Chapter 454: Godslayer

I worked my way up the spine.

Each vertebra was a farmhouse of bone, and each one came apart under my pen. The marrow-light poured out of every break, wet and screaming, and the bones that had already been shattered kept trying to pull themselves back together, the fragments crawling across the glass towards each other with a patience that was almost admirable. I wrote Sever on the spaces between them and they stopped, and then I moved on.

The ribs were next. I walked along the curving rows of them, and I placed the nib against each rib in turn. Break. Splinter. Shatter. The words came faster now, my hand moving on its own, and the ribs came down around me like a forest being felled.

Some of them were so long that when they fell, they took a full breath to hit the ground.

The serpent’s skull watched me from the end of its stripped neck. It could not speak anymore, because I had written Silence on its jaw, but its eye followed me. It watched me take its body apart piece by piece, and it did not look away.

I think it was praying.

∞

By all the lights in heaven, I was so tired.

I waited for the god to fight. I stood on the broken spine with the nib of my pen resting against the next vertebra, and I waited for the eye to light up again, for the marrow to flare, and for the jaws to break my Script. I had watched this god die and heal and scream and laugh all night, and I did not trust stillness from it anymore.

And yet... nothing came.

The eye stayed dark. It was open, but there was nothing behind it, like a window in a house where everyone has gone to sleep. Behind the head, down the long white length of what was left of it, the bones that had been dragging themselves across the glass slowed, and then they stopped, one rib at a time, the last few twitching against the ground.

The marrow was still glowing. I could see it with Eldritch Perception, a line of red coals banked inside every vertebra, but it had stopped burning.

I did not know if a god could give up.

∞

I went back down into the chest. There was not much of a chest left to go into. I had stripped the ribs bare hours ago, so I simply stepped between two of them and walked in. The red mist was thinner now, and it still ate at my skin, though slowly, and the Law of Flesh kept pace with it.

The heart was still beating, but it was slower than before, and the glow inside it came and went at longer intervals, and when it beat, the cavity no longer shook.

I put my palm against it. It was hot, and under the muscle I could still feel that weight, vast and old. It was all still there, every ounce of it.

What was gone was the pressure.

When I had etched Divide on this heart before, the Law of Sharpness had met the god’s will and could not break through it. But I had been fighting against that pressure all night, and against all common sense, I had been able to bring a god to its knees.

I set the nib against the wall of the heart and drew a line, and it went in without the resistance I expected, and the line kept tearing through the heart as the muscle parted in front of the pen like cloth.

The glow inside the heart spilled out from the cut in a slow red flood that did not burn me at all. I drew the line from the top of the heart to the bottom, in silence. A part of me thought the god would fight my Silence and try to beg, but it did not.

The heart beat one last time, around the cut. Then it stopped.

The last sound the serpent made was a breath, slow and ragged.

∞

A god’s death is loud.

I had expected it to be quiet, since the god itself had gone so quiet at the end, but the moment the heart stopped, everything it had been holding came out at once.

The weight I had felt under the muscle went up through the chest and out through the ribs and into the sky in a column of red light as wide as a city, and it tore the black clouds open so cleanly that I saw blue sky behind them for the first time since this fight began.

It hit me on the way past. I was thrown out of the chest and across the valley, and I landed on my back in the glass, and I lay there looking up at that pillar of light while the ground shook under me for a long time.

There was no way to hide this. Everyone on the continent, and maybe beyond, must have seen this light and known that a god was dead. I wondered what it said about me, that not long after I had come to the past, a god was dead.

The blood came last. All of it, from every cut and every heap of meat I had taken off that god, lifted off the glass in a fine red rain going the wrong way, as if gravity no longer existed. It rose up into the pillar of red light and was gone, and I could feel something in the world closing like a ledger.

When it was over, the meat lying in the valley was grey and dry, and before long, the flesh collapsed into ash, leaving the massive bones of the god behind.

The storm above was gone, and the light of the evening sun fell on the ruin I had made and turned it beautiful.

I was still alive. I did not know how. My body was a suggestion, a sketch of a man held together by lines of gold, my soul was a raw wound inside me, and my pen was so dim that it looked like a dead thing.

I had killed my first immortal, and I had not needed to die a thousand times to do it. But the path that had brought me here was long, and I could not forget the deaths along it.

My Status Screen vibrated, and I blinked away the tiredness and the desire to fall asleep, and my eye traced the notifications as they burned their way across my sight.

[Inscription: 132 → 135 (Sovereign)]

[Eldritch Perception: 48 → 50 (Acolyte)]

[Adamantium Titan: 157 → 160 (Sovereign)]

[Title Acquired: Godslayer(Mythic)]

[Entitlement revoked: Natal Weapon]

[Claim Natal Weapon?]

My tired mind read through the notifications slowly. I stopped at my new title, and a small sigh escaped me, and even that hurt every part of me.

"Godslayer," I said. "That’s going to make me popular."

Then I looked at the last notification and did not move for a while. At last I groaned and slowly came to my feet on sheer willpower alone.

It took a while, but I walked to the massive skull of the serpent and collapsed beside it, resting my back against the bone. My sight fell on the blood sword impaled in a mountain a few miles away, and I closed my eyes.