The Shackles We Choose

Deep beneath the Solspire Tree, the air was hot enough to melt metal, like standing near a flowing river of lava from an active volcano, this was the engine room of the Academy, the place that anchored the pocket dimension to reality.

And it was breaking.

The walls were cracking as Malevolant's influence and the void leaked in, clawing at the stone with it's destructive aura while in the center of the room, Chernobog stood alone.

The Headmaster wasn't wearing his hat and his shirt was ripped, revealing skin that was covered in glowing, burning, agonizing ancient runes as he held his hands out toward the massive Reality Crystal that was fracturing under the pressure of Malevolent’s presence and influence.

Chernobog was the only thing holding the pocket dimension together, the last line of defense before absolute devastation.

"Hold... dammit... hold!" Chernobog roared, blood pouring from his nose as his mana capacity, vast as an ocean, was being depleted and drained dry every second just to stop the school from imploding.

The Reality Crystal, the heart of the Academy, was screaming as fractures spiderwebbed across its glowing surface while Chernobog tried his best to stitch the dimension together, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. 

He was dying.

"Hold..." Chernobog demanded, his vision blurring. "Just... a little longer..."

His knees buckled, a shard breaking off as soon as the pressure eased up slightly and the dimension began to collapse.

I can't do it, Chernobog thought, the darkness closing in. I'm sorry, Silver. Everyone.

Just as it all seemed hopeless the heavy iron doors of the chamber blasted open.

"Stabilize the perimeter!" a voice commanded. "Donovan, brace the structure! Callie, keep the Headmaster’s heart beating!"

Chernobog forced his eyes open to find the Four Principals rushing in straight into the belly of the beast!

Callie slid to her knees beside Chernobog, slamming her glowing staff into the ground as she channeled a torrent of green life magic directly into his chest.

"Don't you dare die on us, old man!" she shouted, her nervous fidgeting gone, replaced by the steely resolve as Donovan leapt onto the platform using his pure reinforcement aura by slamming his fists against the cracking base of the crystal, his muscles bulging as he literally held the stone foundation together with brute force.

"I've got the shell!" he grunted "It won't crumble while I'm standing!"

Behind the trio stood Balor at the rear, summoning a wall of spectral spirits and using them to plug the leaks where the void was seeping in, fighting back the entropy with the chill of the grave.

And then, there was Amon.

The Principal of Curses walked straight up to the fracturing crystal, it's mana radiation intense enough to melt skin, but he didn't flinch, his "God Complex" refusing to be crushed as he looked at the crystal with arrogance and fury.

"You think you can break?" Amon sneered at the stone. "You think you have permission to fail? Who allows you to think this way?!"

He rebuked as he bit his own thumb, smearing blood across the cracks.

"I curse you," Amon roared, his voice echoing with forbidden power. 

"I curse this crystal with Eternal Stasis! You are forbidden from breaking! You are forbidden from changing! You will exist because I SAY SO!"

It was a paradox, using a curse to preserve life, harbouring malice to create stability but it worked as the crystal stopped shaking and the cracks froze in place, bound by Amon’s absolute will.

Meanwhile Chernobog, revitalized by Callie’s healing, looked at his staff, the four mages who had stood tall when it mattered most.

"I thought you lot would run, I'm glad I was wrong for once."  Chernobog rasped, a bloody smile touching his lips.

Amon looked back, his eyes burning with power.

"We are the 32nd Degree, Headmaster," he said, standing beside him. "We are the Pillars. And Pillars do not move. We are the foundation that will keep this Academy flourishing for centuries to come!"

Chernobog laughed, a deep, rumbling sound as he grabbed onto the crystal with renewed strength.

"Then let's show this God what the Academy is made of," Chernobog growled looking back at the crystal. 

Back on the surface, while the Jester's golden cloud consumed Malevolant, the ripples of the apocalypse continued to wash over the rest of the ruined Academy, the influence stretching everywhere, even in the shattered remains of the Royal VIP Box where his Holiness, Pope Vincent, was scrambling out from under a collapsed pillar, his white robes torn, his tall hat crushed and his ego deflated.

He stood up to look over the balcony, witnessing the Jester face off against the God and then at the corpse of the Queen, her head rolling across the floor, stopping against the debris of the fallen wall. 

"She's gone, just like you wanted."

The voice startled Vincent who turned around to lock eyes with Lilith, standing there behind him, her sword dripping with her mother's blood.

Her hands, usually steady, hung limp at her sides having become void of emotions all too quickly now that she had achieved her goal.

"You... you foolish girl!" Vincent shrieked, pointing at the massive, golden cloud in the arena where the God was fighting. "Do something! Defend me! I am the Voice of the Shepherd! You are the Royal Guard assigned to the church! Do your duty!"

Lilith looked at the Pope disdainfully before turning her gaze towards the sword in her hand.

"My duty ended ten minutes ago,"

"I command you!" the pope screamed frantically, his face purple with fear. "Protect me, you doll! You are a puppet, MY PUPPET!"

Lilith smiled, a small, broken thing, but it was real.

"No strings," she whispered, wiggling her fingers to mimic a marionette being free from the puppeteers grasp. She stepped aside, uncaring of whatever fate awaited him while Vincent let out a garbled sob of terror and ran past her, toward the edge of the balcony, spreading his arms wide in prayer to the God he had worshipped, shouting over the noise of the battle below to Malevolant, hoping for mercy to befall him.

"Oh, Great One!" the misguided pope shouted. "I am your servant! Take me with you!"

From the swirling cloud of gold and rot in the arena, Malevolent’s voice boomed, shaking the very stones of the box.

"Servant?"

"Yes!" Vincent cried. "I prepared the vessel! I purged the heretics! I provided the necessary sacrifices, it was all my doing!"

"I have no servants," the God rumbled. "I have only food."

Malevolent inhaled cutting Vincent's scream short as his soul was ripped from his body, a wisp of grey smoke dragged instantly across the air and into the God’s maw, causing the Pope’s empty husk to topple over the railing and fall a few hundred feet into the mud below, unnoticed and unmourned.

Lilith watched him fall. She didn't look away. It felt...necessary.

"And you?" Malevolent’s voice vibrated in her skull as Lilith walked over to the Queen’s throne, the only chair left standing in the ruins. 

She sat down, crossing her legs, throwing her bloody sword on the floor infront of her.

"I'm already empty," she replied "You'd starve."

"Correct." the God turned his attention back to the Jester, ignoring her and she was alone again, in the ruin of the Empire, the Queen of Ash, ruling over a kingdom of corpses. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled candy wrapper, something Runa had given her weeks ago, and smoothed it out.

For the first time in her life, she had nothing to do.

And it was beautiful.

She watched as the gold dust cloud shimmered in the grey air, a beautiful, glittering nebula amidst the void and for a moment, it seemed to hold Malevolant at bay, but then, revitalised with the pope's soul, the God exhaled.

The dust didn't blow away, it simply ceased to exist, malevolant erasing the very concept of the obstruction, clearing the air instantly as he floated toward Ezekiel.

"A Jester," Malevolent mused "You are a glitch in the design. A chaotic variable. Solace always did have a soft spot for broken things."

Ezekiel stood his ground, his hands shaking from the sheer strain of holding his shattered mind together as the veins in his neck bulged, turning black from the corruption of the Jester persona eating away at his humanity.

"Don't talk about her!" Ezekiel shrieked, his voice cracking and mixing with that of the Jester. "You don't get to say her name!" 

Touch.

A single point of contact and instantly the giant golden woman turned grey, crumbling into ash.

"Pathetic," Malevolent sighed, flicking his finger as an invisible force field slammed into Ezekiel, just pure kinetic rejection launching the Jester backward viciously as he smashed through three layers of stone walls before crashing into the rubble, right next to the headless corpse of the Queen. He lay there, coughing up blood, his ribs shattered, his mana almost completely gone.

"Is that it?" Ezekiel wheezed, staring up at the grey sky. "Is that the punchline?"

"EZEKIEL!"

Vanessa screamed, her voice tearing through the silence.

She was kneeling beside Silver who was still out cold, his breathing shallow and inconsistent, his body shutting down from the mana exhaustion.

The elf looked at the ruins where Ezekiel had fallen, then at the God floating toward him, ready to deliver the final blow.

Run, 

Ezekiel had said.

Run, 

her instincts screamed. 

You can rewind time. 

You can go back to the forest. 

You can hide in a cave for another hundred years. 

You can survive.

Vanessa looked at Silver’s unconscious face, at Ken, who was pulling a terrified Rain and Summer out of the rubble with his vines, at Noah who limped towards the surface,  at the thousands of students cowering in fear, at Lilith in the VIP box.

If she ran, they all died.

"No," Vanessa whispered to the wind, standing up and steeling her resolve. Her legs were trembling, but she didn't step back. She stepped forward.

She reached up and undid the clasp of the robe Sachi had given her, the heavy, emerald silk sliding off her shoulders as she stood there in her simple white dress, the one she had worn in the cave, the one that made her look like a ghost.

On her wrist, the black butterfly bracelet she had worn for a century began to vibrate. It cracked, unable to contain the energy, and shattered into a thousand specs of light that swirled around her, shedding the cocoon of her past to reveal the Goddess within.

She closed her eyes and reached deep inside herself, not to the Time Magic, that was but a crutch, a way to fix mistakes.

To Solace.

The scroll said I am the savior, she thought. 

The scroll said I am the daughter. 

I am not a daughter. 

I am Vanessa.

I am the Sun!

She opened her eyes and they weren't violet anymore. They were pure, blinding white.

"HEY!"

Her voice rang out cutting through the oppressive atmosphere, hurled straight at the Serpent God.

Malevolent paused right where he was, hovering over Ezekiel’s broken body with his hand raised and ready to erase the Jester from existence, turning slowly toward the goddess standing alone in the center of the arena, burning with the fire of a thousand suns!

"The runaway returns," Malevolent mocked, drifting away from Ezekiel. "Are you going to beg? Or have you come to join your mother in oblivion?"

Vanessa didn't answer as she simply walked towards him and with every step she took, the grey world fractured.

Step. 

The obsidian floor under her bare foot turned a brilliant, polished black.

Step. 

The air around her shimmered, and the blue of the sky bled back into existence in a small halo above her head.

Step. 

Color returned to her skin, her hair, her dress, her mere presence a beacon of reality in a world of void.

"I am not begging," Vanessa replied, her voice echoing with a power that made the ground shake. "And I am not running."

Malevolent seemed agitated, the return of color, the return of Life, burning him with annoyance.

"You are nothing!" Malevolent hissed. "You are a fragment of a dead deity! I will unmake you!"

He thrust both hands forward as a tidal wave of grey emptiness rushed toward her, a wall of erasure meant to wipe her from the timeline, but Vanessa didn't dodge, raising her hand, palm open as she chanted.

"Chronos Art: Stasis."

She didn't rewind time. She didn't speed it up. She stopped it.

The wall of grey energy hit an invisible barrier a foot in front of her face and froze, and it hung there!! Suspended in time, crackling with frustrated energy as Vanessa walked through it, the frozen energy parting around her being like water.

She kept walking, her white hair flowing behind her, turning into a comet's tail of light, marching right up to the floating God, who also didn't back away, feeling unbeatable and omnipotent as he stared at her with something that looked remarkably like fear.

"You took everything from me" Vanessa whispered "You took my lovers. My friends. You took my peace."

She reached out, grabbing Malevolent’s wrist and where her skin touched his, the grey void hissed and boiled, turning into solid, mortal flesh!

"Gods are timeless. Let me show you what time feels like."

She gripped tighter.

"Chronos Art: Mortality."

She poured her mana into him but she wasn't rewinding him to a time before he was a God. Instead She was forcing time upon him, making him age, a thousand years in a second, a million years in a heartbeat!

Malevolent screamed in terror and agony, a sound so loud that it shattered the remaining windows of the Academy as his porcelain mask cracked and his spider-like fingers withered, the skin peeling away to reveal ancient, dusty bone and his mask teetering slightly to reveal the edges of a face, that of an old and frail sorceror.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! STOP IT THIS INSTANT YOU WENCH!" Malevolent howled, trying to pull away, but Vanessa held on with an inescapable strength.

"I'm giving you a lifespan," Vanessa gritted out, blood leaking from her nose as the strain tore at her own body.

"GET OFF ME!"

Malevolent panicked, detonating a blast of pure entropy from his core and the explosion succesffuly blew Vanessa back. She flew across the arena, crashing into the stone near where Silver lay, gasping as she clutched her chest, the white light in her eyes fading to a dull violet.

She was done, having used everything to force mortality onto a concept and it had worked.

In the center of the arena, Malevolent was no longer a smooth, abstract entity. He was breathing. He was panting!

The porcelain mask shattered completely, falling away to reveal a human face, rotten, ancient, and terrified. He looked like a corpse that had been dug up after a millennium.

He looked... mortal.