Looking through the window into End, they all stepped back except for Pri, because he was the only one who had the power to pass through the window. Vraegar had already led them to it, and he had to open the road.
Pri condensed the power of ti on his fingertips, and he touched the window, creating a red dot that spread out and lted the entire window, like a thin sheet of ice eting flas.
Vraegar saw how easily Pri had made a doorway to this place, and he chuckled self-deprecatingly. Only he knew how much he had paid to open this window, and he had been ready to give up his life if he could just open a small crack, and if Pri had just waited a few million years before coming, he would have done this, hoping that his sacrifice would make the path easier for the next to follow.
Pri did not glance at the others, and he stepped through the way he had just opened, and this step turned out to be one of the strangest thresholds Pri had ever crossed.
It was not a step from one place to another, even though that was what he had just done; instead, passing through the window was a subtraction.
It was a sort of dinsional movent that even he had trouble understanding, but what he was aware of was that sothing was removed from him as he passed.
However, this removal was not done with violence or malice, but with the inevitability of gravity. Sothing had to be removed, because what was on the other side could not accommodate the full weight of what he had been on this side.
Even though End had been twisted by the Great One, it was still a thing of rules, and to access its core, a certain price must be paid.
What End took from Pri was certainty.
He felt it go as he crossed, felt the fifth layer of his Origin, the bright, whole, newly-born Aeternitas that had been singing in his bones since the mont of her birth, go dim.
She was not gone, but her light had been dimd, in the way a fla dimd when you moved it into a room with less air.
The new lifeform was still there. She was just quieter here, because here was a place that did not believe in completion.
The other layers adjusted. Kronos drew closer to him, the weight of his armor suddenly reassuring in a way it had not needed to be in the Tower. Kairos gathered her robes. Aevum and Aeon moved to either side of him, flanking him not from protocol but from sothing much older and simpler.
They appeared like phantoms around Pri before they vanished, but they had ensured that the others following him would not pay the full price of what he had paid.
He could recover due to his nature as a bloodline Avatar of Eos, but for others, it was not necessarily the case.
Fury, Circe, and Victorious Genesis crossed behind him, and Pri felt the mont each of them was lessened by the crossing. Fury's phoenix light, which had been a constant high-frequency thrum in the space around him, went muted. Circe's immortality, which Pri had always been able to sense as a faint shimr of probability around her, contracted inward, and Victorious Genesis, whose nature Pri had never fully understood and who had always felt, to him, like a room with too many doors, simplified. In End, Victorious Genesis was just a man, and although it would scare any other Primordial, he seed to be enjoying it, as he looked at his mortal body with glee.
Vraegar crossed last, and Pri watched what End did to him.
It did nothing.
The dragon ca through unchanged. Whatever End took from entrants, it had already taken from Vraegar even before he crossed.
Pri understood, then, why it had taken Vraegar millions of Cosmic Eras to reach this place, which could also be seen as a price, because only the truly worthy would sacrifice everything for their goals, no matter how small they were.
"Keep moving," Vraegar said quietly. "End does not attack. It does not need to. It simply wears down what you believe about yourself. The longer you stand still, the more of you it will take."
"How do we find him?" Circe asked.
Vraegar began to walk.
"We follow the music," he said, "I have been hearing that music faintly through the window, and only he can make music like that… no one else can."
®
Pri looked around this place with curiosity in his eyes. A part of him had expected darkness, but he had been wrong about that, too.
End was not dark. Darkness implied the absence of light, and absence implied the concept of presence, and End did not traffic in concepts that complex. What surrounded them as they walked was a frequency.
A low, constant, almost-sound that made itself known in Pri's bones before it made itself known in anything he would have called his senses.
It was the sound that things made when they were in the process of ceasing. Not the dramatic sounds of destruction or the sharp sounds of death. With the aid of Eos, Pri knew the true nature of End, and now he was seeing it here. This place was the quiet, patient sound of erosion and forgetting.
And this forgetting was the slow, ordinary unmaking that was the true face of End before the Great One had sharpened it into a weapon.
The landscape, if that was the word, was composed of things that had been.
Everyone saw sothing different, but Pri saw, as his eyes adjusted to the logic of the place, entire civilizations folded into strata beneath their feet, compressed histories, reduced now to sothing geological, and even more amazing, it could be walked across.
He saw the shapes of cities that had loved their builders, flattened into the substrate. He saw Primordials reduced to patterns in the dust. He saw Realities collapsed into single grains of sothing that was not quite sand.
Nothing in End was being actively destroyed, because the destruction had already happened. This was what ca after. You could call it the long afterlife of destroyed things, the place where the ended went to continue being ended, indefinitely, forever.
It was both beautiful and intensely horrifying.
"Everything that has ever been ended is still here," Pri said, walking steadily, and making the others understand where they were walking through, knowing it would aid them in the understanding of their Origin. "That is what End is. It is the archive of cessation. Eos believed that the Great One made it this way because they wanted everywhere his broken children could not reach from to have a landfill. A place to put the previous Existences, so they would not haunt the next one."
"It's haunted anyway," Fury said, and his voice was unusually quiet.
"Yes," Pri said. "It is. That is one of the things the Great One got wrong… or maybe right, if it serves their need."
The music Vraegar had ntioned suddenly appeared as they walked.
It was not music in any sense that Pri's training or understanding of music had prepared him for.
It was not structured. It was not lodic. It was the sound of a voice that had been singing for so long that the song had beco indistinguishable from the singer.
A long, uninterrupted note, held across geological ti, bent and shaped by sothing that was not an instrunt but a will.
It was beautiful.
It was also the saddest thing Pri had ever heard.
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