Chapter 758 - Sun Palace

Zeke didn’t bother telling anyone else where he was going.  If anyone in the tower needed him, which was unlikely, they could talk to Eveline.  She could probably solve any issues herself, and if not, there was always someone else to step up.  After all, there were dozens of lesser gods within the Crimson Tower, a few of which were on the right track to take an even higher place within the multi-verse.

No – they didn’t need him.

Not anymore.  So long as the tower itself remained intact, they likely preferred he stay away.  The fact that no one, aside from Eveline, had spoken to him for months was proof enough of that. 

Instead, Zeke left the tower through a gate that would lead him to the Ways.  Once there, he wasted no time leaving his embassy behind and heading out to his destination.  Along the way, he was sorely tempted to stop by and visit the Waymaster’s bubble.  Mostly because he’d neglected his training, but also – at least in part – because he knew the evolved amoeba never turned down a bit of conversation. 

He wasn’t the best person to talk to, but he was better than nothing at all. 

In the end, Zeke chose not to go down that route, and not just because it wouldn’t be productive.  Now that he’d decided on a course of action, he was impatient to get it done.  At long last, he’d chosen to end the threat posed by Shar Maelaine, and he couldn’t abide any other delays. 

To that end, he quickly found his way across the city and to the connected path through the surrounding nothingness.  He’d have preferred to simply take another portal, but the one closest to the Sun Goddess’ location was halfway across the Ways. 

While traversing those paths, Zeke’s mind wandered.  At times, he considered the threads and his relationship with them.  But mostly, he thought back to the life he’d slowly left behind.  The drift away from the people he cared had begun all the way back in the Mortal Realm, and at some point since his ascension, he’d decided to shift his focus elsewhere. 

Given the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising.  In fact, he was proud of himself for having the strength to do it.  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t full of potent regret.  He was.  And the more he thought about it, the worse it got.

Thankfully, it wasn’t that long before he finally reached his destination.  Pushing past the guard – another of the Waymaster’s drones – Zeke entered the corner of the multi-verse where the Sun Goddess was rumored to have hidden herself. 

Immediately, he was beset by a massive spike in air temperature.  It was like he’d stepped into a furnace, both from a tactile and visual standpoint.  If it was less than five hundred degrees, Zeke would have been surprised.  Probably much hotter, given that even with his constitution, he found himself coated by a sheen of sweat.  If he could feel it, then it must’ve been truly impressively hot. 

He glanced around, taking in the scenery.  The most noticeable landmark was the enormous sun occupying much of the horizon.  It had to be a hundred times larger – or closer – than the sun back on Earth.  Maybe even twice that, which explained the overbearing heat. 

And the fact that the entire world was on fire. 

The air shimmered with immense heat, and a it was like what would have been vegetation on a normal world had been turned to fire.  Instead of grass, there was a low carpet of flames.  Trees were made of stone, with leaves of fire, and in the distance, Zeke saw a lake of liquid flame. 

It was expected, but still, the setting surprised him.  The heat and fire suggested that the planet would have been devoid of all wildlife, but that simply was not the case.  Even a simple glance showed Zeke massive golems rumbling in the distance, and he saw a serpent with glistening black scales swimming through the lake of fire.  There were smaller creatures as well.  Reptiles, mostly, but insects too. 

In a lot of ways, it was beautiful.  But it was also so alien that, even though he wasn’t in any danger of being burned to a crisp, Zeke couldn’t feel comfortable.  So, it was only after a little hesitation that he targeted a distant thread and pulled himself into the air. 

He flew higher and higher until he left the planet’s atmosphere far behind.  The vacuum of space was even more uncomfortable than the surface of the fire planet, but Zeke quickly pushed that aside and pulled himself toward the nearby sun.

From his research, Zeke knew that it was much, much closer than Earth’s sun had been to his home, but it was also much larger.  The only reason the nearby planet hadn’t been reduced to slag was because this much larger body didn’t burn quite as hot as Earth’s sun. 

It was still a star, though.

As Zeke drew closer, he was taken aback by just how energetic the surface was.  Enormous explosions of fire and gas arced from one point to another, while the whole thing roiled with every sort of energy that existed. 

Zeke pushed closer and closer, and the star filled the entirety of his vision.  The threads were so tightly woven – and so numerous – that he could scarcely discern one from the other.

Even looking for it, he very nearly missed the speck of darkness that was his destination.  Soon enough, it resolved into a landmass, upon which sat a crystalline palace.  Thin towers and graceful arches gave it the shape of something out of a fairy tale.  It glowed orange, either from the heat or simple reflected light, but Zeke wasn’t that concerned with the source.

Instead, he cast his senses inside, bypassing the divine wards Shar Maelaine had erected around her home.  That’s when he felt her. 

The sun goddess herself, sitting on her massive throne and holding court for her subjects.  They were all powerful – they had to be to endure such closer proximity to the sun – but Zeke knew that none of them could even come close to harming him.  They were inconsequential.  Future casualties of a war they were ill-equipped to fight.

Zeke’s feet touched down on the bit of land just outside the gates.  Outside, the rock was barren and smoking.  Inside was paradise.  Flowers with flaming petals, trees not unlike the ones he’d seen on the planet of his arrival, and even fire-plumed birds he took to be phoenixes – it was a truly impressive home. 

As expected for a woman who’d been one of the multi-verse’s greater gods for longer than most of written history. 

At the gate was a familiar sight.  A pair of knights stood sentry, both pulsing with enough power to intimidate anyone who stumbled upon them.  Zeke stopped in front of the gate and said, “I am here to kill your goddess.  Stand aside, and you may live.  Get in my way, and you will be destroyed.”

Predictably, they chose the second option.  Whether it was due to fanaticism or simple stupidity, they attacked.  They never even had the chance to draw their impressive swords before Zeke yanked on their threads.  The first turned to ash a second later, while the other literally unraveled, his body turning to strings that unspooled onto the ground.

Briefly, he continued to live.  Zeke even saw him blink as he tried to scream.  Blessedly, his life ended only a moment later.

Zeke passed through the gate, only to find himself under immense pressure.  He shrugged and continued forward.  Each step added millions of pounds to the weight pressing in on him, but he shouldered it with ease.  By the time he reached the front door, the pressure was comparable to the pull of a black hole.

But his stride never faltered.

He pushed the door open, only to find a dozen more armored men waiting for him.  He sighed, then repeated his warning.  Like the guards at the gate, these knights chose to attack, and they paid the price for that bad decision. 

Zeke left destruction in his wake as he continued through the palace.  If he was honest, he had to admit that he was impressed with her home.  It lacked the homey quality of a place like the Lord’s Manor, replacing it with divine awe, but it was an obvious work of art that surpassed anything else he’d ever seen.

It was just a building, though.  And as much as he wished he could preserve it, he knew just how unlikely that would be. 

For all that he could appreciate art and beauty, Zeke was a destroyer, not a preservationist.  Like everything else he touched, the crystal palace would soon find itself in ruins. 

Such was his effect on the world.

It didn’t take Zeke long to reach his destination, though he was forced to kill a few hundred more knights.  Along the way, he was treated to the other artistic merits within the crystal palace.  Colors swirled within the walls, and glistening statues decorated the halls. 

But the second Zeke locked his senses onto the Sun Goddess, all of that faded into the background.  He had come on a mission, and he would not be deterred by something so ephemeral as beauty.

He pushed the double doors open to reveal a massive throne room that reminded him of the top of the tower he’d visited during his first extended foray into hell.  Back then, he’d found himself confronted by a crucified dwarven prince, which was just about as different of a situation from the current setting as he could imagine. 

Yet, the size was similar.  So were the massive pillars, though instead of being comprised of the damned, these were made of faceted stone.  A thousand people lined the carpeted approach, which ran from the entrance, between the pillars, and to the throne at the other end of the vaulted chamber.

And there she was.

Shar Maelaine’s skin glowed with the kind of inner luster that only a greater god could produce.  Otherwise, she looked like a beautiful woman with slightly tapered ears, golden hair, and eyes like fire. 

She pushed herself to her feet and stepped forward.  Her white dress unfurled into a long train that stretched far behind her.  The constant cacophony of the nearby star could not penetrate the walls, so the chamber was entirely silent, but for the sound of her footsteps.  They echoed throughout the room, loud and insistent. 

But with all that, Zeke was far more interested in the threads that comprised her very being.  Even the outermost strings glowed like a soul thread, beautiful and powerful. 

“You mustn’t stare,” she said when she came within a dozen feet.  She stopped a little out of arm’s reach.  “Otherwise, I might get the wrong impression.”

“What impression do you mean?” Zeke asked. 

“Did you come to kill me or to ogle me?”

“How did you do that to your threads?” he asked, ignoring her question.  They both knew the answer. 

“A goddess must have her secrets.”

“Not from me,” Zeke stated.  “I will give you one chance to make peace with your own end.  Apologize to whomever you must –”

“Apologize?  Whatever for?”

Zeke frowned.  “You know the answer to that question,” he stated.  “Slavery.  Murder.  Selfishness.  The list goes on and on.”

“Petty complaints for a man who has murdered trillions.”

“Perhaps,” Zeke allowed.  He really didn’t have a moral ground to stand on.  “Then am I to believe you have no regrets?”

“Only one.”

“What?”

“That I allowed you to live when you first came to my attention,” she said.  “I should have squashed you like the pest you were.”

“Maybe,” Zeke conceded.  Certainly, that would have saved her a lot of grief. “Does it make a difference that I’m not doing this for myself.”

“Of course you are.  You may have fooled yourself into believing otherwise, but you are just as selfish as any of your forebears,” she said, referring to the other greater gods.  Did she not know that he’d surpassed that point?  Obviously not.  “You want power, the same as any of the rest of us.  You want authority.”

“I want to save our reality.  You know that the Creator will fall.  The Framework will unravel.  Is unraveling with every passing day.”

“We will both be long gone by the time it fails,” she said. “And that old fool will be around long after that.  He will simply start over.  That is what he does.  When one iteration fails, he simply creates another.  And another after that.  I question whether even he knows how many have come before.  But nothing I say will matter to you, will it?  You didn’t come all this way just to talk about an ancient and doddering old man.”

“I did not.”

“Then why continue this conversation?  The die is cast.  The future is written.  We only need to play our roles.”

“Odd way of putting it.”

She laughed – a deep throated sound that, in any other circumstance, might have been appealing.  “You have no idea what you are doing.  Gloriously ignorant and woefully misguided.  You are not the first, and you will not be the last.  Now, I tire of this ruse.  If you wish to fight me, then do so.  Otherwise, leave my home and never return.”

Zeke clenched his fist at her dismissive tone.  “Very well,” he said, ready to strike.

He never got the chance before he felt a thousand presences suddenly appear all around the castle.  They were familiar, yet he couldn’t quite remember where he’d encountered them before.

And then it hit him.

“I suppose I should have expected you to have found allies,” he said.

“Of course.  I am no fool, destroyer.”

“I guess not.”

And then, he stepped forward, ready to complete his mission.