Chapter 453: The Last Light

The blade was the last thing the god gave up.

It was now dull, cracked along its length and shorter by half, because I was no longer letting the god heal around its own wounds for the blade to feed on.

Although the blade was solid, its composition was odd, having the properties of both liquid and solid, so that it appeared to be made of flowing blood while still being solid enough to cut through my Adamantium flesh.

When the blade cut into anything, that thing would bleed, and the blade would feed on the blood to grow, but I had made sure to deny the god the chance to use it. I could sense its confusion. Inscription did not exist in this era, and the gods here could not understand it, and I used this to my advantage.

When the serpent swung the blade at me the swing was slow, and I met it with a single stroke that cut through part of it, and a piece the size of a tower broke away and fell to the glass and became blood again.

My breathing was coming fast and it almost felt as if I was going to faint, but the pain from pulling on my soul through the crack in the seal was so great that I used it to keep me awake. My bones ached as I drew on my marrow to fuel my titan form... all of me hurt, down to every single strand of hair on my head.

This pain was what I held on to, and I think I was roaring, or maybe it was the storm above. I did not know anymore. My mind had become pure rage, and in this moment, the serpent had become a representation of everything I hated.

It was not fair to this god, but it had attacked my warband, and would have killed me without blinking. In fact, it had killed me, and laughed. So I closed my ears to its scream and my heart to its fear... I embraced the pain, and I went for the head of the god, targeting its jaws.

I drew one line under the chin and one along the lower lip, and the great muscles that closed the serpent’s mouth came away in long wet ropes. Its jaw dropped open, and the Natal Weapon, the entitlement the System had released to it, slid out between its fangs and fell towards the valley.

Before it could touch the ground, I slapped my palm against the flat of the blade, and it flew into the distance and stabbed into a small mountain.

The screams of the god became distorted as its jaws hung loose from its face, and it was in too much pain to call for its weapon.

∞

By the time I stepped back, I had flayed it to the neck.

Behind the head there was a mile of skeleton, still twitching and dragging itself across the glass with the marrow glowing through the bone. The head was nearly all of Raktanāgeya that still looked like a living creature, with its one good yellow eye rolling towards me and then away.

The god did not look at me for long. It raised its head as high as its stripped neck would lift it, which was not very high anymore, and turned towards the dark beyond the broken mountains. The voice that came out of it bore no resemblance to the laughter that had carried across a hundred miles while I lay in pieces in the rubble.

"Father."

It came out low the first time, almost careful, like a child at the door of a dark room. Nothing answered it, and the bones behind it shivered all the way down to the tail.

"Father!"

The second time it screamed it, and the sound went out over the valley, through the broken mountains and on past them, and I could hear the fear in it as plainly as I had heard the pain. It was old fear, the kind that had been sitting under everything else for a very long time waiting for its turn.

I stood on the god’s bare spine with the pen dripping in my hand, turned my head, and looked where it was looking.

I placed the nib against the bone. "Does your father not answer you, serpent? He should, or you will die here."

A shudder ran through the god as its one good eye looked to the heavens, and there was nothing but silence. I stared at the head of the serpent for a moment, then pushed the nib of my pen deeper into the spine, and met resistance.

Bone was not flesh, and it did not yield like muscle, and I could feel the god’s will pressing back against mine through the Law of Sharpness, refusing to be divided.

The flesh on my hand began to peel from the backlash, but that pain was nothing against what I was feeling inside my soul, and I gritted my teeth, blinked through sweat that ran silver, and wrote Break.

The bone cracked. A hairline fracture ran down the length of the vertebra, and red light flared through it. The god screamed through the marrow itself, and the spine convulsed beneath me, trying to throw me off.

I steadied myself and wrote Splinter, and the crack widened. Pieces of bone the size of boulders sheared off and fell into the valley below, and the red light poured out of the wound like blood from a cut artery. The spine bucked, and I drove the pen deeper, and I wrote... Shatter.

[Inscription: 129 → 132 (Sovereign)]

The vertebra exploded.

The force of it threw me into the air, and I tumbled through the rain of bone fragments. Below me, the spine had a gap in it now, a missing link, and the two halves of the serpent’s body were separating. The bones tried to pull together, the marrow-light reaching across the gap like grasping hands, but I wrote Sever on the space between them, tearing that connection apart, and the god’s lower half went still.

∞

I did not stop.

I landed on the next vertebra and wrote Break, and then the next, and then the next. Each one shattered under my pen, and each shattering was a scream, and each scream was a prayer to a father who was not coming.

What father would turn away from his dying child?

The serpent’s skull turned towards me. Its one remaining eye was wide, the white showing all round the yellow, and for the first time, I saw something in it that I recognized. Not rage, not hatred, not even fear... Desperation. Pure, unfiltered desperation.

The jaw worked, and the voice that came out was small.

"Please," it said. "Please, I was born to live forever. Don’t kill me."

I paused. My pen hovered over the next vertebra, and the line I had been about to draw hung unfinished in the air.

The serpent saw my hesitation, and it pressed. "I will leave this place. The harvest is yours, and I shall not report that it has been taken. I shall flee to the depths of Terra and no one shall hear my voice for a million years... I will never return. I swear it by my father’s name, by the throne of the deep, by anything you hold sacred. Just..."

I wrote Silence.

The voice stopped, and the Script forced the broken jaw shut. The god’s eye went wide.

It understood that I was not going to stop, and the last light went out of its eye.