219. Olivia Yang Zheng: The honoured one devoured by Chaos

Karl flinched for the first time. There was no idea for him how to make it this time. It was impossible to make it out alive. That is to say that no one could ever pretend the first phase of the first battle would end simply because two bodies had already been opened.

The thing is, this love cannot pretend it does not include the moment the open question is forced to remember the oldest wound in order to keep standing.

Oshun came again, one-armed, gold blood sheeting down her ruined side, peacock-feather edges still sharp enough to cut concepts.

She drove the river into Karl’s open ribs with the intimacy of a teacher who has decided the student will learn or drown.

The impact drove him to both knees.

The Super Ring flared, yet the pain reached deeper than any ring could block.

It reached the place where the first abandonment still lived.

PUFF!

PSSS!

AHHH!

The memory did not arrive gently.

It arrived the way Kaos had once arrived at the bottom of Hell — absolute, without permission, older than the distinction between then and now.

Karl was small again.

A house that no longer existed.

A woman’s back turning away.

The sound of a door that would never reopen.

His mother.

She did not speak a final kindness.

She did not look back.

She simply walked into the dark that had been waiting at the edge of the yard, and the dark closed around her the way a mouth closes around a name.

Kaos.

Not the softened story later ages would tell.

The true absence.

The thing that had existed before the first light decided it wanted to be seen.

Karl  the child watched the absence swallow her.

He remembered the fire that tried to rise in his chest and failed.He remembered the sun that tried to form behind his eyes and was snuffed out by a speck of that same darkness. For once in his life, there was guarantee for the new path that he had chosen. 

He remembered the power that tried to answer and found itself too small. But this time, there was not going back. 

The memory ended the way all true wounds end: with the child still standing in the yard, alone, the absence already gone, the lesson already carved.

Back in the crater the memory became fuel.

Karl’s head lifted.

Blood ran from his mouth, his side, the opened cheek.

The Super Ring of the Super Primordial Black Hole began to change.

It no longer burned with compressed starlight alone.

It drank the memory of the swallowed mother, the failed fire, the snuffed sun, the power that had been too small, and it answered with something that had never been small.

An infinite black sun.

Not light.

The opposite of light that had decided it would no longer ask permission to exist.

A singularity of pure, refusal-shaped gravity that wore the shape of a sun only so that the gradas would understand what they were seeing.

The crater darkened.

Oshun’s river recoiled for the first time.

Karl rose to his feet.

The wound in his side remained open.

He simply stopped caring.

His voice carried across the gradas and into every watching superverse.

Karl:

My mighty attacks cannot reach thee?

And who decided that?

My blazing sun was swallowed up by a speck of darkness?

And who decided that?

The only one who gets to decide such things is me.

Begone.

The infinite black sun answered the declaration.

It did not explode outward.

It collapsed every distance between Karl and Oshun into a single point of absolute refusal and then released it.

Oshun’s remaining arm rose in pure instinct.

The river tried to become a wall.

Honey and peacock-feather light tried to become a shield.

None of it mattered.

The black sun took the river’s surge, the last of her divine blood, the memory of every offering that had ever been placed at her shrine, and compressed them into a silence that had weight.

Oshun was driven across the crater and into the far wall of the wound with a sound that made several lower Star-Grade seats in the gradas crack.

Gold blood painted the stone in a wide, shining arc.

She did not rise immediately.

Karl stood in the center of the infinite black sun, the Super Ring no longer distinguishable from the power that wore him.

He looked at the place where Oshun had landed. They looked at the memory of the mother walking into the absence.

His mother really loved him. Olivia Yang Zheng. She was so special that the chaos by itself did not take her existence.

He looked at the sleeping form of Ryan somewhere far above the battlefield, still closed by the primordial goddess Sleep.

And he spoke one more time, quieter, yet every grada heard it.

Karl:

You wanted to teach the difference between need and love.

I remember the first hand that left. It was my everything.

I remember the darkness that swallowed her. However, the light was still there.

I remember the fire that failed and the sun that was snuffed. But for what?

Today the only one who decides what reaches me, what swallows me, or what remains, is me.

The infinite black sun pulsed once.

Oshun pushed herself up on her remaining elbow, gold blood running from her mouth, eyes still fierce.

Oshun: Then the lesson continues.

The river does not end because a black sun has decided to speak.

Get ready, Axis.

The first phase is not finished.

And neither is the remembering.

Karl settled into the stance of a man who had just turned the oldest wound into a weapon.

The gradas leaned forward as one.

Sophia and Ananke, watching from their fragment of probability, felt the exact moment the open question grew a new kind of teeth.

The fight went on.

Bloody.

Talking.

So for what? there was no reason for a man to ignore when his world is taken away from him.

Learning.

Remembering.