform the entire bubble that’s formed, trying to adapt and identify what’s caused the disruption, what is holding them still even now, keeping their purpose from being fulfilled. 

A hand reaches out of the dark.

Arrays so intricate they surpass the processing power of a living mind flash in confusion. Pressure has arrived, incoming from out of nowhere and nothing. A profound violence ensues, pushing inward on the palace, compressing the demi-divine magics that have been built around it over millenia. 

The patterns of responsive arcana flash and warp like oil on water, trying to identify the attacker, trying to locate them, trying to refute them and shift their protectorate out of danger. 

A knife reaches out of the dark.

The dome of perfect enchantment cracks down the middle.

Broken open like an egg, like bone snapper apart to get at the marrow, the glow of the palace’s arrays shine ever-more, struggling against an impossibility. Self-repair formulae running through the magic, moments of time flashing in and out of the present to repair the now-missing pieces, while batteries filled with eons of Death and power flush themselves dry to pump energy into the failing magic.

Slugs start to grow out of the spells.

Arcane sigils and runes squirm, their ends bleeding black blood that forms into densely packed worms. Where enough appear, puddles of black ichor steams on contact with the air, acidic and toxic enough to affect intangible energies, and on occasion, white larvaes surface, like clusters of bubbles that hold eat of the worms, forming hardened shells and writhing legs only to birth new eggs into new larvae. 

The array responds, of course. Infection is a weapon it has been designed to resist, and magics of time and elemental manipulation unmake as many of the infested sites as possible.

But where the beetles die, the worms remain. Where the worms are undone, the beetles return, laying eggs and dying in turn. 

Black sludge floods through the magic of that shining palace on the hill, staining it. It seeps into and out of every layer, like water through bedrock, slow and methodical and inevitable.

A Blade of END cuts from out of the dark. 

A slice of Death-magic becomes not. The Death surrounding it floods inwards, torn forcefully out of position by the metaphysical vacuum, and the two concepts, Death and END, pull at each other, forming whorling patterns.

Even as the arrays and their master reach out to pull back the displaced power, those shifting, fluid tides retreat, forming grand shapes in the world around the shining hill.

With its master’s presence, the array redoubles its resistances. It transforms, abandoning its efforts to evacuate reality. Where the worms form, their forms are erased, cast backwards out of time and into the perfect void of the Before-That-Is-Not. Where the hands grasp the dome, impossible and incomprehensible but touching it nonetheless, spikes of Intent and necromancy form, spell-formulae so intricate they look like a flowing liquid turning the impossible into weapons of the real. Dimensional recursions, inverted equations that nullify chunks of existence, and conceptual embodiments all manifest and try to pry at what holds the palace still, trying to dig into the existence binding them.

Pain.

Intent and Comprehension together. Dao and the will to wield it, shaped by perspective. 

Equations and world-breaking magics recoil, collapsing as things with no mouths or minds experience agony and try to scream. 

They cannot, so the Pain manifests differently. Their patterns scramble, losing control of themselves, pieces separating from the whole in an attempt at self-preservation. Pre-prepared safeguards are abandoned as non-sentient mathematics change their variables in ways they are not meant for. 

The dome of the array shudders, continent-breaking magic experiencing an impossibility and reacting to it quite badly. 

It begins to destabilize. 

The hands that hold it clench tighter, push the Pain in deeper, force more fundamental components to begin to fail and short-circuit.

The master of the array strikes back, reinforcing patterns, re-weaving magics that break apart under the onslaught. The creator of the enchantments is their superior in many ways, and spell-work that would take decades for a lesser practitioner to craft manifests instantaneously, keeping the barriers intact a moment longer. Complex arrays and formations that a lesser master might perish just from attempting come into being in their hundreds, then their thousands, some building off of others, acting almost like a biological system in how their mathematics feed off each other to grow and evolve.

The swirling patterns stolen from the array resolve themselves in the sky.

Simple things in comparison to the craft that they face. If the enchantment of the palace is a majestic work of artistry, then the symbols that appear in the heavens above are practical things, made for simplistic purpose and with minimal flair. 

The array and its creator are a power unto themselves. They have been building defenses atop defenses, already preparing for the oversized but simplistic assault about to be added to the others.

A pair of jaws snap shut.

A shine of iridescent fangs flash, unmaking Fate with a bite. 

While some survive, some of the new-formed defences vanish like they never existed at all.

Only some.

But enough.

The clouds of magic transform, forming letters in the language of existence as recorded by generations of immortals.

The sound of laughter, soft and satisfied, fills the dark. 

A droplet of that black, fluid, paradoxical darkness forms, rich in the life and END and Deathlessness of that which it came from, and the magics grab it, charge it, and fill it with the idea of weight, of lightning, of velocity and explosive transportation and intended destination and the Dao of the Gun.

There is no moment to adapt. It exists, then there is magic, then there is impact.

The dome shatters.

The magics collapse and explode in turn, unmaking massive chunks of land around itself in differing flavors of annihilation. What was a beatific sphere of spellcraft turns to jagged thorns and broken glass, pure knowledge and energy transformed into the idea of detritus and shrapnel and devastation.

The hands in the dark peel what remains open.

The Blade Made Of END cuts down, like a whipcord from out of iridescent jaws.

A perfect line, shaped like a knife’s edge, manifests. It marks a perfect path from outside of the shining hill all the way into the very heart of the palace, unmaking and ENDing the garden and magic and defenses and guardians and monsters and architecture and Death in its way.

Then she’s inside, smiling down at a gilded casket.

Bishop Glorianna does not move, nor does she speak. She is, to all appearances, as much of a corpse as her physical nature implies. 

“I did tell you what would happen,” says the intruder.

The corpse does not do itself the disservice of responding.

They stand there, one reclined onto an enchanted throne, the other hovering in the air, unbothered by gravity. 

They remain this way for nearly an hour.

At every second, the Bishop of the Church attempts to reconnect to her spellwork. There are so many layers of defenses in the palace, so many pre-designed failsafes, weapons and final options, that she could burn down a continent multiple times over, should it all be unleashed at once.

The Bishop of the Church attempts to grab hold of the magic surrounding her, in the heart of her demesne, and is met instead by an impossible silence. 

It is as if everything she has spent millennia crafting is simply gone. Unmade and torn away from her, cast into the quiet and the dark.

She does not stop trying, though. So long as the invader does not strike her down, she attempts to locate and activate her preparations, weaving new magics at an astounding rate and preparing hundreds of attacks every second.

One by one, in seemingly no order at all, they simply cease to be. One by one, every attempt and idea is unmade, subverted, or stolen away into the dark in some manner she examines furiously, trying to comprehend and succeeding far too slowly.

Each counter is slightly different. Each vanishing point of magic disappears in its own distinct way, despite their similarities. After so long and with so much understanding of theory, she knows for a fact that it is only a matter of time until she understands it and learns to manipulate it against the intruder.

But time passes, and nothing works. 

The thing facing her, which is not Dead and cannot Die, waits for her to understand. 

It too is growing. It too is using this moment to learn, and with every new technique, every unique formulae or inspired moment of innovation is studied, taken apart, and consumed, dragged away out of her control.

The corpse of Glorianna tilts its head in the approximation of a sigh. A graceful movement, carefully chosen- and yet even in the act of moving she feels the dark and quiet reaching, as if her ability to control her body is just another trick to be taken or undone.

“I have never claimed to be anything I was not,” she says.

The intruder remains silent, watching her. 

“I do not regret my actions. I do not regret my decisions. I am not shamed by your retribution. You are as you are. I am as I am. We are as we are shaped to be, and in almost all aspects, I made the right choices. I simply failed to carry them out as I should have.”

She has not properly experienced physical sensation in a few thousand years, but she quite suddenly realizes that a lack of feeling is not always a lack of perception. After so long, it has simply become second nature to have total awareness of her being at all times.

But now she cannot perceive her hands. Or her legs. Or the magics and powers contained within the phylactery that holds them. 

That lack of awareness crawls up her being, one inch at a time.

“If you were not so arrogant, you might have understood the need for sacrifice. You might have stood on the right side of history, alongside the gods that preserve this world against eternity. Instead, you have made yourself abomination, and have named yourself an enemy to everything that exists. My defeat is no more your victory than the burning of one’s fields is a harvest.”

There is only a skull left, containing all that she has ever been. All her memories, all her awareness, all her existence, reduced to a meager shell and locked away from the world. Enough Death to annihilate whole species, trapped in a bubble of the dark and the quiet, where there is only the squirming of deathless flesh and the chewing of many sharp maws. 

In her final moment, Glorianna surprises herself.

“Tell my husband I apologize for the inconvenience I have caused him.”

The deathless END looks down at her with eyes of obsidian flowers, recursive and roiling beneath a sea of black worms and churning toxin.

“Tell him yourself.”

And then the Bishop is more than Dead.

She is gone.

Into the dark and the quiet, where she is not alone.

Kai Ra sighs, shaking her head. From out of the mass of worms, a few moths scuttle up out of her shoulder, flapping their wings in quiet communication.

“Alright, you can have a bite. But don’t take all of it. I’ll need some for later.”

What remains of one of the greatest mages in existence starts to be nibbled on.