A Duel of Absolutes

When gods fight, the only casualty is the reality they stand upon.

The story did not explode. It detonated.

Vionu’s hands, turned towards the pillar of light, became conduits for an impossible power. The nexus, that living river of pure mana, responded to her command not with a surge, but with an eruption. The brilliant white light of the chamber intensified, washing out all color, all shadow, until there was only a blinding, world-ending incandescence. A low, groaning hum escalated into a deafening, soul-shaking roar, the sound of reality itself being stretched to its breaking point.

I was thrown back from the archway by the sheer force of the unleashed energy, my body slamming against the stone wall of the staircase. My vision went white, my ears filled with a roar that was both sound and pressure. I was a piece of driftwood caught in the first wave of a tsunami.

When my vision cleared, blinking away the searing afterimages, the scene in the chamber had transformed into a battle from a forgotten, terrible myth.

Vionu floated a few inches off the ground, her hair a swirling corona of white light, her eyes burning with the pure, undiluted power of the nexus. She was no longer a woman; she was a vessel for creation itself, beautiful and terrifying. Beams of incandescent energy, pure and perfect, shot from her outstretched hands, not with the chaotic crackle of a spell, but with the silent, absolute finality of a law of physics being written.

The boy—Mori—was her opposite. He stood his ground, a still, dark void against her blinding light. The chaotic purple energy that pulsed from him was a disease in this sterile, perfect chamber. He did not raise shields or cast counter-spells. He met her assault with a quiet, unnerving simplicity.

He flicked his fingers. A tiny shard of what looked like solidified silence shot forward and met one of her beams of light. There was no explosion. The light simply... stopped. It was absorbed, erased, unwritten from existence.

He flicked his fingers again. A shard of pure, black ice formed a perfect, razor-thin wall that a second beam struck and shattered against, its energy dissipating into harmless motes of light.

It was not a battle of spells. It was a duel of absolutes. Her every attack was an attempt to impose a perfect, unyielding order. His every defense was an act of quiet, absolute negation.

"Why do you resist?" Vionu's voice boomed, amplified by the nexus until it was the voice of a god. "I will build a perfect world! A world of order! A world without the pain and chaos that created us!"

The boy laughed. It was not the joyous, unhinged giggle of the Clowny persona I had heard whispers of in his one-sided conversations. It was a quiet, hollow, and utterly mirthless sound. "You cannot erase pain by building a prettier cage," he replied, his voice a flat counterpoint to her divine roar. "You are just another tyrant who has mistaken their own fear for a noble cause."

He raised a hand, and the polished floor of the chamber cracked. From the fissures, not stone spikes, but tendrils of pure, anti-magical shadow writhed upwards, lashing out at her.

She met them with a wave of pure force, a wall of shimmering, white energy that vaporized the shadows on contact. The impact, however, sent a tremor through the entire chamber. One of the colossal crystals lining the wall shattered, its stored knowledge dissolving into a rain of glittering, meaningless dust. The ancient library was tearing itself apart.

I watched, paralyzed, a helpless observer to a conflict that was beyond my comprehension. I saw Vionu, a woman willing to burn the world to build a better one for a child. I saw Mori, a boy willing to let the world burn for no reason I could understand. My naive belief in right and wrong, in heroes and villains, was a pathetic, childish notion in the face of this terrible, absolute conviction.

My gaze was drawn to Mu. The boy was still in his golden cage of light, but the protective sphere flickered and dimmed with every titanic impact of magic against magic. He was watching the battle, his small face a mask of pure, silent terror. He was not just a justification for Vionu; he was a prisoner of her ambition.

The battle escalated. Vionu, her face a mask of furious frustration, realized she could not overwhelm him with direct force. Her perfect order was being undone by his perfect entropy. So she changed her tactics. She gathered the power of the nexus, not into a beam, but into a wide, shimmering wave of pure, white energy. It was not an attack meant to destroy, but to unmake.

But she did not aim it at Mori.

She aimed it at the golden cage. She aimed it at Mu.

"If you will not be erased, flaw," she screamed, her voice cracking with a fanatical rage, "then watch as the future you would deny is unwritten before your eyes!"

It was a bluff. A monstrous, terrible bluff. She would never harm the boy. But Mori did not know that.

For the first time, the boy's empty expression broke. A flicker of something—panic, rage, a memory of a promise—flashed across his face. He moved, faster than I could follow, abandoning his defense to place himself between the wave of white energy and Mu's cage.

And in that instant, Vionu re-directed her attack.

The wave of un-making energy, a silent, world-ending tide, changed its course in mid-air. It was never meant for Mu. It was meant for the only other thing in the room.

It was meant for me.

I had no time to scream, no time to run. I could only watch as a wall of pure, white annihilation hurtled towards the archway where I stood, a helpless witness about to be erased from a story I had never asked to be a part of.