The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 511

Chapter 511: Folded Space

ARTHUR LEYWIN

Kezess turned his back on the great wound in the sky, his eyes flashing like lightning as they swept across the other great lords and myself. “Come,” was all he said before his aether started to wrap around all of us.

I felt myself being dragged away and looked down at Ellie. Gritting my teeth, I resisted Kezess’s pull. “What are you doing?”

He scowled as aether flexed around us, visibly warping the air. “There is no time, Arthur.”

I held his eyes for just a second. Myre shifted, resting her hand on Kezess’s shoulder. The other great lords all turned to me, Radix frowning, Morwenna scowling, and both Rai and Novis looking pale and sick.

Regis leapt into me, while Sylvie pulled Ellie back a half step and nodded.

I let go, and space folded around me.

We appeared in a courtyard amid low, carved walls of white stone. Ivy-wrapped pillars rose from the ground, growing progressively taller as they marched toward what must have once been an arch of matching stonework.

Now, though…

Broken pieces of the arch were spread out in a sort of halo, floating in the air. Inside that halo, space itself was distorted, tearing as it opened out into the huge wound in the sky. The tear itself shimmered with an oil-slick of colors, like reflections off the surface of a bubble. The aurora effect was stronger here, staining the sky around the tear like blood seeping out from a scrape.

The other great lords were already moving. Dozens of asuras, mostly dragons, formed a half circle around the two broken stubs that marked where the arch had been. Everyone else quickly found space in the circle, and with Realmheart active, I could not only feel, but also see the mana particles of their spells move around the tear.

They were trying to hold it together.

A few of the dragons worked aetheric spells alongside their brethren’s mana-based magic, their spatium arts serving as a more powerful component in manipulating the torn space. When the great lords joined them, the slow growth of the wound suddenly halted, but the wound itself still shivered in the sky, an apocalyptic slash stretching from one edge of Epheotus to the other.

Regis drifted out of me in wisp form and floated toward the wound. I sensed the point when it grabbed and attempted to pull him through. ‘They’re barely holding it in check,’ he sent back to me, his form flickering like a gas lamp in a hot wind. ‘The pressure is incredible. Enough to slurp all of Epheotus right through.’

With some difficulty, he reversed course, flying down beside me and manifesting his physical shape as a large wolf maned with purple fire.

Through Regis, I had felt something. The torn space wasn’t Epheotus, but it wasn’t the world of Dicathen or Alacrya either—it wasn’t the real, physical space of the world. It was the barrier that separated the physical world from…anything else. Everything else. The aetheric realm, non-physical space, whatever else was out there—the dimension that Epheotus was safely cocooned within, neither fully inside nor outside of the world as we knew it.

It was a border, barrier, and transition all at once. As it ripped wide, Epheotus would be squeezed back into that physical space, with catastrophic consequences for both worlds.

Layers of insight pressed against one another in my mind. What I was seeing was both destruction and correction. When Epheotus was expelled and the bubble containing it had collapsed entirely, the wound would seal back over as if it had never existed—much like what Fate expected for the aetheric realm.

I stepped forward, passing through the half-circle of asuras until I stood right before the shattered feet of the archway. As I got closer, gravity shifted until the force pressing down on me, and the force pulling me toward the wound, were equal. Another step, and the rift would start dragging me through.

My name sounded from behind—Kezess’s voice—but King’s Gambit was slipping away and my concentration fracturing, the dozens of simultaneously held thoughts splintering off and breaking away, like branches too laden with wet heavy snow.

One single bright thought kept the hangover-fatigue back like a bright light in fog.

Core, aether channels, and the pure physical force of my pseudo-asuran physique all worked together automatically; bright streams of the amethyst particles wound through me, down my spine; my new godrune—pure, distilled insight both brand new and utterly familiar—sparked to life against my back.

The shape of the world changed within the lens of my perspective. Not in the way Realmheart aligned my focus so I could see mana particles, or God Step revealed the aetheric pathways, or even in the way King’s Gambit opened my mind up to so many different possibilities. These, in comparison, were so small, so narrowly focused.

Now, I felt…connected. Broadened.

I felt the space around me, how it had been molded and expanded. Epheotus was far too much world compressed into far too small an atmosphere. The asuras’ homeland didn’t exist simply in a physically bound space, as the world of Dicathen and Alacrya—or even my old world of Earth—did. Throughout its eons of history, Epheotus had continued to grow, constantly making more room for the expansion of asuran civilization.

And yet Epheotus did not hold the crux of my attention. The wound in space was bright and clear and horrible when viewed from my new perspective. The godrune didn’t change my physical sight; light didn’t bend any differently, no new dimension within three-dimensional space was revealed. It was more like how my core gave me a sixth sense about aether. I felt the way space unfolded around me, and I knew—because I had to, because the insight that had allowed me to learn the godrune both ensnared and included knowledge of the godrune itself—that I could touch the space, and that I could mold it.

My hands rose, more a ritual than physical necessity, and my mental fingers began to feel for the edges of the tear. The visual manifestations of distorted light that made the tear visible to the naked eye rippled as space itself was reshaped. Slowly, as I grew more confident, I began to pull the edges inward, smoothing them out and willing the spacial barrier closed.

Distantly, although I was unable to process the meaning of their words, I began to hear noises from the asuras. Gasps, pleas, shapeless words in encouraging tones. Then…

Space snagged.

The pressure created by the wound—the force that was pulling Epheotus into my world—was too great to pull the wound’s edges fully back together.

Changing tactics, I began to fold space along the tattered edges of the wound. The folds gripped the wound itself, holding it in place like staples in parchment. The space around the tear trembled, but the pressure was taken off the asuras currently fighting to prevent its continued expansion. At least for the moment.

As soon as I accomplished this, I began to lose my hold over the godrune. The conceptualization of space in this way was alien, and holding the varied and competing insights in my mind was exhausting. I could already feel the tension of fatigue behind my eyes like a building headache.

I sagged slightly as the godrune dimmed.

From behind me, a stern voice said, “What did you just do?”

I turned to meet Kezess’s gaze, his eyes shining like two blood-stained garnets as they reflected the scarlet aurora. “Bought us time, but…I don’t know how long it's going to last.”

“No, Arthur.” He took a step forward, and the world of Epheotus seemed to shift forward with him, contracting toward me. “What did you just do? How…” He couldn’t stop his focus from slipping upward, drawn into the gravity of the torn sky like Epheotus itself was at risk of doing. “You’ve been withholding things from me.”

I felt my brows lifting, my expression one of disillusioned astonishment. “Your world is collapsing in front of your very eyes and that’s the first thing you have to say?” I shook my head, a wry, disappointed smirk curling one corner of my lips. “I’ve only just gained new insight that formed a godrune on our ‘great hunt.’ I can sense and, in some ways, directly manipulate space. I’ve barely had the time to fully test my limits with it yet, and I can’t close the tear completely. Eventually, those folds in space will rip free, and the hole will start growing again.” I did not try to keep the harshness from my tone.

Kezess, to my surprise, did not react. Instead, he turned toward the others. “Focus all your efforts around those points in space, where the edges of the rift seem to pinch together. Buttress these points, and we may extend for ourselves the time Lord Arthur has bought for us.” With the orders given, he turned and began to walk away. There was something in his body language that clearly expressed an expectation that I follow, just as the other great lords did.

I considered simply not following as the other great lords fell into line behind Kezess. There was an incredible weight pressing in behind my eyes, and I wanted nothing more than to return to my family, lie and tell them everything would be okay, then close my eyes for a few hours.

Instead, with a sigh, I began following after the others.

‘Old Man Dragon is looking a little punch drunk,’ Regis noted as he kept pace at my side. ‘Agrona seems to have won this one, if I’m being honest.’

Let’s hope not, I shot back, although I was no more capable of lying to Regis than to myself in that moment.

Once we were well away from the asuras helping to bind the wound, Kezess came to a stop. When he spoke, his voice churned through the air as if resounding off the distant mountain peaks, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, a blistering heat that rose up from the cold white stone of the wide courtyard floor. “Lord Leywin, you must return to Alacrya immediately.” A second’s pause, the bare flicker of hesitation, then, “I am tasking you with killing Agrona Vritra.”

As the other lords listened to Kezess, they each looked in a different direction. Morwenna stared at me, while Radix’s flint-hard eyes drilled into Kezess. Rai Kothan watched the sky, peering into the wound as if he could see all the way to the heart of Taegrin Caelum, where Agrona was no doubt frothing with glee at his success. Novis, on the other hand, turned away from the wound, gazing toward the horizon and flickering with mana.

I rolled a response around in my mouth for several seconds before speaking it aloud. “Shouldn’t we focus on your people first? We have to start evacuating Epheotus—”

“Nonsense!” Morwenna snapped, nostrils flaring with a sound like rustling leaves. “We absolutely will not let a single rogue basilisk bring down our entire world—”

Radix turned on her with the speed of a Silver Panther, his own much deeper voice vibrating across hers without effort. “And yet it seems as if he has done just that!” With each word, the titan lord appeared to grow by several inches. “Scrape the bark from your eyes, Lady Mapellia.”

“We have all been blind to the true intent of Agrona’s rebellion,” Rai said, his tone placating. “Now our eyes are open.”

A shiver ran through Novis, and flames danced along his skin and over his clothes. “Are they though?” He turned and stabbed one finger toward the wound. “What in all the blazing fires of the abyss could Agrona’s intent be with that?”