Chapter 745 - A New Sanctuary

“So,” Zeke said as they strode through the Ways.  It felt like every single eye followed them with each step.  Zeke barely noticed his surroundings, just that the city upon the platform felt even more crowded than ever before.  “How have you been?”

She didn’t answer, leaving Zeke to follow along in silence.  As he did, he finally allowed himself to see the state of the city’s residents.  Most were the same as ever – lesser gods going on about one errand or another – but there were plenty of much poorer people around as well.  In fact, some even appeared to be refugees, with their every belonging in packs upon their shoulders.  Their clothes were torn, and many looked malnourished. 

Those were clearly natives of the Ethereal Realm who’d never made it to godhood.  As such, they were wholly dependent on the more powerful for safety and shelter.  Some would climb the ladder and ascend into godhood, but those who managed that feat were incredibly rare.  The rest who’d attained that level of power were people who’d ascended from the Eternal Realm, just like Talia, Pudge, and Zeke. 

Well, not so much like Zeke.  His ascension had been aberrant in the extreme.  Others never had to deal with so much pain.  Nor had he heard of anyone spending so much time in the endeavor. 

Either way, ascension from a lower realm set people apart.  The people who managed it were comparatively rare, but their life spans – along with the sheer scope of reality’s existence – meant that their numbers were practically uncountable. 

Idly, Zeke wondered what it might’ve been like for someone who’d climbed to the top of the Eternal Realm, scratching and clawing for every ounce of power they could accumulate.  Only when they reached the Ethereal Realm, they were once again at the bottom.  It was no wonder that some people chose to stay and live their lives out at the top of their own realm.  It was easy to accuse them of being big fish in a small pond, but when it came down to it, who could blame them for wanting the best life they could manage? 

The Ethereal Realm was an amazing thing full of wonders.  Most of them, Zeke would never experience.  But he’d seen enough to know that, for those who did make the ascension, it was worth it. 

But then again, he’d never even questioned his own path.  He’d never considered sticking around at a lower tier of power.  He had always been driven to attain more and more strength until he found himself at the top. 

Currently, he was so close he could taste it.  Only a few people in their reality could rival him.  And one was more of an assumption than anything verifiable. 

He still wanted more, though.  He had no intention of stopping.  Maybe not even when he reached the top.

Either way, he noticed the state of the people all around him, so he asked the question on his mind.  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

Talia stopped mid-stride, and so suddenly that Zeke kept going for a step or two before he realized that she’d halted.  He turned to see her face filled with surprise, anger, and a little bit of revulsion.  Or was that hate?  Disgust?  She had never looked at him like that before. 

“You truly have no idea, do you?”

“What?” he asked.

She stared at him for a long time before just shaking her head in frustration and continuing along.  Zeke had no clue what she was talking about, but he knew he wouldn’t find out by just standing there.  So, he followed, regardless of his own annoyance at being ignored. 

With a single thought, he could simply unravel everyone and everything around him.  They would cease to exist, save for their soul threads.  He could destroy those too, though in doing so, he would set off a string of destruction that stretched further than he cared to consider.

He didn’t deserve to be ignored, and he wanted nothing more than to show Talia why doing so was a bad idea.

But he restrained himself and followed, cognizant of just how problematic his detachment had become.  Once, he’d never have even considered killing millions of innocent people, especially not when his only reason was that he’d experienced a moment of pique. 

Now, though?

How many people had he already killed?  How many of those were entirely innocent?  More than he wanted to count.  The numbers were in the billions, and that wasn’t even considering the ones he’d slain accidentally.  What would it matter if added a few million to that sum?

What would it matter if Talia was one of his victims?

He very nearly stumbled at that intrusive thought.  He didn’t want to acknowledge its existence, but he needed to recognize just how slippery the slope of his current path truly was.  Spending hundreds or thousands of years isolated, with only the alien Waymaster or the threads for company, was not a good recipe for perspective. 

And even if she’d disrespected him, Talia was his friend.  Once, she had been more.  But even if they’d lost that, she was still important to him.  And even if it was a throwaway thought that he’d never act on, the fact that he’d even considered unraveling her existence just because she’d annoyed him was, in a word, terrifying.

He struggled to pull that impulse in.

The walk was not a particularly long one.  Just a few miles through the busy thoroughfares of the platform.  Soon enough, they reached their destination, which was one of the waygates.  Zeke could tell that he’d never visited the location on the other side, but he did find the pattern of the threads incredibly interesting.  The Waymaster didn’t consciously manipulate them.  Rather, those gates were the result of his natural growth, guided though it was. 

Still, there were lessons to be learned from the intricate pattern.

Unfortunately, Zeke didn’t have time to study it.  Instead, he followed Talia, who didn’t hesitate before walking through the portal.  Zeke stepped through as well, and he was taken aback by a distant feeling that it took him a few moments to identify.

Nostalgia.

“This is your domain.”

Talia stopped and glanced back.  “Of course.  Where else would I take you?” she asked, a clearly rhetorical question. 

They’d arrived atop a cliff overlooking a vast city.  When Zeke looked upon it, he saw familiar architecture.  The buildings were made of black stone with red trim, and unless he missed his guess, the city had been built upon the same layout as Darukar, the long destroyed city of the undead.

It had fallen when Abraham Micayne, the necromancer who’d overwhelmed the entirety of the Radian Isles, had enslaved much of its population, using them as fodder for his undead army.  If Zeke hadn’t stepped in, that army would have swept across the Eternal Realm, leaving nothing but destruction and death in its wake. 

Even after Zeke had stepped in, he’d somehow escaped.  It was years later that Talia had finally tracked him down.  The showdown that had followed had been one of Zeke’s most difficult fights, and it had forced him to step further forward on his path than almost any other.  It was both horrific and formative.

“You rebuilt Darukar.”

“That is no longer its name,” she said. “We call it New Sanctuary.”

Zeke didn’t miss that it was named after the city where Talia had been born.  It felt like so long ago that he’d first visited that tiered city and met Talia’s mother.  Idly, he realized that he didn’t even remember that woman’s name.  Once, she’d seemed so important.  Like a god herself.  But now, Zeke knew that she was just a small woman too afraid to move on, both from the Mortal Realm as well as her deceased husband.

Constance.

That had been her name.  It took a few moments for him to fish those memories from his mind.  Thousands of years definitely weren’t conducive to a perfect memory.

“Why that name?” Zeke asked.

“It’s fitting.  Across the multi-verse, undead like me are ridiculed and often hunted, for no other reason than their nature,” she said.  “Some are dangerous.  Others are simply trying to live their lives.  The living, they make no distinction and hunt us all equally.  I set out to gather them, to give them a proper place to settle.  A sanctuary where they can hope for safety.”

“It’s not because of your old home?”

She shook her head.  “A coincidence,” she lied.  “Nothing more.  I left that place long ago, and I have never looked back.”

Zeke was well aware just how untrue that statement was.  Talia wasn’t the sentimental sort.  She never had been. Even after her evolutions, she still kept her emotions in check.  Was it her nature as an undead?  Or was it a defense mechanism, perhaps?  There was every possibility that she’d always kept her feelings closely guarded, even before her transformation into one of the unliving.

Zeke had not known her before, though, so he could not say for certain.

One way or another, he knew she was lying to herself about the reasons for naming her city after her mother’s.

“How long?” Zeke asked.

“What?”

Zeke shook his head, suddenly realizing something that should have been extremely important.  “How long ago did you found this city?”

“More than two thousand years ago.  I spent another thousand gathering enough people to populate it.  It has grown considerably since then.”

Zeke imagined Talia going from one universe to the next, steadily gathering followers along the way.  He saw her as a messianic figure among the undead, though he had to admit that she probably didn’t accomplish most of her goals through peace.  There had been plenty of fighting along the way.  Zeke could sense that much, at least. 

But one thing was even more certain – he had missed so much. 

He wanted to fall to his knees and weep at the loss.  However, he remained standing, his face unmoving as he stoically stared at the city Talia had founded.  Once, she might have asked for his assistance.  She may have even included him in its construction.  But if there was ever a clear sign that she had moved on from him, it was the fact that she had never even mentioned her city – or the journey to create it – to him. 

How many times had she visited since that fateful day when he’d begun his self-imposed seclusion? Hundreds, at least.  Maybe even thousands. 

And she’d never spoken of New Sanctuary.

If it wasn’t crystal clear before, that simple fact made it abundantly apparent that their relationship, such as it was, had long since unraveled.  Perhaps she still cared about him.  He definitely still cared about her.  But they would never share the same connection. 

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’ve just realized something I wish I’d recognized sooner.”

“What is that?”

“We can never go backwards.  For all the power I now wield, time is something I can’t touch.  It continues forward.  Everything changes,” he said.  Then, he shook his head as he continued, “There was a saying back on Earth.  You can never go home again.  Do you know what that means?”

Talia said that she didn’t, though Zeke guessed that wasn’t necessarily true.  She probably just wanted to give him the opportunity to say his peace.  She might not have been in touch with her own emotions, but she’d always possessed an intuition about others. 

“It means that you can’t go back to the places in your memories.  And even if you do, they won’t be the same.  Everything changes,” he repeated.  “It’s the same with people.  Nobody ever stops moving.  Forward or backward, it doesn’t matter.  The person we see today is not the one we knew even a year ago.” 

He glanced at Talia.  “Does that make sense.”

“Of course.  It’s obvious to anyone with a speck of self-awareness, Zeke.”

He let out a sigh.  “Guess that excludes me, then.”

“I suppose it does,” she agreed.  Then, she turned and walked away from the waygate, quickly finding a path that led down from the cliff.  Zeke followed, his mind roiling with everything he’d learned, and in such a short time.  For all that he’d become all but all-powerful, he still found it frustrating – and a little exciting, once he looked beneath his obvious emotional issues – that he could still be surprised.