“This can be happening! I’m immortal!”

– Neoteric Lord Vaingloth’s last words.

Falling into the endless abyss that was the Greater Beast Fragment was a one way trip. I’d known that from the moment I sensed it out on the periphery of the world. I’d told myself I was ready for it and I did have a plan that I could believe in.

When your skin evaporates and all the world turns to emptiness though it’s hard to deny the reality around you.

This was going to hurt.

And I wasn’t going to come out of it.

Someone would.

But she wasn’t going to be who I was in that moment.

That was why I cast Sola free.

“We can fight this!” she screamed as the last of Vaingloth’s bindings on her was severed with the severing of his “immortal” life.

I didn’t have words for her at that point since I didn’t have words left in general. Instead I sent gave her my feelings – the hope I felt that she would return to the world, the resolve that I had to see it with my ever-so-mortal eyes, and the gratitude that meeting her had brought me here.

I’d run my whole life trying to stay alive, but I’d never put any effort into making sure my life was one I would have cared to live at all.

At least not until I met her.

As Sola rose away, hurled skyward as the sun was supposed to rise from the dark, I dropped into the deep, impenetrable darkness of the beast fragment.

That wasn’t enough though.

I needed to go deeper.

I needed to follow Vaingloth down to the fragment’s end and take one last thing away from him.

As a mortal, what I wanted wasn’t possible.

I’d been here before. I’d done this already. I knew what it was like to dissolve and be torn apart and unravel entirely. I hadn’t fought it then because nothing mortal can fight the end of all that is.

From Vaingloth’s screams, first the living ones and then the dead ones from the ghost that remained, he had understood that at last. He and the other High Accessors had unleashed something that they knew would damage and destroy the gods, but they hadn’t understood what it really was. They’d cast down the gods but none of them had appreciated what that had felt like, the agony they’d inflicted.

None of them till Vaingloth experienced it all first hand.

I watched as he struggled, seeing him fighting and scheming and clawing for the dwindling drops of his existence. We were caught in a realm without light but I saw him twist and writhe and boil away. A realm without sound but I heard him curse and weave fell words of power and, finally, try to unmake the world if it couldn’t be his.

And that was what I took away from him.

Mortals had no bodies, no minds, no will at all in that space, and for all the power he held, Vaingloth was still very much a mortal.

I wasn’t.

Not all of me at any rate.

When he tried to hide in the remnants of the power he’d stolen, I pointed the beast fragment towards where to find him.

When he tried to shield himself with a great workings of spellcrafter, I whispered words to the beast so that it could find all the weak points it needed to pierce the shield and consume Vaingloth’s words so he could never speak them again.

Destroying the world was what destroyed him though. That magic I didn’t interfere with. It was greater than me, and I very much wanted to be part of the world still. So the Beast Fragment and I let Vaingloth’s spell of Absolute Annihilation complete successfully. 

Had Vaingloth thought that would defeat his enemy? I can’t say. He could have had nothing else left and cast it out of spite. He could have been planning to turn the world’s death into a source of power, or an escape. The most likely thing though? I think he simply refused to believe he could lose.

That was his first mistake.

 We are, all of us, flawed and fallible. Losing is something we do almost the moment we are born. It can drive us onward or break us down, but in either case it is a part of who we are, and we pretend otherwise at our peril.

A more fundamental issue for Vaingloth however was trying to use a weapon of annihilation against an entity that was nothing but annihilation. It would have been like trying to set one of the Lords of Fire on fire and thinking that would somehow diminish them.

The Beast Fragment allowed the spell to finish, at my suggestion, because with Vaingloth bound up within it, the Neoteric Lord was the entirety of his own world. A world which his spell shattered and wiped from existence. 

A shock went through me, the Beast Fragment, and passed out into the world beyond. 

A Neoteric Lord had fallen. A Neoteric Lord was truly gone.

Three Lords had fallen before him.

None had ever truly died though.

Vaingloth had always imagined himself the first among equals.

Instead, he was merely the first.

That could have been the end of me too. My vengeance was as satisfied as it was possible to be. If that had been all I’d been hanging onto I would have fizzled away with him. As it was, fizzling away was almost unbearably tempting.

In finding his destruction, Vaingloth had been granted the one gift I couldn’t deny him.

Peace.

It’s the one guarantee all mortals have. In the end, no matter how bad things may get, we all find peace. 

Like I said though, I wasn’t entirely what you might call mortal anymore.

Mostly mortal? Oh, definitely.

As flawed and fallible as anyone else? Beyond a certainty.

If anything the part of me that wasn’t mortal, was even more flawed and fallible than the rest. The part of me that was emptiness and hunger and loneliness, the part that was the beast spent most of it’s time asking the rest of me what to do and why and how and whether any of this made any sense.

It didn’t want to return to the emptiness, but believing that life had anything to offer beyond the pains which built day upon day could be so very difficult.

And could I say it was really it was worth it?

In the midst of endless loss, loss which had swallowed more than one world, could I really say that the good parts of my life had been worth enduring all the miserable parts that surrounded them?

No.

That would have been a lie. The good times don’t pay for the bad ones. That’s not how life is balanced. We don’t endure suffering to earn some form of reward. Suffering and misery suck, and people who inflict them can go straight to hell. When the world inflicts them through random chance or by its very nature, that sucks too. None of that is something we have to put up with.

And that’s why, along with my bestial, shadowy self, I began to climb.

Because when things are terrible, we can change them. Or endure them until we can change them. Or take one step forward so that someone else will be able to take a step beyond that.

The world, in my experience, is immensely stupid and unfair.

But we’re capable of being better than that.

We can learn.

We can become more than we were.

There’s no guarantees. We can and absolutely will fail. We’ll be stupid and mean and make the worst mistakes possible, over and over again. It’s so easy to believe in the face of that, that our lives count for nothing.

Easy, but not correct.

As I climbed, the beast fragment asked me a question. Not with words, or thoughts, or anything coherent. It’s question came in the form of an insistence that I dissolve too. That I admit to the reality which defined it. A reality which said than in the end nothing it had ever been mattered. That the only truth it had ever found was that there was no truth, and that everything was without meaning.

You don’t fight that kind of thing with spells or fists or screams that ring off the heavens. You can’t fight it at all. What had happened to the gods proved that. They tried to find meaning in their power, had tried to fight the End of All things with rage and defiance.

But rage burns off, even the rage of a star, and defiance can crumble into acceptance when it’s foundations grow weak and melt away.

So I didn’t try to fight.

I just kept going.

I couldn’t defeat the beast fragment with words or deeds. I had to make my argument by living it. By showing it, and more importantly myself, through the example of who I chose to be and what I chose to do. If I wanted to prove that it was worth carrying on, the only tool that could really do it, was to carry on and live.

The beast fragment didn’t have a response to that. It’s hunger didn’t understand, and in a sense, couldn’t understand.

It tried to consume me, but what was there to consume? Wasn’t I the same as it was?

Obviously that wasn’t true. There was a lot in me that wasn’t in the beast fragment. Or, maybe not a lot, but definitely a Little (yeah, I crack myself up sometimes).

The beast fragment was not amused by that. It wasn’t anything at all, but ‘amused’ was a bit farther away than the rest.

I ascended and felt it tearing away at beastial bit I carried.

It wanted them back.

I didn’t deserve to have them. It could not stand that I’d turned a piece of itself against itself. That was the closest thing it understand to blasphemy, and it struck and tore at the nothing around me again and again.

Each time it struck it pulled back with nothing, and I was left with nothing around me.

I could have escaped like that.

It would have been easier than a lot of things I’d done, but there was one tiny problem with it; the beast fragment would follow me.

Could I have run one of the other cities and fed another Neoteric Lord to the beast fragment? Maybe? Would that have killed more people than I could count? Unquestionably.

Instead, I gave it what it wanted.

A part of me.

Not a big part, and not a part I was losing either. It was more likely a piece of myself which reflected the whole of me.

I couldn’t have it chase me, and I could leave it where it was. The world was never going to heal with an open unending wound in it. 

So the beast fragment needed to become something else.

It wouldn’t be me, not like MB was. Instead it would see the story of me and the story of MB. It would see who we were and who we’d become.

What would it learn from that? What would it chose to become?

I couldn’t begin to guess. It was nothing and so when it chose to become something it could wind up as anything.

Eternity is a long time to climb, but rising out of an endless void doesn’t some with distance markers or a good method tracking progress.

An infinity of years later though, I reached the top of the chasm.

All was darkness still. The world was cloaked in endless, fathomless night.

I tried to glow, even with Sola free of me, I knew I could still call on her domain.

I felt her warmth spread through me, but the world remained dark.

Or maybe it wasn’t the world that was dark?