Chapter 2201: Following The Dragon

Eos had thought it was a possibility, but the Great One did not show himself.

This was, Eos understood, a statement about the impermanence of everything when compared to the Great One.

Prime took a moment to bow to the body of the beast, one of the endless silent lives in this war that had given up everything for the life they protected.

Power, at a certain level, became indistinguishable from theater.

Surrounding this wound was a vast field of blood and flesh, and the dead body of a massive being, it was a turtle, with the tail of a snake.

“Finally,” he said. “Let us meet properly.”

Silence.

“I am always testing something.”

Eos looked at the light, and he understood.

“It means,” Eos said, “that this time, you do not get to start over.”

Prime had been given the key to follow Vraegar, and it was easier when the dragon had been dropping off its scales across time as an anchor for someone like Prime to follow.

It would seem that to tear a hole through the nothingness, the beast had given up everything, including its life.

The light was silent for a very long time.

They proceeded past the wound, and they found themselves inside a blue void that was in the shape of a large room, and a single figure staring out through a circular window.

“You are afraid of me,” he said.

“You found him?”

He had been sitting before it because he had been gathering the nerve to go through it.

This was the being that had shattered the Luminious in the first place and scattered them like seeds in the dark, and it had been patient, because patience was easy when you had been alive since before the concept of time had been invented.

The smile of someone who has just seen the most difficult puzzle they will ever have to break, but who knew this would be the greatest puzzle there could ever be.

“Since the beginning,” the voice agreed.

This had been the Beast of Inevitability that had protected the Cradle for a long time until it was broken by Enoch and later rescued by Eos.
𝐟𝒓ℯⅇ𝚠𝑒𝙗𝙣𝙤𝔳𝙚𝐥.𝑐𝖔𝐦

The dragon was quiet for a long moment.

Eos peered through this door, and he knew that whatever was inside this tower was astonishingly older than Origin or End, predating both of these fundamental forces by who knew how much.

“You have been watching me,” Eos said, and he knew this to be the truth laid out between them like an opening gambit.

“…truth is the one thing I did not build into the equation. The one variable I have never been able to account for. For what is the worth of truth in a place where the rules can always change? You broke that rule, Eos.”

“You have seen power before. You have seen warriors and lovers and geniuses and monsters. You are afraid of me because I am the first one in forty-four Existences who genuinely does not need to win.”

If a Primordial were here, they would not be able to see this door, or even the peak of the Eternal Tower, just because to their senses this tower was infinite.

And the Great One, for the first time in an inestimable length of eternities, opened the door at the peak of the tower.

Only a dragon with the power of Vraegar would be able to tear through time in such a manner without losing himself and be able to leave tracks behind, and this was the task that Eos had given to him.

The light flickered.

“That you are the forty-fourth,” the voice said, “and you are different from the other forty-three.”

“Not of my power,” he continued, and the ten thousand lights of his crown began to slowly rekindle, one by one, drawing from the Origin Tree behind him.

“I am going to rebuild Origin,” Eos said, and his voice carried the same quiet certainty it had carried when he told Enoch that he could grow. “I am going to plant this tree in soil you cannot poison, and I am going to grow something that you cannot harvest, because I am going to make it in the image of love and truth and not hunger. And every life that is born in the shadow of that tree will be a life you cannot predict, cannot control, cannot break and reform according to your design.” He took one more step toward the Tower. “You know what that means.”

“You watched me in that dying body of a prince. You watched me in the Nexus. You watched every choice I made and every mistake, and you let it happen, because… You were testing something.”

A pause. The kind of pause that had weight.

“I gave them enemies that would threaten everything they know, and they all responded in the same manner. They faced their monster with rage or love or righteousness. You faced him with truth. And truth…” the voice paused again, and this time, the pause was different, a calculation rather than a performance,

But the Great One did not need theater, nor did it need to impress him.

“Yes,” Vraegar said finally. “This is where I went and have been.”

The most powerful beings he had ever faced had always announced themselves: Enoch with his body made of End, the Ancient Primordials with their terrible hungers, even Nyxara, Luminious Veil, with her stolen faces and her games.

“This is where you went,” Prime said to the draconic figure, who did not reply as he kept staring through the window, his vast scaled form rendered small by the particular gravity of the view, and Prime realized, slowly, the way one realized things that had been obvious in retrospect, that the dragon had not been sitting before the window for many millions of Cosmic Eras because he was guarding it.

Vraegar must have suffered a lot and spent an unknown length of time digging into the past, but he had succeeded, and soon Prime and the three Primordials with him followed the road laid by Vraegar until they reached a wound in the architecture of nothingness, and through the wound was a place that had no business existing.

“How?”

“They all fought to save what they loved,” the voice said. “You fight to save what they dreamed of. You fight for the thing that has not yet been born. The possible. The potential. The choice.” The light of the Great One pulsed, and for a moment, Eos saw something in it that he had not expected to see… and it was curiosity.

Eos looked up, and he smiled.

“And?” Eos pressed. “What have you found?”

“I found what was left of him,” he said. “And I could not bring him out.”