Story:The End of Eternity/E15

Victorious though he was, Arend could not stop himself from shaking in fear once time began to flow again. The light red hued Key fell to the ground, deactivated from its Master’s expiration, and Klaytaza began to step towards it as she discarded the heart of the fallen Master. Arend was completely motionless save his tremors.

Had he imagined things, or had the enemy leader spoken before time began to resume?

“What are you,” Arend questioned. “Who are you?!”

“The remembrance and the amnesia. The respiration and the asphyxiation… The beauty of separation and the bliss of union. That is what I am, and all I am is an imaginary living creation. An unreal corporeal creator.”

Arend’s expression darkened significantly. “Your next competitor is welcome to step forward,” he spat. “I will cut them down, and then the other two, as well. And then you’ll see what happens when you continue to mess with me.”

“There is no reason to fear any aspect of existence… If only you listened.”

Arend stepped forward to point his blade towards the leader in the back, shrouded in darkness, but he was interrupted and pulled from this thought as another enemy Key stepped forward. This was the Key in light-red celestial armor and two knives in their hand. The Key had a short mop of fiery red hair framing their eyes, outlined in heavy dark material as all other Keys were, and behind them waltzed their Master, who was a dark-skinned woman with golden hair tied in braids around her head. A smile was on the Master’s face.

“Face the Thousand Swords of Acceptance… for mercy is the nonexistent missing link in the chains of humanity. There is no mercy here for you, or for any of us. Imagine and create, she who would toil endlessly at the world.” The light-red Key raised his knives in an ‘X’ formation as the leader in the darkness announced his presence. “Raze: New Era Sepulcher: Cepheus, the second Chandrasekhar limit!”

Without wasting any time, the enemy Key danced forward once announced and aimed both knives at Arend’s jugular. The boy expected this, however, and tossed his blade up into the air once the shadowy leader had ceased speaking. Klaytaza reacted perfectly, as expected, and with a twirl into the air she caught the blade and swung it downward to block the enemy’s attack with one smooth motion.

Arend stepped backwards from the celestial battle to keep an eye on the enemy Master, but in the instant he did this, he lost sight of her. She had either moved extremely fast or had disappeared somehow, but she was definitely out of his sight. Already he had erred.

“Relax. I want to show you something,” a voice dangerously close to Arend’s ear purred. The boy jumped and moved to back away, but found his arm held tightly – impossibly tightly – by the vice grip of the red Key’s Master. She looked at him with ebony eyes from beneath a stray bang of hair. “Are you willing to see the truth?”

“What are you doing?! Let go of me. Klaytaza – let go of me, dammit!” Arend turned around in a panic, but Klaytaza was completely occupied with the fighting of the almost-pink Key. Arend considered stopping time to deal with this situation, but remembered how the enemy leader spoke (or did he?) during the last time stop, and decided against it for now.

“Above you, child. Do you see it?” Arend looked up and saw the gigantic upside down cross, as well as the nondescript man hanging from it. He was no more surprised or taken aback by it than he was when he and Klaytaza arrived. The female Master spoke on. “That is the cradle of sorcery, aesthetics, and astronomy. Above it lies the new world, and above that lies only illusion.

“Now, below you – look!” Reluctantly following the Master’s directions, Arend glanced downward. Just as when he and Klaytaza entered, he saw only the floating platform, somehow supported from the small stairs that led up to it, and the dark cloudy atmosphere around the platform. “Do you hear them? The cries of the expanding sphere? The construction of unconsciousness?”

“I hear nothing, you old crone! Free me!”

“Look again, child.”

Against his will, somehow, Arend looked down once again – and this time saw a completely different scene.

The platform continued to persist in his vision, but now it was detached from any stairs and was the summit of an endless tower. Every inch of the tower was coated in sharp, bloody spikes, and on every one hung at least some part of human flesh. More often than not, very little of the tower’s surface area could be seen, because it was coated by legions of naked humans, all shaded the same vague shade of muddled brown. Every one of them was naked, and each one of them reached upwards, reaching, reaching; hands poised at the top as if to climb it, and grasping to the stars as if to claw them down.

Beneath and around the writhing mass of humans, clinging to the wall and one another as if insects, was another visual marvel of absurdity. The clouds had morphed, disappeared even, and in their place flew the legions of all horrors. Skeletons with bare wings, various-skinned demons with horned heads and wings, angelic-looking humanoids with six pairs of wings… forms began to exist and faded from vision instantaneously, but all of them beat around the tower and prodded at the humans with humor. They flew about endlessly, forever out of the reach of those confined to safety and live.

Once he noticed all the beings in existence, Arend began to hear their cries.

At first the sound was a formless blob, simply something to notice and eventually ignore. But the more he pushed it away from the back of his mind, without any conscious decision in the matter, the more his body noticed the cries. Screams were more accurate when it came to these noises, death throes even. It sounded as if every human was crying out in pain and agony, repenting and relinquishing, and to counter this it sounded as if every aerial denizen was laughing at them in the most dissonant tones imaginable. Not only did they laugh, but they cackled and screamed as well, and even let loose sounds that defied an alphabet. The sounds of the inhabited void were so very loud, and so very clashing, that nothing was able to be pointed out and identified before being swept away by a new cacophony of horror.

The sounds had to stop. Arend needed to scream, but he could not bring himself to do so. His body would not move, so frozen was he in his awe and fear. There must have been billions of humans crowded together, and millions of taunting aeronauts, but this one singular boy had his health and his mouth – but could not scream.

The female Master, still holding onto Arend, grinned at his agony. “Do you hear that? The sounds of war? The cries of the deceased? The graveyard of all existence is before us, and it beckons to reach the lives that we hold. The cycle is unending… It is eternal… That is all that is eternal! This is the mystery of creation!”

“There is… No mystery,” Arend struggled to say. He could growl out words, but could not scream. The arm holding him captive to the image felt as if it were going to fall off. “Your war is simply the painting of a God who forsakes you all! The illusion precedes… the reality!”

The female Master looked at Arend with a curious look, and her braids unraveled without any cause. Long golden curls twirled about her shoulders and danced about her narrow face. The elegant and careless style of this long style of hair covered her forehead and some of her eyebrows. With this aesthetic, her expression changed from one of mischievous wrath to one of listless melancholy.

She tossed Arend off the platform without a word.

His reaction was, even to himself, surprisingly nonchalant. He knew that he was being cast down and away from existence, doomed to reside in the eternal purgatory between the states of life and death – reality and illusion – love and hate – awake and asleep – interest and boredom – grace and wrath. He did not bother trying to resist, or stop time, or any other methods. He did not scream. He did not even despair. He only closed his eyes and laid his arms out, welcoming the eternal war of the tower from the abyss.

He never hit the ground, but found himself laying on it.

Arend blinked and sat up. He was on the platform, the original platform, beneath the massive cross and the raised hidden man nailed to it. The light red Key lay on the ground some distance to his side, lifeless and cut to ribbons. Impaled on Klaytaza’s blade was the female Master. Her braids were loosened, and her falling curls somewhat masked the blade that dove straight through her heart. Her forever adamant face was pulled into a look that demonstrated revelation and complete understanding.

Shaking and unused to the sudden silence on the platform, Arend stood up and dusted his pants off. He looked around in bewilderment at the statuesque enemies that still posed around him before glancing upwards at the falling cross. Without cause – or perhaps without effect – the eternal man’s hands came free from their nailed constraints, and slowly drifted downwards until they hung around the platform, framing it with skin so pale it seemed to dodge one’s very vision. Still the cross continued to slowly but steadily fall.

“The mystery has been solved,” stated the leader in the darkness, “and the pleasure behind slaughter has been relinquished. But while the Kingdom may crumble, still the subjects remain, and so too does the world, for it is eternal.”

“Where are we?” stuttered Arend.

“The summit of the clock tower,” answered the leader with confidence. “The summit of time and space. The top of the world. The end of reality.”

A deep bell’s tone rang through the cold air, quietly and only for a short moment. When it was over, the Key with pitch black armor moved one foot forward.

“Your trial continues,” whispered the absent leader.

KEYS TO ETERNITY REMAINING: 3