Chapter 748 - Lattice

Zeke did not want to move.

As he sat on the balcony, his eyes closed, he didn’t allow himself to study the threads.  Still, they beckoned him forward, promising to reveal all the answers to questions he’d never even considered asking.  Aside from the Creator, he likely knew more about those strings of power than anyone else alive.  Perhaps more than anyone else who’d ever existed.

And yet, he knew he’d only scraped the surface of their mysteries.  Then there were the negative threads.  The bits in between those strings where he knew something existed that he could not even perceive.  He knew less about them, but even so, the mere knowledge that they existed was far more than anyone else in the world could claim. 

Yet, he kept himself separate from his desire to study, to train.  He didn’t want to fall into that trap, lest he blink and another century had passed. 

A tiny ripple in the threads announced Talia’s arrival.

Zeke didn’t respond.  Instead, he remained where he was, entirely unmoving.  He didn’t even breathe. 

Finally, Talia asked, “What will you do?”

“I intend to do what you brought me here to do.”

“I didn’t –”

“Don’t, Talia.  I deserve your honesty.  You do too.  You can’t keep lying to yourself about this.  If all you wanted was advice or to see me, you could have done that in the embassy back in the Ways,” Zeke stated, finally opening his eyes.  He rose smoothly to his feet, then faced her.  “But you didn’t do that.  You wanted me to come here, to see what was at stake so I would have reason to act.  Well, you win.  I intend to act.”

Pointedly, she didn’t dispute his claims because there was no other explanation for why she’d invited him to her domain.  Whether she’d fooled herself into believing otherwise was a different conversation entirely, though Zeke could see in her expression that she’d come to terms with the truth.

He was a walking weapon, and not a precise one.  By bringing him into the fight, she’d known what she was doing.  He wasn’t there to join the battle.  He was there to end it, and decisively. 

Certainly, she didn’t like that line of thinking.  She believed him to be a horrific monster.  Zeke could see that in her eyes.  She couldn’t even look at him without recoiling.  Not anymore. 

But she would accept his help.

She would let him destroy her enemies.

It just so happened that her adversaries were his as well.  She’d interrupted Zeke’s training so he could destroy Shar Maelaine, and so, that was what he intended to do.  Once he was finished, he would return to his task. 

The notion that he might not be up to the task never even entered his mind.

In a small voice that lacked any of the ire of their previous conversation, she asked, “How?”

“I’m going to go there and rip the entire domain apart.  If she lives through that, I will tear her to pieces too.”

“What about her followers?”

“I’ll kill them too.  If they’re in her domain.  Otherwise, they’ll be safe enough.”

At that, she seemed a little disappointed.  Had she expected him to go on a rampage that included the entire Radiant Host?  Did she want him to descend into the Eternal and Mortal Realms to deal with her followers there?

“She has many worshippers,” Talia stated.  “The entire Mortal Realm belongs to her.”

“What about the zombies?”

Talia shook her head.  “Long since dealt with,” she answered.  “The island continent kept them contained, and eventually, they ran out of food.  They withered and died, and more people were reborn there.  It is fully populated now.  She wasted no time installing her religion, just as she did with my mother.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think you do.  Not really.  Because of what happened before, undead are more common.  Some of those have the potential to ascend.  She slaughters them all.  Even when they’re not hurting anyone.”

“I can’t go down there without destroying the entire realm.”

“Are you certain?”

Zeke was not.  He had enough control over the threads that he could completely contain his power, and to the point where he became virtually undetectable.  However, the Mortal Realm was so comparatively fragile that he didn’t dare risk setting foot in that realm. 

Yet, he did find himself wondering how he’d get there.  It was possible.  He knew that much.  He just wasn’t certain how.

“You can do it, can’t you?”

Zeke shrugged.  “Maybe.”  Even in those short few moments, he’d come up with a few ideas about how to make it work.  “If I figure it out, there’s still a chance it’ll unravel the moment I set foot in that realm.  No matter what precautions I take.  You realize that, don’t you?”

She set her jaw.  “It is necessary.  The Radiant Host is a menace.  Even if you get rid of Shar Maelaine, they will continue to wield too much power.  We can deal with them in the Eternal Realm.  But we have no presence in the Mortal Realm.”

Zeke sighed.  “I’ll consider it.”

Her request was a long way from what she’d said during their previous meeting.  Had that been for the benefit of her people?  Or had she simply swallowed her objections and moved on?

Zeke asked.

She shook her head.  “I don’t know,” Talia admitted.  “Perhaps a little of both.  I don’t like this.  I don’t want it.  But I don’t see another way.  I just…I just can’t do it myself.”  She took a deep breath.  “You were right.  I brought you here because, in the back of my mind, I knew how you would address the problem.  I wanted it, even if I wasn’t prepared to embrace the violence myself.”

She looked at him.  “Does that make me a hypocrite?”

Zeke stepped forward, putting his arm around her and pulling her close.  “We’re all hypocrites, Talia.  Our morals only last so long as it takes for us to encounter a problem that can’t be solved according to our principles.  When pushed, we’ll always do what’s necessary.”

“I tried.”

“I know.”

“I have a code.  I only kill when necessary.  We don’t attack anyone.  We defend ourselves, but…”

“I know,” Zeke said again, realizing that she was weeping.  He wished he could dry her tears.  He wanted to make her happy.  To protect her from the choices she was forced to make.  But that wasn’t how the world worked.

“Our code is the only reason people tolerate us.  We can’t…we can’t abandon it.  Not if we ever want to be accepted.”

 Zeke didn’t respond.  Instead, he just held her.  But he knew she was hoping for something she’d never get.  The reality of it was that the living would never truly accept the undead.  Tolerance was the best she could ever hope for.  The real reason they hadn’t already been eradicated was because it was too dangerous a proposition.  If the living believed they could accomplish it, they would have long since destroyed the entirety of New Sanctuary. 

But they couldn’t do that because Talia was there.  And from what Zeke understood, she was not kind to those who harmed her people. 

He respected that about her.

“I will take this burden,” Zeke said.  “I will destroy them, root and stem.  When I’m finished, there won’t be any members of the Radiant Host left.”

She pulled away.  “Are you certain?”

Her question was performative.  She didn’t mean it.  Rather, she merely believed she needed to ask it. 

Zeke played along, saying, “I am.  I’ll do it.  Don’t worry about it.”

And he meant it.  For all that he was as immortal as any being in the multi-verse, he still had the heart of a man.  And for better or worse, he loved Talia, and he would move planets just to spare her the tiniest bit of pain. 

So, he turned his mind to the problem at hand.  He would destroy the Radiant Host first.  In the Mortal Realm, then in the Eternal Realm.  Only then would he focus on Shar Maelaine.  Not because he thought she could rival him.  Even with her flock of worshippers intact, she could not.  Rather, he was afraid that she would somehow find a way to flee.  But if he was slaughtering her people, her anger might overwhelm her good sense.

In fact, he was banking on it.

For the next couple of days, he and Talia became intimately reacquainted.  Zeke was initially afraid that she was only with him because of what he’d promised, but it wasn’t long before he had moved past such worries.  Even if that was the case, it wasn’t as if he could change anything.

And more than he wanted to admit, he needed the closeness she offered. 

He accepted it gratefully.

But then, reality came back to haunt him, and he was forced to abandon their intimacy when Talia was called away.  She left reluctantly – perhaps she had fooled herself into believing it would last – and Zeke once again found himself alone.

The pangs of loneliness were far more potent in the wake of her departure.

To mitigate their effect, he focused on the problem.  He knew that greater gods could project their awareness into the lower realms, but doing so required a filter.  A machine in the Ways provided that.  But Zeke didn’t want to simply send a projection down to the lower realm.  He wanted to set foot in the Radiant Isles.

The answer to that conundrum lay in a direction he’d already explored in depth.  When he’d first stepped outside the Framework, his thoughts had been so powerful that they’d echoed across the galaxy, killing untold billions.  His first task had been to confine that power.  To restrain it.  And he’d grown so adept at it that he didn’t even need to think about it anymore.  He did it subconsciously.

Now, though, he delved back into that practice, and he was surprised to see that his previous efforts had been incomplete.  Strands of power escaped with every passing second.  If he’d allowed himself to walk in the presence of anyone but lesser gods, they would have been, at best, knocked unconscious.  At worst, they would have simply exploded. 

Arduously, he embarked on a quest to retract those threads and patch up the latticework of protection he’d woven around himself.  It took weeks.  Months, perhaps.  But he kept at it, and long after Talia returned.  He paid her no mind.

Instead, he dove wholly into the task at hand.

Once he’d repaired the net he’d woven around himself, he began the process of retracting it.  Tightening it.  It burst, not unlike an overfilled sack.  Zeke had expected as much, but the violence of the eruption still shattered most of his balcony, and in only the slit second it took for him to wrestle manual control over the tendril.

With great care, he rewove the lattice. 

When his presence was once again contained, he began to reevaluate his plans.  He tried a half dozen other patterns, all with the same result.  He doubled the lattice, and it held a little longer.  But ultimately, it failed too, and more spectacularly than the first time. 

If he hadn’t already woven a secondary net to catch the resulting explosion, half of New Sanctuary might’ve been destroyed.

Zeke wasn’t accustomed to those sorts of consequences.  And he didn’t like working under such constraints.

But it was unavoidable.

In the end, it took nearly six months for him to figure it all out.  The secret was, predictably, in the negative threads.  Through a deft manipulation, he managed to weave his confining net of those negative threads. 

Not completely.  The basic foundation was still made of the same strings with which he was more familiar.  But the rest?  Negative threads.

And when he retracted them, they held.  They didn’t even strain, either.  In fact, the pressure made them stronger. 

More interestingly, not a wisp of power escaped that confinement.  With that intact, Zeke could finally descend into the Mortal Realm.