“Do you see him, Irakish?”
Where is this? Why am I not in my descended body? Is… Is this really the Astral plane…? Did you truly strike it down to the mortal world?
“Father. I really do not appreciate this favoritism you have towards my sister.” The voice of the unseen one mocks snidely. “I had respected your long-serving detachment as one of ultimate power… But, it seems the god without a heart finally grew one a few sizes too large… and for her? For Irakish?”
The Vastiga tries to move, but it cannot. It tries to force itself away from the abomination before it, but it cannot.
“I never expected you to have a mortal form like this. Is this the reason the poison forest has always been a thorn in my side?”
The grotesque entity moves to the side, incredibly fast considering its size. That is when the Vastiga sees its… daughter.
“Do you see, Father? Isn’t she just beautiful?”
Irakish… is in her mortal form. The horror…
The Vastiga instinctively, desperately, tries to reach out to her. It cannot move itself. It can hardly even understand its current form. It tries to reach out with the appendages it has at its disposal. Every movement it makes, its branches start to tear apart.
Branches… Blue leaves, white bark. The First Tree?
The Vastiga’s roots are firmly fixed to the ground of this plane. It grows more desperate as it focuses on the appearance of its daughter. It is already… too late for her now.
“Father, while on the outside only hours might have passed since Irakish was abducted from her armies, for her in this plane, it has been almost a year. A year of continuous… uninterrupted… torment.”
The Vastiga has no mouth yet it must scream.
It tries to move forward with all the force it can possibly muster and its trunk shatters. It falls to the ground in pieces of itself. As it regenerates itself, the Vastiga can perceive the gaze of the phantom god staring directly at its broken form, as if it is nothing more than a pathetic creature. He speaks joylessly, as if he were seeking a reaction that he didn’t obtain.
“In this world, Father, only I am God. You are mortal. So is she. You can see her, right? Your precious divine daughter. The mortal demon with her wings torn off, her legs and hips flayed, her torso cut apart, stabbed and pierced, her arms and feet crucified, her face mutilated… You can see her, right?”
The Vastiga tries to think clearly. Magic. It should be able to cast spells. If nothing else, it is capable of creation. In order to handle her daughter’s mortal enemy, her daughter’s tormenter, he has to create beings to defend her.
With his power, he can conjure pure crawler gods, wyvern kings, even gods like Irakish whose only purpose would be to exterminate this phantom.
Yet, it cannot. Try as it might, no magic flows forth from this tree body it has.
“This world, Father, was created based on a theory of mine. I had thought that perhaps you and my dear sister had grown closer over ten thousand years. She was always protecting you in that place at the center of the world. I could never reach out and take your power for–”
The Vastiga does not listen as the phantom god starts monologuing. All it can focus on was what had been done to Irakish.
The horror… How could this have… How could I have…
“You activated the second trap, Father. I’m glad my ten thousand year plan succeeded, yet… I’m disappointed.” All joviality in the unseen one’s voice disappears.
The phantom god stops speaking, knowing that the Vastiga is watching. He reaches out a hand towards his crucified sister.
She is covered in burns. Her black hair is torn off of her head by its roots. Her left horn is missing and her right horn is cracked. Her nose is bitten off. Her eyes are bleeding tears of black blood. Her chest is torn open, exposing her lungs intaking air and her heart faintly beating.
He had kept her in a state of torment for who knows how long, just waiting. Waiting for the Vastiga to come to save her. Ten thousand years of patience and an opportunity resulted in this outcome.
No… No. No. No! Stop!
The Vastiga tries to move, destroying itself over and over again in an effort to get in the way of the phantom god’s limbs slowly moving towards Irakish hanging in crucifixion in midair. Cackling resounds at the pathetic display of the most powerful creator. Its depths of its magic, the depths of its unending vitality, all is lost.
It tries to reach its child as a limb of the phantom god tears off her legs. It tries to prevent another appendage from disemboweling her. Limb after limb of Irakish is ripped off. Piece after piece of her body is devoured.
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Her screams… don’t materialize. Her expression is not yet lifeless, but cold. Yet inside, Irakish feels warmth. She is finally able to end her suffering. In the end, she did not succumb. The Vastiga watches as the last vestiges of her body are consumed.
Nothing remains but her pride.
—
The Vastiga falls into the bowels of the phantom god. It is still alive while sinking into this corrosive sea of emptiness. It waits for its end. Root after root is stripped away. Leaf after leaf is dissolved.
After it is finally consumed, this world will also end. It doesn’t care.
It only feels… sadness. It has never experienced loss since it has never gotten close to anything. Only she was special to it. Now she… is gone.
What was the Vastiga born for? To create? No, that was what it was born to do. It didn’t have a real purpose however. Yet when it was beside her, Irakish, it had one. For the first time in a long time it had one. It doesn’t even regret dying in order to fulfill this purpose. It had given its life without thought all for her.
Ten thousand years with her. It was… fun. Wasn’t it?
Now its purpose was gone and the Vastiga only had one thing left. Sorrow. Regret. Anger.
Hatred.
An… adversary.
For it had seen its daughter disgraced and defiled, tormented. It had seen her torn apart, solemnly facing agony and death without bending. Her flesh tearing. Her sorrow long since exhausted, replaced by only an acknowledgement of an inevitability.
Then finally, her death.
They would never meet again. She was gone. Yet, the Vastiga was still here as well as the adversary.
It felt for the first time a need. A craving. A deep yearning. Vengeance.
It could not allow the phantom god to face no consequences. It simply could not. Even if it had to pay the most permanent price. It knew what the adversary was after. Its memory and knowledge of the entity responsible for its creation.
You want to know of the Mother? You, a mere whelp, wish to glimpse at Her truest divinity?
It would not let that knowledge be handed over. Never. For its creator’s sake but also for the sake of its daughter.
You will obtain nothing, adversary. I will curse your existence. I will make sure that you obtain nothing except permanent oblivion.
The Vastiga was created. It had a creator but it could not call on the Mother. That was a meaningless endeavor. Yet, it could call on something else. The end to all things in this world has a title. The Divine Limit.
Nothing else remains, does it? Nothing else that I can do for you, Irakish. The only thing I have left. The only thing I can possibly give right now… is…
The Vastiga prepares itself to say the true name of the ancient one. The counterpart of its creator, of creation itself. His name has an effect on the world once it is spoken with intent to invoke His attention.
Would He even grant the Vastiga’s wish? Its death by itself would be a sign.
—
“What? A-Ah… AAAAGGGHH!?”
Psionic feedback. The phantom god was focused on each of the Vastiga’s strands of memory and consciousness, devouring its mind while he continuously absorbed its spiritual body. Yet all of a sudden, his exploratory senses were exposed as if they were open nerve endings. All of them were exposed. That much lack of information created stress.
The Vastiga had…
“Father, you… killed yourself? No, you didn’t just kill yourself, your entire mind was… erased. Right down to your… heart.”
The phantom god tries to understand this outcome as the psionic feedback tormenting its mind starts to slowly dissipate.
“...How? How!? Y-You don’t have that ability in my domain, in my belly. I know you don’t. If you had that kind of power, m-my magic would not have posed any problem to you! How, Father!?”
The Vastiga’s mind was not merely dissolved. There are no remains of it at all. The spiritual matter forming its being was still intact, yet the ultra-complex network of its mind that manifested through these spiritual constructs were all scrambled, rendered into patterns of nonsensical, meaningless gibberish.
All of the information that the phantom god had not yet parsed was completely erased. It didn’t take even a second. It was literally instant. The shining immortal sun of the galaxy had been annihilated as if it were the snuffed fire on a candlestick.
The unseen one realizes what has just happened, as well as what was just lost. The most important part of the Vastiga, the mind… gone. Its wish to… to learn of the true creator…
“No… No, no, no, no, no… Th-Thousands of years of effort… All for this moment. All for… for nothing. He… He couldn’t have done it himself. My Father couldn’t have done all that by himself! He doesn’t have the power! Nothing has that power!”
Fury and madness grips the unseen one. As well as clarity.
“It was… his creator. The creator. It must have been! Whatever it was, it didn’t want me to know about it. It… could be the only thing conceivably capable of this. It… Has it seen me?”
—
“So… Someone called for me… It begged me to grant its wish. What a desperate one it was, though at least it wasn’t just playing around. It was even able to garner an instant of my infinitely divided attention. Quite the resolved little thing, seeking me out knowing its future was forfeit.”
The Divine Limit stands over a reddish-black mass of something akin to a singularity in the shape and size of a small planet. Above Him in the sky is the multiverse, laying undisturbed yet always in flux.
An infinitesimal piece of His mind considers His supplicant while the rest of Him sets His focus on the mass below Him, along with the infinite mosaic of the multiverse above Him.
Yet all of a sudden, His half of his mind focused on the multiverse considers the wish with full clarity. The half of His mind focused on the mass below His feet remains consistently watching below. Due to the Divine Limit’s lapse in concentration, an uncountable number of lives were spared, for at least one more moment.
“Synchronicity is so fickle. There in the same neighborhood as the supplicant… They live. I haven’t met them since they were born. Hm. A task for them. A meeting with them. Disruption. Change. Progression. Ah, how wonderful.”
The multiverse looked down at the Divine Limit in agreement.