Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 309: Dawnfall

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Toren Daen

The tide did not break us.

We crossed the curtain faster than a bolt from any godbow, trailing ripples as we tore through the atmosphere. We moved faster than a lightning bolt, faster than sound, faster than thought and emotion as the accel path hurled us like the world's greatest spear. We held onto Inversion's tone as we crossed the veil, following Unseen paths to salvation.

It became clear to us immediately that the space within was warped and twisted. Even as we flew through a horizon of glass shards along a hidden path, we did not approach that horizon at the speed that we should have. Though we flew with a hurricane beneath our silver-sun wings, what was the concept of speed to the warping of space? What was distance to those who could command it with a wave of their hands?

Space was bent here. Twisted and mutated by the weight of concentrated grief as it wove itself around our ears. We felt the clawing hands of those ghosts against our white-gold shroud, trying desperately to pierce our protections.

Listen to us, they begged. Hear us when no one else can. Listen to our pleas.

Force enough to grind mountains to dust squeezed inward around us, suffocating against everything that we were. Against our wings. Against our spirit. Against our very souls. All the intent and memories, compressed into a small, terrible dot, tried to overwhelm us again.

For a few moments, as we flew through an impossible expanse of fractals and glassy reflections of our burnished form, our hold began to waver. Against the tide of intent and memory, I remembered the brother I had lost over a year ago. I remembered the loss of all those close to me and my failures throughout this war.

My soul wavered, struggling against the pressures on all sides. I could feel myself burning, my edges flaking away like paper over an open fire. Each little bit—pieces I didn't know I had—drifted from the periphery of my soul.

I could taste the loss like ashes on my tongue. As I continued my descent, the might of a thousand dead gods pulsing through my exhausted body, I tried to recall what it was that was leaving me. But I could not... Not now. It was gone, and I didn't know what it was.

And then Aurora's soul tore its way closer to mine once more, unwilling to let me shoulder these searing flames alone. As not-souls screamed in a false echo of the Song, she alone pushed past the tumult, wrapping me once more in her protective embrace.

Mother, I thought, tears streaming from my eyes as I continued in my endless flight, Aurora, I—

"Forward, Toren!" she cried, our bond alight with fire and fury. "Never, ever stop! We move onward! I have you, my son."

She threw herself about me like a cloak, her wounded-star soul blanketing me as best it could. And together, we found equilibrium. We were caught between a volcano erupting beneath a thousand miles of ocean pressure, the two impossible forces battling each other for dominance. The Will of the Asclepius would burn our souls to ashes—it was already tearing us apart. But in turn, the pressure from the countless doomed lives compressed everything inward, seeking to crumple us with their misery like a fist around a gentle rose.

So we took the impossible force and the immovable object, and we found a balance between. Like the edge of a horizon, we teetered on oblivion as we flew through endless space, always on the brink of annihilation. Though our shroud was torn and battered and our wings withered, we found our way to the eye of it all.

Inversion led us true.

Our skin burnt from the heat building within and around us as we reached the nexus of the ritual. A dragon's heart was forced to beat amidst the torment of countless howling ghosts. Every swirl of aether and mana coasted toward Inversion's whitened hilt, before flowing through the dragon's heart and into the space around us.