I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 466: She Is the World's End

Hila was going through the storage hold aboard the hot air balloon boat. Behind her drifted a mythology spirit dressed like an astronaut, bobbing along on the air like an inflated balloon.

A spirit with long golden hair was going over the odd and curious things on the shelves, most of them gathered up by her and Shelly along the way.

"Vellen, see that everything we gathered along the road is kept safe!"

"And if we come at last to the next era, might these not be the only keepsakes left of this one?"

The spirit picked one of them up and stroked it gently.

"Many years from now, when we bring them out again and call this journey back to mind, it is certain to be a delight."

The mythology spirit waved his arms about, telling the Dream Sovereign that he had sorted through everything perfectly, without a single flaw.

Whenever he could get away without speaking, he did his best to say nothing at all.

Yet he always carried himself as though he had already spoken, as though he stood out in the vacuum of space, where there was no air to carry a voice.

"Vellen, it seems there is nothing of your own in here?"

"Is there nothing at all that you like?"

"Whatever you like, only say so. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. You were born a myth, yes, but you ought to have hobbies of your own all the same."

"And this place ought to hold a little space that is yours alone."

The big mythology spirit said nothing at all, and only went on wiping down the cabinet with great care.

But silence was sometimes the loudest answer of all, and what he did spoke his thoughts plainly enough.

Vellen wanted nothing else. This hot air balloon boat was already the thing he loved and treasured most.

He meant to keep the vessel whole and sound, to keep it looking new in every moment, so that it might carry the Supreme Divine Being onward, toward an endless future.

How far off that future truly lay, he did not know. All he could do was tend this vessel faithfully, every moment of every day.

Knock!

Knock!

Knock!

Up through the hatch from below came the sound of knocking.

It came slow and measured, and one could tell that whoever was knocking was a person of excellent manners.

Hila seemed to sense something, and turned her eyes down toward the sound.

The door swung open, and what lay beyond it was not Black Rock City beneath Lava Mountain at all, but a twisted, fantastical world unlike any other.

That was the Reflection Realm, lying beneath the Gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation.

Overhead a passage of brick coiled endlessly into a spiral, countless doors set all along it, each of them opening onto who knew where.

The door had opened beneath a flowering tree, and beneath it stood a nymph in a white gauze robe, a wreath of flowers upon her head.

The moment she saw Hila push the door open, the nymph bowed at once, and as she bent low the key at her neck slipped forward and swung.

"Lady Hila!"

This was the Door Spirit Realm, and the one who had knocked was the Door Nymph, Rosa.

Hila stepped inside and took in the sights of the Door Spirit Realm.

The light of Dreams spilled into that shadowed place, and the whole realm brightened at once.

"Why, it is Rosa!"

"So this is the Door Spirit Realm you have built, is it? It looks most interesting."

"And more than that, with the key I gave you, you have already fixed upon the very door of the hot air balloon boat. It seems you have come to command its power with real skill."

"It is only because Lord Vellen once gave me the coordinates," Rosa answered. "That is how I was able to find his door."

Hila came to stand before Rosa, and looked at her with a smile. "And how many teleportation gates have you raised so far?"

Rosa looked faintly abashed. "I have not done well enough. There are only two as yet."

"I have found eight people already, and given out eight keys, and yet only two of them were able to raise a teleportation gate."

That was only to be expected. Not everyone could bear the cost of building a teleportation gate.

Few enough people ever came by a key. Fewer still could build a door with one, and of those, the ones who could push a teleportation gate open at the last were rarer than phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.

Hila gave Rosa a word of encouragement, and then added, "It seems there are not many people now who long for distant places. Perhaps that is no bad thing. It means that most people have no wish to leave their homeland."

It was then that Rosa came to the true reason she had sought Hila out. "Lady Hila, I have presumed to seek an audience with you today because there is something I wish to ask."

Rosa lifted her head. "Ought a teleportation gate to be sent to the gods of the mortal world as well?"

Rainbow tree branches and Dream Vine leaves had gone out to the gods already, after all, and Rosa did not know whether her own teleportation gates ought to follow them.

Hila saw straight through to what Rosa was really asking. "You wish to use the temples of the gods to raise more teleportation gates?"

Rosa nodded. Nothing she had managed so far satisfied her in the least.

"I have found some suitable people, but those who can truly raise a teleportation gate are still far too few."

"It is not enough. It falls far short of the vision and the dream I held when I first began."

"And so I thought that if the gods themselves were to use teleportation gates, the Door Spirit Realm might grow the faster for it."

Hila asked her in turn, "But the keys were born of a Dream that longs for distant places. Do the gods of the mortal world hold such a Dream? And would they give their own Dreams into your hands?"

Rosa was not sure either. Ever since she had built the Door Spirit Realm she had been rushing about without rest, searching everywhere for the right people, hunting for those who held a Dream of longing for distant places, all so that she might complete and perfect her own realm faster and better.

Hila looked at Rosa and ran a hand over the nymph's black hair.

"You are too much in earnest, and far too much in haste."

"In that, perhaps, you would do well to learn from Saint Raphael."

"She is never in a hurry over anything, and nothing ever troubles her."

"Some things need not be done quickly. Swiftness is not always a good thing. Be certain only that the road you walk is the right one, and then walk it slowly, step by step."

A smile crept across Hila's face whenever she spoke of that Storage Nymph, as though Raphael were joy itself made flesh, as though the mere mention of her name could bring happiness to anyone and wash their worries away.

Even Rosa seemed to remember something at the sound of it. The earnest look she always wore softened, and the corner of her mouth twitched despite her.

Hila left Rosa with one last piece of advice.

"And if ever you meet with difficulty, you may always seek help from others."

"Do not go to them as some messenger of Creation. Go as yourself, and tell them your own thoughts in all sincerity."

"Sometimes a thing can only be done with the help of friends, and of all those around you."

Rosa nodded. "I understand."

Rosa hugged her books to her chest and said, in deep earnest, "Lady Hila, I have lately found a place that holds a great many people who long for distant places, and their longing is very, very strong."

"Their desire is strong as fire, their Dreams burn bright and fierce, and they cling to them and will not let go."

"But I have found also that the door has no power over them."

"And so in the end I could only give up!"

Hila asked her, "And where is this place?"

"The Abyss," Rosa said.

Hila said, "They swore an oath, once, that they would never depart of their own will. A door is of no use to them. The very instant they step through one of their own accord, they die."

"Lady Hila, if there is one in the Abyss who wants a teleportation gate as well, ought I to give them a key?" Rosa asked.

Hila was a person led by feeling, and something seemed to come back to her then.

She remembered the shadow who had turned into a bone demon and fallen into darkness, the very first mortal of this era to swear the Crown of Wisdom Covenant.

"The Abyss is the darkness of the world. They fell through obsession and madness, and they sank through the harm they did to others."

"But sometimes it is not wickedness at all that brings a person down."

"There are some among them whose obsession and madness sprang not from evil, but from a longing for what is beautiful, a longing for a perfect world."

"It is only that this world is sometimes not so perfect as they once imagined it."

There was something like regret in Hila's voice. "They flew toward the light, and in the end it was darkness they fell into."

Hila never said outright whether Rosa could or could not, and Rosa listened without quite understanding.

Rosa took Hila's advice to heart and made up her mind to go and find someone who would help her.

To go as herself, not in the name of a messenger.

She wasn't as reckless as the Storage Nymph, Saint Raphael, but she had qualities of her own all the same, an earnest nature, and a certain impatience.

She bowed to Hila. "Then I shall go and find someone to help me at once!"

Hila asked her, "Have you settled on whom you will ask?"

"Saint Raphael tells me that God Iva is a most kind and gentle god, and that he holds faith in You besides," Rosa said. "I have decided to go and see him."

Rosa wasted no time. She bowed, then left Hila's side and set off down the spiraling passage.

She walked at first, and soon enough broke into a run.

In this warped and twisted world the path beneath her feet ran perfectly flat, and yet to the eye she seemed to be walking a spiral.

Her figure showed now above, now below as she went.

Flickering, impossible to pin down.

At last she pushed a door open, and beyond it lay the hollow of a rainbow tree.

And just like that she was gone, forgetting Lady Hila there in the spirit realm, as though the place were not her own realm at all, but Hila's own temple.

And she herself no more than a passing visitor come to pay her respects to Hila.

Hila did not mind in the least. She smiled and nodded, then turned a slow circle, taking in every corner of this little realm, and when at last she left, she took the door beneath the flower tree with her.

The door swung shut, and the whole of it twisted and warped, then dissolved into a beam of light and vanished.

The Mortal World, Sky Miracle Garden

A figure stepped out of a rainbow tree into a sea of blossoms, a field thick with Cup of Desire flowers.

The very hollow that had once been too narrow for a certain nymph now let her pass through whole and entire, whether because it had widened over the years or for some other reason altogether.

Rosa met the God of Desire and Alchemy in his splendid hall. He welcomed her most graciously, and asked for her name.

Rosa's name, once spoken, drew admiration even out of this divine being, who was said to be rather stiff and awkward.

"Rosa. It is a beautiful name, like a night wind moving through the forest!"

"But what is a Door Nymph?"

It was the first the God of Desire and Alchemy had ever heard of such a thing as a Door Nymph, and he could not help asking.

Rosa explained herself once through, and only then did Iva understand that after the Letter Nymph and the Storage Nymph, even a nymph who could craft teleportation gates had now been born into the world.

Iva knew of the Reflection Realm, though he had never once set foot inside it himself.

He had passed the Gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation countless times, though, and had of course seen the twisted shadows and the dark domain that lay beneath it.

At last Iva's gaze came to rest on the key hanging at Rosa's neck.

The Star Key.

Iva told Rosa, "It is a divine artifact of destiny."

"Only it does not yet truly possess a mission and a desire of its own. Perhaps it falls to you to find them for it."

Iva was the most ancient of all Sun Cups, the one that had devoured the Royal Bloodline, and the wood nymphs were in a certain sense a variation born of the Sun Cup itself. By that reckoning, Iva could be counted something of an elder to Rosa.

He had become the God of wisdom ability, and yet he understood the nature of dream ability quite well too.

Rosa stood frozen a moment, then lowered her head despite herself, reaching up to close her hand carefully around the key.

"A divine artifact?"

Iva nodded. "How else should it command the Reflection Realm?"

"If Lady Hila was willing to place it in your hands, then her hopes for you must be high indeed."

"Rosa, Lady Hila is very fond of you indeed!"

From what they had said to one another so far, Iva already understood why this nymph had sought him out.

He turned it over a moment, then spoke to her.

"Rosa, you might write a book. A story of teleportation gates, a fairy tale of distant places."

"I could help you carry this fairy tale through the mortal world, so that more and more come to know of distant places, and to long for them."

"Should there arise among my believers any who holds a key, I shall help them make a teleportation gate, and set that gate within a Miracle Temple, where anyone may use it."

"And I shall tell every mortal that it is a gift of the Dream Sovereign, a blessing from the Supreme Divine Being."

"And if in time every city and every Miracle Temple holds a teleportation gate of its own, I believe it would surely bring good fortune to countless people."

Rosa was still clutching the key, her astonishment not yet worn off, and only when Iva had finished did she find her voice.

"You are indeed just as Raphael said. A kind and merciful divine being."

"I wrote a book once, called Labyrinth, Door, and the Reflection Realm."

"I could conceal the parts of it that concern power, and remake it as a story, with the secret of gaining a key and summoning a door hidden away inside."

The God of Desire and Alchemy, Iva, caught the name Rosa had spoken. "The Storage Nymph, Saint Raphael?"

He laughed, and seemed on the point of saying something more, when all at once the world outside changed.

The sky went dark.

But raise one's eyes, and not a single star was to be seen.

It was a darkness to drive one to despair, without so much as the faintest trace of light.

The God of Desire and Alchemy said, "What is happening?"

Yet the words were barely out of his mouth before Iva had a faint guess as to who stood behind it.

"The Mother of Life?"

Meanwhile, on the other side of things, Hila had just stepped out of the hot air balloon boat and was making her way down the steps.

That was when she saw the whole world go dark. She froze for a moment, then lifted her head to look up at the sky.

Unlike everyone else, what she saw above the endless darkness was a demonic god.

And through the shadow of that demonic god, she saw a face.

A face of pure innocence hung suspended over the world, peering down over all of it, breaking into a delighted, childish giggle.

She had reached out with both hands and laid them against the sky itself, blotting out every last ray of light.

The whole vault of the sky, the sea of clouds, all of it lay inside her hands, and she had packed the entire world away in a jar.

"Shelly!"

Hila understood at once. Shelly must be up to something.

She was on the point of flashing back to the Glass Temple when an Eternal Star returned from beyond the heavens, sweeping every last trace of darkness and gloom from the sky.

A smile touched Hila's face. "God has returned."

Blood Kingdom of the Deep Sea

A few days earlier, in the very instant Void's mold was born, the red-haired demigod of the Temple of Truth had been seated upon the Flesh and Blood Throne with her eyes closed, and she heard the whole world burst into cheers.

Countless voices rose as one, swelling into a wave of sound that swept into every corner of the world.

"The Void Ruhe!"

"The Void Ruhe!"

"The Void Ruhe!"

"..."

Every microorganism and fungus in the whole world was changing. From this moment on they had a master, and a road that led upward, toward evolution.

They were no longer the lowest form of life in the world. Now they had a ladder they could climb.

Because the Supreme Divine Being had opened the Path of Mythology to them.

Vivien opened her eyes. She was a Life demigod, and she understood at once exactly what had happened.

"The tenth Ruhe has appeared."

After the seven Ruhe Great Gods, Stuen had been the eighth to hold a Ruhe Seal. Vivien's own Ruhe Seal had come down to her from Stuen, and at the dawn of this era the Snake Mother, Sermos, had received the ninth.

And now Vivien could feel the birth of the tenth Ruhe. It was not yet a myth, and already it held Mythical Authority.

Vivien reached out and felt the strength and authority of this new Ruhe.

It was nothing at all like the traditional Life demigods, herself among them, whose power ran thick and vast.

Like nature itself. Like the very phenomena of the heavens.

But this Void Ruhe seemed not to exist at all, just as its own name, Void, suggested.

It commanded the smallest living things in this world, things invisible to the naked eye and yet present inside every living body there was.

Vivien could sense the changes running through those tiny microorganisms, and could even feel this brand new Ruhe stretching its reach out across the whole world.

"Is it not a wondrous thing?"

"It is not a mountain. Not a forest. Not a sea of clouds. Not the ocean."

"It cannot be seen, and yet there is nowhere it is not."

Vivien did not understand what this newly born Ruhe was meant to be, or why the Mother of Life had made it.

But she understood soon enough.

Because the moment this brand new Ruhe stretched its reach across the whole of Ruhe Beast Island, the Supreme Divine Being showed mortals exactly what it was for.

Darkness descended.

In that instant every trilobite symbiote across the Blood Kingdom came pouring out, each of them feeling some terrible presence settle over the world.

All eyes turned upward. Some worked divine technique right there in the sea of blood mist cup blossoms to throw up a projection of the scene outside, while others gathered beneath the lighthouse and used its light to cast a projection of what was happening over the ocean of the mortal world.

"What is that?"

"An eclipse. It's an eclipse, isn't it?"

"You ever seen an eclipse like this?"

"Even the stars are gone. What's going on?"

"Something's blocking out the sun!"

"Blocking out the sun? What's big enough to block out the sun?"

In an instant the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien, stood beneath the lighthouse, at the very front of the crowd, her own head tilted back to look up just like the rest.

But she was not lost and bewildered like the other trilobite symbiotes. She looked up at the sky and spoke a single sentence.

"It is a hand."

Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, several times over, before the next sentence finally came.

"She has laid her hand upon the sky, and refused the sun."

In an instant the trilobite symbiotes lowered their heads, looking to the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien.

The unease and confusion on their faces went ashen in an instant.

Every one of them was frightened out of their wits.

"That's a hand?"

"No way. That's just a hand?"

"One hand, and the sun's just gone from the mortal world?"

They could not imagine what manner of being could put out a single hand and strip the whole world of its light.

And letting the thought run further still, what if that hand had not been blocking the sun at all, but reaching downward instead?

Could She simply close the entire world inside the palm of her hand?

Every trilobite symbiote turned to look at her, and the Scarlet Goddess, her head still tilted back in that same upward gaze, spoke again.

"That is the hand of the sovereign deity."

Of all the divine beings she alone had seen the true sight in the sky, because she was a Life demigod.

She was looking upon the most terrible sight of her entire life, so terrible that shock and terror and despair themselves seemed to fail her.

She stared up at the sky, a kind of blankness filling her eyes.

Because what she saw was a demonic god's hand laid against the very edge of the atmosphere, pressing down upon Ruhe Beast Island itself.

There should have been another hand somewhere farther off, but she could not see that far.

As far as her eyes could reach, the whole world lay clasped inside that palm.

And in the faint gap where the fingers parted, a single eye looked down through the towering sea of clouds, watching this world, gazing down upon it.

Vivien's expression never changed, and yet her body could be seen to tremble.

She had seen it.

For the first time in her entire life, she had seen the true face of this Supreme Divine Being.

Even straining with everything she had, all she had managed to see was a single eye.

She was like an insect trapped in a bottle, looking up through the glass at some unknowable, eternal spirit. Her whole world, everything she was, lay held inside the jar of that incomprehensible, magnificent being, and whether she lived or died hung on nothing more than a single passing thought of its own.

And looking upon it, she could not force out so much as a single cry, because that unknowable magnificence could not hear the cry of an insect, and likely did not care in the least even if it could.

Amid the panic and terror of the trilobite symbiotes all around her, she spoke the name that could only be true.

"The Mother of Life."

"The Creator's eldest daughter!"

Vivien had sung the praises of that divine name more times than she could count. She revered that being's power and station, and was grateful to her for bringing forth the god-created man.

But never before this moment had she felt the whole weight of that being's greatness so completely.

In that instant, she thought of every hymn ever written for the Mother of Life, every record ever kept of this divine being.

But what rose in her mind at the last was something else entirely, words left behind by Yesael, the second King of Wisdom. The exact wording had gone from her, and yet it began roughly like this.

"At the feet of the divine there stands the Mother of Life, and she bears the countenance of a god."

But the line that came after, she remembered with perfect clarity.

"She is the demonic god of ruin, and she is the world's end."

The first time Vivien read those words, she had been unable to understand why King Yesael would call the Ruler of Life, who had created all life, a demonic god of ruin.

What terrible sight could the second King of Wisdom, Yesael, possibly have seen, to make him call her the world's end?

And now, in this very moment, she understood at last how Yesael, the second King of Wisdom, must have felt.

"Yesael, second King of Wisdom, was it this very sight that you once beheld?"

And she understood, too, what the Mother of Life's tenth Ruhe was truly for. It was the Mother of Life's own eye.

"It is the messenger of the Mother of Life, bearing every secret of this world out of the mortal realm and into the Divine Kingdom of Creation, to the side of the Mother of Life herself."

All around her they were seized with panic, staring in fear at the shadow that had swallowed the sun.

But Vivien began to walk upward, rising little by little with an infant cradled in her arms, stepping slowly out across the surface of the sea.

She looked up at the sky, murmuring the words under her breath.

"She is the maker of life, and she is the demonic god of ruin."

"She is the origin of life, and she is the world's end."

"O Supreme Divine Being!"

"What is it You wish to see, when you look down upon the mortal world?"

Vivien watched, transfixed, as that terrible demonic god's hand pressed slowly downward, and then boundless light bloomed at the far edge of the sky and drove the darkness away.

Vivien never knew that she and the whole world had walked to the very edge of ruin and back, and yet when the light finally poured down again over the mortal world, she let out a long, deep breath of relief all the same.

She looked down at the child in her arms. The baby was busy sucking at her own fingers.

"Ah-ah!"

Vivien assumed the child had been frightened. Anyone who saw a sight like that would feel some fear rise in them, after all.

"Do not be afraid. You carry the bloodline of the Divine King of Wisdom."

"You are destined to inherit a portion of the Divine King's own authority. You are the true god of the future."

But the child was plainly not afraid at all. That innate, extraordinary consciousness of hers seemed to have caught hold of something else entirely.

She pulled her finger out of her mouth, and while her eyes stayed on Vivien, she pointed off into the distance.

Vivien looked where the child was pointing and called out the name of the place that lay there.

"Lava Mountain?"

"What are you pointing over there for..."

Then, all at once, the scene from before came back to her.

The place where the darkness had first fallen, and the place where it had first lifted, seemed to be one and the same.

Understanding came all at once. God was there, at Lava Mountain, right now, this very moment.

"So the Creator had come to my side long ago, and I simply never noticed."

She gazed off into the distance, her heart stirring. If what she felt for the Mother of Life was awe and dread, then what she felt for God Yinsai was boundless longing and yearning, the way a child longs for a father.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, it seemed, King Redlichia had carved that faith straight into their bloodline.

Vivien took a few steps in the direction of Lava Mountain, then all at once stopped short.

But ever since the Contract of the Gods had been sealed, she had come to understand any number of things.

She was no longer as lost, as helpless, as she had once been.

No longer did she wander blind, leaving everything entirely to the guidance of the divine being.

Through the Saint's Chapter she had already learned the will of the Supreme Divine Being, and what it was that she herself needed to do.

"There is no need to force it!"

"If Yinsai wishes to see me, this world will grant me the sight of Him."

And yet her gaze still lingered on the distant shape of Lava Mountain.

If the divine being should set out again for some far country, she wanted to see Him off with her own eyes, to watch His divine mount vanish into the distance.

The divine being might not care one way or the other. She wanted to do it all the same.

Moonlight City

Most of the people in the city had thought little of the darkness earlier. The less one knew, the better one tended to survive.

The more one understood, the more fear and uncertainty took hold instead.

Inside the governor's residence, the provincial governor, Anu, was hard at work, buried under one matter after another with never a moment to breathe.

He had finished the morning's work and was on his way back to his own experiments for the afternoon when an official stopped him in his tracks.

"Governor!"

"There's still something on for this afternoon. The Harvest Temple in Moonlight City is about to be dedicated."

"You told me to be sure and remind you."

Anu pressed a hand to his head and said loudly, "I nearly forgot."

Anu looked at the man. "Is there anything else?"

The official checked the notebook in his hand and rattled off several more matters, the last of them this.

"A few of the Avel want to see you. They say they'd like you to teach them how brown ball vine is grown."

Anu said, "For a thing like that, go and find..."

He had barely got the words out before he stopped himself short.

"The Avel?"

"Avel from where?"

"Avel from the New World!" the official said.