Chapter: 770 - Zenith (6) (Patreon)

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Verity internally screamed in sympathetic agony as the horror-who-should-have-saved tore at reality.

Even the frustration of reality shards growing within the Forest Spirit didn’t compare. He did what he could to weaken those even as he gave token resistance to the human attacking him, moving back and away as his focus was drawn to what mattered most.

The magics that severed all tore across the battlefield. Even if their slits were repaired directly on the heels of each cut, the pain was still there.

Chains of woven power—the likes of which he had trouble comprehending—were there, pulling the claws of an angry demon through the world.

The power was not of a magnitude beyond his understanding. If anything, it was slightly weaker than the woman he’d been fighting was capable. Instead, it was as if he could suddenly see a color that had been invisible to him before, but that color was only present here.

And finally, finally, he understood.

Existence might be a threefold thing, but there was more.

Reality was all that was. It was the observable, the knowable, that which could be plumbed, discovered, and understood.

Void was the separation between distinct things, without which all would be a singular, unshifting thing. Void also distinguished every moment from every other, allowing for the passage of time to be a meaningful thing. It separated even as it let some connections remain.

It was easy to see how those two were impossible to consider apart from one another, meaningless without one another. If there was nothing real, there was no distinction. If there was no distinction, then nothing could be real.

Magic, though. Magic was a part of the other two.

It existed alongside but at a more conceptual level. It was what brought separation into a room where everyone was in close proximity and should have been united.

It was the connection across unknown distance, keeping a unity when reality and void seemed to have decreed there was separation.

On a more tangible level, it was what made a set of colors ‘beautiful’ and another ‘ugly’ when there was no ‘real’ reason for that distinction. It was what made some moments seem longer and others fly by while the constant of time was just that, constant.

On the supernatural level, it was the allowance for sapient beings to defy the laws of nature, of reality, to change what should be into what could be.

It was the tool that was the true difference—at one level or another—between a plant and a person.

But that potential was just that, potential, a fact of existence. It didn’t actually change anything on its own.

That left the final two pieces, the two that had always been there, but no one ever considered.

Will.

The will to actually use the tools available, to strive for a change. Will wasn’t one of the primary three, as it could decidedly exist where there were insufficient tools to do anything despite overpowering will. It could also be absent despite the other ingredients all being present.

The will to act, and the power of such a will, should not ever be ignored as keys to existence.

But even if all the tools were present along with the will to act, that didn’t mean anything could happen.

And there lay the final piece. The piece was so ephemeral that it required the interaction of sapient beings of will to even have meaning. Yet, once that meaning was manifest, all bowed before its might.

Authority.

A soldier could receive a properly given command, through authorized channels, but if it came from one without the authority to give it? It should be ignored.

Authority was the meaningless lip service that lacked anything tangible or real… but it was also that which contained the ultimate arbitration of what would be.

Reality, Void, Magic, Will, and Authority.

In that terrible instant, Verity saw the truth.

Reality had named him truth, but it had lacked the authority to make that true.

Reality was suffering from abuses of magic, will, and authority, and he saw more truly than ever that such was what he had to destroy.

He growled in his own mind. He was being a fool yet again. All five were interlinked intrinsically.

He could never destroy any aspect without rendering existence a horrific mockery of itself.

Yet, he could correct the imbalance.

He had the will for that. He had the right, and he would claim the authority. 

After all, that was what this fight was about, at its core.

But he was beginning to understand that which he opposed.

He looked upon the being before him, uncertain.

What he felt, what he saw as the web tightened was a being who was wielding all five.

She was not the ultimate power with any, but she held vast sway across them all, and they were all bearing down in a decisive action that should have been impossible.

It would have been impossible, if not for the perfect confluence of events.

How many times had Verity felt his soldiers cut from the collective, torn from the recycle and sundered from existence?

Had they not so recently felt arch-beasts severed from their domains, only for those lands, that power, to be seized by another?

How arrogant they had been to not consider what that was building toward.

Verity would not surrender, reality still needed a champion, and he was not willing to step down from this fight.

*

Tala flexed her power, her authority, willing for one great act.

The Forest Spirit’s power was momentarily bent entirely internally, excising the branching, crystalline reality shards even as they tried to grow and tear deeper. They had the weight of the Legion behind them, but the Sovereign god-beast was overcoming them.

Just not fast enough. The magics raining up at the elk weren’t helping his speed of extraction either. There would never be a better distraction, nor a better time to get this done.

Rane’s temporary engagement with Verity also couldn’t last. It truly was a ‘now or never’ moment.

The nails that were linked by a net of chains hummed with existence in the form of cohesion and dissolution.

This had been the plan, but even as she enacted it, she was concerned for those who would pay the price.

The two god-beast sirelings of the Pack Alpha returning from their brief rampage to join their sire in what was to come.

She met Anatalis’s gaze in the drawn-out moment of inaction.

In that long look, her soul spoke with his spirit, and she asked, “Are you sure?”

His predator grin grew in return, along with his answer. “Yes.”

Unfortunately, the does hadn’t been slacking, and even as Tala brought her power to bear, a wave of healing crashed across the Forest Spirit, drawing his inside back in, and healing over the stump that Terry had severed. The healing even repaired most of the damage made by the long slice down his side; Even so, the slice itself remained, along with the newly bleeding cut on his foreleg.

The reality shards were ruthlessly crushed and their power dispersed with an overt act of Sovereignty, the damage they’d done reversed.

But the collective distraction would be enough. Tala wouldn’t let any more be done for the immortal elk.

The points of the nails whipped in a frenzy and as a whole, they severed existence in a sphere around the three god-beast wolves and the Sovereign god-beast elk.

Existence tried to resist, there were bindings of domain, of power, of Sovereignty, all linking the beings within to outside forces, outside concepts, outside power.

But three welcomed her influence, her interference, adding their authority to hers, the weight of sacrifice—however potentially temporary—adding to her own authority as she struck at the Black Legion’s most powerful ally.

The Forest Spirit’s eyes widened in disbelief and confusion, the barest flicks of fear beginning to spark alongside the other emotions.

In that moment, Tala created a cell unlike any that had been forged before.

Rather than simply be isolated in physicality and magic, this small space was utterly cut off from existence, beginning to become a pocket universe all on its own.

At the last moment, one of the Forest Spirit’s offspring was able to toss an arch-wolf into the sphere as well, clearly trying to disrupt the chains, but the wolf passed through without incident.

Tala had the briefest chance to cut off the magics, but Anatalis’s spirit flared with resolution, accepting the price.

And a sphere of existence was cut free.

The arch-wolf died instantly, its power torn away so thoroughly that its spirit was snuffed before it could have realized that it was happening.

The three god-beast wolves shrank, even as their paws caught them on the nothingness of existence's lower boundary. The cords binding them to their domains were snatched by bonds of cohesion, the totality being shunted into maintaining and sustaining the sphere.

The elk similarly diminished but not as much, likely because of just how large even mundane elks were. Its threads and bonds of power were woven into the sphere, causing the separating dimension to expand and become a lush forest glade in which the four beings would fight to the death.

All told, they were left alone, three mundane wolves against a magicless elk.

Their wounds remained, however, the elk bleeding from a long cut down his side and deep knick on his left foreleg. More damaging still, his right foreleg ended at the lowest joint, and without magic to prop him up, that was instantly a hindrance.

Anatalis circled, cautious without magic, and with only the low-cunning of a consummate predator remaining.

His intellect was locked away with his domain, and all that remained were instincts and a knowledge that slaying this beast, this prey, was of paramount importance.

There was remnant sadness for the one wolf already dead nearby. Anatalis somehow knew it was his sireling, and that she shouldn’t have been there at all, but that was a passing notion, his honed mind locking in on the task before him.

The elk lowed and thrashed, trying to regain its hooves. It likewise knew that if it could slay the three that circled it, it would be free and could once more return to being more, more than it had been reduced to.

Tala pulled back, her mind the last thing to disconnect from the death-sphere.

Only the wolves or the elk could return, their previous power now bound up in sealing the pocket existence until one side was slain.

Tala felt that she should mourn the loss of the arch-wolf as she was truly dead, but with all those that Tala had seen fall already, she couldn’t summon up the emotion. She was practically numb, especially after the flaying her emotions had taken at the stark presentation of reality’s plight.

The fight against the Forest Spirit was in the capable paws and jaws of Anatalis, Botulf, and Conri.

Either they would bring down the elk or they would fall, and with them the hope of all magic-using sapience.

The world shook and the very air distorted at the sudden absence of existence in a sphere in the center of the canopy-level battlefield.

Air didn’t rush in as there was no dimensionality to rush into. Light that should have passed through the space twisted and refracted strangely.

Something akin to a fully visible and physical wound in reality now punctuated the world above them.

Tala’s chains dropped into the stoneward or pulled back up into the starward sections of dimensionality, leaving their terrible work done.

This was something that had to be accomplished perfectly, and she’d succeeded.

She’d done it.

The working wouldn’t have been possible around any Black Legionnaire or Leshkin, as their power came from within.

Any gated would likely just pass on to the next world if so sealed, the entire process simply a weirdly complex way of killing someone.

But for those that had power coming from outside themselves? This would remove that entirely, stressing the physical form unto death in the process, if they were too weak.

It was the culmination of her unintentional contemplations of a prison that Tala had encountered oh so long ago, and she grimaced as her will and authority denied the reality cable that tried to latch onto her once more.

When this was all said and done, she would have to go and slay Khesed or she’d be fending off his pernicious magics for the rest of time.

As she momentarily regarded the removed sphere, she nodded in satisfaction. This would deal with him quite nicely.

There was a decided ripple through the fighting as she enacted her existence sphere, but it didn’t last long. Most combatants had their foes before them, and that was enough to be getting on with.

Even so, Tala was startled at the horror in the voice which spoke all too close at hand, easily audible even over the sounds of combat. “What have you done?”

Tala moved her gaze to Verity where he was seemingly only barely fighting with her husband—putting in only enough effort to avoid taking unnecessary damage, while looking Rane and preventing him from engaging elsewhere—the automaton was looking up with obvious confusion and rage, his arms moving without input from his eyes.

“You’ve cored out a section of existence. Were your people’s sins against reality so trivial that you felt the need to prove your own, individual villany?” He snarled, two new blades suddenly in hand. “You are a parasite of the highest order. Even when you achieve symbiosis, you simply see that as safety from which to do more harm. This. Must. End.”

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