Chapter 4313: We Follow His Will! II

The Veil...that junction separating the living and the dead, a concept as old as consciousness itself!

A line drawn in the sands of existence that different cultures interpreted according to their preferred level of existential comfort.

For some, it was mere metaphor, a poetic way to describe the boundary between known and unknowable. These were the people who slept soundly at night, who thought death was just another transition, who used phrases like "passed on" and "in a better place" without their voice catching.

They saw The Veil as natural order, no more threatening than the horizon...a line that existed but didn’t really matter since you’d cross it when you crossed it.

For others, it was a point of connection, a sacred threshold to mystical realms.

They built altars, left offerings, spoke to ancestors they insisted were "just beyond The Veil," listening and occasionally intervening.

These people found comfort in proximity, in the idea that death was just a very thin wall between neighbors who could still hear each other if they spoke loudly enough.

And then there were those who saw it for what it truly was: a fragile, fraying curtain between their ordered reality and a hungry, absolute dark. A taboo. A danger!

These were the ones who understood that some doors were closed for a reason, that some boundaries existed not to be crossed but to keep things separated that should never, ever meet.

As for which group was correct?

It turns out, the ones with the most anxiety, the ones who saw monsters in every shadow, were the most right.

Because The Veil wasn’t just a boundary. It was a containment system.

Think about it: if death was natural and peaceful, why did everything living spend so much energy avoiding it? If what was beyond The Veil was benign, why did crossing it only work in one direction? If the dead were really resting peacefully, why did every form of life have stories about what happened when they didn’t?

The optimists said The Veil was there to give life meaning through finitude. The mystics said it was there to separate stages of spiritual evolution. But the pessimists...oh, the pessimists understood!

The Veil was there because without it, The Dead would consume The Living like a tide dissolving sandcastles.

Not from malice. Not from evil. But from the simple fact that entropy was hungry, and order was delicious.

The Dead didn’t hate The Living any more than winter hated summer.

They simply were, and their very existence was antithetical to the careful arrangements of atoms and energy that The Living called "life."

Put them in the same space without separation, and The Living would cease while The Dead would simply continue, slightly more substantial for having absorbed what they touched.

This was why The Veil mattered.

Not as metaphor, not as mystical gateway, but as Existence’s desperate attempt to keep its experiment in consciousness from being reabsorbed into the hungry dark it had emerged from!

In the current moment, as tears multiplied across Folds and The Dead emerged with complexities that mocked the power scales The Living had so carefully constructed, the truth became apparent.

The Veil hadn’t been philosophy or poetry.

And now it was thinning. Not failing...that would be too simple. Thinning, like fabric worn down by too much use, too much pressure from both sides, too many attempts to peek through or poke across.

The optimists were revising their positions, suddenly finding merit in barriers they’d previously called "artificial constructs of fear."

The mystics were discovering that their ancestors were less "watching over them" and more "held back by increasingly inadequate infrastructure." And the pessimists?

The pessimists were too busy running to say "I told you so!"

Because being right about existential horror doesn’t actually make you any better at dealing with it.

The paranoid person who correctly identifies the monster in the closet still has to deal with the fact that there’s a monster in the closet.

The Veil, it turned out, was exactly what the anxious had always suspected...the only thing standing between existence and its own unmaking.

And like most safety features, you only really appreciated it when it stopped working.

The Dead emerged through tears with the casual certainty of things returning home after a very long trip!

—

At this very moment, across the vast, interconnected weavings of the Folds, The Veil was tearing.

Multiple Tears of Existence, jagged, necrotic wounds in the fabric of reality, wept their contents into the realms of The Living.

But past these tears, past the very Veil itself, far into the lands of the dead... the Folds of The Dead... there were wonders and complexities that The Living could not even begin to imagine!

Here, in this realm of endings, one could travel for countless Gigaparsecs, past a silent, shuffling sea of over six trillion of The Dead, both the weak and the mighty.

And even further in, past the chaotic, mindless hunger of the common Dead, one would come across... The Cryptlands.

Lands that were filled with terrifyingly powerful Dead Existences who, unlike the shambling hordes, held a sense of... Order.

Order!

In the heart of The Cryptlands, a grand citadel floated in the silent, starless void.

It was a necropolis of impossible, terrible beauty, a city of death that pulsed with an astonishing, brilliant white light of Order.

This was Nagash-Prax, the Citadel of the Prime Dead.

It was a vast, circular island forged from the fused bones of a billion forgotten creatures and the shattered, petrified remains of countless Desiccated Sleeping Shores.

It spanned light-years in diameter, a continent of death in an ocean of nothing. From this island, massive, obsidian-white walls of polished bone rose to a height that scraped against the very firmament of the Fold.

And upon those walls, they stood.

Early Creatures.

But these were not the vibrant, titanic beings of the First Folds, whose skin shone with the splendor of gold or the verdant brilliance of life.

These were their dead echoes, their zombified reflections. Their skin, where it was not rotting away to reveal the gleaming, obsidian bone beneath, was a pale, almost translucent white, yet it shone with a terrifying, powerful light.

It was as if their decay had not made them lesser, but had distilled their very essence into a more potent, more absolute form of being!

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