BOOK III
The Song of Eternity
Chapter 175
The Story Goes
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" he didn't know when he fell asleep. Perhaps it was partway through the drinking binge he was enjoying, partaking in the foods and drinks from Earth that he had all but forgotten. Then… there was darkness. And now, he woke up to the familiar scream and a familiar scene. But it was different.
His face was expressionless, eyes glazed in the seeming indifference. It no longer hurt. It no longer stirred his heart with fire. It was a sight he had seen many times before, so much so that every second of it was seared into his brain. But it was a sight that no longer hurt.
He looked to the side and saw young Ryne clutching her face, blood fraying out across her tiny fingers and down her arms. Crouching, he extended his arm and wrapped it around her, pulling her into his chest. As though by the hand of invisible magic, her cries seem to silence, as if she recognized him by touch. Her arms reached out and wrapped around him tightly, as if she were holding onto her dear life. She wouldn't let go, and he didn't ask.
There was a keen sense of magic in letting go, he realized. There was no longer a mountain pressing on his chest, no longer a sense that he had to keep carving through a tunnel into infinity. It was all arrayed perfectly, like the flowers in a heavenly garden. Purposeful. Simple. All-encompassing.
He walked around the battlefield with Ryne on his shoulders, the young girl's arms wrapped around his neck. She fell asleep, eerily enough. The bleeding had stopped, eerily twice. Looking about, everything was the same… except for him. He had changed, considerably, from when this day first occurred. He thought that the hatred and the anger and the anguish would fuel him for all eternity. But he was wrong. There was little certainty in him even as to exactly how long it had been. Decades, for sure. Perhaps centuries even. Time… was indeterminate, he realized.
Eventually, he wound up in the basement, where he and Ryne used to draw talismans. She was still fast asleep on her bed while he jilted about the space, looking at the old relics of their success. Even if he drew the most powerful talismans he could, they would pale in comparison to his own strength. Such was the curve, he realized. Tools to springboard a beginner eventually become obsolete, in almost everything at that.
He sat down and cracked one of the bottles of wine she hid open, pouring a few sips down his throat. The meeting with the woman was… unexpected, to say the least. And though it had changed a lot, it also changed nothing. No, perhaps a better way of putting it is that she accelerated what would happen anyway.
His goal was still the same, the point of it all was still the same, and though his suspicions were confirmed… quite a few more came up. She was very cryptic when it came to everything considering this world, while happily answering him most other things, no matter how ridiculous of a question he asked. They must have chatted for hours upon hours before he passed out, and she must have either killed him or simply reset the loop for him.
It felt strange, knowing that the young-looking girl held his entire life in her hands. She brought him here, gave him the strength that kept him alive all this time, and could have taken it away whenever she wanted. Still can and could, even. Though he had pictured his summoner many-a-times before, he never quite pictured a young girl.
Then again, it was unfair to classify her as one—it was merely her avatar, that much she herself confirmed. Her actual form was… well, there wasn't one—at least not in the way Sylas understood 'forms'. She was energy and matter transcendent, and could form herself in whichever way she liked. Even calling it a 'she' was incorrect—it was merely a being, a something unfathomable.
Sylas suspected that the crow and the doe were the same—that they merely took those shapes either out of curiosity, randomness, or some other thought he couldn't fathom. All Voyagers, apparently, were like that—though not all were alike. She was among the oldest, yet not oldest still—and the crow and the doe were among the youngest, apparently.
It was all relevant, however—even as the 'youngest', their actual age, though she never disclosed it directly, was likely in millions, as, according to her, 'they drew the first breath this world made'. Comparatively, she was quite open about Gods, and Sylas learned quite a lot.
The Gods themselves weren't transcendent in any way, not truly. They were merely the strongest beings, in part due to the inheritance of the Voyagers, and had cleaved themselves from the rest of the world, forming a bonding relationship of worship. That worship was like a feeder, the fear and adulation providing energy while, in turn, they effectively created missionaries through the Prophets and Exorcists, helping the rest of the world fight off other ills.
There were, at the moment, quite a lot of them—nearly a hundred thousand altogether, in fact. Though they can die, Gods live long lives—only ever reaching the mortal age in the five digits—and had been using the sapped energy of the world as a feed ever since the Rupture, as they called it, when they first cleaved themselves off of the rest of the races.
There were quite a lot of discrepancies, Sylas learned, between what the man beyond the mountains told Valen and what was likely the truth—namely in that there was no 'union' against Gods of any kind. The world was always a free-for-all, and alliances were as fickle as any other. After the Gods freed themselves and 'ascended', in a way, the remaining races all took the same approach and started making deals with the Voyagers, borrowing power.
It resulted in a massive, absolutely colossal world war simply dubbed 'The War of Extinction', as the vast majority of the races were wiped out of the existence, with the few surviving ones having extremely low numbers. One thing that shocked Sylas more than anything else was that the humans took no part in the war—at least not the humans from whom the current world descended. They weren't even seen as worthy of the participation and were largely ignored.
After the war, however, due to their numbers, they managed to conquer a vast majority of the world, stealing whatever secrets they could from the others, and eventually becoming the prime race of the world. Unlike others, they sought help from the Gods—and in their name they built Cairns all over the world, 999 of them altogether, which allowed Gods to gift them Prophets and Exorcists and Exalts.
Such a dissonance created a duality—a relationship of dependance and worship. However, as with most things, time dilutes the bonds—and thousands of years after the fact, few, if any, remembered it. More and more, humans yearned to be free—there was a belief that they, too, could ascend and become God-like, but were being held back by the Gods from the fear.
In time, many rebellions were led—all with magnificent failure. The most successful one was also the latest one—the Empire's Twilight. Fueled by the Gods' heeding, hundreds of barbaric tribes surrounding the empire formed a coalition and invaded. The dead sought the benefits too, selling themselves both to the Empire and the invaders. Eventually, while the Empire's strongest warriors were destroying Cairns and defeating their guardians, the rests of the Empire fell and the survivors went into hiding.
Their warriors' title of the 'Shadow' came from the old Empire's saying, 'Shall the Empire's Light draw dark, those living may as well lay dead in the shadows'. That is, it was considered a betrayal to outlive the Empire itself. And yet many still did.
It was a massive influx of information, but nothing monumental. Sylas had many, many, many theories when it came to the Empire's fall, and one of them was practically word-for-word in line with what actually happened. It was nice to a confirmation, for sure, but it did little for him. He didn't care about the empire, nor did he care about the Gods—and cared even less for the humanity's everlasting struggle to supersede everything.
No matter the world, it seemed, curiosity bounded reason in people. Everyone always dreamed of the world beyond the beyond, of the opportunities, of things above things. Once one mountain was conquered, rather than relishing in the scenery and the beauty of the everlasting, eyes flocked over to the taller peak and the minds wondered—how do we conquer this one?
They were chasing ghosts, however. Should the last Cairn in the Capital fall, the Gods would simply come, kill just enough humans to restore the old fears, and build a few new Cairns. The rest of the world was already in their grasp, and this little corner's struggle, while noble, was entirely pointless. Perhaps poetically depressing, Sylas still saw some beauty in it. Life, after all, was a struggle. From cradle till the grave, people struggle—some less and some more, but the struggle is one constant that unites everyone.
And if there must be struggle, let it be the grandest of them all—the conquest of the unconquerable. The depressing fact of life was that some mountains simply couldn't be climbed. Be that they are too tall, too steep, too frigid, or any other number of factors, the fact remained that they would stand just outside the reach for all eternity. And, despite of that, Sylas knew, the humanity would continue throwing bodies at it.
For this wouldn't be the first time that the Cairns were destroyed. And it wouldn't be the first time the humanity thought it had won. There would be yet another grim reminder—though Sylas would ensure that it wouldn't happen in this lifetime. He would be gone one day, however, and another aspiring, young man will look to the history and the adulation of things unseen and wonder—why can't humans be Gods? And he will pick up a sword and shield and his words would be the kindle of the thousand fires that would burn like the most luminous stars in the sky… and then fade, as all things, only to be rekindled thousands of years later, when yet another starry-eyed young woman would look to the sky and wonder—why can't we be star-blessed? We are just as good as they are! And so… the story goes…