Chapter 10: The Dream and the Doom
"How Arrogant.".
He clenched his gauntleted fist around the hilt of the dark sword, its blade twisted and eroded by a swirling maze of twinkling stars. The weapon stood out as a stark, poignant stain against the ruined, frozen terrain—a silent testament to the monster's overwhelming power. The colossal creature loomed above him, its gaze fixed downward like he was nothing more than insignificant pulp. This thing meant to be his pawn, now radiated an unholy arrogance that fueled his rage.
The crack in his hand widened, spiderwebbing up his arm—a sharp reminder of his mortal frailty. Vortagem's voice cut through the tension, soft but insistent, her head bowed in deference. "I apologize for my intrusion, Lord. Without the essence of Death, I mean no disrespect to your grandeur, but it's the truth—you won't be able to defeat it. Not in that frail mortal body. I shall lend all of my aid."
His dark hair fluttered against the suspended white world around them, defying the frozen stillness. He tilted his helm toward the menacing shadow above.
"If I wanted to defeat it, I would have heeded your words, dear Vortagem," he muttered. "I only need it weakened, to enshroud it properly. Using you would strain me further, and I need you to deliver the final blow." His free hand reached out, caressing the suspended snowflakes in the air. "I wish to encage it within a minute mirror realm of the Dreaming, but first, it must be weakened, or it will resist."
Darkness swirled in his palm, devouring the nearby snowflakes and materializing into a small orb. Inside it, a diminutive mirror realm shimmered, identical to the one he'd used to trap the Inquisitors. He handed it to Vortagem, who cradled it carefully in her hands.
"Then tell me, Lord," she said, her obsidian hair flowing like liquid shadow, "how do you plan to battle such a monster with only a powerless sword?"
He reached out, gently petting her hair downward in a reassuring gesture. "It's true—any more use of my Authority would shatter this mortal body." He surveyed the colossal entity before him, its massive form casting a deeper shadow over his own. The creature remained rooted, unmoving, as if the tiny being below wasn't worth the effort. Black ichor dripped from its wounds in thickening streams, flooding the landscape with corruption.
Even in this timeless void, the liquid eroded everything it touched—the last standing trees crumbled to charred rock, the fallen ones dissolved into ash, and the snow-covered plain turned into a bubbling, blackened mire that stretched endlessly under the pale sky, steam rising where cold met decay.
He felt the corruption tugging at his mind, trying to drown his consciousness with whispers of oblivion. The streams surged toward them, merging with the surrounding shadows, inching closer with relentless hunger, the ground hissing and cracking as it advanced.
"Go, Vortagem," he commanded. "Await my signal and stay hidden until then." With a swirl of darkness, she vanished, ever compliant.It was now up to mortal way of battling foes-Combat.
An excellent way to gauge how this hungry minion would withstand the weight of hope, faith, and the collective dreams of thousands.
The vortex on his helm churned violently as he watched the sea of ichor surge forward, a dark wave claiming dominion over the frozen expanse, its edges bubbling and dissolving the air itself. He withdrew his essence from the unholy sword, letting the suspended snowflakes fade to dust, succumbing to their delayed death.
But that wasn't the point. With a casual vertical swipe, he struck at the ominous liquid. It pulverized instantly, disintegrating into oblivion, leaving the rock beneath carved into a deep abyss that yawned wide, swallowing light and echoing with the faint crackle of vanishing matter, the edges of the chasm crumbling inward as if pulled by an unseen voi...
A massive fist erupted from the thin air before him—dark, scaly, and clawed, each talon as large as his body. It cast a colossal shadow over his form, blotting out the white horizon. His body warped into shadows just in time, evading the cataclysm. The claw smashed into the empty space, unleashing a seismic force that pulverized the ground behind, shattering frosty spires into glittering shards that hung mid-air, and reshaping the landscape into a vast crater stretching into the horizon. Strata of rock hurled skyward, hanging suspended in the timeless air, their jagged surfaces glinting under the unchanging light, casting erratic shadows across the deformed plain below.
He rematerialized in the still sky, gravity itself dead around him, the air thick and unmoving. Below, the titan clenched its empty hand, now reduced to a jagged stump of flesh oozing ichor that dripped in slow, viscous trails. His eyes locked on it—or so he thought—when another colossal force surged from behind, the air rippling with its approach. He dissolved into a labyrinth of ethereal night, barely escaping as the claw seized the air, triggering another cataclysm that deformed the landscape further, the ground buckling in waves that radiated outward, uprooting distant rocks and sending tremors through the frozen soil.
A testament to its terror.
This time his visage materialized above it, high enough to see the full expanse of its branched form against the white void..His mind pieced together the puzzles—now he was certain. Not only did that monster ignore the concept of time, it also ignored distance. No—from it's attributes,as stated by the Sentient Tree..
It Freezes it..
How intriguing.
His form vanished from the gentle still sky before the monster could lay its eyes on his silhouette, reappearing behind it, straddled on its nape. Towering spires rose from its spine, shadowing him like ancient monoliths, while dark mist drifted from its skin in tendrils that curled toward him in a vain attempt to corrupt, the air growing heavy with their foul, acrid scent.
Without much thought other than suppressing the essence of Death with the Dream, he plunged the unholy sword into its nape—but it met only void.. nothing but still air. He fell, the world tilting as he plummeted, but not alone—the gigantic dark stump of the colossal monster re-emerging from oblivion,lashed at him with cold ferocity. The still air before him turned to frost, crystals forming in fractals that spread outward, accompanied by a great suction force pulling at his limbs. His body blipped away into ethereal darkness, avoiding the catastrophe as the fist cratered the ground below. Shockwaves rippled out in concentric circles, laced with frozen icicles that speared upward and sideways, disfiguring the plain into a jagged maze, digging deep toward the planet's tectonic plates, the earth groaning and splitting with deep rumbles that echoed across the horizon.
His blade traced the outline of the gigantic arm next, his armored form clinging to its shoulder amid the dripping ichor and swirling maze, the liquid splattering against his helm. As it registered the impact, the entire joint pulverized to a burst of ichor and iridescent bone that sprayed in all directions, coating nearby rocks in glistening black. The gigantic arm collided into the ground with a thud that rattled the entirety of the plains, sending vibrations through the air and ground alike, dislodging distant snowdrifts that cascaded slowly in the stillness.
Yet the monster didn't scream. The corrupted didn't bellow, nor did it swing its gigantic rows of teeth at him. It merely gazed at his form, its cold gray eyes matching the intensity of the vortex in his convoluted helm—a fallen god against an ascended mortal.
With another swing of the unholy sword, the other gigantic arm exploded in a maze of black ichor falling into the ground in a great stump, like the first, the spray arcing high before splattering across the frozen earth. His silhouette had already shifted away from the other shoulder. Yet still the creature's eyes merely looked at him, in the depths of those cold e....
A seismic force rattled his side, landing his mortal body in cracks, his form hurtling in a blur across the deformed landscape, the wind whipping past as he skimmed over craters and shattered spires. His eyes caught glimpses of the creature—its both arms intact. He would have called it an illusion perhaps, not until his eyes gazed upon the two gigantic stumps of flesh upon the stream of black ichor, lying amid pools that bubbled and spread.
Truly intriguing.
Instead of a great crash, his figure descended in a gentle step upon a bushy forest laden with the canopy of everfrost trees, their branches interlocking overhead like a frozen vault, leaves crunching softly underfoot. In time to bear witness to a seismic roar that shook the entire plains—but still it was the preamble. Reality contorted in the face of such declaration, birthing an inverted vortex of tectonic force emerging from the towering branched monolith—the winter monstrosity, his pawn. Its presence graced the eradication creeping towards him, covering distance that would have taken a mortal two days no less in seconds, purging the snow world free of all resistant matter. Along with a surge of gigantic frost spires creeping with it that purged the remains, the spires thrusting upward in spirals, impaling trees and rocks alike, their tips glistening as they expanded outward in a wave of destruction.
A catastrophe no less.
This mortal frailty had birthed cracks; it would only hold for a shorter time and minimized output. Truly a burden.
He sighed.
He summoned the Orb of the Dreaming in his palms, holding it upon the apocalypse creeping closer, swallowing the still trees—their trunks splintering with sharp cracks as the vortex pulled them in, branches whipping wildly before freezing mid-motion, roots tearing from the soil in sprays of frozen earth that hung in the air, the entire forest groaning as leaves and bark peeled away layer by layer.
"I deem you as nothing more than a Dream."
And so reality complied. The entirety of the catastrophe was not erased but devoured by the orb of the Dreaming, the entirety of it nullified out of existence into a mere figment of imagination, the vortex collapsing inward with a whoosh that echoed faintly, leaving only void where destruction had been. Yet the icicles that persisted hung like crystalline daggers across the landscape; with a casual sweep of his sword, he obliterated them, the shards exploding outward in a glittering haze that scattered in all directions, reflecting the pale light as they tumbled slowly through the air, some embedding in the ground with soft thunks, others vaporizing into mist..
He wished back the orb of the Dreaming.
Dissolving in a star laden mist.His dark form receding back into reality amidst the branch of a huge tree, enough for him to see the tapered edge of the jagged tail of that creature in a great frozen crater into the initial spot he stood, which in the next moment disappeared from his view.
With a colossal claw heralding its return, reaching towards him before its full gigantic form materialized, the talons curling inward like closing jaws. He plunged towards the force with the same ferocity. The unholy sword's brooding blade, its essence suppressed with his, collided against the gigantic dark hand—a convergence that reformed the entirety of the landscape from the flourishing biome it was to a frozen wasteland submerged far below sea level, a great depression where the ground sank in layers, walls of ice and rock rising around the edges like a natural arena, the air howling with displaced wind.
And in the tempest, the unholy sword emerged victorious; the testament was an explosion of ichor and jagged pieces of bone that rained down in a wide arc, splattering across the new wasteland and hissing on contact. Bathed in the demiurge and clad in his armor of night, his voice lauded.
"For certain, even if your size were to defy heavens or deny these peaks of its sunlight, oh Corrupted Titan," a break as his sword crushed to pulp its next colossal fist, another seismic deformation of the landscape and a torrent of ichor lacing the ground in a stream of black that pooled and spread in rivulets, carving channels into the frozen earth. " in the face of overwhelming power, the might of all mortals dreaming at this perilous moment, you are no more than a gnat—only worth being used as my Pawn. Worry not; soon I shall force your kneels down in reverence."
Yet relentless, more fists collided against his minute figure—a multi-mirage blur of colossal flesh, an endless barrage of catastrophe rained down his figure from above, below, and sides, the air compressing with each strike. Yet before the unholy sword they met the same fate: destruction.
a birth of a dark fog of ichor and visceral that billowed outward like smoke, obscuring vision and filling the air with a metallic tang. His figure being forced further below towards the expanding crater being formed by the endless mountain of attacks, the walls of the depression deepening with each impact, loose debris tumbling inward.
He was the one being forced down in reverence, his figure kissed the frozen landscape, his body bathed by the drowning ichor that seeped into every crevice of his armor, pulling at his senses with corrupting whispers that echoed in his mind like distant screams, the cold biting deeper as shadows lengthened around him. Yet he shone darker, the cracks in his skin spreading across his torso like fractured veins pulsing with faint light, he could feel the seeping of his essence and the foreseen destruction of the mortal vessel and the mortal realm, the air growing heavier with impending collapse, the ground trembling subtly as if the world itself sensed the fracture, distant horizons blurring with rising mist. A result of the mortal frailty and the suppression of the Creator.
He had to switch the odds. He blipped out of the mountains of attacks, the mountain of attack now dug into the landscape, which retorted in an immersion like a ripple went through the entirety of the landscape, along with a ring of impact that obliterated the remainder of snow trees—their trunks exploding in splintered bursts, branches shearing off and spiraling through the air, roots erupting from the soil in geysers of frozen dirt. And the entirety of the first strata of the ground shattered, hurling huge debris of soil and severed rocks into the atmosphere, suspended in the stillness of time like a chaotic constellation, chunks the size of boulders and hills floating amid dust clouds that glittered with ice particles, casting long shadows that danced across the scarred earth below, the air humming with residual energy.
His visage appeared upon one suspended in the stillness of time, high in the grandeur of the frozen chaos—overlooking the deformed plains stretching endlessly in all directions, craters pockmarking the surface like wounds on a giant's skin, ichor rivers snaking between them under the unchanging white sky that seemed to press down with infinite weight.
His eyes traced a path amidst the suspended debris, directed to the orb that hung suspended upon its great talon-like rib encasing the pale white orb—he had speculated would be the only weak spot of this monster.
He sighed; he probably didn't have enough time left amidst these cracks of this mortal vessel. His body dissolved into a maze of swirling darkness drowned in the labyrinth of stars.his dark visage warping concurrently in a calculated zig zag pattern across the suspended rocky mater and boulders,A rthymic dance greeted by the winter monstrosity with a haul of great boulders tearing the air towards each visage of the dark figure masked in the horned helm—yet each were met in a resistance by his sword, crushing to a mist of dust and splinters of rocks that dispersed in fine clouds, drifting lazily in the still air.
Transversing the distance before the great monstrosity in mere seconds, his night-shrouded figure warped into the air, hands grasping the towering unholy sword of death. In that moment of stillness, the monstrosity's eyes widened not in its earlier indifference but in terror, and something darker—fear—as the unholy sword tore towards the darkness shrouding the orb, the blade whistling through the air with a low hum.
And in response to the threat now to its existence, the concurrent halos behind its enormous head, the bigger one spun in the clockwise direction whilst the smaller one bore direction in the opposite.
Then everything stilled—even Dream himself felt it: the encroaching cold that seeped into bones from all sides, the absurd silence that swallowed all sound like a vacuum, and overwhelming clarity that sharpened every detail from the tiniest crack in the ground to the distant horizons. And the restrictions of all things before him bound movement like invisible chains.
A nostalgia like the whispers of winter.
This monster—he was far more stronger than he had gauged.
How interesting.
This invisible multifaceted barrier plaguing him...
It had frozen the space between them, deeming his attack a futility.