Chapter 51: Destroy
The black wound closed behind Amon with the sound of a tomb sealing.
The same amount of pressure was still there. Instead, it took on the form of a second skin and began to flex and contract. It remembered every single prayer that Amon had ever failed to answer.
[Warning: User has entered a sealed domain outside standard creation parameters.]
[Divinity integrity compromised.]
[Tier 1 Level Mortal Transcendence: restricted.]
[All stats temporarily capped at 999,999.]
[Error: Higher authority detected.]
Amon ignored the messages. He had expected them.
He walked a great while upon a floor made of pressed down, unanswered prayers. Every step sank into the mass of neglected life just a little, as though the very domain he walked through was not pleased with his presence.
The gold light of the System wobbled in the background, powerless to keep up with the quick changes of the real world.
Then the pressure shifted again.
Then something immense started to move through the dark ahead. Not as a sound, but as the memory of a long, long forgotten voice, from before there were even words for a voice.
"Second Breath."
Amon stopped.
The creature slowly unfolded before Amon like a dark, twisted tapestry. It was humanoid in shape, yet utterly alien, with long, spindly limbs ending in dark, void-like hands and feet, like dark, grasping vines snaking across the ground.
The body was a single, unbroken mass of dark, glowing, interlocking seals, each one pulsating with the same energy as the original script of the Creator.
And at the very apex of the creature’s twisted form, a single, vertical slit of absolute blackness stared out at Amon like an open, bleeding wound.
The thing Hades had been feeding. The thing the Creator had sealed and then, apparently, forgotten.
"Second Breath," the presence stated again, its words rearranging themselves in Amon’s mind, "you walk on the remains of the ones you erased. How many souls never reached an afterlife because of you?"
Amon did not flinch at the question. "I was not summoned. I will leave."
The vertical eye slit narrowed.
"Every creature would travel in a single direction through the door, said the Creator, locked up irrevocably for all eternity, save for the Second Breath. This door was put up for the Second Breath, bearing one condition, the same as being one way for all beings other than it."
Amon’s face remained impassive, but a cold feeling spread behind his ribs. "Explain."
The sealed mass shifted. Seals along its torso brightened, projecting fragments of memory into the air between them, scenes older than Eden, older than the first breath.
Amon saw the Creator standing over a formless dark, shaping the first laws. He saw the same Creator later, after the Flood, after the Nephilim, after the first rebellion of angels, kneeling and carving seals into this very domain with His own light. He saw the final line of the original script being written:
The Second Breath shall never be allowed to rest. When he walks away, the forgotten hunger will wake. When he seeks peace, the sealed thing will taste the absence and open its eye.
Amon never thought he was meant to be a weapon. A failsafe the Creator had built into the world long ago.
"Here’s what He actually built: a leash. And you’re supposed to wear it for all eternity. And every time you retired from the world, this fed it. And every year you spent drinking away in the mountains, the seals were weakening."
Amon curled his hand slowly into a fist, trying to force golden light to come forth, but it found little to work with in this thirst-hungry area and only managed to partly form.
"What are you?"
The vertical eye slit of the First Refusal seemed to look at Amon with long-forgotten curiosity.
"Before light, before order, before the Creator decided there should be a difference between good and evil...I am the part of existence that said no. He could not destroy me. He could only seal me and give the key to the one being strong enough to keep walking forever. You."
Silence stretched.
Then the System, lagging badly, finally forced a new notification through the pressure.
[Critical Alert: Origin-level entity recognized.]
[Designation: The First Refusal / Pre-Creation Hunger.]
[User status: Designated Warden (involuntary).]
[Warning: Continued proximity will accelerate seal degradation.]
[Recommendation: Immediate extraction impossible.]
Amon stared at the single black eye slit.
"...And the Creator disappeared because He couldn’t stand watching the leash He Himself had created for His Second Breath of life, to begin with," Amon said quietly.
It didn’t need to answer.
Far above, in another kind of darkness, a newly opened door pulsed once in answer.
Amon felt it.
His head turned slightly, golden eyes narrowing.
"...Liliana."
The sealed entity’s voice, still not quite a voice, filled the domain again.
"...She has already begun feeding me. The girl who loved the leash more than the man who wore it. How poetic."
Amon’s light flared briefly, weakly, against the domain’s thirst.
"...I am going to leave," he said. "And when I do, I am going to put you back to sleep the way the Creator should have."
The vertical eye slit widened a fraction.
"I know what you’re trying to do, why you are killing all the demigods. You want to kill them, the Olympians. To unseal yourself. But you cannot be unsealed, Amon. The seals were written in the original script of creation. Only the Creator’s hand can rewrite the original seals of creation. And the Creator is...gone."
Amon’s smile was small, tired, and entirely without humor.
"Then I will become the hand."
He stepped forward.
The domain itself seemed to flinch.
Liliana passed through the thin vertical wound in the altar, as if going through a doorway.
And within herself, the rot uncoiled from its tight ball, pleased, fed by the sustenance that had been waiting in the dark places of her soul.
On the other side of the wound in the altar, rather than finding her way deeper into the Underworld, she found a place that resembled the place Amon had gone into.
A thin, cold domain, sealed by the same ancient, interlocking seals of original script, but many of them were cracked, leaking a colorless, ravenous hunger.
Her three dead demigods followed her, their eyes boring blankly into the space before her.
From her injured wrist, a few violet threads descended, thicker now, with a black, older thread mixed in. As they dissolved into the cracks of the stone, the stones drank greedily.
[Host psyche integrity: 41%]
[Warning: Foreign authority detected. Origin-level resonance increasing.]
[Darkness affinity evolving beyond previous parameters.]
Liliana laughed once, a short, broken sound. "Do you feel that, Master? I am no longer your leftover tool," she said, the words dripping with unmistakable venom.
A single gleaming eye far below had opened for her earlier. It opened wider now.
A voice that was not a voice brushed the inside of her skull.
More.
Instead of draining power from her, her blood began to churn with a golden, sparkling liquid.
Like a can of soda opening, it fizzed upward, forcing its way through the seal in front of her, and flowing into the violet-lit stones.
Instead of getting weaker, her energy seemed to be pouring into the temple, into the runes that scrawled themselves across the stone in a sick, twisting violet.
Across the world, people who had once been able to remember a Golden Immortal were now having the same dream. In it, a man with golden hair was walking away from his home, and behind him the sky was splitting apart.
The Oracle felt two lumps of cold, hard metal in his coat pockets shift and change. One would grow cold, then hot, then cold again. What I feared had come true, it seems. She has opened a second mouth.
The pale, expressionless color of Liliana’s eyes deepened. Thin cracks of absolute black began to spread like a spider’s web across the white of her eyes.
Her smile, already a half smile that didn’t really reach her eyes, began to widen. She was beginning to look younger, and in a strange way, almost like a younger, female reflection of Hades.
The three demigods’ knees bent in unison.
The voice was clearly Liliana’s own, yet she felt something much older surfacing through her words.
"Find every soul that still remembers the Golden Immortal. Bring them to me. Alive if possible. Broken if necessary. And when you find the ones he called family..."
She paused, tasting the word.
"...leave the woman for last. I want him to watch."
The three undead demigods rose to their feet as one. They turned and, one by one, set off in three different directions, into the darkness of the newly opened door. Behind them, Liliana stepped through the increasingly wide portal, the portal to the second world.
Deep within the sealed domain of the First Refusal, Amon felt another mouth tear open, like a fresh and bloody wound in his chest.
The First Refusal’s single vertical eye regarded Amon with something akin to satisfaction.
"...Your student, she could be more, more than what you trained her to be."
Amon’s capped stats pushed hard against the sealed domain of the First Refusal. A flicker of gold light pulsed out between him and the entity, then fell back. The light steadied and turned into something much colder and harder.
"...I’m going to walk out of here. Take her as a vessel, and be free...and the very first thing I’m going to do is take the world by its throat and destroy it."
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