JUDGEMENT PART THREE

I was no longer a man.
The vessel of flesh and bone that was Arda Nebula, the grieving father from another world, had been scoured clean, reforged in universal power and unbearable loss.
I had become a concept, almost like a certain Cosmic Armour iteration of a certain blue-suited man.
I was Order incarnate, and my very presence was the only thing that stood against the void.

I stared into the void, and it stared back.

The desert floor around me was now a crystalline lattice.
The Gladius Nobellus was now a blade of pure, solidified meaning, a weapon that cut not flesh, but existence itself.
I looked upon Dietha, and I saw her not as the mistress of darkness, but as the gaping, screaming wound she truly was - Chaos.

For the first time since her creation, Dietha, the Second Great Calamity, knew fear.
It was not the fear of a mortal, but rather the conceptual terror of a fundamental principle encountering its absolute antithesis.

"You. What have you become?" she whispered in awe.

"I am the memory of every life you have consumed. I am the love of the family you shattered. I am the collective will of all that is good and pure in this world. I am the end of your eternal torment."

I did not walk towards her.
I simply was before her.
The space between us ceased to have meaning.

-

Dietha attacked first.
She wielded the very concept of non-existence. 
A wave of absolute nothingness washed towards me, treading to erase the past, present, and future.
Light, sound, and causality itself began to unravel at its touch.
To the mortal eyes of my companions watching from the edge of the battlefield, it looked as though a section of the universe was being deleted.

I met her attack.
I held the Gladius aloft and asserted the fundamental principle of existence.
I did not block the nothingness; I simply declared that it could not be.
Where the white light of my power met her encroaching void, reality reasserted itself.
The laws of physics snapped back into being.
The light returned.
The sound of a world holding its breath crashed back into being.

"Clever." Dietha's thought echoed in my mind. "But you are only one principle. I am the infinite potential of Chaos."

The surrounding universe fractured.
We were no longer in a desert.
We were in a thousand places at once, throughout spacetime itself.

We stood on the deck of the Obsidian Maw as Aquarius made his final stand against Tigress, the sea raging around us.
Dietha tried to use the memory of his sacrifice to break my will.
But I was no mere man. I was also the strength of the First Dwarf.
I planted my feet, and the very concept of unbreakability flowed into me, reinforcing the memory, turning Aquarius's spirit not into tragedy, but into an eternal bastion.
The memory held, and Dietha's attack shattered.

We were in the soot-stained smithy of Stonehearth as Lord Valerius gave the order to slaughter Xerta's family.
Dietha wielded betrayal, of order being used to create injustice.
But I was not the fury of the First Half-Human.
I reached into the memory and asserted the principle of retribution.
The spectral form of Lord Valerius screamed as his own greed turned inward, his threads unravelling under the weight of his own crimes.

We stood in the grey, dead pocket dimension, and she brought forth a perfect, beautiful image of Kathuria, her hand outstretched.

"Join me, We can have it all back." the phantom whispered.

But that was no Kathuria.

Dietha was wielding the concept of regret, the most powerful weapon against a mortal heart.

But my heart was no longer mortal.
It now held the Breath of the First Human, the endless potential to build anew.

"You are not her," I stated. "You are just an echo. My love will NOT BE EXPLOITED. It is the very source of my power."

I reached out and gently touched the phantom's cheek, not with force, but with the pure concept of acceptance.
The illusion could not bear the weight of such a pure, ordered emotion.
It dissolved into dust, and Dietha herself recoiled as if burned.

The battle became a blur of seismic, unquantifiable proportions.
She threw entire galaxies at me, and I would weave their stars into new constellations of Order.
She tried to drown me in the river of time, the stream that holds all events, both past, present and future, but I stepped outside of it, no longer bound to time.
Furthermore, she showed me the heat death of the universe, the final victory of entropy.
I showed her the first spark of creation, the undeniable will of life to simply be.

On the battlefield below, my friends watched in stunned silence.
To them, the sky was a mess of improbable, shifting colours, a war of light and shadow that transcended their very understanding.

"What... what is he doing?" Xerta breathed.

Cassandra, her ancient elven eyes wide with a reverence she had never shown before, whispered,

"He is not fighting her. He is... arguing with her. He is debating the very nature of existence."

Dietha was growing desperate.
She could not unmake me.
She could not trick me.
So she turned to her final, most terrible weapon.
If she could not destroy Order, she would prove its inferiority.
She focused her power not on me, but on herself.

"You champion a world of fleeting, fragile life. You believe in the strength of mortals. Let me show you what true strength is." She declared, her form beginning to swell, to draw in the chaotic energy of her portal.

She began to collapse inward, her form condensing into a singularity of pure, absolute Chaos.
She was going to become a self-contained Calamity, a force so potent it would not just destroy the world, but erase the very dimension it occupied from the cosmos.

This was her final gambit. 
She would not win, but she would ensure that we both lost.

I knew what I had to do.
I could not simply counter this.
I had to create something more powerful, more absolute.
I held the Gladius Nobellus before me, its light a comforting presence amidst it all.
I drew upon the final gift from Erton, the combined essences of his children.

The Heartstone gave me the unbreakable will of the mountain.
The Seed gave me the infinite, flowing adaptability of life.
The Breath gave me the unending ambition of humanity to build.
The Echo gave me the fierce, protective fury of the wild.
And Tulote, Yui, Kathuria, their sacrifices would be avenged. Everyone who had been wronged by the overflow of Chaos in this world would be avenged here and now.

All of these concepts, all of these principles, flowed into me.
I was no longer just Order.
I was Life. I was Hope. I was Love.

I raised my sword for the final time.

"I am not a god, Dietha," I said, my voice now calm.

I spoke to her as a lost and grieving mother. I knew loss, I lived loss, but I had one thing you were devoid of from the beginning.
Humanity.

"I am not a Calamity. I am Arda Nebula. And my family is everything."

I reached out with my entire being and did what Usasha had taught me all those months ago in her realm of pure creation..

I found the central thread of her existence.
The one, singular glyph in the heart of her being that was not Chaos.
It was the memory of her children.
It was the last, infinitesimally small spark of the mother she had once been.
It was the source of her pain, the engine of her grief, and the key to her unmaking.

And with a single, gentle, and infinitely compassionate thought, I did not sever it.

I mended it.

I poured every ounce of my power, every memory of Kathuria's love, of my children's laughter, of Tulote's sacrifice, of Yui's brilliance, into that single, broken thread.
I did not attack her with Chaos, but with Order.
I healed her grief with love.

For the first time in a billion years, Dietha felt something other than loss.
She felt... peace.

A single tear, for pure, clear starlight, traced a path down her void-like cheek.
The collapsing singularity of her power faltered.
The all-consuming hunger in her soul was extinguished.

"Thank you~" she whispered.

Her voice was no longer of cosmic horror, but the simple, grateful whisper of a woman finally freed from an eternal pain...

And then, with a soft, gentle sigh that was not a sound but a feeling of immense release, she ceased to be.
Not destroyed.
Not unmade.
But... at peace.
She returned to the great, formless void, her story finally, mercifully, at its end.

The black storm in the sky vanished.
The oppressive weight on the world lifted.
The brilliant, life-giving sun returned, its rays washing over a desert that was, for the first time in centuries, just a desert.
The power receded from me, leaving me once more a man.
My borrowed armour had shattered and fallen away, the Gladius Nobellus a simple, beautiful sword in my hand.

The war was over.

I looked upon Cassandra and Xerta, and upon the tens of thousands of soldiers of the Imperium, who kneeled to me, chanting me as their saviour, and their new king.

I, however, was EXHAUSTED.
And justifiably fainted.