Chapter 60: The Fourth Fate

Amon stopped fighting.

An immense, bony hand halted mid-reach. The light of crimson fragments flickered, dying like embers. Yet, in that second, Amon did nothing. He did not start to break the walls down, nor reinforce the seals.

His eyes opened, gold flecks shimmering in the hush of the devastated space. Amon sat cross-legged amidst great piles of rubble, his golden hair matted to his forehead with sweat, a look of quiet exhaustion on his pale face.

Crunching, guttering red light fragments danced around him, casting flickering, shifting shadows upon the solid, cracked floor.

His body losing the divinity quickly.

Then why am I so tired? He leaned against a wall of rubble for a moment.

"You wanted me tired. That’s why you are only buying time."

The darkness stilled.

"You possess strenthg that no being should be posess, why?!"

"To face cunts like you."

There was silence as Amon’s words settled. He had fought so long and so hard to protect the world, but in reality every fight had weakened reality, broke it, with every push against his opponent, the barrier separating the seven worlds, dis integrating.

He had never been created to protect the world; he was just a means to an end for his own destruction. Maybe it was despair, that made him feel thus way, or maybe it was his opponent.

The dark creature’s grip on the vast expanse of void relaxed ever so slightly. Realizing the same thing, but it gripped back. Realizing his time to care was gone.

Amon let out a breath of air. "Die already," he whispered.

The word did not echo. Instead it settled into the air, pressing upon his chest until it became almost too hard to breathe.

Golden runes erupted into life beneath his feet. Like those words were trying to manifest.

They scurried up through the rubble like a trail of grinding stone. Those simple words, reached the dark creature. The First Refusal’s myriad tendrils reeled in horror, dying before they had even retreated a few inches.

That was the voice. A skill with backlash.

And that backlash came in quick, An immense weight crashed down upon Amon as if the entire ocean were about to sink inside his chest.

And the first refusal didn’t let that chance go. Piercing Amon with his nightmares. Like he had done with liliana.

Dark tunnel vision swept over his mind, but he steeled himself and accepted. The chains of the seal were folded around his own backbone.

A few drops of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. They were not caused by a blow. No, it was the tremendous weight of this new authority being poured into his marrow.

He took a step. The world buckled.

Another. The world fell back, not in fear but in self-preservation.

"If I shatter this world by fighting it," he said, "i will do so."

The darkness exploded from him in a tidal wave of black that for a moment blanked him out from existence. Then a golden light began to pulse inside it, drawing inward to him in long snakes of radiance that ran up his neck and down his jaw.

The anguish shot up his face like a jagged and burning spike of pain; a grinding fatigue such as he had felt for so long, but sharp, new, searing.

For a fleeting moment, he was transported back to that terrible, forgotten night in Eden and the splinter of wood he had somehow managed to bury so deep within his own psyche that he had entirely forgotten it existed.

That was it, that was something the first refusal could use.

It’s voice penetrated deep into Amon’s mind. "You finally remembered, remember it all, everything that you despair. " it said.

The gold dissolved in a cold dread, stone-like in his belly, a far sharper ache than all his millennia of hardship put together. "Ha! Remember what? Stop playing your games with me, I am not my students."

A pause, then he continued anyway. "You were never created to protect the world." The words echoed in Amon’s mind as a cold realization. A chill ran down his spine that he could not shake off.

"You are like me!"

Before he could even process the creature’s words, he was snapped back to reality by a blue flash of color at the periphery of his domain.

Blue was a color that Amon had never associated with this particular entity, and it was urgent and foreign in a way that made his gut twist.

Amon’s eyes snapped toward it. "That role wasn’t mine in the first place.."

"AKJBDUIEBABJSNAAA!"

The First Refusal screeched in sheer horror. Someone had touched an original law. He felt the harmonic tremor resonating deep within his bony frame, echoing through the mountain of rubble.

Olympus. the creature thought.

It’s eyes narrowed.

Liliana.

***

Liliana touched the Key.

Liliana was instantly transported to a desolate, frozen salt pan, miles wide and seemingly endless, with a cold so biting that it forced itself up through her bare soles.

She slowly turned around and saw three doors. The first was a tarnished gold color. The second was black as obsidian. The third was made of bleached bone.

The golden door opened first.

He was young; his eyes were unburdened. He was standing before a figure of such blinding light that she had to look away.

As she approached the door made of black obsidian, she was once again transported to the small village of her childhood. She saw her dear friends, grinning from ear to ear, a look of pure joy on his face.

But then the sky began to close up, swallowing the sun, and everything was devoured by a terrible void.

"What...is happening?"

The bone door opened. He had built the Second World for her. It looked exactly the same as she had left it.

Amon was there with his Second, but there was a hole where something else should have been. A name. A person. She strained to remember, but she was given only static.

The cold seemed to deepen into her lungs. "What is the price?" she asked.

The cold hummed up from beneath her feet. "Everything."

She clenched her fists, her nails biting into her palms. "Then everything I shall give." she said.

The three doors all broke at once. A simple wooden door appeared in their place. It seemed like something you might find on a small rural cottage door.

"The answer that was not written," the Key replied.

As soon as her fingers touched it, she was flooded with a vision as raw and vivid as her own memories of Eden, of the Creator and the first humans and the great task he had set before them: the writing of their own stories.

In Eden. The Creator. Amon as a young man standing at the side of the throne of light. Before them lay a scroll of gold.

On it a script of glory, but now it was smudged with something dark and wet. The Creator was not watching humanity. He was watching Amon. Amon was watching the Creator.

Liliana stumbled back, the ice cracking under her heel. "Wait..."

It had also revealed the first lie that was ever spoken, before any other had been invented. And for a moment, as she knelt there on the cold, hard floor, she felt each of her heartbeats as if they were being pounded into her chest.

She lunged for the door again.

The darkness inside her split.

A scaly, obsidian limb shot out from between her shoulder blades and slammed through the ice, splintering it in a cascade of sharp shards.

The force of it drove her to her knees. Behind her, a massive, shapeless form reared up from the darkness. Two burning crimson eyes fixed on her, and a cold, putrid breath played against her ear.

"Stop."

It hurt her to smile, but the pain in her jaw only made her look more determined as she spat a mouthful of blood onto the ice in front of her.

"So you are afraid of it."

A colossal form burst toward her, but a great wall of sapphire light shot up from the end of the Key. The creature crashed into the frozen ocean, causing it to creak and shift alarmingly.

Liliana slowly rose from the ground, her legs sore. She looked down at the small object in her hand. "You’ve been living inside me for so long," she said.

"You showed me all the things that I wanted to see. The locked-off domains, the horrible creatures that reside there. But you never showed me these things." Her hand tightened around the Key in her hand.

"Eden. The Creator. Him."

The entity went utterly silent. The part of the first refusal, still embedded inside her.

She began to drag the Key across the frozen ground. "You hid the truth, tell me." she said.

A low, rumbling voice that did not belong to either herself or the creature said, "Choose," from beneath the ice.

Three paths materialized. Amon. The World. The First Refusal.

The weight of the prophecy fell upon her shoulders. The pressure was felt in the small of her back. She felt her head bowing and her knees dropping in an attempt to reach the ice.

"I reject all three," she said.

The pressure intensified. The air grew thick, suffocating.

Her hand burned from holding the Key up to the ceiling. "I don’t care about your prophecy. I don’t care what Olympus saw. I don’t care what the Creator wrote in his little scripture," she said.

A fourth door materialized before her. "I want the fate that wasn’t written," she whispered.

The Key thumped her palm once, then burst into blue light.