The rumbling, the march of ghosts had ceased. But this accursed, burned out armor refused to stop rattling as if they still stared their need. 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 failing. But only one was holding his firm.

The collapsed facsimile, that more manageable gravity, more even resonating of being beaten flat. Forced back to be something buried deep in its song. 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 then again, he wouldn't have 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 we both hate it, you really are still me. You got everything you are from me. All my pain. All my resentment. All the festering bullshit I wanted nothing to do with. And, in turn, every bit of fear that came with it. You never saw them as I did. As I still do. As I'd seen them in every dream that was suppressed to nothing till it wasn't anymore. As the family, as the friends, as everyone I'd ever known before they were all taken from me. Becoming nothing more than names and eyes. Judgment for surviving what they were lost to."

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! That they suffered under! You try to cover it up with other people's suffering! You eat and eat to make it all go away! But it's still here!! I will always be here!! There is always a scar!!"

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 always 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!

"To do away with this scar on all of our lives!! To heal it away so no one has to remember it ever again!! So that's what we're going to do!!"

That adverse soul reeled into place, pitiful form rammed back into what it was in truth, what threads it was spared molding into that baffling grind only he had control of!

"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 bloody bolts raking! Across barren and tainted and long scared fodder!

Tearing concrete to cinder and rust to dust. Dancing down miles deep emptiness to chew through heel beaten earth. Carving and caving and making naught of its worth. Plying at its goal shadowing nothing. Tearing it apart for everything it had refused to make whole!

Stairs and panels and plates and poured blocks. Broken rails and pulleys and lichen etched trash. Structures and base and bulk and hell. Every memory bled in and seeped in bone deep. All of it made to rend apart! Made to cracking torrent, to 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, whole numbered 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 still 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 wandering catastrophe, this raucous system of gravity raging out of line. No third body needed to send forth its chaos. To make its pilgrimage to where it all began. So that all of it may end for once and for all.

Metal and false stone rippling across his tongue. Gunpowder and magnesium stinging at olfactory. Blood and sweat boiled to life and pressed forth. And the darkness returning in billowing caucus.

Bristling into resurrection more real than should stand. This Rubicon torn open and crossed in fury. Dared and charged in one final great dash aside too late. 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.

Dread 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, Maltsburgers and Mables. Teachers, children, store clerks, and nobodies. All 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 near its true blinding end. That this hell of all hells was not to last more. That their anguish had its listener and its blistering call forth. 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 leak. Rendered down to fuel and poured without heed. To fuel and fire into their roiling... resounding... creed. Stonework and architecture, simulation and abstraction, study and work and fundamental laws. Allowing technology to journey without pause to bear flaws!

Half finished yet fully usable, tight grip holding and feeding it staunch. Power ripped free pouring in, representation tearing everything but to fodder. That savior matter teleporter sitting idle no longer. Possibilities ignore, a melting down existence more pressing, will already cracking under strain... ringing. 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 totaled nightmare named 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 blitzed and shattered and burned and was rent to the empty robbed dust for which it was sacrificed.

Until that fallen stick, that long ago rung gong, snapped from the weight of its former owner gone. As that storm took all its nightmare along for the ride torrential in binary song. 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. As all before him fell to their wills utterly ruthless.

A step made across miles and between, landing to thunderclap as that storm reemerged. Another familiar sight, another memory held tight to. As recoil proved apogee flung and breathed relief into scenery not long for this world. 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 dead pain to end.

A town not remembered by any but those forced out to and from it, now filling with raking pull and splitting lightning massed across it. 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 should be, amorphous not melding with the physically solid. That new step made, that gait turning metered, more matter turned energy and breaking without care. All just to see more already seen. And make days into instants before resentment found its seam.

Empty landscapes, rusted hulks, broken defenses, and tainted earth. Desperate regrowth, undisturbed graves, blackened soil, and blooded asphalt dearth. Wrecks and signs, fire path and hollowed memory. Step after step, the footprints of a giant striding into oblivion perigee. Before oblivion overtook it and spread beyond. Swung him away as analogy became too real.

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 flash by, overlong instances to fill this coffer. To churn it to the brim with decimation uptaken. More dust conjured and called and purified forsaken. More ghosts and souls and torusing throttle. Faster and faster, not bound by simple metaphor, just whirling to magnus unwilling to bottle. All before his grip could prove too weak to keep back the madness. The baffling lasting but centrifugal abstraction... not so. That tangle allowed to regrow and become more than just co.

Adverse feelings, resentment and hate. That promethean hell flashing its existence a mistake. 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 his own terms. This had to end, this had to be stopped. He had to reach the center before his gambit doubled down and everything-

…

Shattered...

To a stop.

Broke to a halt like there was never a hope of outpacing the inevitable.

A step made but no next destination was in sight. Like all his power had allowed itself to bottle up. Be returned to its too high shelf. And yet… even that spiraling, tangling resurgence was halted in its conflict. Resent akin in this stoppage unfit. Feelings shared and a sentiment forming into clear and total blockade. All from a single tendril, a single seeker strand, wafting away its plasma afterimage. The only strike out from this wandering storm too roiling to care to see all it passed. 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. Bouncing over buildings and rubble and charred piles ground down. Dark splotches still trying to add themselves to the deathly scenery, but failed to stay as focus curated them away. Yet where they once stained remained clear in this undisturbed desolate. The outskirts, the destroyed town. The ripped open shop, the dug through destruction. The powerlines, the trashed cars, the lives ripped away. Everything that had been taken from Brighton. Yet one more was added and drawing forth this totality of wait. 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 walls. And yet the screams and blood were louder, clearer, more than they ever should be. More than they ever were. Resent being rent quieter than it should even be possible.

The trail of ionized taking leading them low, into the darkness more real, the basement... below. Yet still there was emptiness chained together there, a stain persisting where it too should not be. Flashing and marring where well enough was not allowed this free.

Flesh between claws too strong to stay solid. Bones crushed and snapped and ripped at seams carotid. The taste of blood and fat and attempted heaving. Feelings locked hard yet eking through bleeding.

Desperate. Pleading.

Forcing away! Forcing down! Forcing self to see what was untouched by others of its kind! And glowing brighter than anything, utterly sublime. Primal, inconstant, maligned intent pulling. A hunger too strong to deny its calling.

The stairs down filled to bursting, crawling them all forward into that darkness too bright. A closeness, a smell like ozone ambrosia. But truth found horrified in unfiltered light. Malignance, weight upon frozen, true feelings finding control where he thought he was without. As... as this laceroid found its untouched son, and green eyes reflected in his glazed over black out.

Steps... were retraced. Unwillingly retaken. A tone reverberated, bones and being strummed acoustic too strongly to stand. The forced back others fleeing, storming away with what meal remained. Yet those eyes wanted nothing but to fight and stay. To be ripped out of this mutated form and hug his son once again. Straining hard, to tell him it will be alright. 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 on the floor. Curled up and barely feeling the hug desperately managed. As the past in stereo full faded. Back to the black spot in the basement he now loomed over.

More memories found his tether, more being snapping together, uncontrollable leakages stringing it to the afterlife that all the others received. Another familiar place. Already back to that blasted hell. Back to Berta as the sound of wood struck its 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 that instant snapping and bouncing crunch. 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 forward. In rebuke bred starvation and broken swarm flow. 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 knowing this truth. 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. Animals controlling both of them 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 staking in the thaw. Humming thread and baffled tone both feeling it draw. Armor full stopped over curled up dust becoming glass. Failing, furling, 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 then and there, that struggle returned, that baffling wavered, that Resent trying desperate to flee like all the rest! But there was nowhere to go!!

No grip to hold out! The event horizon lost to what it had been without! Sadness and grief and rage and disbelief. Emotions overriding and sinking all of it deep. Accreting being to filtering lens, void to form shaped round the wrong way in! Armor buckling and snapping and whole maw! Its form made malleable and boiling raw! The pain too much, too great to ignore!! Only allowing release as pure wanton-

"RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

No snap, no break, just pure obliteration! The basement, the building, the darkness of it all! The crumbled modernity, the destroyed lives, the blood soaked to its bones. And those bones along with it! Everything heaving, everything lurching, and everything everything everything fall!!!

Falling in! Falling apart! Matter atomized in concentric blasted ripple! Ash and dust too heavy for it even be called! Cement and stone, shelves and overgrowth, dry batteries and dry stains! The whole fucking lot of it!! All of it shattering in the wake of all hell it made! Anguish rending roadways and sadness every structure, pain tearing down every reminder of its existence! This town no more, this once Brighton graveyard, no more than mass for the break! The spiral, the pull, the accretion disk real! 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!

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

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 toroid call! The same pull, the same full loss of all control! The same resonant tone taking position pole! With any focus left broken open to fill this empty hole! Chunks like hills smashing 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!

Too high, too much, but all of what was needed. A new weight, a new perspective, force upon the force that gone unheeded. A being expanded, too far too fast. But the goal the same, to end it at long 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…

"Oh my gods, 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 like all those stains beyond had spilled out from containment. The smell of ozone, like cordite, saying enough of the timescale. Minutes at most, but destruction already too extreme. Too damn much! This place was a fucking monument! A reminder of everyone who died! This was a graveyard!! And yet he's cut it apart like…!

Like he wasn't in control anymore.

Heated stare turning cold, demarking intent and path set before her. Calculating exactly what had happened and what she was going to need even if she hated it. This new scar stretching inward terminated 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. Like Eagleville, like Terrace! But different, disturbing in ways she couldn't contend with. Way too much way too fast and way too soon. As if he was being both purposefully losing control. As if his very existence wasn't offending enough to so many already! This was beyond overdoing it, this was an outright sacrilegious!

That cold analyzing failing not to heat back up. This damn habit of his trying to break her further, 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!!"

Empty static like... buzzing foam.

"Anybody respon-"

"Ae…gis…"

The radio, the air, her bones vibrated to life. All as a new star dawned. Flashing brighter in the distant billowing strife, that was no horizon unclawed. The clouds could not hid what they could not compete with, just form risen higher than the curvature could hide. Illuminated grand blue by glare staring back, through the scar it had made in her memorial left aside.

A new mountain making itself known where it should not, adding itself to the crests still too far to seek. But there was no grandeur, no beauty, no majesty to this peak. It was golem… No! Pure titan of earth and stone! A living crust the shape of the monster only fitting to rule over this emptied loam. A laceroid to end all, staring back at the truly only one. Who could bear this, know this, and accept...

"What the hell… have you done?"

Vertigo, dread, eldritch existentialism. A terror insurmountable in the breakdown of realism. As the landscape moved to its own volition. And spoke without regard for mortal contrition.

"Th-the… only way…"

Her radio fizzed, overloaded like the air. His voice like an echo falling into and out of itself to cataclysmic flair. It was still him, still his, but overdoing it wasn't this. Wasn't the sum totaling of allowing the abyss.

"S-seth… you… You need to hold on-"

"The only… wa-ay… The only way… to finish this…"

That mountain, that star, all of it turning in slow breaking order. Distance silencing what undoubtedly thundered, but making no concession for the ground rumbling to molder.

"I-I have to… do this. Have… to end this…"

Steps reverberating through miles upon miles, quaking landscape to threatened fracture. Too much weight, too much yet still solid and at will, and marching its peak away… in…

"I have… 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 to heel. Too much, too damn much for any of it to be real! Yet Aegis was forced stone cold as it tried to disappear. Over that horizon not far enough... To get away from her!

"I have… to do this! But yo-you… you have to stay!!"

Challenging need hesitating, flared away by the nerve. At this kowtow, this buzzing, this tone unable to not be heard! Until its boom across frequencies, in all ranges and amps, flattened back down... In shared fearful laps.

"You have to stay- Have to protect them- You need to stay there! Ne-need… to keep them… safe…"

Nerve utterly faltering at this still uncrossed Rubicon, this 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- You have t-to shield them… Keep them safe from…"

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 fucking 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-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 to its beat. Like a god was making landfall to rake it all replete. True titan talons flattening pyres burned to stain. A blackened patch of rubble that once personified his pain. His town, his Frigateville, his homecoming too vast. 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 thermonuc-

*BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo*

The clouds gathered burst apart, the sky trying to turn black out, everything on that torrential horizon pushed by reality snapping 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 electromagnetic hell. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, but had to defy this dooming frail. Arms spreading out before the empty collapse nigh. But the shape was too much, the scale too much, just fizzling to haze in her mind's eye.

Straining and fighting 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 tone it couldn't hold, it can't hold! This had to be stopped, had to be stopped here! It had to end before it consumed everything!

Determination locking her feet, drive denying replete, damnable oversharing pushed to 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 curvature in her mind. Fighting clear through the trill like she knew every inch. From Block 36 to those stupid rocky plinths. From Eagle's Fall to the bloody Final Mile. Every part of it, every plate, every suffering drenched stand. This whole fucking tainted defense will be suffered-

"No More!!"

A reflex, an instinct, an automatic spring out. A seen wonder, a felt depth, a known existence that will not stay idle! That shield bearing arm forcing tight and unfurling. That barren metal mirror, that false mundane, this chosen fate beared by none but those worthy. A power, a purpose no longer hidden by the splitting up of twins of paracausal existence. A call reminiscing, a need it remembered, a demand made loud! No more sleeping in wait for someone else to take this stand. The final plate slamming home upon this metal shield made whole. Its silent will called forth for all it had hoarded. A shining, a spreading, a passing of its memory an accent to her call. Terrible power held at bay to match what may. The memory of and fate of all who stood before. Countless eon, a familiar day flashing, the passive glean it had taken to remember them always in its abyssal reflection. Now pressed to fuel and pressed to shoot forth to break another abyss upon its shores!

That barrier, that translucence, that comforting millimeter, cannoning out in pure ballistic! Oblong haloes cracking off, air spalling to hot white fire, a real impervious wall crashing across the landscape with no restraining limit and end in its sight! No end but a horizon she would create! No point left but there beyond mortal vision! A ring of pure energy to shut off this despair! Twin binding ring halves to meet in telluric planet crash! Crushing together and dashing the monument it once rung to! Now outmoded wholesale and sentencing to death! In devastation reverberating their sins widening! But climbing, filling, closing it all away under! Before all could be rent to atomic asunder!

Yet sunder was assured and promised to all. In the annals of this true gravity's fall. Strikes of lightning ringing everything to stinging static deaf, yet turning excess matter weightless as if gravity was bereft. This mountain, this monolith, this titan of siphon nothing but rind. The whole of its crush rising like nothing could bind. Accretion accelerating, heart's friction uncontrollable. Levitating this leviathan higher in discordant pull inconsolable.

Forests burned, toppled, and heaved. From just excess wafting celestial, allowing no reprieve. The hole in its center, this gravity well existence, this denial of convention and physic theory persistence. This molded void, this paired over being, this final gambit to force it all into true paired keening. But more and less! To destroy and recreate! To take in everything and sift out the hate!

Make it all real! Make his promised truth ring!

And make all this resentment matter for anything!

Crush it, pull it in, this matter titan made to fail! All fodder to feed an insatiable grail! Metric megatons reeling, compressing, dropping 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 to even arch corona! A new shape, a new stature, all of this condensate matter! All it dissolving to stardust bleeding! 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 the light! And make this scar a memory no one ever had to fight!

Nothing else mattered, nothing could ever! There was only the pull, the hunger, the resentment of better! This molded over void, this Resent put to heel, made to do what it wanted for the cause... it thought real!

Disharmony, recoiling, fighting their resonance! The one it subverted and so owed due penance! This blurring binary system, this melding together stellar heart! Now both hollow voids set to rend each other apart! No forms, no beings, just wills adverse! Grits and tones seeking outcomes converse! Roiling passed into being no one could contain! Pushing past starborn into utter cosmic disdain! All the while their body, his body ceased to be! Just particles and matter overburdened and set free! 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 reality's quaked for its fabric! 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 filling 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 it 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 repelling verily. 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, the light pure obliteration, matter and structure denied its everything!! Shattered to naught, 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 he made!!

Fire and matter, a wall desolation and reality deresolution! Whole forest burning away, whole towns, whole strata! Racing across this scar, charging to break all to plasma! Air at machs that forced it to ignite! To blaze this hollowed night into uncaring light! A wave, a tsunami, dashing everything to powder! And cresting to swallow the only thing left to tower! Wanting for nothing in eccentricity, but to tear down this wall of hallowed hypocrisy!!

To smash it to smithereens, dash its memories to shrapnel! Bash effort and expense and blood and forced chattel! All of its crimes to desiccated soil! And smash it against its only true foil! Not kick, not punch, but absolute crash!! The drive of a bass line for only the moon to thrash! And everyone else to pray for survival! Another comet, another tail of simmer cut to fight danger close demise. A desperate ploy to keep standing, in the face of absolute break!!

The ground behind her shattering, faults and beds lifted to the air! Swaths recoiled away from just the stymied forces brought to bear. Curling down and rolling like wallpaper, but crushing hills like paint bubbles and mountains like molding. Not a tree surviving, all dashed Tunguska. 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 might beyond its champions. The shockwave ignoring it, 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, 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 burned apart in roiling creation!

In fires destroying and smashing together! Atoms and particles under heed and under call! Vast expanse a staller barbeque, corona and plasma and impossible surface! A being remaining, a dark shell of string! A black hole core bereft yet unwilling to reclaim what it rang! 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 only his!!

That mold, that void, that coating resentment! These slingshoted bodies on their ways to escape velocity! Their full form a blur, their existence conceptual! Spiraling apart yet dead set on rupturing reunion! But there was no hope left to bind, no restitution but the one set in line dragging it back! The center, the greater, Seth latching hard! Grabbing hold of the vestige that remained of his so claimed self!

All his power used and fried, all his threads frayed slack! All of his resentment made rue and as it died, unable to foment its 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's chosen make! The poisoned silence, the tainted dirt, the clawing memories of structures left in the hurt! All these homes abandoned by their scaring stains! All the wrecks and monuments to everyone's pains! 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 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 scar 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 resonance 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 fall! Another tsunami slamming out yet reversing its atomic maul! 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 rendered 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 it greatest of sight!

That orange reassurance, that safety for all! One final ring to sound this earthquaking toll! One final crash, one final push farther! This burning away soul made to burn ever harder!! Made to suffer, made to rue not one moment more! So they both could know atonement to their very core!!

In the screeching light of a personified terror, with only one way out!!

And that was through that barrier, so this world could live on without!!!

Aegis was blasted off her feet, blinded, buried, and sent to fly! The force of expansion tearing hope to plate glass! Shattering her grand dome like the world was nothing but soupy water! But not to destruction, not to doom for everything rung off behind her! Just another rut dug back first into what little earth remained. Smoke and clog, mundane dust sent skyward. Muscles made to paper mache 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 thrashing, the sky fighting back, her lungs on fire and yet smothered in particulate. A grit telling her she was alive as opposite reaction wanted her to not be. The ring of it all not helping in the slightest. A fight to stand against it or at least rise off her back almost a battle in and of itself. But the inlaid flash of that glare still striking, burned in to her eyes even closed. That crimson banshee unbound by body, raging into her, 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. As wind force and convection trundled to nothing. As vertigo inverted, missing a mass of risen horizon.

The Wall was gone, nothing but smoke spilling out of its place. Pillarous and storming cataclysmic. Nothing but thick obfuscation for all that was ahead, like the Earth had had enough and popped its crust open super volcanic. But... but was too white. Too ozone. Too… pine?

Already dissipating into the sky as nothing could keep it in. Steam and condensate, humidity conglomerated as it was roasted away to rain down somewhere else. As... 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. What used to be, what had been here before building and crisis tore it to cinders. But losing in the only sound left to its dying sizzle ring.

The stomp of metal on earth.

A desperate shaky rise, force pushed out where there was just so little left. A fear reignited as a figure made itself known in the mist. 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 dark, back down to unpowered again. Not even horned. Not the laceroid it hid away so many times before. Just a suit of semi mundane trudging out of the fog very much not. Stumbling into the warm light it had outshined just horrific moments ago. Grinning from ear to ear across that still broken helmet. Yet... smiling that same damn grin…

As it buckled and fell, and crumpled to the ground. Just shy of its remaking.

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