There is nothing for a million miles below David as the fabric of the world tears to reveal empty space. Air and time are rendered foreign. Flight is rendered movement in abstract space without a world to push against, and yet David finds his way to Yaldabaoth’s side. His fingers move towards the God who would leave, and yet find themselves frozen just beyond His sweet flesh’s embrace.
Below them Zorvilon continues to flare as his power strains body, mind and soul. He had been here before and yet it could only prepare him so much. The act of being cut in half may have been enough to force a compromise between him and the burning frenzy within, but this was different. It felt like he would be torn apart not just from the interior but from outside. A current pulled him down as the body maintained itself firmly in position, in turn ripping his flesh apart. He was anchored to Chad Anderson who seemed hardly worse for wear and floated about, untouchable as Zorvilon’s jagged bolts of fire tore through the empty sky.
Zorvilon would tire eventually, he knew, so there was no point in engaging. All Anderson needed to do was buy enough time for Yaldabaoth to take care of the trash. He didn’t need to win. He didn’t even need to try. All he needed was to wait out the clock on Zorvilon and David in their futile attempt to claim godhood from God himself. It was a vain hubris, frogs lusting after the whitest swan, unable to see the buffet of flies before them if only they would kneel. They could have lived on this world in perpetuity and yet they would crave more? What hubris. What utter contempt for the way things should be.
Zorvilon burned with rage as frenzy overtook him. The world had been stagnant for so long. He had been stagnant for so long, and now he would lose to some nobody simply because he had trained in stall tactics? No. Zorvilon wouldn’t stand for this. He wouldn’t allow himself to become no one again. A decade of sliding back into decay after the reveal of foreign powers had been more than enough. He had lost so much to bad actors within and enemies without his kingdom to last ten thousand years that it had been rendered a shadow of its former self within a single child’s span of life.
The general shape and color of man gave way only to fire. The heat of life and desire to keep going after gave way to frenzied rage. Anderson was not blinded for his technique, but it had become clear that stall tactics were no longer possible. He would fight or he would die.
And yet in the moment he would take on Yaldabaoth’s divine and nourishing light to render him the true embodiment of The Left Hand of God, his god failed him and fire speared him through the chest. It would seem that without Yaldabaoth’s latent energy left in the air, there was nothing to take in as power.
As the man known formerly as The Left Hand of God falls he is already a corpse, and as his face approaches the point at which it is supposed to make contact with the ground, it is already ash. Yaldabaoth feels his essence fade and does not react. His hand is cut off, and yet there is no response. And then Amanda’s tears begin to fall from the eyes of God. She had been given a place to stay and unconditional protection from those who would take advantage of her grief and now she would let them die? No. It wasn’t going to—
But in her anguish Yaldabaoth refuses to resurrect him.
“What do you mean you won’t resurrect him?!” she screams through the god’s lips.
“I will not tamper with the natural course of this creation.”
His words move through the air as pure sound in absence of an origin in flesh. They grace all ears from all sides, and yet to Amanda inspire nothing but rage.
“Then why are you here?”
The face of God does not speak. There are no words, only the thought within Amanda’s head.
“I’m here because you called.”
David begins to make his way through the absent air, floating on currents of nothing towards the dual-natured God.
Amanda’s voice breaks as she screams, “You call yourself a god and you can’t resurrect one man? First you let Sion die and now this?!”
To David it seemed like she was screaming at herself, but he continued to approach anyway. Yaldabaoth does not respond. From the God’s body a wave of light and fire blows out David’s material form. Zorvilon’s frenzied flame quivers but is not destroyed— perhaps he is immune to attacks of fire and light. David reforms in place from seeming nothing— perhaps he is already at the portal to another world.
Beneath them the waves of cracking light continue pouring out of time into the world. The sky shivers as though infinite heat degrades the fabric of space to render it bent. The sun above them is saturated past the point of visibility, and yet David’s form grows blacker against the background of the rainbow sky. Beneath and behind him is a dearth of color, the inverse of the space they reside in. He is tethered to it by a shadow miles wide streaming from his form and blocking the power of Yaldabaoth from reaching out to wipe away this stain from the fabric of the world.
And yet Yaldabaoth hardly seems to notice, preoccupied by internal turmoil. Amanda continues to scream in a voice hardly audible for the distance and extreme wind pulled by the vacuum they reside in.
“Oh almighty Yaldabaoth, what can you do?!”
“Anything.” The voice enters all ears without a medium to propagate through.
“But not this?”
“But not this.”
“And you call yourself almighty?”
“No, but I am close enough.”
David reaches out to touch them, so close as to almost succeed, but the air missing between them expands to render his fingers distant once again.
“You’ve been gone for a thousand years and you come back now for me but you won’t do the one thing I ask for?”
A response is not required, and so there is none.
Zorvilon expands and attempts to encircle the dual being, but finds himself locked away, more of a shield against David than an enemy engaged in battle. David passes through easily, yet quickly finds himself outside and again and again.
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“What’s the point of this?”
Yaldabaoth’s voice echoes through all ears, this time sounding as though it originates from the same void the world’s air is pouring out into.
“Do as you will.”
His voice fades and Amanda feels His presence fade into Her own. She looks to Her fingers, each easily capable of the force of ten nuclear bombs at a twitch. She looks to the sky, cracked, and sees the portal out of time. All around and below there is a void. Above there is no sky, the air is boiling away from Zorvilon’s frenzied flame, and light has been saturated past the point of usefulness. Even still She sees beyond him and to David. His features have blurred. His soul has become distorted, corrupt, and yet could She even say it had changed?
They had killed together in pursuit of a better world, and She had betrayed him at the last moment to prevent his slaughter of ten thousand and more. And yet here She stood over a forming pit to be a thousand miles wide. How many bodies would have already fallen over the edge? How many more were to come?
She reached out to the sides a hundred miles away and stopped their expanse. Strain applies to the fingertips and yet it is clear minimal effort has been expended. She blows Zorvilon apart with a breath, and he is scattered far into the sky, but immediately begins to reconcentrate.
She looks to David and erases him completely, and yet he reforms from below. There are no features to be recognized, and yet She clearly understands a smile. She scowls and he is destroyed by the air blown forward to render him giblets, and yet out of the giblets flies a man once more.
She rips his legs and arms apart and throws them to opposite ends of the east and west and north and south in all directions, and yet new limbs reform. She tears his head from its inky black stump of a neck and flicks it to the portal with the force of a tungsten rod falling from sky to earth, and yet a new head simply regrows. His whole body is thrown into the void, the sky, the sun, the stars— reformed and whole moments after each time. In each death the inverted picture of an absent God washes out, but is not erased.
She lets go of the pit and takes hold of the fractures in the sky. Rays of light are removed from space, and air finds its way back to the void it had been stripped from. And yet in this moment Amanda finds the strain of a god magnified to its utmost potential. Every fiber of her being strains as Her soul itself finds itself on the balance. She is the God of this world, and yet it takes Her all to preserve it for even this one moment. Lactic acid builds and is washed away by divinity, and yet its presence lingers beneath the skin. Amanda feels as though holding Her breath despite being in the largest continuous expanse of air ever materialized on the face of the planet in its history. She erases David and he does not rematerialize.
Yaldabaoth remembers Her past, the betrayal, the rage, the anger, the pain. She remembers the last apotheosis, the last man rendered God in Her place and the one before and the infinity of others all distant, lost amongst the cosmos on ten thousand other worlds lost to time.
She remembers Sion and Anderson. She remembers the last thousand years of pain and torment and turmoil. All this power, all this immortality, all this strength and freedom expended on this moment of infinite duration holding something together that in a single moment of distraction would immediately be once again torn apart. It had taken a thousand years to reach this point, and yet She would have to hold it for a thousand more. Would it heal? Would there be any change to this state given time? She didn’t know. It didn’t seem there was an answer.
She could do so much, and yet was stuck here maintaining the status quo. Even in success what was there to be gained? A restoration to the order maintained in stagnancy despite Her everything being spent on simply preventing the world from being torn apart? To what end? She stood to gain nothing but animosity. She stood to live ten thousand years here in this stagnant world, to be hated and despised as the single being atop the status quo. She stood to be the capstone on all cultivation and its pursuits. She stood as the God above all, the once absent pinnacle now visible to all and the single target to be overtaken to reach the same end.
But Amanda didn’t crave power. She never had. This wasn’t the end goal. This wasn’t the present she had strove for. Tears began to fall from her face as time found itself caught up in her chest. She wanted love, not adoration. She wanted peace, not constant turmoil in pursuit of it. She wanted just enough strength to live for herself, not absolute power to impose Herself over all.
Amanda fell to her knees floating in the sky and threw her hands to her face, sobbing, shivering, as the sky blew itself once again apart. David softly put his hand on Amanda’s shoulder and comforted her.
“I know you didn’t want this. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you. “You’re sorry?” no you’re not.” She pushed him away, but he came back.
“You’re half right, I don’t regret what I did, but I am truly sorry you feel this way.”
There was no point in a response, so David continued speaking.
“I didn’t want it either, at first, but the power got to my head and now I’m— we’re here.”
Amanda continued to cry into her hands, but half-listened to the words.
“There were so many things I wanted and I thought I could have them this way.”
“But you were wrong…” Amanda spoke softly, trailing off.
“No, I wasn’t. How else am I supposed to take what I want if not by force? It’s not like people will give you things just because you ask, you have to reach out and take them.”
“Like this?,” Amanda gestured below with one hand.
“What difference does it make—?” David began,
“How could you possibly say that about ten million lives blown away in the blink of an eye?”
“Because there will be more. Atop the path to the top there are a hundred million corpses. That’s just how it is. You can’t rise in this world except upon a sea of blood. Just look at Yaldabaoth. So many followers and devotees, all fed upon his ichor. If not for him they would have had to tear each other apart instead.”
“And yet he gave himself,” David continued. “How naive; there’s only so much of the self to give. You’re left with a choice now. You can either continue to fight me in a futile struggle against the inevitable—”
Amanda cut him off— “Futile?”
“Futile.” He continued without a pause in cadence. “Even if, and I do mean if you kill me, there will be ten thousand more of me and those like me every day for the rest of eternity. Is that what you want? To kill me and them forever?”
“No…..” She nearly choked on the single word.
David paused for a moment before deciding on a response, “When the time for words has passed, action is all that remains.” He had killed himself after speaking those words, and here he was now, consoling Amanda, hoping for her to do the same.
“You’d be just as bad as us if you—” David thought of continuing, but he knew those words were empty and trite. They were hollow and meaningless, so redundant and quite simply wrong, so he delivered others instead.
“You don’t want to kill me and them forever, and I don’t want to fight you forever. Let’s both get what we want. Leave this world and go to another— go make another, I have faith in you— you’re strong, you can do it.”
“No you don’t, you’re just saying that.” Amanda retorted.
“Even if I am, you know it to be true. I want this world and you don’t want to protect it. I value what is here, but there is nothing for you left. Nothing stops you from leaving. There are other worlds you can go to, other times, other places. You don’t want this and I do, so let me have it.”
There was a long pause in which David continued siphoning energy from the new god.
…
…
“Fine.”
While he had only scratched 1% of Amanda the God Yaldabaoth’s power, he allowed her to leave through the portal of his own design. With her departure he was free to do as he will, and oh how he shall. So she left, and David was left alone with Zorvilon, god of fire alight with madness.