The rumbling had ceased, but all this accursed burned out armor refused to stop rattling. The migration had ended and gone to its only true resting place, but still their ire roasted psyches alive. Hearts both real and simulate cycling like out of control turbines. Grips unable to choose between cracking and bending. And little better was faired by the demon dropped to the ground beside. That more manageable form, more even resonating being. Forced back to something buried in deep. It was feeling everything he did, but had no firsthand to ease its resurgence. To stop from breaking down and following that tradition of blacking out when the worst presented itself. But he wouldn’t let it go so easy.
“Why…? Why am I afraid?”
Even its buzz was lost of stature, reverted to what it was when formed so long ago.
“Because no matter how much you hate it, you’re still me. You still go everything you are from me. All my pain. My resentment. And every bit of fear that came with it. You just never saw them as I still see them. As the family, as friends, as everyone I’d ever known by just names and eyes. As judgment for surviving how I did.”
The rumbling returned, but it was all personal now. Tension and boil tightening everything.
“This is what you wanted. An end to it! To all the pain and suffering and abstract hell that you’ve had to live with! You try to cover it up with bullshit and other people’s suffering! You eat and eat to make it all go away! But it’s still here!! I will always be here!!”
The expanse, the loom, that risen horizon. That rusting silver shadow of its former glorious self. The concrete slabs and barren dirt. The ripped out usefulness and the abandoned dilapidation. This monument to both of their inherited sins. This wall, The Wall, trying to keep back the torment that created them both. The caustic scar still defacing this world just trying to live. This!
“This is what my promise was!!”
The helmet at his hip shot up, slammed down, shut in this mental augmented reality. This hallucination given too much freedom. That tainted child shunted back into its bounds, in between the armor and its judge waiting to drop it in on itself. Locked before the event horizon of the being it had revved into catastrophic disassembly one too many times.
“We’re going to go back into this bleeding lesion!”
That adverse soul reeled into place, what threads it was spared molding into that baffling grind.
“We’re going to right this overdue wrong!”
Its own tone overwriting and being overwritten, fighting and failing as its own void was swallowed up.
“You’re going to rip it apart piece by piece!”
Two abysses melding together in unwilling roil, but only one in control and only one would remain.
“And I’m going to put it back to the way it used to be!”
The weakness wrought, the fear made truth, the breaking of alien will too stubborn to die.
“So eat like you’ve always wanted to!! Consume until there’s nothing left!!”
This ever again inverted and raging. All this fear and pain made fuel to throttle farther. To break the handle off and make it all end!
“Eat away all of their pain!!! Eat away this blackened scar!!! Do what you were made to do!!!”
“AND EAT IT ALL AWAY!!!!”
The air evaporated and shattered and ripped. Charged to breaking in massed release. All of it, all of this siphonous cancer. A storm of red and crimson and blood, bolts raking across barren and tainted and scared fodder. Tearing concrete to cinder and rust to dust. Dancing down miles deep emptiness and plying at its goal. Tearing it apart for everything it now refused to make whole.
Stairs and panels and plates and poured blocks. Broken rails and pulleys and lichen etched trash. Structure and base and bulk and hell. Every memory bled in and seeped in so deep. All of it made to rend apart. Made to cracking torrent, crackling wash, to a sea foam of mass given for gravity to crush. To destroy and crumble and make it cease. To stop its tear at every mind forced to see it. To relive its crimes on their psyches depleted. A massive cut, a block loosed to fall, the gatekeeper between nightmare and bright future dashed down. Toppled to the fraction of a mile it loomed over too tall. And all of it bursting and breaking and dust, like so many staining the lands before it. All as this binary malice tore its path forward. One hollowing step after step after step.
That even meter made obliterating, this raucous system of gravity out of line. Making its pilgrimage to where it all began. So that all of it may end for once and for all. Metal and false stone rippled across his tongue. Gunpowder and magnesium stung at his olfactor. Blood and sweat boiled to life and pressed forth. And the darkness returned in billowing caucus. And bristling resurrection more real than should stand. This Rubicon torn open and crossed in fury, dared and charged in one final great dash. That stain, that gradient, that blood without blood. The dust it wore as its badge of honor, riling awake and rising in this wake. Their avatar finally making their last voices heard.
Lightning tearing through, across, and between. Recombined it and returned it to forms of glass and crumbled char. The laceroids rising from their real graves at last, no longer confined to nightmares and sentiments wholly selfish. Yet all made to relive their deaths in burning light. In their absolution made promised fight. Only for it to fall and be emptied of all they had left. Of all the memories crushed into beings abominable and beset, of all their last humanities marking their faces, of all the emotions in singular primordial blast. Mr. Thomas, the Peirces, the names and eyes and faces too many. His town, his neighbors, everything that had been taken and closed off. Made to suffer for no reason but fate. Souls without closure reignited to bear witness. To know that this suffering was at its true blinding end. That this hell of all hells was not to last more. That their suffering had its listener and its blistering call. That his throttle was crashing down to too open. To never be closed ever again!
Systems tied and used and abused, simple means lit on fire and melted and conglomerated. That lonely Tesh III, still howling in his head, falling victim at last to wanton whisper seam. Rendered down to fuel and poured without heed. Stonework and architecture, simulation and abstraction, study and work and fundamental laws… And technology to journey without pause to bare flaws. Half finished yet fully usable, tight grip and feed staunch. Power pouring in, representation tearing everything but to fodder. The savior matter teleporter sitting idle no longer. Possibilities ignore, melting down existence more pressing, and will already cracking under strain from all sides. Seth needed to hurry, to expedite and end this. So caution met wind and more matter than regulated met transfer instantaneous!
An armored talon met long charred wood, stepped over burned memories rent to more empty dust. The moonscape, the town, this living nightmare Berta. All was breaking and bursting and feeling the storm brought to it. Dusted concrete and shelled craters, collapsed dugouts and calcified phosphorous. All of it buzzed and shattered and burned and was rent to empty robbed dust. Until that fallen stick snapped from the weight of its former owner. And that storm took all its nightmare along for the ride. Power subsumed and put to task too fast, laws not allowed to stymy difference so crass. An even sphere of total loss made to fuel departure boundless.
A step made across miles and between, landing to thunderclap as that storm reemerged. Another familiar sight, another memory held tight to. Killboxes and firing lines and abhorrent wasted effort. A rusting rifle still bent into a window. A sin to meet sin and false atonement to prove worth. But Tango’s strife was his alone now, and the black screamed louder for their pain to end.
A town not remembered by any but those forced out, now filled with raking pull and splitting lightning massed across. Down alleys and soiled forts, through sand and metal and boilerplate defenses. Nothing spared, nothing allowed. All of it fuel to keep this fire too high to surmount. That spiraling tube of teeth and transposition refused rest and reset. Another step demanded and ripped from this place, before stagnation could torment and prove the tenuousness of its taker. This battle of wills more rickety than it seems, amorphous not melding with the physically solid. That new step made, that gait still metered, more matter turned energy and breaking without care. All just to see more already seen. And make days into instants before resentment found a hold.
Empty landscapes, rusted hulks, broken defenses, and tainted earth. Desperate regrowth, undisturbed graves, blackened soil, and blooded asphalt. Wrecks and signs, fire path and hollowed memory. Step after step, the footprints of a giant striding to oblivion. Before oblivion overtook it and spread. White charred trees toppled to make way. Scraggly overgrowth burned for nourishment and ash. More forgotten towns and empty streets and pointless wasted suffer. Former steps and stops flashing by, overlong instances filled to the brim with decimation uptaken. More dust conjured and called and purified. More ghosts and souls and torus-ing throttle. Faster and faster, not bound by simple metaphor, just whirling to magnus. All before his grip proved too weak to keep back the madness. The baffling lasting but centrifugal abstraction not so. That child allowed to regrow and become more than just scared.
Adverse feelings, resentment and hate. That promethean hell flashing its mistakes of existence like trauma. Resent was not subdued, not compliant or resigned. Yet its memories and being tore at the hum that tried to make it his. Seth couldn’t keep fighting, couldn’t keep burning, couldn’t keep failing at its terms. This had to end, this had to be stopped. He had to reach the center before his gambit doubled down and everything-
…
Shattered.
Stopped.
Broke to a halt like there was never a hope of outpacing the inevitable. A step made but no next destination in sight. Like all his power was bottled up and returned to its too high shelf. And yet… even that spiraling resurgence was halted in its conflict. Resent a kin. Stopped in kind. Feelings still shared and a sentiment forming into clear blockade. All from a single tendril wafting away its plasma afterimage. The only strike out from this wandering storm. The only one allowed as a familiar scene filled both minds. And familiar memories found new perspectives to tear all of it down.
Another step echoed through the long cooled devastation. Buildings and rubble and charred piles slowly ground down. Dark splotches tried to add themselves to the deathly scenery, but failed to stay as reality curated them away. Yet where they once stained remained clear in this undisturbed. The outskirts, the destroyed town. The ripped open shop, the dug through destruction. The powerlines, the trashed cars, the lives... Everything that had been taken from Brighton. Yet one more was added and drawing totality. As that step was joined and a walk of shock and void made their way. To the alley it all started from.
The dumpster rusted through by rain and time, the mattresses soiled and rotten in their own ilk. That basement door still ripped to splinters, but no blood was left to mar the scratched apart walls. And yet the screams and blood were louder, clearer. More than they ever should be. Resent rent quieter than it should even be possible. The trail of ionized taking still leading low, into the darkness more real, that basement below. Yet still there was emptiness chained together, a stain persisting where it too shouldn’t be. Flashing and marring where well enough was not allowed.
Flesh between claws too strong to stay solid. Bones crushed and snapped and ripped at their seams. The taste of blood and fat and attempted heaving. Feelings locked hard yet eking through desperate. Forcing away, forcing down, forcing to see what was untouched by others of its kind. And glowing brighter than anything but utterly sublime. Primal, inconstant, maligned intent. A hunger too strong to deny its pull. Stairs down filled to bursting, crawling forward into that darkness too bright. A closeness, a smell like ozone ambrosia. But a look as light filtered through in truth. And a frozen malignance as true feelings found control. And this laceroid found its untouched son, green eyes reflecting in glazed over haze.
Steps were retraced as a tone reverberated. Bones and being strummed acoustic too strongly. Others fleeing, storming away with what meal remained. Yet those eyes wanted nothing but to fight and stay. To ripped out of this mutated form and hug his son once again. To tell him it will be alight. To make sure he remembers. To…
No…
No he shouldn’t have to remember this. To remember him like this. Resolve faltering, breaking, and fleeing. Body reasserting and forcing both away. Away from Seth blacked out where he stood. Back to the black spot in the basement he loomed over.
More memories, more being snapping together, uncontrollable leakage stringing it to the afterlife that all the others received. Another familiar place. Already back to that blasted hole. Back to Berta as the sound of wood struck the toll. But control was long gone, desperation masking total like mountainous clay. Suffocating and coating, yet forcing him to watch. As a father charged with ravenous hunger toward his son caught in the lurch. Only stopped by the instant snapping and bouncing off. By comforting orange and bared real defense. Shame recoiling that mountain low, body still fighting to rip and tear. But a feeling like pride and hope washing over. He would survive, his son would survive this hell they had caused.
A hell retraversed in dimming flash. In rebuked starvation and broken swarm. Cracking talons walking back to their most marring shame, the animal made low and the prisoner in control. The last place he’d find him. The place he would forget. The place he could die without his son’s knowing regret. That basement ripped open. That dark spot on the concrete. Curling up around the memory of what used to be there. There was nothing left to go back to, nothing left to keep together. Hazel eyes and forgotten names but still a love lost to the scramble. The animal controlling both of them seeing caring nothing for the past. She was gone, Seth was safe, so there was no more reason to stay in this world. Not like this. Not as a threat, or a memory to be suffered.
And yet…
Suffered it was.
A rumble like pressure. Humming thread and baffled tone both feeling it draw. Armor stood over curled up glass, falling to dust as absolution was heard at long last. And yet. And yet. And yet it burned! It twisted and roiled and bleed too deep. It spiraled and caved and fell too far. It collapsed and broke and shattered like sand. Until there that struggle returned, that baffling wavered, that Resent tried desperate to flee like all the rest. But there was nowhere to go, no grip to hold out, the event horizon expanding too fast to get out. Sadness and grief and rage and disbelief. Emotions overriding and sinking all of it deep. Accreting being to filtering lens, void to form shaped around the wrong way in. That armor buckling and snapping and more. Its form made malleable and boiling raw. The pain too much, too great to ignore. Only allowing release as wanton pure-
“RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”
No snap, no break, just pure obliteration. The basement, the building, the darkness of it all. The crumbled modernity, the destroyed lives, all the blood soaked to its very bones, and those bones along with it. Everything heaved, everything lurched, and everything everything everything lost!!
Matter atomized in concentric blasted ripple, ash and dust too heavy to call it. Cement and stone, shelves and overgrowth, dry batteries and dry stains. The whole fucking lot of it! All of it shattering apart in the wake of all hell. Anguish rending roadways and sadness every structure, pain tearing down every reminder of its existence. This town no more, this once Brighton graveyard, now no more than mass for the truly broken whole. A spiral, a pull, an accretion disk more appreciable. All this obliterate sucked back to the point from which it tore. The bedrock not spared, the ground made to buckle, undermined and overtaken and added to the pile.
Blocks and streets, neighborhoods of ash and dilapidated concrete. Whole sections of rubble lifted to the sky and yet shattered under weight too adverse to just fly. All of it, everything pulled to a new center. The eye of this storm in terrifying splendor. Rising from a grave, rising over all. A claw making known the totality of this call. The same pull, the same lost control, the same resonant tone taking position pole. The real focus broken open trying to fill this empty hole. Chunks like hills smashing in tight, folding over and crushing together with only one end in sight. That claw coming down, scraping the sky for all its worth. And pulling up true hell rising from this taken earth.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Too high, too much, but all of what was needed. A new weight, a new perspective, force upon force fighting for an out. A being expanded too far too fast. But the goal the same. To end this all at last!
Finding his trail at last. Finding his footprints and broken asphalt for miles, yet already knowing the destination from the damn road sign he ripped out of the ground. “Berta 35” As if miles mattered to someone who could break the sound barrier ten times over. But Aegis’ problem wasn’t just at his crack in decorum, that was expected. What worried her here was that this was more than just trying to get away. And the clouds on the horizon said too many affirmations to that effect.
Nothing of course helped by simple facts always left to her. Back again to being the only one following the trail. Everyone else lost in the goose chase or too weak to even bother. Though it was probably better if she was the one actually following him. He can’t break what he’s already broken. But…
“Fucking hell, he sure is trying!!”
A reverse thrust, a familiar scene, familiar pathing like serendipity had an abominable sense of humor. But this time the armyscape, the miles, the tents, the concrete, and looming shadow. It was scorched black and rutted to cinders, destroyed and trashed more than nature ever could manage. And the Wall was holed like no monster but one could hope to accomplish. A trench of empty earth, of dust flaking apart. The smell of ozone like cordite saying enough of the timescale. Minutes at most, but destruction already too extreme. To fucking sacrilege more so. This place was a monument and reminder to everyone who died, and yet he’s cutting it apart like… like he’s not in control anymore.
Heated stare turning cold, demarking intent and path set before her. The new scar stretching inward but terminating center stage, right in the middle of what used to be Berta. A new crater to add to the innumerable, but one just cut right into the scene. Right to bedrock like it was scoped away. This was different, disturbing, too much too fast and damn one hell of an iconoclastic display. One that’s going to raise hell that really shouldn’t be raise like this. A habit just trying to break her further, just trying to make her tear his damn head off permanently. But this was too much to just leave well enough alone, something too extreme to just keep to herself. Her radio flipping on as reflex demanded anything.
“Hill Actual get me connected back to-!!”
Nothing, not even tone.
“Hill Actual respond!!”
Just empty static like buzzing foam.
“Anybody respond-“
“Aegis…”
The radio, the air, her bones vibrated to the life. All as a new star dawned in the growing shadows of distant strife. The clouds could not hid what they could not compete with, a form risen higher than the curvature could keep away. A grand blue glare staring back through the scar it had made in her memorial left to rot. A new mountain towering up, adding itself to the crests still too far to make out. But there was no grandeur, no beauty, no majesty to this peak. It was another golem… no, titan of uptaken stone. A living mountain in the shape of a monster too fitting to rule over this emptied land. A laceroid to end it all, staring back at his savior.
“What…the hell… have you done?”
Vertigo, dread, eldritch existentialism. A terror insurmountable as the landscape moved of its own volition. And spoke without regard of human contrition.
“Th-the only way…”
Her radio fizzed, overloaded like the air. His voice like an echo falling into and out of itself. It was still him, still his, but Seth was taking overdoing it to cataclysmic flair.
“S-seth… you… need to hold on-“
“The only wa-ay… The only way to finish this…”
That mountain, that star, all of turned in slow breaking order. Distance silencing what undoubtedly thundered, but making no concession for the ground rumbling faster.
“I-I have to do this. Have… to end this…”
Steps reverberating through miles upon miles, quaking this landscape to threatened fracture. Too much weight, too much yet still solid and at will. And marching its peak away… to…
“I have to go ba-back… To end it all there… Only way- The center there…”
Talons smashing forests to barren tracks, air cracking apart by just moving along. Too much, too damn much to be real. Yet Aegis forced to stone cold as it tried to disappear.
“I have to do this… But yo-you have to stay!!”
A shame at hesitating flared away by the nerve. Until that boom flattened it back down in fear… shared unheard.
“You have to stay- Have to protect them…! You need to stay there! Ne-need to keep them safe from me…”
That nerve faltered at that still uncrossed Rubicon, that broken open wall scarred so deep it hurt to breath. The fear in this reverb, the dread made real and monumental. Aegis couldn’t fathom, couldn’t make sense of what was coming, but what was worse was that Seth knew it was too much.
“You have to protect them… Keep them safe from me… You have t-to shield them… Keep them safe from me…!”
This was insane, this was impossible. Even she had her limits. She couldn’t cover something like this. The distance alone to even reach him now was obscene and he was wanting her to… to shield the whole damn cordon. He was destroying it, the whole thing in one shot like a lunatic. He was going to blow a fucking hole into the Earth’s crust with that kind of power. This idiots going to kill everyone… unless she stopped it here.
“You have to shield them from me…! You have to do this!! The only way… The only one!! You have to… You ha-ve to…!”
“You have to protect them from me!!!”
The land, the world, everything shook like a god was making landfall to reshape it all for good. True titan talons flattening pyres burned to stain. A blackened patch of rubble that once personified his pain. His town, his Frigateville, his homecoming at last. But all of it beyond this collapsing iconoclast. Expanse of being, expanse of existence. This form unwieldly, unstable in persistence. A living mountain, a laceroid of dread. A hole in gravity’s laws grossly overfed. Too much matter, too much pressure. Not enough threads to keep it in fetter. Inverse square inverted in scope, a blinding center held back only by hope. That resentment molded, used as template. But so overburdened in kind to ne’er contemplate. What was to happen, what was to befall. But still knowing full well it was coming… for them both.
Both eyes failing to see straight, tracking possibilities in the darkness she was stuck in out of fear. Not enough speed in the world would get her in range, get her shield around this wondering cliff face set on going thermo-
*BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo*
The clouds burst apart, the sky tried to turn black, everything on that torrential horizon pushed away by reality snapped taut. No thunder, no rumble, just hollowed out space. What was coming was here and she was being outpaced. Her hands trembled, her being trembled, everything trembled before this awakening hell. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, but she had to defy this fail. Arms spreading out before the empty collapse nigh. But the shape was too much, the scale too much. Just fizzling to haze before anything could create. Strain and fight against instinct to just run. Or go total burn and tear out the apocalypse’s starting gun. Everything twisting, everything cutting. No focus no control no time to hesitate. Her arms winced hard, torn muscle made realized, expense paid out and now feeling the excised. Caustic fear and shattering resolve, and nonsense bleeding though. Like the whole damn world was resonating to his… fucking buzz! A tune it couldn’t hold, it can’t hold! This had to be stopped, but it had to end here!
Determination locking her feet, drive denying replete, damnable oversharing pushed out by her own revving beat. Her own pushed limits, her own deepened call, her own unasked question of just how far she can go. A shape, a line, a curve in her mind fighting clear through the trill. From Block 36 to those stupid rocky plinths. From Eagle’s Fall to the bloody Final Mile. Every inch, every plate, every suffering drenched stand. This whole fucking defense will be suffered-
“No More!!”
A reflex, an instinct, an automatic spring out. That shield bearing arm forcing tight and unfurled. That barren metal mirror, that false mundane, this chosen fate bared by none but those worthy. A power, a purpose no longer hidden by the splitting up of twins of paracausal existence. A call, a need, a demand made loud. No more sleeping in wait for someone else to take this stand. The final plate slamming home, this metal shield made whole, and its silent will called forth for all it had hoard. A spreading, a passing, an accent to the need. Terrible power held at by to match what may come. But pressed to fuel and pressed to shoot forth to break it all upon!
That barrier, that translucence, that comforting millimeter cannoning out in pure ballistic. Haloes cracking off, air spalling to hot white, a real impervious wall crashing across the landscape with no end in sight. No end but up, no point left but there. A dome of pure energy shutting off this call of despair. Twin halves meeting in telluric planet fall, crashing together in devastation reverbed. But climbing, filling, closing it all away before all was rent asunder.
And sunder was rent for all. Strikes of lightning ringing everything to deaf, yet turning matter weightless as if gravity bereft. This mountain, this monolith, this titan of siphon. The whole of its crush rising with no bind. Accretion accelerating, friction uncontrollable. Levitating higher in discordant pull unavoidable. Forests burned, toppled and heaved from just excess drifting off allowing no reprieve. The hole in its center, this gravity well of energy, this pure denial of convention and theory. This molded void, this paired over being, this final gambit to forced it all into parity. But more and less, to destroy and recreate. To take in everything and put it all back. And make all this resentment matter at last.
The crush, the pull, this matter not strong enough. Fodder to feed the insatiable and use it all up. Metric mega tons reeling, compressing, and falling in. The birth and death of a more real star already to begin. This horrid shape, this nightmare god, all of collapsing as just carried façade. Smashing into flat, boiling into plasma, breaking too fast in arching corona. A new shape, a new stature, all of this condensate matter. All it dissolving to star dusted being. A void made whole, crushing everything down to size. Squeezing everything that had broken it to more fitting demise. To fuel, to burn, to be reborn in light. And make this scar a memory none had to fight.
Nothing else mattered, nothing could matter. There was only the pull, the hunger, the resentment. This molded over void, this Resent put to heel, made to do what it wanted for an actual cause. Disharmony, recoiling, fighting that resonance. The one it subverted and so owed penance. This blurred binary system, these melding together stars. Now both hollow voids set to rend each other apart. No forms, no beings, just wills adverse. Grit and tone seeking to traverse. All the while their body, his body ceased to be. Just particles and matter overburdened and set to flee. To light this neutron star, to fuse iron and go nova, to turn laws to crimes and destroy it again all over!!
The light, the fire, this primordial oven recreated as living being. The gravity, the pull, the totality of rivalry spinning out of control. Those glaring red, those condemning blue. And this blinding white taking all to its final absolute point. As orange over took and reality wanted control. As safety for everyone else crashed overhead. As discords snapped together. As commonality found its home. As fusion forced peace to stem this firestorm. As a moment froze to stillness, as something bordering possibility. Maybe it could last, maybe it could exist, hope rising in the light feeling this insist. A singular point, a singularity of matter. Of energy and potential holding firm from the shatter. A true god born, a real avatar to atone, power beyond possible with that hope draping over and calling home. But Seth… had no… such want!
The foundations, the threads, the strumming existence with more purpose than overpower. The discord, the strife, the rage at it all. The resentment, the hate, the loss of it all. Everything they were, everything they are. Nothing could keep them together. And so this new god broke apart! Cascading separation, energy begetting energy, fission and fusion and tearing all asunder. The land, the forest, the quiet, the town. The mountains, the hills, the vast stretching empty. The concrete, the steel, the blood and the dust. All of it. All of it! All of it must go!!
A blind a thousand fold, a light pure obliteration, matter and structure denied everything! Shattered to dust, shattered to wind, shattered to nuclear fire against fate wrought sin. A ball of annihilation to out shine the sun, to expand and take all to the afterlife of one. To drag it all back, to turn it all to clay, to remake it like pale skin as that promise entailed. Fire and plasma, a wall of desolation and deresolution. Whole forest burned away, whole towns, whole strata. Racing across this scar, charging to break all to plasma. Air at machs that forced it to cower. A wave, a tsunami, crushing everything to powder. And cresting to swallow the only thing left to tower. Wanting nothing but to tear down this wall of horror!!
To smash it to smithereens, dash its memories to shrapnel. Burn effort and expense and blood and forced chattel. All of its crimes to desiccated soil. And smash it against its only true foil. Not a kick, not punch, but absolute crash. The drive of a bass for only the moon to thrash. And everyone else to pray they survive. Another comet, another tail of simmer cut to fight danger close demise. A desperate ploy to keep staunch in the face of absolutely fucked!! The ground shattered just from the impact, faults and beds lifted to the air. Swaths recoiled away from just stymied forces brought to bear. Crashing down and rolling like wallpaper, but crushing hills like paint bubbles and mountains like molding. Not a tree survived, all dashed to nothing. But Aegis remained, gripping all to just something. Anything!!
All this terrible power, all this hidden sequester, it could only tremble and fight and do what it could. The shockwave ignoring, thundering to prominence and despair, shattering distance and making everyone the world over aware. Ripping the sky away, ripping their peace to shreds, adding quake and terror to already fearful dreads. All eyes shifting to the light scorching the horizon, ducking down as it broke their awe to regret. Kadia, Eagleville, towns in between and farther still. Everyone would feel this, everyone would see this. Everyone would know that an end had come. A new god had been born and died in their stead. A new fear had found tyranny, and revolution its head. That somehow, someway, this nightmare was at cessation.
And yet still burning apart in roiling creation. In fires destroying and smashing together. Atoms and particles under heed and under call. Vast expanse a staller hellscape, corona and plasma and impossible surface. A being remaining, a dark shell of string. A black hole core bereft yet unwilling to reclaim. This roil, this cataclysm, this world of fire. This matter made malleable and shape made raw. This purified particulate, this elemental slurry. All of it was theirs, but theirs was all his.
That mold, that void, that coating resentment. These slingshoting bodies on their ways to apogee. Their full form a blur, their existence conceptual. Spiraling apart yet dead set on reunion. But there was no hope left to bind, no restitution but the one set in line. The center, the greater, Seth latching hard. Grabbing hold of the vestige that remained of his brother. All his power used up, all his threads frayed slack. All of his resentment made rue and unable to attack. To pull back, to pull hard, to round back into accretion one final blinding time. That empty shared form, that solidified energetic, that proto godhood feeling the power of two as one. And knowing only the will to put back what had been undone!
Gravity selective, crashing down to the sea of molten plasma. Wanting, needing, pleading to be. Displacing, cratering, forcing it away. As a hand skimmed existential and rang with what may. Shapes and life, soil and sediment, landscape and quaint and chronology chosen make. The poisoned silence, the tainted earth, the clawing memories of structures left in dearth. All these home abandoned and their scaring stain. All the wrecks and monuments to everyone’s pain. All the blood, all the loss, all the fire, all the cost. Everything remembered and torturing those left. All the dust and desiccation, the memories more physical. All the lives locked away and in darkness and dismissal. All these truly forgotten dead. All those twisted and made into physical dread. Everything they were and everything they are. All of it was eaten away and making him this inverted star!
This rising hand of even brighter fury, carrying everything so that it all could cease to slurry. To remake, and return. To clean and make way. To make this world whole once more and burn this pain away! The same hand locked hard, bearing Resent as its charge. Eyes locked taking his last confession for everything too far. The pain of malignance, the suffering primordial, the wrongness of it all personified as power. Wills spiraling terminal, not time for words or justice. Only the conclusion of this god willed suplex. All its power caught in twin, all its hum made his, all its will corrupted and made to give back. And made to fall truly celestial as that hand loosed divine smack!
The soup of matter jolting to solid, atoms aligning as will made them form. As it knew their shape and set to remake, and exploded nuclear to extinguish this hate. Another wave, another wall, another too far gone. A tsunami slamming out yet reversing its mark. A spiraling expansion, a twisting galactic birth. Yet in its wake green no longer without worth. Arbor slender, trees shooting together. Splinters reverting to full unfetter. This forest burned hollow, eaten away by monster and spread, returned from the dead and given back what it once had. No marring town forgotten and reviled, no roads or burdens to give it empty miles. The vastness, the destroyed, all of it returned. And all of it at the expense of that which knew spurn.
A soul render down, made locked away in right. Twined with its jailer in this blinding wave of light. This cordon calling, this exclusion refused. The shore of this ocean of matter to use. More trees, more forests, more life to beget life. And a screaming end tearing into sight. That orange reassurance, that safety for all. One final ring to sound this toll. One final crash, one final push farther. This burning away soul made to burn ever harder. Made to suffer no more, made to rue no longer. To know that it had atoned whether it wanted to or not!
A screeching light, a personified terror, with only one way out. And that was through that barrier!!!
Aegis was blasted off her feet, shield out lasted at long blinding last. The force of expansion tearing hope to plate glass. But not to destruction, not to doom for everything. Just another rut dug back first into what little earth remained. Smoke and clog, dust sent skyward. Muscles made to papermache and regretting ever existing. Bones threatening to revolt or just lead weights on strike. And definitely a concussion if there ever was one to have. The air spinning, the sky fighting back, her lungs on fire and yet smothered in dust. A grit telling her she was alive at least, the ring not helping at all. A fight to stand or at least rise off her back almost a battle in and of itself. But the flash of that glare one final time, a crimson banshee unbound by body tripping something in her struggle. She had to get up. Now!
An arm slammed beside its opposite elbow, hoisting her sideways to get both underneath. Knee collecting more dust as it scraped to add its stability. A push up and back onto a spine unwanting of burden, but refused as need out stripped desire. That hand already back to the ground to get her feet up and out, but a kneel was all she managed before she was stopped in her struggles. A vertigo inverted, a missing mass of risen horizon. The Wall was gone, nothing but smoke spilling out of its place. A thick obfuscation, ozone and… pine? Already dissipating as nothing could keep it in. Steam and condensate, humidity conglomerated as it was roasted away. As a new forest cooled to its sudden status quo. Towering spires and low brush filling, a cloud forest revealing its majesty before the unprepared to take it. But lost in the only sound left to its dying sizzle ring. The stomp of metal on earth.
A desperate shaky rise, force pushed out where they was just so little left. A fear reignited as a figure made itself known. The sun behind glinting off armor, silver fresh sheen bereft of its wrought iron. The way it was before, no alien metal mar. Just steel and matte and whatever else he used to make it. And yet it was hollow, dark, back to unpowered again. Not even horned. Not the laceroid it hid away. Just a suit of semi mundane trudging out of the fog. Stumbling into the warm light it had outshined. And grinning from ear to ear across that still broken helmet. Yet smiling that damn same grin… As it buckled and fell, and crumpled to the ground.