Chapter 725 - Unraveling

Zeke was unmade.

His body unraveled as his mind scattered in every direction.  Through willpower alone, he forced it to coalesce, maintaining his form.  Then, the threads came again, this time from an entirely different direction.  He endured that attack, same as the last – and hundreds before it – rebuilding himself as quickly as they could tear him to pieces. 

And then they came at him from different dimensions that he couldn’t even perceive.  One second, he was whole, and the next, he was unraveling.  There was pain there, but it echoed through him in a way he couldn’t really understand.  The agony bypassed any resistance he’d developed, cutting to the core of his reality until nothing else remained.

As he felt himself crumbling, a surge of panic rang throughout his soul, encompassing his body and mind in a way that would invariably leave him scarred.  Yet, he did not die.  Even as his body disintegrated alongside all the ephemeral bits that comprised his identity, he continued to survive.

That was not according to the entity’s plan, as evidenced by the voice echoing through the prison.  “What are you?!” it shouted.  “How have you not joined the collective?”

Zeke had no mind, so he could not conjure a response.  No mouth, so he could not give voice to any reply.  No soul, so he could not feel the terror of that reality.  And yet, he persisted as a collection of severing threads that snaked out to tangle the assailing strings. 

He did not have the capability to understand it.  Instead, the threads that were all that he was lashed out, strangling the writhing, snake-like things that clearly composed the enemy. 

It screamed.

Zeke realized that he was screaming as well, though no sound emerged from his nonexistent mouth.  None of it made sense, but it didn’t need to.  Not to him, at least.  The world shattered as strings gathered all around him.  They multiplied, one after another until the prison filled completely. 

The enemy roared in defiance, leaving the childlike calm behind.  In its place was terror.  Resistance.  Anger. 

None of that mattered.  Zeke was entirely incapable of feeling concern.  His mind coalesced just as he realized what the strings represented.  Divine energy was part of it.  The Framework was there as well.  But there was something else.  Something that put a stamp on those strings in a way that rendered them unique.

He flexed.

And those strings went wild.  The cube distorted, bending in a thousand different ways.  Like a crushed can, it collapsed, but it also expanded.  A blazing white sun appeared in the center of the space, illuminating everything.  That’s when Zeke saw the entity’s true form. 

A thousand eyes.  A million tentacles.  Black and white and staring at him with such fervor that it should have driven him entirely mad.  Its body was neither here nor there, phasing in and out of perception with every passing second.  It writhed, and yet, it remained still.  A contradiction incarnate, its mind slammed into his and rebounded, screeching silently as it tried to retreat.

Meanwhile, the sun expanded, roiling with the heat of divine energy.  Threads lashed out, wrapping around everything in the room.  Then, they yanked inward.  Zeke willed himself to remain where he was.  Just a tangle of threads, he held himself in place as everything else within the prison imploded.

For a moment, nothing remained.

No air.  No sound.  No entity.  It was empty in every way that mattered.  Even the threads were gone, sucked into that sun to compress into a tight ball of strings that defied every perception Zeke could conjure.

Then, it all exploded.

Zeke’s body, recently formed and still fragile, disintegrated.  Even as he did, the threads responded to his call, latching onto everything and rebuilding his shape in the blink of an eye.  The entity had no such ability on its side.

Zeke watched as its threads struggled to attach themselves to one another.  For a moment, they seemed to succeed – at least until another bundle of strings slammed into it.  They grabbed hold of each thread, pulling them apart until they ceased writhing. 

And then, he realized that the walls were gone. 

Floating in the middle of space, he looked around, his body once again whole.  And he saw nothing.  Just an empty void.  The moons were gone.  The cube had been disintegrated by what he now knew was an instinctive expression of [Primordial Wrath].  There was no evidence of the creature, either.  Its strings had been destroyed, and its body was gone. 

Perhaps it had never existed in his current reality.  Zeke was confused about what it all meant, though in a lot of ways, he understood the way everything fit together better than anything else he’d ever seen.  His mind, body, and soul existed in a contradictory state that should have been incomprehensible.  However, in the wake of the experience, he saw things the way they were.

More, when he focused, he could just barely perceive the threads that comprised the entirety of his reality.  They were everywhere.  They were everything.  But they existed just out of phase with his perceptions, so unless he concentrated on seeing them – if that was even the right word for how he sensed them – they were entirely invisible.

In a lot of ways, his normal way of seeing the world was like looking at a forest from a distance.  Only when he looked closer did he see individual trees.  Even closer, and he could see the leaves.  The branches.  The bark.  On and on it went down to cells.  Atoms.  Quarks.  And whatever came next.

So it was with the reality and the threads.  In the end, everything was comprised of those same strings. 

It was both troubling and enlightening, as if he was getting a peek behind the curtain, and he was surprised at what he saw.  It was complex, but the demystification of the building blocks of his reality left him feeling hollow in a way he couldn’t truly explain.  But he felt it nonetheless.

For a long time, Zeke just floated there until he felt something nearby.  It took him quite some time to resolve that bundle of strings into a person, and they were coming very, very quickly. 

He blinked when they drew closer. 

“Oberon?” he tried to say, but his voice didn’t carry in the vacuum.  Indeed, the dwarf stood atop a hunk of earth, his hand upon the gnarled trunk of a tree that spread its limbs for hundreds of feet in every direction.  It was like the thing had been recently uprooted, and it had taken a good portion of the turf with it. 

“What have you done?” the dwarf demanded, his voice weaker than before.  It was barely more than a rasp.  What’s more, the dwarf was thinner, and his mossy beard looked distinctly withered. 

“What happened to you?” Zeke asked.

“Never mind that.  Do you know what you’ve done?”

“I destroyed the cube, which turned out to be a prison for the adversary.  I killed that thing too.  Now, answer my question.  Why do you seem so weak?”

Oberon sighed, then extended a hand.  Zeke grasped it, trying to ignore the fact that he wasn’t really touching his patron’s hand.  Rather, their strings simply tangled together, intertwining in a superficial way.  He let the dwarf pull him onto the small island, and he let out a sigh when his bare feet found a home in the soft grass.

That was when he realized he was entirely naked.  He had no idea where his clothing had gone, but it stood to reason that it could never have survived the implosion of [Primordial Wrath].  Technically, even his body had been destroyed, and it was far more durable than a few bits of cloth. 

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if he could simply recreate his outfit.  After all, everything was just strings, right?  And if he could manipulate those threads, couldn’t he do so to create some new clothes?

It was a good question, but one he knew wouldn’t be answered without significant examination. 

“How did you destroy it?” demanded Oberon.  “That…thing has existed for longer than I have been alive.  Some believe it is a remnant from an earlier version of our universe, left behind by beings far more powerful than we could ever hope to be.”

Zeke took a deep breath.  Then, he explained his experience to Oberon.  Some of it defied description, and when he started talking about strings on strings, he knew he lost the dwarf.  Finally, he got to the conversation with the entity inside.  The explanation that it was an imprisoned piece of the greater threat was met with some skepticism, especially when Zeke said that he’d killed it.

“I have seen your skills, and powerful though they are, they are not capable of that kind of destruction,” Oberon stated. 

“And yet, I destroyed it.  And the cube.”

“I know.  That is what frightens me,” the dwarf revealed.  He looked around.  “Do you realize that the cube’s destruction was felt across every universe?  It destroyed half of the Shattered Belt.”

Then, he explained that those asteroids hadn’t simply exploded, as Zeke might have expected.  Instead, they simply ceased to exist.  “How do you explain that?”

“The threads.  I unraveled them,” he stated.  “Or my skill did.  I don’t know exactly how it all fits together.  I’m still learning.”  He sighed.  “How long was I gone?”

“Seventy-seven years,” Oberon answered.  “Plus a few months.”

“Shit,” Zeke muttered, his eyes finding the turf.  “Is everyone…”

He couldn’t even finish the question.  Suddenly, guilt suffused him.  While he was within the cube, it had felt so far away.  But now?  It was like he was experiencing it all at once. 

“Your friends are fine,” Oberon said.  “At first, they kept to your schedule, but as the years went by…”

Zeke frowned.  “I get it,” he admitted.  They had lives that included more than just waiting on him to do whatever it was that he was doing.  “What about you?  You seem…”

“Like I am dying?  I am.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Oberon shook his head.  “I have lived too long.  My worshippers verge on extinction.  I can no longer protect my own domain, and vultures have taken advantage.  Even now, thousands of lesser gods have descended upon my home, taking everything of value and laying waste to anything they cannot take with them.  Such is the fate of a greater god who outlives his own purpose.”

“How long do you have?”

“A hundred years.  Maybe two.”

“You say that like it’s no more than the blink of an eye.”

“To me, it is less than that.  Once you have lived as long as I have, the years begin to feel like minutes.  Anything else would drive me insane,” he stated.  “I have lived for eons upon eons.  Millions of years have passed since my ascension. I am at peace with my life.  Do you know why?”

Zeke shook his head.

“I have loved.  I have lost.  And I have loved again.  I have lived a multitude of full lives, but my most important achievement is you.  The day I plucked you from the void and gave you life, I –”

“Wait.  You pulled me from the void?”

“Of course.  Where did you think souls went when they died?  Clusters of souls drift about, formless and without purpose.  When they come close, we pull them into this universe.  I thought you knew this.”

“I…I did not.”

“In any case, my point is that you are my crowning achievement.  You are different.  You may be powerful enough to do what I never could.”

“You want me to join the Creator.”

“No.  I want you to replace him.”

“W-what?”

“You heard what I said.  That is where this will all inevitably end.  The Creator is old.  Far older than me.  He has no more worshipers.  He has become weak.  He can barely hold the Framework together.  But you?  You will only grow stronger.  Supplant him and save our reality.  That is your mission.”

Zeke didn’t respond.  He’d already heard a variation of that same charge, though he’d not understood the implications.  Now that he had a little context, it seemed even crazier than ever before.  But he didn’t say as much.  Instead, he just said, “Let’s go back to the Shattered Hold.  I would like to see my friends.”