Chapter 746 - The Limits of Power

Accidentally scheduled this Death: Genesis chapter for 8PM instead of 8AM and just realized. Sorry about that!

“I hate being like this,” Zeke said, mostly to himself, though Talia was close enough to hear him.  After she’d given him a short tour of the city, they’d fallen into old habits – and her bed.  Though she’d made it perfectly clear that they weren’t reconnecting.  It was just a physical release between two people who stood near the pinnacle of power and could find no one else with whom to couple.

Or that was how she looked at it.

Zeke wanted more, though he knew precisely how little sense a true relationship made.  For all that he might want something like that in the moment, he was well aware that he’d abandon that connection the second he went back to his training.  And given the monumental task ahead of him, he couldn’t afford to stop.

The constantly fraying threads taunted him.  It felt like they could all snap at any second.  They probably wouldn’t.  Zeke was nearly certain that they were still millennia away from that danger.  However, with the timescale of his training, which had already spanned thousands of years, he could not let himself relax.  He couldn’t allow himself to take a break – not for more than a few weeks, at least.  Otherwise, the entire multi-verse could unravel before he was prepared to stop it.

He leaned forward against the banister and hung his head.  Behind him, Talia lounged upon the bed.  She’d never stopped staring at him. 

Her feelings toward him were more complex than he’d initially credited.  He’d known all along that she didn’t hate him.  Not truly.  She might’ve moved on, but she could never stop loving him.  Instead, she’d channeled those emotions into forced disdain, and of a sort that was mostly indistinguishable from hatred.

But she had also allowed him to see beneath the surface, and in doing so, he’d seen hints of the vulnerable, lost, and ultimately devoted girl he’d known for so long.  Of course, there was more than that there.  She’d always been strong, but now, that strength had become divine.  More than that, she bore the weight of leadership on her shoulders.  She cared about her people, and they, in turn, supported her in an instinctually symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit. 

That was how being a greater god was supposed to work, and she pulled it off quite well.  Better even than Pudge, who seemed the pinnacle of such standing. 

It strengthened her even as she empowered them. 

And her people loved her for it.  Undead the multi-verse over were reviled by the living.  It wasn’t difficult to understand why, either.  Often, they looked grotesque.  Sometimes, they smelled even worse than they looked.  And many of their practices were repulsive.  But more than that, the existence of the undead became abhorrent to the living for two more prominent reasons.

The first was that it was a reminder that everything they were could be snatched away in an instant.  Most beings accepted death as an inevitability, but the notion of identity death coupled with a rotting corpse of their former bodies living on without them was, in a word, horrific.  That was what the undead represented.  Someone else walking around wearing their rotting skin – it was just too much for most to accept. 

For Zeke’s part, he didn’t much care about that.  Once he was gone – if such a thing was even possible now – he was gone.  It didn’t matter if, after he’d died, someone else wore his body like a shell.

The second issue was that, to most of the living, undead just felt unnatural. Even Zeke sensed it, though it was easy enough to ignore.  The only undead he’d ever met that didn’t feel wrong, at least in some small way, was Talia, and that was probably because of her unique origin. 

In all the versions of the Mortal Realm – and there were too many to count, spanning an unknowable amount of time – no one else had survived such a beginning.  She was one of one, and as such, there were elements of life within her unliving flesh.  Zeke still didn’t quite understand it. 

But he wanted to.

Picking apart her threads would almost assuredly yield quite a lot of progress.

He shook his head at that thought, only to find that she’d approached him from behind.  Laying her hand on his bare back, she said, “Often, I forget the burden you bear.”

“I don’t,” Zeke admitted.

Indeed, it weighed down on him with every passing second.  Forgetting it was impossible, especially with his awareness of the threads pressing against his mind at all times.  Those frayed edges taunted him with his inability to counter their decay. 

“I miss your scars,” she said, her fingers dancing over his spine. 

With a thought, Zeke reformed them – just as they’d been.  His horrific treatment at the hands of hell, coupled with the results of his many battles, had left him horribly scarred.  Normally, he didn’t think about it – especially after his regenerative abilities outpaced the effects of the wounds – but it only took a single thought to bring them back. 

And they covered every single inch of his body.  In fact, he looked more like one of the undead traversing the city below than he appeared to be a human man.  Talia’s fingers hitched for a single moment before she got control.  Even she was horrified by what she saw. 

By the evidence of everything Zeke had been through.  It wasn’t an exaggeration to state that he’d spent a subjective eternity being tortured, ripped apart, and killed, only to rise again, pristine and new.  His body remembered every single wound.  Every moment of pain.  Every would-be death from which he’d miraculously resurrected himself. 

Letting it show only required a moment of relaxation.

“I know,” Zeke said.

“You know nothing.”

Zeke let out a small chuckle at that simple sentence, a mostly-forgotten memory of Earth reasserting itself in his mind.  “Fair enough,” he agreed, pushing that memory aside.  He pushed himself to his full height, then turned to face Talia.  As he did so, he reasserted control over his body and reformed it without the scars. 

But the bulk of his attention remained on her. 

If perfection had a form, Talia’s surpassed it.  Ageless beauty combined with just enough danger to create something wholly enticing.  How he’d never seen it before his ascension was a mystery.  Back then, they would have been perfect together.

Then again, they were different people in the Eternal Realm.  Neither was ready to recognize how well they fit together.  And now, it was too late.  There were too many other factors.  Too many responsibilities for either to focus on their relationship. 

And it would require attention.  More than most relationships, in fact.  Their natures dictated that much. 

At least she didn’t hate him, though.  Not truly.

That was better than he’d expected.  Better than he deserved, if he was honest with himself.

“I sometimes forget,” she said, stepping close, her hand finding his stomach.  “All that time we were missing you, you were going through something…something none of us could even imagine.  So much pain.”

Zeke didn’t respond.  Instead, he just shifted his gaze to the balcony floor, where his eyes locked onto a single tile.  He couldn’t blame Talia – or anyone else – for not understanding his trip through hell.  Often, he wished he could forget it.  Sometimes, he managed to ignore it for whole centuries until a particularly vivid memory would drive itself through his mind. 

“It had to be done.”

“Did it?” she asked.  “Did it really?”

“You know what’s happening.  You know why I’m –”

“I know what you’ve told me,” she interrupted, breaking away.  “But it can’t be as bad as you say.  We’d know.”

“I do know.”

“The rest of us, Zeke.  You tell us that reality is unraveling, but you’ve been saying that for centuries.  You said that more than a thousand years ago, and nothing has changed.  Wouldn’t we –”

“No.  You won’t see it until it’s too late.”

“But what can we do?”

“What I’m doing,” Zeke answered softly.  “It’s what I’ve been doing since I started down this path.”

“You can’t be expected to carry that load alone.”

“There’s no one else.”

“But why?  Why can’t I help?” she pleaded.  “I want to.  I have a whole nation of undead ready to –”

“I’m different, Talia.  No one else can do this.  There are only a few people in all of reality that can even see what I see, much less manipulate the threads.  I’m the sacrifice on the altar of preservation.  I don’t get to have a life.  I don’t get to think about myself or my relationships with the people I love.  That’s the price I pay so that everyone – including you and everyone else I care about – gets to continue existing,” he explained.  “Do I like it?  No.  I wish – more than anything, I wish – I could just…I don’t know.  Retire.  Live out the rest of my life with you.  Or that I could’ve spent more time with Tucker or Pudge.  I just…I just can’t, Talia.  I don’t want things to be this way.  I wish they weren’t.  But wanting isn’t going to change anything.  This is about action, not fruitless –”

“I refuse to believe that you’re the only person who can fix this.”

“I’m not.”

“You just said –”

“I’m the only one who survived long enough to fix it,” Zeke said, revealing a conclusion he’d long since reached.  “Do you think I’m the only person capable of reaching this point?  I’d bet there are thousands – maybe millions – of people who had the potential.  They just didn’t survive.  Or they fell off the path.  Or they made a few wrong turns.  I don’t know.  But what I do know is that I am not unique.  Not by a long shot.  I’m just the one that kept going.  The one that survived.  The one that reached a point where I could actually fulfil my purpose.”

“You say that like you were created with this goal in mind.”

“Maybe I was.”

Zeke had given that a lot of thought over the years, and it just didn’t make sense that he was unique.  Not with the near infinite number of potential candidates.  There had to be others who possessed his blend of attributes that gave him a chance to fix the problem at hand. 

“But you said that you weren’t the only person who can fix it.  That implies that there are others out there right now who could do it.”

“One other.”

“Who?  Where are they?”

“Otherwise indisposed,” Zeke answered.  “The Creator could do it.  He has more power and experience with the threads than I could ever accumulate.”

“Then what is he doing?”

“I don’t know,” Zeke admitted with a sigh as he ran his hand through his hair.  “Maybe fighting against the adversary.”

“The interdimensional beings that want to consume our reality.”

“Or being,” Zeke said with a shrug.  “That might not even be entirely accurate.  The Waymaster has never really said whether the adversary is a creature or just a force of nature.”

He shook his head.  “The point is that the Creator hasn’t shown himself – or herself, I guess.  Itself.  Whatever the case, they haven’t stepped up.  This has been happening for tens of thousands of years.  Reality has been unraveling for longer than we know.  And the Creator has let it happen uncontested.  I think it’s safe to assume that they have no interest in stepping up.”

“But why not?  They’re part of reality, too.”

“Maybe they know it’s useless,” Zeke said, voicing his most ardent fear.  There was every chance that his goal was unattainable.  “Or they might just want it to all end.  Eternal life can get very lonely, I imagine.  Maybe they’re tired of fighting.  Tired of existing.  Or they might be too drained.  Power is a finite resource, so it’s possible they’ve reached their limit.  The point is that I just don’t know, and I can’t afford to stand aside and wait until I do.  I have to act.”

Talia turned away. 

“Not what you wanted to hear, is it?” Zeke asked after a few moment.

“No.”

“What did you want to hear, then?”

She shook her head, saying, “I don’t know.  Maybe that the problem wasn’t as urgent as you made it out to be.”  Then, in a smaller voice, she added, “Or that the multi-verse was doomed and that we could spend the remaining years together.  Maybe that you chose me over…everything else.”  She looked up at him.  “Silly, isn’t it?  Selfish and silly.”

Zeke didn’t answer.  Instead, he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.  As he did so, he wished he could make her desires a reality.  For all his power, he couldn’t control everything, though.  No one could.  And ultimately, that was the problem.