March from Darkness | ✓ (to be edited)

SEVENTEEN

DEMITRI

"But you can't tell me what or who I am meant to fight?" I asked Phrer the next day. I had woken up to my body being overly warm and pressed against what I thought was a wall until I realized it had been breathing. I had turned over to find myself wrapped in Phrer's arms while he simply studied me in my sleep, a calm expression on his face. It was interesting to wake up to something like that, and it struck something inside me to realize that not even she had ever done this. Truth be told, I had never wanted to; but this... this had felt oddly nice.

Too nice.

I didn't trust this. How could I? Everyone that I had ever come to care for in some semblance of the word had broken me and abandoned me, and those had been regular people. This man, this being, he was a god, something that, up until recently, I hadn't believed in at all. Not only could this man break me, the god in him could very literally destroy me if he felt the desire to; he didn't need a reason to, not after from what I had gathered and read about gods. They very easily did what they wanted to do, and they did so very often.

After looking him over for a moment this morning, I had realized what I had been doing and had scrambled out of his arms to sit at the side of the bed. After taking a few minutes to calm down, during which Phrer had apologized profusely, I had been able to keep my face from turning an embarrassing shade of red, and he had taken me to the library, where we now sat with my expression morphed into one of questioning while Phrer looked very nearly guilty.

"It isn't that I cannot in fear of revealing too much, little one," he stated, looking almost pained. "Rather, it is the fact that I physically cannot. I have no idea who you are meant to fight, not their name, what they are, or what they can do on a small scale. No one does anymore, and the only thing that anyone knows about them is that they are the universal personification of Chaos, that they were the last thing to spring from the Center before the Universe left everything to Its Creations, Osphysus, Toraterus, Lordus, and Lordus' child, Kālaya. Their name is kept only to those who were present at their Silencing, and it has never been uttered again for fear of drawing them out. It has only been demonstrated what they can do on a large scale."

I felt my blood chill slightly. "So how will I know who they are if I run across them?" My voice sounded detached from my body and I had to clear my throat to try and staunch the slight quiver in it. I had not felt this sensation of true fear, the kind that made your chest hurt and your muscles weak, the one that made it hard to think, in a long while. Gods, if this person, or being, I suppose, sent terror through the most immortal beings in existence, made their Creator "silence them, what was this being capable of? "What did they even do to be silenced? What the hell even is Silencing?"

Phrer looked immediately uncomfortable with the line of questioning, but he held a hand up when I went to say that he didn't have to explain. "A Silencing is essentially stripping a being's powers, a way of the Universe reclaiming something that It sees the creature no longer worthy of. It has been said that they destroyed not only a god out of nothing more than sheer boredom and irritation, but that they wiped an entire Plane of existence." Seeing my eyes narrow in confusion at his explanation, he continued. 

"A Plane is not what the standard mortal thought assumes it to be. They are a precursor to Dimensions, an they are just areas of the Universe. Some areas, such as Earth, have several Planes because there are so many beliefs due to all of the different God figures. A Dimension sits on top of or below the mortal Planes and there can also be multiple Dimensions. The Christian Hell, for example, has seven different dimensions, but fluctuations in one Dimension affect the entirety of the Plane and can even affect those surrounding it."

"So the destruction of a Dimension or Plane is bad," I concluded, my eyes feeling cold.

"No, min vackra, it is far worse than simply 'bad.' The cleansing of a Dimension causes the mortals and other creatures that reside on the Plane and other connected Dimensions to suffer famine, extravagant storms, war, and death. The cleansing of a Plane rids all life from that particular area and every Dimension connected to it. The very few immortals and non-human entities that managed to escape before its destruction eventually went insane and died; the creature that caused this started the history of the Gods hating each other, sending them into a frenzy, and their mortal followers on their Planes started wars with those around them. The Universe knew Hatred before the creature came into existence, but It did not know the kind of sick joy that can be derived from Hatred, from Bloodlust."