The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 479

Chapter 479

Chapter 477: Ascension

ARTHUR LEYWIN

It all made sense now. For whatever reason, Tess was the vessel for Cecilia. Maybe it was because of our relationship in this world, which had to create the bridge, but that didn’t matter.

If both Nico and I became this strong after reincarnating into this world, how strong would Cecilia—the “Legacy”—be if she reincarnated into Tess’s body?

The distant echoes of my thoughts resounded over and under my present, wakeful self.

“Sylvie. You know what Rinia said.” My voice came out pleading, but only because of the keystone’s strange effect that caused events to play out just as they had. “We can’t let them have Tess.”

I felt Sylvie shake her head against the small of my back. She was holding me, keeping me from continuing to fight. Because Cadell and Nico were about to take her. And I was dying. “We’ll both get stronger,” she said, her voice muffled. “As long as we’re alive, we have a chance.”

With Aroa’s Requiem channeled, I reached out and pinched the golden thread between my fingers. Time froze.

Tessia was still in the act of turning away from me. She had just spoken the words I had feared might be the last she ever would. It was almost funny, in a way; I was so distracted that I still hadn’t heard what she said. I considered reversing time, paying closer attention, only…

Beyond Tessia, battle-weary and blood-stained, Cadell and Nico waited for her. The city of Telmore was burning around them, the sky-high flames like stained glass against the smoke-filled sky.

This was the moment everything changed.

And this is our next challenge to bypass if we want to continue forward, I communicated to Sylvie and Regis.

Sylvie’s body untensed from behind me as her conscious self exerted control. Her arms relaxed, falling to her sides, and she stepped around, her gaze sweeping across the frozen battlefield.

Regis manifested beside me, stepping out of the darkness and into the keystone world in his large shadow wolf form. “And how exactly do we do that, princess?”

We had spent some time following the threads of time and Fate back and forth through these early years of my life, but we hadn’t unlocked any new insight into the keystone’s mechanics or the aspect of Fate. Whether by the nature of interacting directly with the golden threads through Aroa’s Requiem or Sylvie and Regis’s grounding presence, I’d discovered that I could make changes and explore alternate events without forgetting myself.

Even as I thought this, Regis loped away from me to stand beside Nico. With a mischievous look, Regis reared up and closed his jaws around Nico’s throat. The thread jerked loose from my grip, and the world lurched into motion again. There was a spray of blood, and Nico stumbled backwards, falling hard on the ground with a choked, gurgling cry.

Before the scene could go any further, I grabbed hold of the thread again with Aroa’s Requiem and pulled slightly, reversing time to before Regis’s attack. “Feel better now?” I asked Regis, my voice thick with exasperation.

“Not really,” he admitted, his lupine shoulders rising and falling as he sighed deeply.

“Focus,” Sylvie chided him gently before turning back to me. “Go ahead, Arthur. I’m ready.”

I focused on the Aroa’s Requiem godrune again, barely noticing the constant itch in my physical core anymore. Slowly, wanting to experience everything as it happened, I pulled us forward along the golden thread, experiencing again my creation of the pocket dimension that allowed me to safely remove Tessia and the others from the battlefield through a portal created from Rinia’s medallion.

Sylvie cast her own spell—if that was even the right word for what she’d done in transferring her own life energy to me—and we looked at each other as, once again, she faded.

I gripped the thread tight, freezing us again.

Sylvie was still there, a person in two parts: a ghostly aspect formed within the lavender and gold dust, and a bright silver spark of her own life force that was drifting toward me with all the rest of her energy, attaching itself to me. Sylv?

The silver mote sparkled while the ghostly image remained frozen. I clenched my fists and pumped my arms in excitement. It worked!

‘It did, although…I’m having a hard time forcing myself to remain conscious in this form…’

Of course, I thought back, feeling foolish. Drift into me. Regis, guide her.

Regis, who had already returned to his incorporeal state, drifted out of me and flitted to the silver spark. Buzzing around each other like glowflies, the dark wisp and the silver spark fluttered jaggedly, growing closer with each sharp turn until they vanished into my chest.

‘Oh!’ Sylvie thought, her mind relaxing and allowing me to release a tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying. ‘That’s a lot better.’

Let’s go.

The thread again moved through my fingers, and I fell into the portal that I had conjured.

Only…it didn’t take me to the underground sanctuary as was intended. It had worked for Nyphia, Madam Astera, and Tessia, but as I fell into it now, stepping carefully forward through time, I could see the weave of aetheric magic coming undone. As the portal collapsed, it left behind a sort of hole.

A hole into the aetheric realm, I realized.

Just on the other side was a large circular hall with smooth white pillars holding the ceiling up, lit by a warm glow.

Golden energy was oozing out of solid stone, pressing against the edges of the hole left behind by the portal, keeping it open as I entered. The portal was gone, and the hole between dimensions swallowed itself the moment I passed through it. The golden light flickered and faded, and I was left lying on the floor, just as I had been when I first awoke in the Relictombs.

Sylvie? Regis?

‘We’re here,’ they answered together, two nodes of warmth and consciousness within my now broken core.

I rolled onto my back and grinned up at the blank ceiling. “It worked.”

Regis manifested beside me and trotted across the chamber. He sniffed around for a minute. ‘The egg thing. It isn’t here.’

We must not need it then, I thought, nervous and hopeful both. Sylv? Are you able to come out?

‘I’ll try.’

The silver spark drifted out of my chest. It was hesitant, bobbing the air just beyond the shelter of my flesh and bone. Regis’s wolf form became transparent and immaterial, then changed into a dark wisp, which zipped to Sylvie’s side. The two whirled around each other momentarily, then—

Regis swallowed the silver spark. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. For a couple of seconds, Sylvie was visible only as a small amount of silver light leaking through the dark wisp’s incorporeal body. Their combined thoughts were distorted and difficult to parse, but I waited, trusting them both just as much as I trusted my own self.

Regis began to glow with dim golden light. Gold and lavender particles began emanating from the wisp and to take shape in front of me. Sylvie was drawn in bright gold out of thin air, her features coming clear as the halo around her faded. Regis reappeared at her side, dark against her light.

With Realmheart still active, I watched the threads of Fate carefully. Interestingly, the timeline was not drastically altered by Sylvie’s appearance in the flesh.

“I was always here, in a way,” she said, picturing the stone egg in her mind. “That piece of me never left you.” She turned her hands over and looked at them questioningly. “It’s strange, though. I don’t feel quite…real.” Then, without warning, she dissolved back into light, appearing only as the spark. ‘Look! I can—’

The spark darted forward, moving effortlessly through my flesh to drift around the ruined remains of my core. ‘But why would I be able to do this?’

“Could be just a glitch in the matrix,” Regis said, sitting back on his haunches, his tongue lolling. “But my incredibly educated opinion is that Fate is just fucking with us.”

Sylvie reappeared before me again. “Mouth, Regis,” Sylvie scolded gently, biting back a smile.

“The laws of reality do seem to be breaking down the more powerful we get,” I said as I reached out and squeezed my bond’s hand. “It does beg the question though: what happens when we leave here? It makes sense we will still know anything new that we learn or any insight we gain through the keystone, but what if I—I don’t know—unlock a new godrune? Just as an example.”

“An interesting question, but the bigger one still remains,” Sylvie replied. “How is this getting us any closer to insight into Fate and escaping the keystone?”

I couldn’t quite hold back the frown that I fell across my face. “The Relictombs is where all the djinn knowledge is kept. Everything they knew about Fate is here, somewhere. Looking back, my path through it was full of missed opportunities. First, I want to see what happens when I rebuild my aether core inside the keystone. After that…we do what all ascenders do.”

***

Navigating the Relictombs inside of the keystone was different than it had been in reality. My ability to pull us back and forth through time allowed me to explore in a way I couldn’t before. Curious, I drifted forward until Caera and I claimed the Compass from the Central Academy reliquary, then stored the Compass in my extradimensional storage rune and reversed time again, all the way back to the first zone I’d entered.

Once again standing inside the unadorned chamber, I looked into the extradimensional space. The Compass was there, waiting for me, despite my having technically acquired it in the future. Feeling a rising excitement, I withdrew the Compass and turned it over in my hand. The burnished sphere was still a dead relic, so I channeled Aroa’s Requiem and proceeded to again repair it.

“Now we can go anywhere,” Regis said, padding around me eagerly, his claws tapping against the stone floor. The tapping stopped, and he looked up at me with a frown on his lupine face. “Anywhere except the millipede. Never again…”

I chuckled in good humor. There was a sense of hopefulness shared between the three of us. “Actually, I was thinking. We’ve now got everything we need to navigate the Relictombs together, but before we do, there is something else I want to know.”

Sylvie’s brows rose as she realized my intention. “I…would like that. Do you think…”

“Yeah, I don’t see why not. It’s the keystone, after all. And if something goes wrong, now we can easily try again.” I tapped my sternum. “Better get inside me, though. We’re going pretty far back.”

Sylvie’s gold eyes shone brightly for just a moment before she transformed back into the sprite, and both her and Regis took shelter within my core. Taking a deep breath, I activated Realmheart and Aroa’s Requiem, took the golden thread in my fingertips, and pulled hard.

My lifetime flew past in reverse, unspooling all my many accomplishments and failures in a matter of moments. The war, Epheotus, Xyrus Academy, the Beast Glades with Jasmine…and then I was again standing in front of Sylvia’s cave, only a boy freshly separated from my family. And yet my young skin was marked by the spellforms and godrunes. More strangely, the core in my chest swarmed with both aether and mana.

“We’ll see what grandma has to say about this…” I muttered, starting the climb down into the cave where Sylvia awaited.

All the other times I had lived through this moment played in the back of my mind, the memories overlapping and blurring together. A realization struck me. After enough time in here, one life would become indistinguishable from another.

‘The keystone would swallow you whole,’ Sylvie added, and a shiver ran down my spine.

The end is in sight. It has to be.

I landed at the bottom of the long fall, supporting my body with both mana and aether and landing comfortably.

“So child, we finally…” Sylvia’s resounding voice trailed off. She gaped down at me, her tree-story-tall frame sitting stiffly in the throne of jagged stone. Those red eyes—so petrifying to me as a child—were full of wonder, confusion, and…fear as they burrowed into and through me. The massive horns growing up from her demonic visage turned slightly as her head did the same. “But I don’t understand…”

“I’d be surprised if you did,” I answered casually. Sticking my hands in the pockets of my childhood trousers, I bobbed up and down on the balls of my feet and regarded her with a smile. “There is a lot we need to talk about, Grandma Sylvia.”

An hour later, Sylvia and I sat together on the ground in front of a small fire. Instead of her demonic or dragon forms, Sylvia looked the way I had seen her in her portrait. She was a handsome woman, refined and noble, somewhere in her middle years by human standards. Her light blonde hair wasn’t braided around her head like a crown, as it had been for the painting, but hung in a single thick braid over her shoulder.

Her iridescent lavender eyes met mine, still the azure I’d inherited from my father. “That is…quite a story, Arthur. How many times have you rewound time to bring us to this point?”

“None,” I said in my small voice. “Assuming you believe me. Otherwise—” Realmheart activated, lifting the hair on my head and conjuring glowing runes under my eyes.

She raised a hand to forestall me. “I do. How could I not? But then, you are filled with the confidence of one who knows they cannot fail.”

I grimaced and released the godrune. “Can’t fail here, with you, maybe. But the greater picture—Fate—is still very much undecided.”

“And…” She hesitated, her fingers unconsciously playing with her braid. “And my daughter?”

I smiled softly. “Prepare yourself, Grandma Sylvia.” Come out, Sylv.

The silver sprite floated free of me, drifting like a leaf on the wind around me. Sylvia watched it with intense apprehension. After several long seconds, the little light spread out, molding into Sylvie in much the same way her human form changed into the dragon. She appeared with her hair intricately braided and wrapped around her head, not entirely unlike Sylvia’s portrait, and wearing a battledress of black scales.

Sylvie’s jaw worked silently. Grandma Sylvia stood, favoring her wounded side. The two regarded each other without words, a subtle tension building between them.

Then, at the same moment, they both stepped forward and wrapped their arms around one another. All the tension flowed away as if carried on a receding tide. Sylvie let out a surprised, childish, lovely laugh, and her mother followed suit. Grandma Sylvia looked down at me over Sylvie’s shoulders, and her eyes shone with tears.

Finally, Grandma Sylvia pulled back, although she kept her hands on Sylvie’s arms. “You are more beautiful than I ever could have hoped. Oh, my daughter. I thought—well…” She swallowed visibly and gave a small shake of her head, causing a single tear to slip free of her eye and trail down her cheek. “It seems as though entrusting your egg to Arthur was the wisest decision I could have made.”

The two began to talk, Grandma Sylvia asking questions and Sylvie answering them as best she could. The tale of Sylvie’s life so far was not entirely a happy one, and Grandma Sylvia alternated between flushing red and growing pale as Sylvie answered her questions to the best of her ability. It was strange, seeing her like this: huddled around the little fire, sitting on the ground with Sylvie, both in their humanoid forms.

I’m glad I got to see her like this, even if it’s only a simulation, I thought to myself, my throat constricting with suppressed emotion.

Regis shifted, resting his chin on my leg. ‘Emotional support weapon of mass destruction, reporting for duty, sir,’ he teased.

I felt a small smile smooth away my frown and rubbed him between the ears. At ease.

The conversation between Sylvie and her mother continued only for ten minutes before Grandma Sylvia hesitantly broached the topic of Agrona.