Inevitable Ascension

Chapter 25 - Inevitable Ascension

The City of Enoch sank beneath the waves as an unfathomably gargantuan mass of water flooded the earth. The world was destroyed once more—its inhabitants burned, drowned and crushed in their fall. Violina had witnessed her own death hundreds of times over, and worse yet, Lux's. The very thought was numbing. The death of one was a tragedy, but it was as if the death of multitudes was mere information her mind forcefully blocked out.

Suddenly the Throne of Vexia, as seen in the pit of the Dark Ages, surged into Violina's thoughts. The answer to why it was littered with demolished Wardens and Taloc-Mechs piloted by identical skeletons now shined in horrific clarity: The corpses were her own.

As if such a revelation weren't soul-petrifying enough, she realized this meant that she had never even once changed history. Every act she performed throughout time was how the world had already been shaped. It was she who had set everything on its original course. The steps of the Pillar of God became a streaming blur as Violina's mind was assaulted with this truth.

The City of Enoch was created before Violina was even born, but only because she had gone back to the Ice Age and given Enoch technology and the secrets of immortalium, leading him to invent the Consecrator she would later find in the pit. She now knew how the skeleton she and Lux had found in the mines during their escape from the museum had died: He was one of the Condemned who had drowned in the final calamity of the era. In fact, the reason the mines even existed was because Violina directed Enoch to create them. The world had lost all knowledge of the Blessed, the Condemned and the City of Enoch because everyone had died. The destruction had sent the world into a second Stone Age and left only artifacts and mysteries in its ruins. Or had everyone died? If that were the case, mankind would have gone extinct. Perhaps Cassandra and Noah on the A.R.C. survived and would begin the world anew?

Violina's world caved in around her as she realized that all of her efforts to save the future and destroy the Second Sun were what led to the events bringing their doom in the first place. There was no changing the future. The Ascension was inevitable.

***

As the girls made their way down the lower half of the Pillar of God, they passed the familiar glass cells containing the miscreations that were the previous queens of Enoch. The gruesome sights did not even faze Violina—not after all she had witnessed.

"What happened up there?" asked Malachi as the girls reached the foundation. "It is done then? The Second Fall of Man?"

Kza eyed Violina with deep concern, but before she could reply, Vexia spoke up. "Teach a man to fish and you make him dependent on creatures beyond his control. Teach a man to kill his fellow man and he can become the most free, the most enslaved, the weakest and the mightiest last man standing. The superlative applies in all facets to the one that remains."

Surrendering to fate, Violina realized there was one last link in the chain to complete the cycle. She looked at her bracer and immediately knew how Kza, Malachi and Vexia had gotten to the various points in history where she had first met them. "Follow me. God awaits us."

With the spin of a jewel-encrusted wheel, the ornate double doors opened. There in all its colossal glory stood the Second Sun—the object of her utmost loathing. The five of them walked into the chamber in complete silence, but then just as Violina had been expecting, portals suddenly began to open and shut sporadically as she approached with the artifact on her bracer.

A rift with a grassy landscape and two suns opened under Vexia's feet, stealing her away to the Steam Age where she would accumulate a fortune of platinum and build her estate, only to meet an earlier version of Violina and Lux and die on The Cordialnaught.