NOBODY SURVIVES JUDGMENT DAY - Printable Version

It was utterly feral when it emerged, the edges of its consciousness thrumming with desperation, mind completely devoured of nothing but CHAOS, cannibalizing itself over and over again, eating its way from its heart and brain out until it was nothing but fire and violence and madness. It was not a beast, it was not alive. It was simply a thing disconnected from reality, from itself. It did not exist and yet existence made it real and it was agonizing to Be.

It didn't remember anything between its re-emergence and its return to the Black Spire. One moment it was clawing and breaking its way free like a rabid animal escaping a cage, black spots in its vision, green fire lighting up the corners of its mind, the next it was trembling before the Spire. Its chest burned where it touched the ground, its shivers were so violent it hurt to move. Clarity was returning in the presence of Chaos, some modicum of reality was returning to its body and mind, but it still felt halfway dissociated between living and agony. It tried to get itself up, but it couldn't, its limbs wouldn't obey. It didn't know why - Esther had crushed them, sure, but shouldn't they have healed?

And then it looked and saw. What is this?! Its entire left side, the limbs consumed by the tentacles it conjured. Its right had only lost one. Two out of its six limbs remained intact. It could not walk - how did it even get here? It could not fight - it was helpless.

The horror of it shocked V-Ruby-One's body into stillness. The reality of this consequence was catching up to it.

All at once, it became too much. The beast felt something overwhelming take hold - it wasn't the chaos or violence that it was used to, that part of itself was still gorging on the radiation of the Black Spire - this was something else, something that was buried as deep as possible, that had never risen to the surface, always choked and silenced by the corruption that ran like a lifeblood through its system.

It ripped its way out of the beast's heart and flooded its veins with something heavy and cold and crawled up its throat and stung at its eyes. It clenched its teeth against it, but it was no use. Its body trembled with the release and it gave in, at least.

It curled up and began to cry.

The time stretched on as every emotion ever-buried in the beast's heart spilled out like a tidal wave. It couldn't contain it. It couldn't stop itself. It didn't want this but it didn't have a choice. Valkhounds didn't cry. Beasts of chaos didn't cry. It was V-Ruby-One, it was HELION, and it was not WEAK. It had gorged itself on chaos to be stronger and stronger and it would not lay here and take a failure like this! It would go on and fight, it would make Esther pay, it...it....it was STRONG. STRONGER THEN THIS. It was...it...it....

It cried. It didn't stop crying.

Every violent, proud thought melted away. Useless. Pointless. Every time it tried to move, when it thought the tears were slowing, its limbs shifted and it remembered its misery and the crying started again. It couldn't stop.

The tears ran dry, dehydration tickled at its throat, and still it curled into itself and dry-sobbed into its chest. It wanted to rip at itself, claw at its chest and throat, rip its eyes right out of its head for daring to CRY but its limbs flopped uselessly on the ground.

Pointless. Useless.

Its teeth grit. It felt...clarity. In this disconnection from chaos, momentary as it was, in the weakening of the monster in its heart that was still basking in radiation, like a starving man upon an oasis, it felt its mind briefly freed from the influence. There was not much difference, V-Ruby-One had been born into chaos, raised through it. Its mind was as intrinsically linked to that power as its body. But with clarity...it could think. Properly think.

It could ask itself, without that backlash, without the immediate violent answer telling it to destroy and consume - What am I DOING?

What was the point of all of this? Of all the violence and the hatred that it had been spitting for cycles and cycles? All it had ever amounted to was brief moments of satisfaction. And this. This was where it had ultimately led it. Trembling and useless before the Black Spire, a slave to its own power, deformed by magic it had once thought a part of it, but now felt alien. Disconnected. Uncaring. No...no, the magic had always been uncaring. Uncaring and cruel. It had simply ignored it, fed into it, and become uncaring and cruel itself.

It had not spoken to Azrael in cycles, its life-giver that had done his best to raise it, care for it, and make it strong. It still despised him with all its breath and all its blood but there was no screaming in the back of its mind to rip him limb from limb, no hatred filling its bones with the need for violence against ANYONE that tried to tell it what to do. Their pride had clashed against each other, but V-Ruby-One had always gone too far.

It didn't talk to him now. It felt something like regret.

What was the point, of being a creature of violence and hatred, if its reward was this punishment? Pain and agony and punishment? The very thing that urged it to kill and destroy and devour and ruin turning on its master and eating it from the inside out? It felt so fucking weak without it.

Clarity allowed it to think of Daphne. She had been nice and it had only pushed her away. Clarity allowed it to think of the Onyx. There had been no reason to escalate it so quickly. Perhaps if it had continued going down the road Vargas had put the two of them on, it would have become something more. It could have become useful.

But...useful to fucking who? It all wrapped around to Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. CHAOS. CHAOS. It was a never ending circle, a cycle, it would never let it go. It should die. It should die and be fucking free of all of this. Why couldn't Esther have just fucking KILLED IT. Better dead then here, where it hated so much, the radiation bearing down, its limbs useless to take it away from this place. Better dead then

this.

Its teeth grit and it eyes turned up to the Spire before it. Hatred was filling in again. The corruption would never leave its bones. It is V-Ruby-One, it is Helion, and it is hatred.

MY HATE WILL DEVOUR YOU ALL.

"I hate you, you know that?" it hissed into the air, voice cracking and rasping. "I fucking hate you. What the fuck is the point of it all?" With more difficulty then it should ever be, Helion dragged itself forward. The heat of chaos was a thrumming pit in its stomach, reawakening slowly, still reconnecting. It pulled itself up until it was right next to the shifting, groaning crystal, the heat of it overwhelming, but still it got closer. "Violence and war and all that. Fucking. Bullshit. You are just insane. I am just insane. What the fuck is the point of it all!!"

Its claws gripped the stone beneath it and it...it wished...its will surged, willing the Spire to crack under the pure force of its hatred, pulling from that very well of Chaos that it was trying to destroy, but it was so disconnected. It was so...

weak.

Helion snarled, and pressed forward anyways. If hatred was Oil, it would be spilling from its eyes, its mouth, its very heart. As the world blurred red, despite its inability to grasp its magic as it used to, it burned with fury and willed with every bit of it, that this Chaos break. Shatter. Kill them all right there so that none of them would suffer its foul corruption again.

The moment Helion's claws reach the Oilstone, it feels itself fall forward—into the spire—as if being drawn in by an immense gravity...

Immediate white-hot pain erupts from its claws, then its hand, then its limb as it is being drawn in: in a rolling, roiling movement, its flesh is bubbled and boiled from its bones and explodes outward in bursts of meat and blood; and its bone, too, shatters under the heat and radiation of the Oilstone, sending out shrapnel splinters that shoot into its body like bullets.

Helion is not just being drawn into the spire, no—it is literally falling face-first into the Oilstone as its supporting limb is deconstructed in boiling, bloody masses of bursting flesh and bone. Its spell cast does not help it here, as the spire reacts and sucks Helion in further. As the cat-demon's body collides with its target, it is unable to pull itself back or attempt any more magic: it was happening now and it was happening fast. Akin to the way a body falls from a ledge, Helion's body falls against the spire in almost the blink of an eye. A mercy, one might say. But not for Helion. Almost the blink of an eye...

It feels every moment.

With one limb gone, Helion's shoulder brings the rest of its body to the spire, where its skin peels back from its flesh and its flesh bubbles from its bones, all in that same roiling movement of blasting, bursting, boiling bits of biological mess. Its other limbs, its ribs, its hip are next—its organs all pop and burst—until its other side meets the same fate, corrupted tentacles and all.

All for its head.

Its cheek is pressed against the spire, sizzling and crackling as its body disintegrates beneath it, but it is being held by the horn on its head: some manifestation, as Helion had WILLED for the spire to shatter. But it is HELION who shatters.

All that is left of it now is its head, suspended in the air, held by its horn in the grip of shadowy claws. From the spire emerges the murky neon-green face of RREVALK—not actually the Creator, but a manifestation of His radiation from the influence His spire produces.

Before the last of Helion's blood could empty from its brain and render it dead, it sees this, and it hears:

"WHAT IS THE POINT OF IT ALL?" Rrevalk's manifestation bellows, collapsing on and bursting Helion's eardrums with its thunderous sound. The shadow arm jerks the bodiless head violently, shaking it from side to side; Helion's stone feels as if it might shatter in His grip. Its cheek is smashed repeatedly against the spire and its flesh is starting to melt, exposing black teeth and neon green gums. "YOU ARE DISORDER. YOU ARE A HOUND! YOU ARE MEANT TO DESTROY—" Helion's battered head is thrown harshly to the ground—discarded. Its hearing and vision are fading, its life finally coming to an—

"END!"

This word erupts in Draco like a sonic boom.

Helion's corrupted ruby begins to break itself down, growing over and blanketing what is left of its host's head, reaching first to cover its faded, once-glowing eyes. The manifestation dissipates rapidly as Helion's chrysalis slowly forms—and it will grow, as the cat-demon's new body does, beneath the Oilstone spire. Splattered across the walls and floor of Draco near the spire were its sizzling bits of flesh and bone, slowly becoming oil and fading—but the stench of oil-burned flesh would linger.

The easy part was the reformation of its body. The hard part...

Helion is thrust into the life of a VALKHOUND. Endless nightmares plague its time in its chrysalis: it is destroying cities, it is killing waves of all manner of creatures, it is a HOUND. It is wild, it is insane, it is crazy, it is CHAOS. It sees the shattering of the rainbow sky and it is PURPOSE. It sees the shattering of its own body and it is REBORN. Such was the gift of its VALKHEART, its CORRUPTED RUBY CORE: IT WOULD NOT SUFFER ITS LIFE OVER AND OVER IN END AS OTHER CREATURES DO; IT WOULD DESTROY END.

It had imagined the black stone cracking beneath its willpower. It imagined its hatred so intense, its despair so great, and that it could manifest such things out of sheer force of its rage. But its eyes did not match reality for a moment, and when the agony began, it thought it had become the Spire.

In a way, it did. Pulled in, ripped to shreds, skin and blood pulled from bone, disintegrated under the force of Chaos that it had never known in such magnitudes. That beast within it that had always felt like a seperate piece, screaming in its mind, taking over at times, edging it towards violence and chaos, the beast that had momentarily been quiet, disconnected, suddenly turned on its own mind. It was a rabid animal made manifest, devouring each hair, each flake of skin, every cell and atom of Helion in slow motion, in the blink of an eye, over a thousand years, in the seconds it took for...all of that to happen.

It did not comprehend what was happening to it. All it knew was agony. It would have screamed if it could have opened its mouth, but the shock had utterly frozen it in place. Why is it not dead yet? KILL ME KILL ME PLEASE I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE! But the voice that usually screeched from that ugly place in its mind merely laughed, howled, held its mind in its grip and forced its eyes open, even as they boiled in its sockets. It turned its gaze to HIM and time stood still.

DISORDER. HOUND. DESTROY. END. The claws sunk deeper in its mind, leaving trails of its toxins behind, marring, scarring, poisoning. Its entire world was narrowed in - all it could see was that green face glaring at him. In this moment, its hatred faltered - not because it did not hate anymore, but because it was nothing - NOTHING - in the face of this pure entropic being.

It did not know pain until today. It did not know what it was to hurt. Not until this. Esther's flames were tickling feathers, the crushing grip might as well have been a child's hand. The scale had completely shifted and Helion suffered all the more for this new world of all-consuming agony.

There was nothing else. Nothing but the face in front of it, the claws around its gemstone, sinking its venom in deep into what pitiful remains was left of the gembound, hollowed out and filled with CHAOS. ONLY CHAOS REMAINS!!! The agonizingly long moments in which is chrysalis formed seemed like it went on for centuries, the crystal so hot it was numbing, its consciousness hanging on by the thread the beast had wrapped around its claws, shearing through as the seconds went on until it snapped. It knew nothing more.

...

......

AND THEN IT KNEW TOO MUCH.

AND THEN IT WAS VIOLENCE INCARNATE. IT WAS HOUND, IT WAS DESTRUCTION. ITS CLAWS RIPPED FLESH AS THE STORM OVERTOOK ITS VERY BEING. THE BEAST WAS SCREAMING IN DELIGHT. IT WAS ALIVE AND IT HATED AND IT DEVOURED ITSELF AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

"Somebody help me," it gurgled, but the only answer was oil flooding from its mouth. Blood staining its black teeth red. Rising red-hot rage like a pyre it had lit itself consumed it from the inside out.

AND THEN IT WAS VIOLENCE INCARNATE. THEY FELL BEFORE ITS RAGE. ITS HATRED WAS ITS BREATH, ITS VEINS, AND IT POISONED THE VERY EARTH.

"What is the point of this?" It was desperate. It was scared. It wanted to cry, but the tears that came to its eyes might have been magma from the way they burned out its eyes. DESTROY END. SHATTER THE RAINBOW SKY. WE ARE VIOLENCE INCARNATE. Its throat burned. Oil spilled from its jaws.

AND THEN IT WAS VIOLENCE INCARNATE. ITS HATE DEVOURED THEM WHOLE. IT HATED THEM ALL. IT DID NOT NEED A REASON. IT WAS CHAOS. IT WAS HOUND. IT WAS HATE.

It screamed. It did not know itself. It did not exist for anything but violence. All were dead. All were devoured. And yet it hungered, it SCREAMED FOR IT TO END it clawed off its own skin for lack of bodies to rip apart, none remained but its own so it devoured ITSELF.

AND THEN IT WAS VIOLENCE INCARNATE. IT WOULD NEVER END UNTIL END WAS DESTROYED. DESTROY END. DESTROY. DESTROY.