Chapter 3967: Desecration IV
Chapter 3967: Desecration IV
Across the endless expanse of existence, through layers of reality that most beings would never perceive, the consequences of that choice began to manifest in ways that defied prediction or prevention.
In the Transcendent Temporal Folds, where time itself had been given form and substance, reality operated according to principles that made even Paradox seem straightforward by comparison.
Here, the very concept of sequence had been abandoned in favor of something far more complex..layers upon layers of purple-blue rivers that represented different temporal streams, different continuums, all wrapping around each other in patterns.
These rivers didn’t flow in any direction that could be called forward or backward. Instead, they spiraled, twisted, sometimes flowing into themselves, creating loops where end became beginning, where causality chased its own tail in endless circles. Some streams moved faster than thought, compressing eons into heartbeats. Others crawled with such deliberate slowness that single moments stretched across millennia.
The entire realm pulsed with the particular beauty of time made visible...purple representing possibility, blue showing probability, and where they mixed, the actual present moment that most beings experienced as reality.
It was a landscape painted in temporal hues, where yesterday might be a mountain on the horizon and tomorrow could be the valley at your feet.
Into this carefully orchestrated chaos, the obsidian light arrived with the violence of absolute wrongness.
It erupted from nowhere...or rather, from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, as if it had always been arriving and had never existed until this moment.
The light that had shot from the awakened corpse’s eyes in the Paradoxical Folds had somehow crossed impossible distances, violated fundamental laws about the separation of Transcendent Folds, and manifested here with purpose that defied comprehension!
The moment it appeared, it shattered.
It shattered with the thoroughness of something that had always been meant to break, that had traveled across existence for the sole purpose of breaking in precisely this place at precisely this moment.
The rupture it created was massive beyond scale, a tear across the Temporal Folds that blazed with menacing deathly light!
It was wrong in ways that made even time itself recoil, a wound that shouldn’t exist in a realm where everything, even endings, could theoretically be reversed or redirected.
Deathly!
The word itself seemed insufficient to describe the radiance that poured from this impossible wound.
This wasn’t the death that came at the end of life, the natural conclusion that even Living Existences eventually faced if killed!
This was Death with significance that transcended the individual, Death as a fundamental force that stood opposite to everything else that existed.
Through the rupture’s terrifying obsidian brilliance, something even more disturbing became visible...there was something beyond it. Not just void or absence, but actual space, actual existence, vast beyond comprehension.
If one were to cross this rupture, if any being were brave or foolish enough to step through that tear in reality, they would find the other side to be endlessly vast, containing distances that made even the infinite seem quaint by comparison.
Inside the rupture, visible now through the wound torn in the Temporal Folds, stretched regions of endless obsidian brilliance where death was not just present but manifest, given form and substance and terrible purpose!
It was a realm that should not exist, could not exist according to every law that governed reality, yet there it was...undeniable, unavoidable, absolutely real!
And within this realm of manifested ending, figures moved in a small piece of its vastness.
There was a group, no, a horde...thousands upon thousands of Existences that radiated such immense auras of death that the very concept of life seemed like a distant memory in their presence.
They didn’t walk so much as rove, their movements carrying the purposeless purpose of things that had forgotten what purpose meant but continued to seek it anyway.
Their arms were outstretched, reaching toward nothing and everything simultaneously!
Their heads were raised as if in blank celebration, angled toward some sky that didn’t exist in their realm of absolute ending.
They drank...not with their mouths but with their entire beings from vast reserves of death that flowed through their realm like rivers of negation.
The sight would have induced horror in any living consciousness unfortunate enough to witness it!
There were thousands of these deathly existences. They came in all varieties...some that might once have been humanoid, others that defied any attempt at categorization.
Some had been beautiful once, their forms still carrying echoes of whatever glory they had possessed before death claimed them so thoroughly that even death wasn’t enough to describe their condition.
But regardless of their size, their shape, their origin, they all shared certain characteristics that marked them as belonging to the same fundamental category of existence- or rather, non-existence made manifest.
Their eyes, when they had eyes, were voids of obsidian darkness that didn’t just absorb light but negated the very concept of illumination.
Their movements carried the eerie synchronization of things that shared a common purpose without possessing individual will.
And each one, from the smallest to the most massive, emanated complexity equivalent to Honored Living Existences!
At the moment the rupture formed, they all stopped their endless roving.
One by one, with the eerie precision of dominoes falling in sequence, they turned their attention toward the distance where the tear had appeared.
Through that wound in the fabric of death itself, they could see the brilliant rivers of temporal blue and purple that marked the Temporal Folds, could perceive the existence of something beyond their realm of ending.
Without communication, without any sign that they were even capable of communication, they all began to move.
Their previous purposeless wandering transformed into directed motion, all of them traveling toward the tear with the inexorable certainty of tide coming in.
Their heads kept their jaws upwards as if they had to continue this ritual as they began to move!
They didn’t hurry...hurrying would have implied they understood time, which was a concept that had no meaning in their realm!
They simply moved, and their movement carried within it the promise that they would arrive, that nothing could prevent their arrival, that their reaching the tear was as certain as entropy itself.
Because in existence, there were the Living, and there were the Dead.
The truly Dead.
Not the dead that could become living after accumulating enough complexity, not the dead that Living Existences transcended when they crossed certain thresholds of power.
These were the Dead Existences....entities that had achieved a state of death so absolute that it had become their fundamental nature, their very reason for being despite being defined by not-being.
They were the Inevitability of Cessation!
Dead Existences!
They were carrying within their forms the quality of inevitability that made even true Inevitabilities seem negotiable by comparison.
Where Inevitabilities were paradoxes that demanded resolution, Dead Existences were resolutions that demanded nothing because they had already ended everything that could make demands.
They were the antithetical enemy of everything that drew breath, everything that thought, everything that dared to exist in defiance of entropy’s final victory!
They stood opposite to Living Existences not as rivals but as negation itself, the absolute denial of what Living Existences represented.
They were even more fundamentally opposed to Early Creatures, those beings who had been first!
Dead Existences were the argument that nothing was the natural state, that existence itself was the aberration that needed correction.
For eons beyond counting, for time periods that predated the current understanding of time itself, the Living and the Dead had been separated.
Not by walls or barriers or even by conscious effort, but by the fundamental incompatibility of their natures.
They existed in different aspects of reality, unable to interact because interaction required both parties to exist in ways the other could recognize.
For the most part, this separation had held.
For the most part, very rarely had it been violated in the past.
Oh!
For the most part!
But no longer.
The awakening of the Early Creature’s corpse, that impossible resurrection powered by Paradox and a stolen half-drop of blood, had created consequences that rippled across every layer of Existence!
It had been a violation so profound that existence itself had cracked, creating wounds that connected Weavings that should never touch!
No longer would the Dead remain in their Weavings of ending.
No longer would the Living be able to ignore what waited beyond the boundaries of existence.
The tear in the Temporal Folds pulsed with malevolent promise as thousands of Dead Existences approached it from one side, while on the other, Living Temporals began to notice that something had gone terribly, impossibly wrong!
A choice had been made in the Paradoxical Folds. A corpse had been given motion.
And now, across all the vast expanse of existence, everyone would have to live...or cease, with the consequences of that choice.
The butterfly’s wings had caused their storm.
And the storm had torn holes in the very fabric of what separated existence from its absolute opposite!
Oh!
Oh!!!