Universe's End

Rory stared into the awning pit before him, his gut once more lurching at the sight.

“That’s trippy,” Zoey said from his side.

“Agreed,” Allison added.

“I don’t want to go in there,” Eric said, no pretense.

“In fairness, I’m not sure who would willingly want to enter that,” Tom said in concurrence.

As a group, they’d spent the better part of a month having Eric ferry them back and forth, significantly slower than the initial sprint here with Rory, but significantly faster than traveling purely on foot.

Staring into the depths, the gnashing tear in reality, a swirling black hole of energies that spewed sparks that burnt reality itself before being sucked back in, seemed to growl up from the depths like a menacing creature.

“So… Are you sure you can use that?” Zoey asked after a moment of silence.

“I’ve forged armor from a star and the lifeblood of Aelia herself,” Rory said, puffing himself up.

“Yeah, and that’s a black hole that somehow feels pissed off,” Eric countered.

“I don’t think it’s technically a true black hole,” Allison said after a moment.

“It’s not,” Rory said. “It’s just how our minds are comprehending it. A gash in existence that Eon allows to exist, spewing primal creation energies. It’s how The First has been able to advance and propagate powerful lifeforms so rapidly. Anomalous energy is just the contained form of that, significance and chaos grinding up against each other and tearing each other apart to form pure potential.”

“And you know that how?” Eric asked.

“I don’t,” Rory admitted. “But it feels about right.”

“And you’re going to immerse yourself in it,” Eric followed up.

“No, I’m going to stand on the Event Horizon,” Rory said. “I hope.”

“Well…. Good luck with that!” Eric snorted before backing off.

“Zoey, Tom?” Rory asked. Eric backing off was expected; he had nothing to offer if things went south, whereas Zoey and Tom had either massive durability or a secondary slowing effect that could perhaps buy them time.

“We’re with you,” Tom agreed.

Allison merely frowned from where she stood. Without either set of her armor, there wasn’t as much as she could do.

Steadying himself, Rory nodded as the three of them began to travel down the winding corkscrew pathway, jagged and torn and chaotic; each step felt like they were taking a step back through time, into the era of chaos and instability itself, when realities were shredded and fused only to shred each other once more.

I can work with this.

More and more, it felt as if entropic winds were shearing away their very being, and, without realizing it, Rory was the last one standing; the others pushed back.

“Rory!” Zoey finally shouted. “We can’t keep going!”

“What?” Rory suddenly snapped to, having been enraptured by the beauty and chaos of the World Crucible.

“Only one of us can!” Zoey shouted once more, her voice ripped away by winds that didn’t quite exist. “You’re the one with the most Anomalous energy on hand; I think you’re being let through because of that!”

Tom said nothing, covering his face as if he were trying to protect himself from a blistering sandstorm.

For a moment, Rory had an option presented to him. He could turn away, approaching the World Crucible too dangerous.

Or.

Or he could keep going.

“I’m going to press on!” Rory shouted back.

Zoey looked as if she wanted to say something, but after a moment's thought, she merely shook her head.

“Be careful!”

With that, the two began to back away from the conceptual winds that threatened to consume everything they were.

Alone, Rory continued downward in the corkscrewing path, the rest of reality feeling like it was a universe away. It was just him, on his single downward path, approaching the looming maw of a black hole, an accretion disk composed of physical matter and conceptual potential alike, whirling and gnashing around the fake black hole.

At a certain point, even if Rory wanted to turn around, he couldn’t find the energy to do anything but focus on his single goal, all that was allowed to remain in the face of the World Crucible.

Making his way to the bottom, Rory stared into the event horizon. There was no interface, no explanation of what to do. It was a matter of instinct and ability to imagine.

And imagine he did.

World Phylactery withdrawn first, Rory gave it a snap as crystal pillars surrounded him; the normally unusable Anomalous energy was siphoned into those same crystals. It made sense: in stable form, the anomalous energy was exactly that- stable, inert, and unusable. Here, before the very source of the anomalous energy, that stable ‘shell’ was stripped away like the capsule of a dissolving pill.

Good to know.

By utilizing more of the anomalous energy, Rory empowered his projections, which existed as real objects so long as they were within range of the World Crucible, a makeshift workshop created around him from the projections and Earth Soul. Thankfully, the First seemed to have no control over the ground surrounding the World Crucible, at least.

With the workshop in place, Rory withdrew several more items. First, the two armor sets that had belonged to Allison, one created by her people’s greatest artisan, channeling himself, and burning up quite a few extreme-rarity natural treasures in the process. The second was the Spectro Orckalite armor that Rory himself had made for her not too long ago.

Now, the other stuff.

First to appear was a contained source of stellar matter obtained from Ehkorrus. As a point, Rory tried not to use the stuff, as it was impossible to obtain unless he was spending time in Ehkorrus, and the truly high-quality stuff required a lot of resources to produce.

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Next up were several inert keystones purchased from the shops scattered throughout The First. The sheer openness they had for potential made them a great source of conceptual malleability.

Third, a small silver figure-eight, the Possibility Chain, obtained from the defeat of the territory alpha Will-O on one of the six moons of Oscuro-Noctis, the flowing interplay of possibility was something Rory believed would be crucial.

Fourth, several ingots of Spectro Orckalite and Noctis Silver floated around him.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly of the physical items, Rory twisted his fingers as the Silvermere Quicksilver appeared, the group reward for their efforts in Oscuro, the bound space containing the material rapidly unraveling.

Now, if this works anything like stellar forging works…

Flicking his hand toward the accretion disk, the stellar matter and inert keystones shot out before being swallowed up. Next to be consumed were the ingots of Spectro Orckalite and Noctis Silver.

Alright, and here comes the hard part.

Activating the Eyes of the Architect to their max, Rory placed the two sets of armor side by side, focusing on what could be. With that vision in mind, it was as if the two armors began to dematerialize from reality; the environment's chaotic nature meant physical items could lose their hold on reality by mere intent.

Taking the armor that now appeared almost as if it were a digital hologram rather than physical items, Rory rearranged it upon the crystal anvil he’d summoned. With his trusty blood-bound hammer appearing, Rory began to ‘reshape’ the overlaid images, letting intuition and decades upon decades of trial and error as a crafter take the wheel.

Slowly, though Rory had no true sense of time, the two ‘holograms’ became one as Rory reshaped them, focusing on the vision of what could be until it matched exactly what he hoped for. While they seemed intangible, every reshaping and strike of his hammer to smooth out, round, or correct whatever displeased him felt like striking the hardest metal, layered twice for the two armors.

Which is to say, by the end, Rory wiped the sweat from his brow, beyond exhaustion.

Can’t stop.

To back off felt like closing the window of possibility, so Rory instead withdrew a brew and an ossified gem, chasing the gem with the potion as he continued his work.

The two armors, now ‘one,’ still didn’t properly exist; they were an idea that had been given the chance to exist as a physical item, but only within the range of the World Crucible; for them to persist would require more effort on his part.

Drawing his hand closer as if gesturing for something to come closer, from the accretion disk something was ejected, formed from the fusion of the materials he’d added earlier, now existing as something that refused to be examined by Rory.

Let’s just call it Anomalous Matter.

Burning with the heat of creation, Rory began to work with the Anomalous Matter, forging it into ingots that defied physics and understanding of how anything ought to have worked. From those ingots, Rory began to build the armor up, all the while seamlessly switching between hammer and knife as he added inscriptions that seemed to melt deeper within, layering them as deep into the material as he possibly could.

Again, Rory wasn’t certain how long he’d worked, but he knew he must persist. Such opportunities to work in such an environment were few and far between. From it, Rory was not only working to create the greatest armor ever seen but also refining himself.

Whatever may happen, by the end of it, the Rory who existed would be different from the one who descended the slopes of the World Crucible.

“Six days,” Zoey said. “Surely we need to try to retrieve him.”

“We can’t, you know that,” Tom retorted. “You and I felt it firsthand. Those winds would erase our existence if we pushed any further than we did.”

“But six days straight?” Zoey crossed her arms. Normally, she was all for trusting Rory, but the environment of the World Crucible was unreal.

“Can we do anything but trust?” Allison said.

“You just don’t want to leave because you’re shit out of luck if he died and both sets of your armor are gone,” Eric pointed out rather rudely.

“No,” Tom shook his head. “I don’t think he died. We likely would have been informed or sensed it somehow.”

“You sure?” Eric asked. “Because that sucky sucky hole seems like the exact place that would suck up every last drop of significance and energy, no way to know if nothing escapes.”

“No, I agree with Tom,” Allison said. “I do believe we would have found out somehow.”

“I also think he is still alive,” Zoey said. “But that’s not the problem. If he’s depleted or knocked out or-”

“What can we do?” Tom finally huffed. “Faith. Have faith in your friend.”

Zoey frowned before, at last, sighing.

“Fine. Two weeks. He has two weeks before I’m going to try to drag his ass out.”

The Architect had forgotten who he was or why he was doing what he was doing.

All that mattered was the armor before him, the flow he existed within of reforming the forces of creation and creating something beyond.

To break reality, to become abnormal, to become… aberrant.

Reshaping, reforging, reevaluating, constantly making sure everything was perfect and starting over when it wasn’t.

It took try after try after try, as something was just off, that he needed to start over.

But at last, as the Architect looked down at the armor upon his red crystal anvil that had required reinforcing time and time again as he siphoned his ever-shrinking stockpile of anomalous energy, he felt it.

It was right.

Oh, a future version of him would see blemishes he could not see now, that much the Architect was certain of; to assume otherwise was to assume he was already at the pinnacle. Still, for who the Architect was right now, it was the magnum opus of his abilities to create, the pinnacle of the resources and environment he had to take advantage of. Truly a masterwork, given his own personal limitations in tier and skill.

There was only one last step.

Taking the contained Silvermere Quicksilver, he poured the liquid metal over the Potential Chain, while feeding it even more anomalous energy. As a last thought, he drew his own blood essence, isolating his ‘identity’ from it as he purified it through inspiration from chalk wolves he’d seen in the past. Isolated from outside identity, with one final painful tug, like a rubber band snapping around his heart, the Architect forced a thread of foundational energy ‘into’ the blood essence itself. Knowing that the two energies would clash if forced to house them for much longer, the Architect injected the energy into the figure-eight, now coated with Silvermere Quicksilver. With his knife, he scored the liquid silver coating the infinity symbol, and a single rune was laid, one of the exceptionally few evolved runes.

The Living Rune.

After a moment or two, the Architect finally smiled as the chain, coated in liquid silver, began to take on an ever-so-slightly pale pink hue.

Before pulsing like a single, labored heartbeat.

With the Silvermere Anima Heart, a name the Architect gave it on the fly, he gently placed it into a single socket in between the shoulder blades of the chest piece, the preferred location for gem slotting. Typically, a gem was meant to be disposable, slotting in and out as needed. This would be a one-of-a-kind ‘gem’ that had no such purpose.

Silvermere Anima Heart socketed into the armor; for a moment, nothing appeared to happen until, through the metal, slight ridges began to form, barely noticeable if one didn’t have the Architect’s keen eye.

But if they did, they could make them out for what they were.

Veins.

Pleased, the Architect examined the armor, nodding to himself.

He’d done it. An armor never before seen.

Had he been more aware, he would have felt something almost like a ding, a notification that was ignored in his crafting trance.

Now then.

With the armor created, his reason for existing had ceased to exist. It was time to become one with the energy of creation, to fall into the hole in reality and-

Wow, wait, what?

Rory suddenly snapped to, like waking from a dream.

Fuck me.

The agony he was in was beyond comprehension. It seemed like every aspect of existence, physical, mental, energy, everything, had been so overtaxed that it had gone full circle into numbness.

And then gone full circle again, into a state of in-between, a delirium that felt like a tank of water emptied, only for that not to be enough, as even the space within was emptied.

Glancing at his interface and physique information, Rory felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.

Oh.

He had negative vitality. As in, he should be dead.

Oh. Oh.

It didn’t take much of a genius to figure out. Something about being exposed to the World Crucible had kept his life in stasis, even when he had been sapped of everything he had to give. And the only reason he hadn’t faded out of existence was the supply of anomalous energy that kept the World Crucible from removing what was left, a secondary source or lifeline tether.

Right. Well, I don’t like that.

Ossified gems appearing by the mouthful, Rory crammed them down his throat before chugging several brews. As much as he wanted to wait and see if they would save him, staying in the presence of the World Crucible wouldn’t help.

So, with great pain, Rory turned his back before forcing himself to walk away from the crucible of primal creations.

Up and up he climbed the winding slope until, as if he were stepping from one world into another, he could suddenly see again, no longer on a pathway descending into darkness, but standing before a vast event horizon.

“There he is!”

With those words, Rory collapsed, falling flat on his face.

He was back.