Chapter 72: Destroyed

I didn’t stop climbing.

Behind me, the fight raged on, Sera’s Divine purifying fire, Arthur’s vines, Theodore’s fists, Mary’s light, all of it reduced to a distant roar beneath the singular focus that had taken hold of me.

I wasn’t thinking about the loop anymore, or what I knew, or what I didn’t.

...I wanted Choez dead. And he wanted me dead.

Thunder Sunlight blazed in my grip, heat rolling from the blade in waves that made my vision swim at the edges, and sweat poured freely down my back as I hauled myself higher.

My muscles had already began to protest, my palms slipped against the wet bark, but I didn’t slow down. The branch was getting closer, and for the moment, that was the only thing that mattered.

Choez watched me come.

It didn’t flee.

It didn’t even bother standing up fully, merely tilting its crane-like head another degree as strings drifted lazily from its horns, the creature looked almost curious about what I thought I was going to accomplish.

There was something deeply irritating about that expression, the same detached patience I had seen before, as though it had already decided that I was nothing more than another insignificant creature crawling toward its inevitable death.

"Come down here," I snarled, tightening my grip around Thunder Sunlight. "Let’s see how brave you are without your shadow strings."

The strings answered instead, snapping forward faster than I could track, and this time I didn’t even have the opportunity to dodge.

My entire body locked in place halfway through the next movement, one foot was still lifted above the branch, and I toppled sideways into the mud below with my weapon still clenched uselessly in my fist.

I couldn’t move.

Not my arms. Not my legs. Not even my fingers.

For a moment, I could only lie there and stare at Thunder Sunlight glowing beside my face, its heat washing uselessly across my skin while every command I sent to my body disappeared into nothing.

I had already experienced what those strings could do, so the paralysis itself wasn’t enough to surprise me.

Choez had done this before.

What it hadn’t done before was keep going.

The strings tightened, and something reached past my limbs and straight into my mind.

Pain exploded behind my eyes, sharper and deeper than anything I had felt from the creature before, and I was yanked bodily into my Domain of Mind before I even had time to brace myself.

The sea stretched beneath me exactly as I remembered it, the mountain rose from its center with its edges already began to crumble into the water below, but something was wrong.

The realization came before I could understand why.

The entire sea was vibrating, a low and terrible hum ran through every wave, and when I looked down, I saw cracks spreading across its surface.

Jagged black lines raced outward in every direction, splitting the blue water apart like glass under impossible pressure.

I barely had time to take a step backward before an explosion of raw black energy tore straight upward from the depths, a geyser of violence ripping through my consciousness with enough force to make the entire landscape shudder.

The sea shattered.

Chunks of blue water hung suspended in the air for a single impossible second before crashing back down, waves tore across one another and colliding in every direction as my thoughts scattered with them.

Pain slammed into my skull, and I dropped to my knees, both hands flew to my temples as though I could somehow hold my mind together through sheer force.

I couldn’t.

Memories flashed around me now, faces and names appeared for barely a heartbeat before dissolving, whole sections of the mountain collapsed into the churning sea below before I could even recognize what they contained.

I reached for one of them and watched it disappear between my fingers, the memory gone so completely that I couldn’t even remember what I had been trying to remember.

The pain wasn’t distant or metaphorical anymore.

It was physical, blinding pressure crushed the inside of my skull while something enormous tore through the foundations of my sub-consciousness.

My vision went white...

Then red...

..Then black.

For a moment, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and my mind began.

I could feel the mud against my back and the cold water beneath my knees at the same time, could hear the battle outside and the roar of my collapsing Domain of mind as though they were happening directly beside me.

Somewhere in that chaos, a voice reached me from impossibly far away. Someone was screaming my name.

It took me several seconds to recognize it, and when I finally did, something inside me tightened.

Sera...

I tried to answer her, but I couldn’t remember how to speak.

I couldn’t even remember whether I was supposed to be speaking with my mouth or my thoughts.

The mountain cracked beneath me, another massive section broke loose and slid into the sea, and then another followed it, until the entire landscape of thought and memory seemed to be folding inward on itself.

The last thing I felt was my Sea of Consciousness collapsing completely.

The mountain finally gave way beneath the wreckage of my own mind, the remaining fragments of memory swallowed by the black water as everything I had spent my entire life building inside myself came apart in an instant.

Then there was nothing...

No pain...

No thoughts...

No memories...

No sense of my body or the world around it.

Just an endless void stretching farther than I could comprehend, with six stars hanging silently above me as though they had been waiting there the entire time.

I didn’t understand what they were doing there, and I didn’t get the chance to wonder.

That same impossible force seized me once again and dragged me backward through time before I could even finish disappearing.

I opened my eyes...

The tree stood in front of me.

White leaves, dark wood, twenty feet of motionless branches stretching into the air above me.

For several seconds, I simply stared at it, too stunned by the sheer normality of everything around me to move.

Then I flexed my fingers.

They responded.

I moved my wrist.

Nothing was broken.

I shifted my weight onto one leg, then the other, and both held without protest.

My head wasn’t splitting apart, my memories were still there, and my body was once again obeying me as though none of what had just happened had ever existed.

I almost laughed at how strange it felt to be grateful for something as basic as being able to move my own limbs.

"Edmund, wait!"

Arthur’s voice came from behind me, exactly where it was supposed to be, and I realized I was already walking toward the tree again.

My body had started following the same path without waiting for my permission;

I stopped myself before taking another step, breathing heavily as cold sweat gathered across my skin.

None of this had happened to my body yet.

As far as everyone else was concerned, this was the first time we had reached this clearing. But I remembered everything. I remembered the strings tightening around my mind. I remembered the sea breaking apart. I remembered losing pieces of myself and I remembered dying.

I looked up into the branches.

Ouroborus was still there.

Coiled around the same branch, its jaws locked around its own tail, its eyes closed in that same unbothered, almost meditative stillness.

It hadn’t moved.

Nothing about its posture suggested that it even knew anything had changed, yet something was unmistakably different.

I stared at its body for several seconds before I finally noticed it.

More of it was gone.

Before, only a small portion of its tail had disappeared into its own mouth, but now nearly a third of its body had vanished, the empty gap stretching considerably farther up its length than it had before.

It was still eating itself...

And it didn’t look like it was stopping anytime soon...