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Chapter 3. A Legacy of Gods(2)
🕑 Added 2025-03-23 15:02:01 +0000 UTCThe fourth Skyholm did not have magic. At least not in the traditional sense. To Rafe, he seemed positively divine. He was a warrior. A pure warrior and nothing more.
A warrior who could crash a small hill with an upward lunge and downward slash was rather overpowered though.
Still, the battle scene he saw resonated deeply with him. When slowed down to a crawl, the man just swung his sword in the most basic of movements. His feet moved lightly, all his muscles rigidly controlled through years of undoubtedly grueling practice. He slashed vertically, slashed horizontally, thrust forward, took a half step back to dodge by a hair's width and then he was there again, a flurry of small cuts appearing on his enemy's body.
And then he changed his stance to a crouch, and iron sang, and clanged, and blood spurted, and the dance went on. Parry, slash, thrust, back step, dodge, parry, counter, and again.
It was a simple swordsman duel. Rafe was sure the men didn't even intend to kill each other. Why then did the fourth Skyholm choose this particular duel to showcase his path? Was it even his choice? Who even made this …legacy trial?
It was the simplest vision. A few fantastical-looking movements here and there, but most of the time it was just two swordsmen exchanging blows with utmost efficiency. It was beautiful.
Still, the visions moved forward.
The fifth Skyholm was the only other nonhuman, although she did appear as a beautiful human woman with crimson hair meditating in peace before she was attacked.
The fifth Skyholm, the matriarch of the nest of fiery fate. Her chosen concept was one of immortal fate, and the battle she chose was one that never happened. One that should have, though. The battle for the end of a universe, maybe even the multiverse.
When the Demon God attacked her, she had been a woman meditating among celestial bodies. Rafe saw another god-tier battle, although he wasn't sure what that meant, and he was sure some impressions were being screened from him.
They fought for decades, for centuries even, there in the expanse of space, among the stars. But this was a different fight from that of the third Skyholm. The woman had transformed into a bird, a familiar-looking fantastic beast of fiery feathers.
Only its flames were white instead of crimson and yellow. It still healed though. The demon king seemed to be concepted with widespread destruction. Almost any movements he made had a celestial body set to explode.
Yet the firebird was it's natural counter. Every one of her movements rebirthed the galaxy, and so like that, a concept of absolute annihilation and a concept of rebirth clashed at the highest level. And none could find any leverage for centuries.
That is until something distracted the firebird. Rafe saw it too. The moment a thread of fate moved away from its path, the firebird lost its head before it could even follow the distraction to its natural end.
The demon god pounced on its decapitated enemy and reigned destruction-infused blows with impunity, the galaxy they were in darkened with the advent of the void.
Then the fire burned brighter for a few moments, and the firebird was reborn in all its glory. It took a lot out of it (her), holding absolute annihilation and the void back on its own.
She cursed the old guardians for their folly. She did not doubt in her mind they'd orchestrated this whole ordeal. She had known they would, for she had reached the pinnacle of the concept of fate. This was the fate of the universe though. One universe had to end for another to be born in its ashes.
It would take an anomaly to stop such a fate. An anomaly like what had distracted her. An anomaly like a thousands-year-old enchantress performing a grand ritual to make her younger self the strongest being in the universe, applying the concept of time —time travel even. Regression.
“She created such an interesting ability…” the phoenix thought as a piece of her mind watched the thread that had interested her.
A young girl, not even nine yet sat in a burning cave. Her whole world had been upended on that day, a mentor had betrayed her, and her family was nowhere to be seen, but beside her was a blue screen Rafe found familiar. The first such ability in the known universe.
The phoenix vision bled into the next. A bit of a montage of the young anomaly's life. She too was a genius. Like the first, so too the last.
The sixth Skyholm, the enchantress, colonist of the void, protector of life, defier of the end times, the strongest god the multiverse ever did - and ever will - see. The last Skyholm.
She entered the stream of fate, the enchantress did, and even before she had ascended to their level, bore witness to the fight for the end of the universe. And she would not let it come to pass.
She was a spell sword, is what she called herself. An anomaly not even the first Skyholm could rival. The first Skyholm had seven aspects or affinities or concepts, but he only got them after a freak accident left him with a fractured soul. Something that would have killed many was an opportunity for him.
The enchantress was born with her soul strong enough to have six aspects already, although she could only start with them at their weakest possible levels.
Still, a little hard work to strengthen her soul was nothing to the woman. She formed her sword style, a style where she used a long whip imbued with an arcane mana so pure it had never been seen before her time.
With a flick of her wrist, the enchantress summoned her whip, still watching the battle that could have crushed any lesser being. And then the whip started to levitate slowly as she imbued mana into it.
One of her eyes was bigger and shone almost like a borne fire seen from atop a hill on a dark night. There was a vertical scratch on the eyelids showing that maybe she'd lost that eye once, and now it had been replaced by a phoenix eye.
Her eye shone, she took a stance, and none of the other two combatants noticed her. The shine in her prosthetic eye intensified when the whip shot forward, holding the Demon's concept of destruction as the whip held it down and her pure mana ravaged its soul.
The phoenix with the white fire took her chance as well, tearing through her opponent's chest with her sharpened claws and not bothering to remove its heart but instead dumping her immortal flames inside it.
When the concept of destruction escaped its leash, it destroyed the pure mana ravaging the demon's body, and all the wounds it had suffered too. The fire came back though. For it was immortal.
And the enchantress joined the fray in earnest. Her sucker blow had not been enough to win the fight for the universe, but such was the fate of a weaker truth fighting against a fully realized truth at the pinnacle. The Demon soon realised fighting two opponents at once might be too much for it.
Rafe noticed a smile on the enchantress’ face as the demon god decided to take her out of the picture before he returned to fighting the fires ravaging his soul.
“Fuck the Pinnacle,” she said. “There is always higher to climb, and I've already deviated from your structured paths. The pinnacle is nothing to me because I will surpass it!”
The last was a shout, and as she said it a scythe appeared in her hand. One covered in runes of blood, one that spoke of laws yet unknown, yet unseen. In her other hand appeared a lantern with a flame burning in it. A terrible flame nobody should look at.
Not even Rafe who was just a projection could avoid the feeling of his head splitting into thousands. He could only imagine what the Demon God felt at that moment.
No, forget the Demon. The enchantress who was holding it, who was holding that blood scythe, whose body was visibly wilting as she fought to keep the terrible power she had unleashed in check.
With the descent of the scythe, the universe froze for a moment. The heavens wept as a pinnacle being, the holder of a mantle of authority, died.
The phoenix was knocked out in the background. The enchantress approached her and took something out of her very soul, although she didn't do it out of malice. It was the mantle of Skyholm, that she had earned the right to inherit. Her body was visibly healing now she'd put her evil instruments away. It was healing very slowly.
Then she took the demon's newly born mantle too, and slipped back into that stream of fate from whence she had come. Thus the end of the universe was averted, and a memory the phoenix had lived was made unreal. It was real, in her mind, but it would never come to pass. The universe would not end that way, because the enchantress found another way, another path for the universe, and she held two mantles too.
