Hour of Reckoning
Is there a means of attaining contentment without excess self-satisfaction? Quick is the plunge to stagnation, once one's goals are attained.
-Notes of the Forebear
Monday, the 1059th world.
The treadmill of worlds ground on ceaselessly, and he increased his pace to match. Long had it been since his first dire transport, his first breathtaking emergence into mystery and wonder. Now there was only the drab gray abattoir of his trek, the mire of worlds each successively crueler and more ashen than the last, pith of his soul ground into an unfeeling husk. Yet even that dusky charcoal had not been enough for the Procession. By raw pressure alone it had smelted him into something harder, charcoal become diamond, become something that could neither tarry nor yield; but only press ceaselessly onwards into the abyss of worlds. There was no brightness in this mire, so all he could display was his sharpness: the power to pierce, to strike, to cut.
That sharpness he'd refined on the whetstone of worlds, until his fingers were bone and his marrow was wine, until his mind and soul like errant wax dribbled from his eyes and stained the cosmos beneath. One of the few benefits of perpetual reincarnation: the ability to train beyond the limits of any one body or self.
He cut those things which were easy to cut. He cut those things which were difficult to cut. He cut those things which were possible to cut. He cut those things whose possibility was in question. He cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, until he could cut through, even if it could not be cut.
That had been his first salvation. The spiral of things he could cut expanded slowly, torturously but without limit, and he knew that one day he would cut his way free no matter the cost.
Such edge, he thought dully, and briefly smiled. What would his younger self have said, if he could see him now? He whose life was some ghoulish nightmare out of his darkest dreamings, who a thousand times had died gasping only to awaken into a realm colder still? He could hardly remember the boy he'd been once, faintest glimmerings of a threadbare identity.
The Procession of Worlds was a staircase that only descended, and he its benighted warden, yet still he had lived and seen wonders beyond the reckoning of pallid mundanity, glimpsed and grasped power beyond the furthermost imaginings of men. Still it was not enough. Was that his curse, or merely his burden?
The enemy was upon him once more. Berserkers, a horde to darken the wide-rimmed horizon, each beast engorged with the swollen might of devoured pantheons; the pantheons themselves richly fattened by entire worlds enslaved, engines of exploitation so deeply engrained that their laborers had no word for even the concept of choice. How many quadrillions lived and breathed their own oppression, fearful yet hopeless, with neither the will nor the desire to conceive of better, knowing absolutely that their flat merciless existence was the best of all possible worlds?
Torments of such modest scope failed to quicken him anymore, yet he had no choice but to fight. The staircase was endless and without remorse. Conquest and dominion meant he would take only a single step down, while failure would see him descend entire flights, the power and torments of the worlds where he landed unthinkable to a mind of his present level. Had he not learned to cut... he shuddered at where his current existence might lie. Trapped and mewling in some torture dimension half a thousand steps up, perhaps. The Procession did not take kindly to those who ignored its implicit dictates.
He welcomed worlds where the opposition was mightier, for that meant their depravity could only be more mundane.
At last the Berserkers had concluded their glacial charge. He'd considered leaving them to their business, for the stench of evil upon their target-worlds had seeped beyond all mundane means of resolution, but the ingrates had presumed to attack him as well, mistaking indifference for weakness, or simply too stupid to care.
The Berserkers were judgement given flesh, a perilous flood to sweep sin away when the monstrosity of the universe grew beyond even their ravening evil. Perhaps in him they saw the shadow of an oppressor whose hands were too stained for any shred of mercy. Or perhaps their divine hunger was wholly unreasoning in its all-consuming impetus.
They were impressive specimens, the warpaint-bone of their masks harrowing to the very soul, their merest footfall the end of worlds, each errant stroke an age's close. These were beings whose clutch and weft could pluck free the bones of gods, the might of aeons a stripling yew before their methuselah provenance.
He drew the Blade and the realm was quelled, grown quiet and still in the presence of that steel. It had been an ordinary sword once, a bastard sword, hand-and-half of uninspired design, flat gray pommel and blade. Now it was the instrument by which his cut was delivered, and that sufficed to elevate it beyond the realm of gods, or those who devoured them.
The Forebear of Dynasties took one step forward, and cut once.
The Berserkers fell. Ambrosia and stranger things pooled from the bodies of the now-depleted army, half-digested remains of reveler gods.
"Do you regret sacrificing your name for power?" One foe remained, a statuesque woman dressed in silks. Space and time spooled about her like molten amber, her skin the pale bone white of her underlings' masks.
"I don't think about it," he answered honestly, preparing his second cut. The sides of his head burned in anticipation. All of it had been too easy thus far; he had expected a complication such as this.
"Names have such beauty," the woman breathed. "They are so critical to the essence of what we are. Know a being's name and you possess dominion over them, if only by a little. Exercise that dominion wisely, and it can become total control."
He struck, and the woman flashed back, but this third cut was aimed and thus inescapable. She split in half diagonally, and trembled once.
"I can offer you answers," she continued sedately. "The meaning behind your endless journey, this troubleshooter of worlds, this cosmic janitor. I can-"
He struck, and it was the fourth cut. Four was the number of death. She perished, and with a flick of his blade he restored his hearing, his ability to comprehend the spoken word.
The Forebear continued without regret for the data he might have lost. It was not his to wonder why, but merely to cut through, always and forever, until the task was done. It might not be achieved in finite time, but impatience was one weakness that had been ground out of him early on.
He stepped, and appeared on one of the few worlds un-ravaged. Its occupants bowed to him as a god and he discouraged them. He set his Blade down in the stance of rulership, sword in the stone with pommel upright, and severed the chains on their mind and soul. This sufficed not, for they had no spark of volition in the first place to stoke, and he resigned himself to the slow grinding process of deploying another Dynasty. Perhaps it was the very system of divine power-through-worship that lead to such unpalatable extremes. This realm needed to be restructured from the very fundament, the souls recycled and rebirthed into a plane more appropriate to some level of flourishing.
He cut, and felt the temporal noose loosen, and was confronted by the Greater Aspect of the woman he'd earlier slain. She was wreathed in the cosmos, the nebulae her accoutrements, and now wore a mask of blinding radiance, the primordial fire of all creation.
"How convenient," the Ur-Mother hissed, her voice a sibilance that transcended sound and imparted meaning without medium. "That you might wander the worlds and only ever encounter villains so vile that any atrocity might be justified by their destruction! How utterly and shamelessly appropriate for the likes of you."
"It is," he said nodding. That mere annihilation was a luxury wildly undeserved for his current regime of foes did weigh on him at times. Surely there were misdeeds of such scale for which vengeance was downright mandatory, and death a grave miscarriage of justice. But it was not in him to be just. The ideals of justice were just one part of the weight that added strength to his cut. So wielded, could anyone retain their appreciation for such?
"You seek to undo all that I have made," the Ur-Mother growled. "You, with your mere brute
skill, your unseemly invincible power, would unseat me and make of this place the pale shadow of a paradise realm, something like the Earth which after all these eons anchors still your conceits of normality. Can you not see that such an act would shirk the purpose of all possible universes, reduce ineffably the grandeur of all that is? That you have discarded name and meaning, it does not follow that you must inflict the same upon every realm you tread!"
"I don't care," he said. "Are you done begging for your life?"
"I will ruin you," she began, "from beyond oblivion if I must. I am not some trifling pretend-divine, to be disrespected so-"
"Unconditional surrender," he said, "And l spare you. Else I will draw my Blade again."
"Hah!" She laughed. "You cannot so much as move as long as we speak, for my Speech is the very stuff by which this cosmos was made, and remade every instant with you inside of it. Now we will bargain, child, and you will find my reservoir of mercy has run low... but neither of us shall depart this moment until we have reached an accord."
He spent mightily of himself and cut through to the solution of this unpleasant dilemma. Better eons spent in recovery sleep than wasted on this dialogue.
The knowledge appeared in his mind. He arrayed his energies in the All-Defeating Stance, by which nothing that opposed him could not be ruined, even an ontological lack, and felt the last lingering curse of the Ur-Mother from her defeat three instants into the future.
One.
Ruin itself had permeated his form, and all that he touched would crack and dissolve. Useful if weaponized. He integrated it into the nature of his Stance and mastered it thereby. Perhaps there was more to the cut than a blade's edge, if body and essence could be arranged so profitably.
Two.
"Last chance," he said, and she desperately marshaled her energies, full realities fed to the cauldron of her ascension as she prepared to oppose him in direct strife. Numberless innocents incinerated on the pyre of such pointless hubris.
Three.
He pulled sword from stone. The hour of reckoning had come.
In the aftermath, the multiverse she'd burned rained like ash down upon the Realm of Forms. He'd collected what few remnants existed and seeded them into the hollow dimension he was in the process of restructuring. Without the Ur-Mother, causality itself was paused in this realm; he pulsed his newfound power, and Ruin pervaded reality, enabling the passage of events so long as they trended towards destruction in the end.
Ruin in such a guise was mere entropy, and though its ending would be dire, there would be spots of brightness in the universe to come, and that was all that was required for his task to see completion.
Enough. Time to rest. One day in the future he would be king of this patchwork realm, and witness its shining apex before departing to a world fouler still.
'Quick is the plunge to stagnation, once one's goals are attained.' Perhaps that is the wisdom behind my interminable journey. If so, have I any choice but the repudiation of all wisdom?
- Notes of the Forebear
---
The winner was
[X] The Armament Fish. How do you think Hunger will react to this information? How should he react? Was the Forebear an example to be aspired to, or a cautionary tale to be vigorously spurned? Assuming that he's truly gone at all, of course...
Hunger has attained the Title,
[X] King of Winter. Three EFBs acquired in a single update is truly power beyond all reason! Even so, the power of the Armament Fish is undeniably vast; and what better enemy to withstand a deluge than a Fish? Good tactics can improve his odds greatly.
Vote update later tonight or tomorrow!
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