Chương 198: 4.63 A mother's gentle caress

After leaving their loot behind, the two of them descended the staircase. Irwyn tried to have a better look at what the floor actually looked like, but that got harder with each step, rather than easier. It was familiar, and incredibly magical… but every other detail just felt innately irrelevant. Like the structures were so meaningless that the world itself was denying them shape or color in the face of what else lay in that very room.

Though the first impression of the true legacy came with surprisingly little fanfare. There was yellow on the left, red in the middle, black to the right. Each stretching into infinity. Each magical, yet at the same time, Irwyn could not even begin to comprehend how. Either whatever boundary held them back was too potent to see through, or his mind just refused to fully comprehend what it was looking at. But that much was only to be expected.

"We will meet on the other side," Elizabeth said with a smile. Full of arrogance, Pride. Embodying that which the Voidmother had demanded with every breath. She took Irwyn into a crushing hug before he could respond.

"Yes," he replied, unsure what else to say except return the embrace. Perhaps that was everything there was to say. Elizabeth could not allow even a figment of doubt to enter her mind, while Irwyn had full belief they could do what they had set out to. They had felled a dragon, what came next would be perilous in a different way, perhaps harder, but by no means more dangerous. As far as chances were, taming something incomprehensible and not meant to be held was better than a hostile legend.

The gap between stepping forward and entering blurred. In both memory and reality. They naturally moved to the side first, leaving the Flame in the middle as more of a stabilizing force for the moment, but the decision to walk forward became the exact same as taking that action. Thus Irwyn found himself within infinite Light. In a way, it reminded him of the dragon's breath, just pushed to a completely different extreme. There was no Time. There were no natural laws. No causality or chronology.

Though Irwyn's mortal mind would perceive and re-arrange everything as if happening one after another and at the same pace, every moment could take eternities or be skipped entirely and then occur later instead. So there was no such thing as order of events. Merely an artificial structure Irwyn had to graft onto what really happened, was happening, and will have happened. So, with that in mind, the 'first' event was becoming as one with the remnant.

A part of Irwyn had expected he would have to find it within the bright infinity. It was called a Fragment after all. Logic dictated that there would be a piece to be found. Yet Lumen had been Light itself. There was no piece of glowing rock to touch. By entering the endless yellow, Irwyn had already become one with his Mother. Or what was left of her. There was no will. No thoughts or ideas. The brothers would not have given those pieces up otherwise, would they?

Just the last vestiges of personality remained, a gentle tone of voice, coming from as if from long dead lungs. Barely enough to compare to his dreamt memories and realize just how much had been lost from the original. It ached, even if those memories weren't his. A small fragment of Irwyn's mind wished that it didn't. So the pain stopped. And there Irwyn realized the true difficulty of what he was attempting. There was no mind present, except his own. A mortal will, melded with the piece of a being without limits.

One that would fulfil every whim, every even distant echo of desire. As long as Irwyn sought it, anything could happen. Except it would not be well-formed and carefully worded wishes. No, it would be notions fulfilled the instant they were born, with no logic to guide the tempers of the heart. Ah, how easy it would be to ruin oneself with that. Omnipotence, wielded through a stained window with broken arms. He wondered if one could destroy themselves utterly with just a single particular thought of self-loathing.

And then instantly became aware of a thousand different ways that could happen with exact and excruciating detail, his idle curiosity fulfilled. That should have knocked him out, but since Irwyn did not want that to happen in any way, it did not. Instead, the figments smoothly entered his memory, not a hitch passing. He had to tread carefully. Concentrate on what he needed. The issue was, Irwyn himself had never been sure what that was. What was the best course of action?

What was or should be his heart's greatest desire? What purpose did his life truly serve? And since he dared question, with a gentle caress of Light on his cheek, Irwyn was made aware. A man with grey eyes was. He refused to be beheld, same went for his actions and their consequences. His foe chose the same. Ten thousand lives flashed before Irwyn's eyes. Ones where the Tears had never gone on that faithful heist that had thrown his life out of the mundane. Of course, it had been Fated to happen.

Gentle yet firm threads had guided him towards that. Woven long before his birth by a great being desperately clinging to any trace of hope. A small part of Irwyn was repulsed by the very existence of those treads, even if they worked to his benefit. The Fragment made them vanish. Which Irwyn instantly regretted and wanted them back. They reappeared, just as they had been. But the inevitability was not the point. It was the suppositions. Possibilities of what if.

Staying in Ebon Respite that was never disturbed by Alira's rampage. Leaving Irwyn to live on as the biggest fish in a meaningless backwater, but side by side with his oldest friends. In some, he lived out a good chunk of life, decades, before he ever realized that he was not aging. Then the paths diverged. Sometimes he spent his time in that city, watching everyone around him perish. The Tears first, Waylan last, and Old Crow almost never - a fellow immortal, never changing across centuries.

Succumbing only to the most violent deaths, and often returning even from that. Elsewhen, Irwyn eventually left rather than watch everyone age and die. As Young Mockingbird or dozens of other monikers. He was worse at magic. In almost none of the possibilities, he ever tapped into his visions or reached even the edge of Conception. His journey started far later, with no imminent threat pushing him towards exile. Rarely did he still meet Desir, never Elizabeth. Deep down, Irwyn rejected that notion.

Their feelings, finally confessed and then strengthened throughout the trial. By facing life and death, side by side. They had promised each other eternity. If that meant slaying any past that would have prevented their meeting, so be it! The Rot devoured everything. Sometimes sooner, always later. The soonest happened as early as around the present day outside - Ebon Respite overrun by hordes that made what had happened to Abonisle look like a light skirmish - but it was almost a staple of the possibilities.

Be it years or decades, the undead always arrived eventually. And they never, ever, stopped coming. In a thousand possibilities, Irwyn witnessed his death. In most circumstances, he erupted into a blazing sun, razing whatever city he had been in to ash along with a good chunk of the countryside. Rarely, a particularly powerful Lich would realize a fraction of the Truth and manage to keep the body whole and usable - the Duchy Federation usually succumbed to the consequences of that soon after.

Irwyn wondered what happened to him afterward in those cases. Born again. Different place, different time. The bonds of Golem's Fateweaving weakened, yet still there. But no longer Irwyn. An identity discarded easily, for its briefness when compared to eternity. Another chance, even though the odds would become worse with every consequent attempt. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. But a truth had crystallized through the experience.

Always, Irwyn had felt that vague thirst for power. A desire for self-determination, yet no real understanding of what that meant or why. The thought prompted him to be made aware that some of his past life's desires had indeed bled through. Any last remnant of doubt about whether it had actually been his own was also stripped away. But in a way, an alignment occurred. Ignis Lumen had wanted to end the Rot. He had wanted to avenge the Aspects and end the threat of the Betrayer. Irwyn wanted to live.

Whichever life he ended up choosing, he was unwilling to give it up. And yet, the vision had shown him a simple truth. The Rot came. Over and over, eternally. New visions sprouted, like fruits of curiosity. A million lives, a million wars fought. Some millennia long. Some lasting longer than history. More than once, Irwyn lived to see Time slain again, the River unravelling and all of reality with it.

Ten thousand times, he stood at the forefront of the very last bastion, wherever it ended up being, facing legions without end, hopelessly defending the few that yet lived. More times than he could count, his life was claimed far sooner than that, rarely ever by anything other than undead. So, if Irwyn wanted to live, he had to win. The only question was how. The Fragment answered the best it could. The Betrayer's corpse was sprawled over the singular place even approaching comprehensible in the Great Beyond.

Outside the universe, no laws of reality imparted by the Aspects existed, yet the broken carcass was potent enough to enforce a semblance in its 'vicinity'. Therefore, Irwyn could witness the infinite armies rising from the shapeless existence. After all, just like Lumen was Light, the Betrayer was Souls. All of them. They were his creation, as commanded by Ignis who did not want things to be broken. A wish to make thoughts eternal. Insurance that the sundering of the flesh would not lead to a true loss.

Of course, the Allfather had never intended for there to be nearly so many. Just two, for his sons. When he had still cared. The Aspects were omnipotent, only restrained by their capacity to wield that power. Their roles were not a matter of necessity, but preference. But all the rules and laws of magic had not been made to bind their creators. The Betrayer would never stop. Would never run out of reserves, for its power was innately bottomless. The only way to put an end to the Rot was to cull its source.

Yet it was not so easy, even with the Fragment's limitless possibility. The power of one Aspect ended where another's was already being upheld - one of the few restrictions they could not bypass at will. Then how had the Betrayer killed the other eight? There was no memory to be gleaned. Those events had been burned out of history so thoroughly not even the Aspects themselves in their fullness would have been able to witness them again. So the Fragment offered a different answer instead.

It could not directly predict the Betrayer's death, but it could conceptualize it. Going through every possibility within its power and arriving at one: Something powerful enough that it could not be fully predicted. A half-formed Edict that had once cracked its owner's Name and was thus banned by a caring Mother. Except now that oath was in the way and had to be unmade. A binding made by Lumen in her fullness. It would not be so easy to break with just a small and twisted portion of her as a tool.

But the fetters could be weakened. Chipped where it mattered the most. It would still by no means be easy, but it was ultimately an Oath. Not fetters, but a well-meaning restraint. That would make all the difference when it came to severing it. And it would have to be done. Nothing short of an Edict could even affect an Aspect. Those were the rules. The walls of the box that had been built around reality. Everyone was born into those restraints. Even the first children.

The universe was, after all, a playground for them. A game built for the puppets and pets with precise and unbreachable laws. Because magic could be such a potent yet volatile thing. How could its creators give it any real bite? Of course, that had been when they had still kept watch. When no one perished where Light shone. When the undead were still sane, serving their original purpose - as a form of afterlife for those who had played out their role.

When Vitaros personally curbed the worst urges of every last living being, and Umbra at least ensured that those who were not worthy of being her own would be allowed to flee out of the Void in exile. A toy that could never be misused, for Logos already knew who might try to violate those rules before they even had the intrusive thought - usually long before the offender was even born. Then they had died and those boundaries with them.

Pieces of reality were left shattered in their absence, massive chunks ripped out. Those rules were among them. The innocence of battle, for the first time, twisted to kill. The cruelty inherent to Life, no longer mitigated as it sprouted. True hatred, unlike anything that had been before. For its sake, people searched and found the loopholes. Gaps in the laws and half-fragmented inner workings, desperately trying to function without their creators to pre-empt anyone testing their boundaries. Edicts.

Once the greatest attainments. Only offered to those who had gained such mastery of the playground that they were allowed to cheat as a reward. They existed outside the box. A nod from the creators, permitting their children to experience a narrow sliver of true power. But not quite like theirs. Therein lay the opportunity. An Edict existed outside the rules, yet at the same time it was not the same as the power of the Aspects that could not affect one another.

A purposeful allowance, for what did the omnipotent have to fear from even that much? Just an amusement to let themselves be affected. At the height of their power, they could easily subvert even the greatest act of hostility - see one coming centuries in advance. As a parent would allow a babe land a few punches, then declare victory. The Betrayer was already an insensate corpse. Just a remnant of devotion and regret strong enough to linger.

Reaching the carcass would be tremendously difficult, yet the easiest part by far. What Irwyn needed was the power to actually do what had to be done, given that opportunity. Breaking his binding was one thing, but that was far from enough. If just an Edict would finish the Aspect, someone else would have done as much eternities ago. The power of it would need to surpass even that. An Edict, technically, yet greater than any ever decreed before. That was why Ignis Lumen had to be the one to partake in that mission.

After so many eons of warring against the Rot, he was the only one with something left to give. Everyone else had their personal Edicts, long stretched beyond mending. Only the son of Light and Flame had not gone so far, thanks to the Oath's bindings. But to break them would require him to leave grooves of thought carved across eons. That could not be done by the son who had once lived. But a detached mind? One molded by mortality and its changing nature. Perhaps it could finally unmake that kindly inflicted curse.

Especially with a push from Fate. And then he would build a foundation able to bear that which could slay an Aspect. Just the Name would not be enough for that. It would require something sturdier by far. But a body as old as time could not be remolded so easily. Too set in its way. Too refined and perfect, only for a wrong purpose. Something younger, though, could yet be remade better. Once again, by the omnipotence of Aspects, just with an explicit goal. A form fit for salvation.

A second reason why such a rebirth was necessary. So there Irwyn stood. Exactly as someone else had planned. A long spiral of coincidences and subconscious pushes, leading him across the woven paths of Fate. Determined before he had even been born. Everything for that moment when he took on the mantle of savior. A vessel of hope, made to a purpose so that it could perhaps save everyone and everything before they were ground to dust. A part of Irwyn rebelled against that. About a duty chosen without his choice.

An option picked by Ignis Lumen before Irwyn ever had a say. Deep down, he was still that street rat who fought only for himself and those in his closest circle of confidants. The very notion of saviorship made him think of either liars or fools who wouldn't survive long. And yet, it was a perfect trap. To reject the burden meant certain death. For one day, all would succumb to the Rot.

Not to mention that while Irwyn had great selfishness in him, it was not nearly to the point that he could reject what was before him. To spit on perhaps the greatest chance there ever was to stop the Betrayer for good. All of reality and every possible future dangling on a rope - then telling him to either grab on, or cut the hemp and let everything plummet. Not to mention the whisper at the edge of his mind. A Name that remembered. This is what I died for, it said, what is the cost you pay, compared to that?

Everything had been set long before. He hesitated for just a moment longer, then focused. With determination, Irwyn let the Fragment commit what had to be done.