In case it wasn't clear, Logos was the last of the gods to heed the call of Fate and leave the old universe, or the immeasurable eternity between universes. That 0 energy state that Jan left? That was Logos, and once Logos decided to call it quits, it all collapsed back into the Potential the gods initially put in. But in a sense, he was also the first to act.
Order is eternal. And to forge the New, the Old must be remembered, even if only by Fate. That is the great and terrible price of the First Law.
He flew on in the unending twilight. Beneath him was darkness. It was impossible to say exactly what it was, or how far below him, or how far it stretched in every direction, for there were no landmarks, no boundaries, no shadows. Just a hypnotic slow rippling. Only by the speed or slowness of its motion could one guess whether a wave was a near-by ripple, or a far-off ocean swell. Once he’d thought he had been high above the seas, and only a lucky glimpse of a ball of white—his own eye reflected—had saved him from flying right into it.
Some unmeasurable time ago, he had grown too weary to hold it all together. He had sunk into the ocean of potential; with a burning hiss, and when the tower of steam cleared, he had left an immeasurable black crater behind. For a few bright seconds he thought he might have caused the stuff some harm. But the wound closed in on itself with a loud plopping sound, leaving behind only a slick black spiral smear on the surface.
Just—three colors: dark blue above, a purple welt below, and a dim blob of black bobbing in-between.
It was not a true purple, but a sickly blue-and-red-tinged mixture of every color, swirled together, stirring slowly into infinitely fine vortices and spirals. Infinity absorbed and averaged together. It seemed wrong for the laws of optics to make so many bright things cancel each other out into dull gray.
It was quiet, as final apocalypses went. Not so silent that it sucked the breath out of you, like the gray cinder worlds whose ashes he had trodden, worlds too spent to raise the wind to blow away a puff of ash. Not raging, like the worlds that had ended in fields of lava, belching sulfur. Not hissing and biting, like the wind across endless plains of snow broken here and there by ghoulish ice statues. Just a gentle, persistent sucking sound, like an ocean sloshing against the bottom of an endless pier.
As he flew, he replayed the final moments in his mind over and over, looking for warnings he could have heeded, precautions he could have taken.
One of them was shouting. Pleading. The other was too far gone. It had seen the great beyond and could no longer turn away from its siren call.
'I will have it! I must have it!' It was the latter that spoke, looking towards him, for it could see him now.
'Brother! Cease this foolishness at once! You know not what you do, you will see us ruined!'
But no obvious turning point could have prevented This without causing That. It seemed the universe hated Order, and pushed back harder the closer it came to it. Even reifying it into its component elements had only made the final fall harder and faster. The power needed to hold a world together in harmony could also tear it apart.
No revelation. Just faces and voices. Faces and voices.
The only mark of the passage of time was a dimming of the light, and a settling of the ocean as the purple mass consumed itself, squandering the fruits of millions of years of life in confused and conflicting waves, defecating heavy black tendrils into itself that sank beneath the waves.
All the faces and voices.
How long did it take?
Long.
How far did he fly?
Far.
How tired was he?
The world beneath him shrank as it cooled and solidified, drawing itself together until the dark curve of its horizon was visible. By then the only light was the glow of the god himself, which pulsed in white waves from his body. He touched down on the featureless black surface. Only then did he allow himself to think on how tired his wings were. The moment he did, they dried up into gossamer gray cobwebs and crumbled into dust, leaving a bare smooth patch behind his shoulders.
Fate and He waited there. That was how he thought of them. They had bid him come, and come he did – though it had taken him eternity to do so. A creature of almighty power hung there in the nothingness, wavering and ethereal, but with power supreme. Beside it stood a terrible thing indeed but was tall and dark and wispy as always, like the shadow of the smoke of a fire. He walked towards them. When he drew near, Fate looked at him calmly, with eyes incapable of surprise or expectation.
He held out a sharp dark spike, so hard and bright-pointed that the hand holding it was too insubstantial by comparison to be seen. It was more like a slashing interruption of space than an object one might idly toss or spin on the basis of no higher authority than the laws of physics. Nonetheless Logos took it between his fingers and gripped it like a sword.
Fate did not quite nod in response, but His eyebrows may have momentarily raised a hair’s width in acknowledgement. He turned his head slightly to the left, directing his attention. Before them stretched the Road.
It was black, slick, and every bit as hard as the bit of un-space he clenched in his hand. It would have been as frictionless as theory, if not for the rows of short grooves etched lengthwise on its surface. Each groove was a little over an inch long, with dozens of parallel grooves per row.
His eyes followed the rows of grooves one by one. By the time he had lost them where they and the Road vanished at the horizon, he was breathing hard and his legs were shaking. He took an involuntary step back.
Fate tactfully averted his eyes up and to the left a few degrees, as if to say, It is regrettable. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Logos began to walk down the Road, and Fate and He followed after.
“Walk” is a brisk word for their movement. He took a deep breath before each step. The grooves in the Road seemed not merely to stop him from sliding, but to pull at him and drag him to a halt. They sent vibrations up his legs, whispering, Remember, remember, remember us . So many faces and voices.
With every step he stopped and stared at one or another of the countless scratches. Some his eyes passed over with a shudder; others, he gazed at for a long time. Behind him, when he moved on, each thin groove glistened with a ribbon of white light.
By the time they had gone a mile, his glow had dimmed to a cool grey. Or perhaps the darkness had thickened. The landscape seemed too worn-down to present any definitive shape or silhouette, too tired to catch the light and reflect it properly.
He was limping now, stepping very gingerly and grimacing each time he set a foot down. It was hard to see in the dim light, but a darker liquid dripped behind him now, coalescing into blobs and skittering off the road into the darkness. His limp seemed off, even for a limp, and strangely quiet.
His legs were too short. The soles of his feet had worn away. He looked down at the bloody pads exposed underneath, and his brows narrowed and his eyes flicked upwards by the tiniest angle, as if he were severely put upon by this foolishness.
Several times he shuddered and almost fell, but caught himself. The Terrible Being expressed eloquently with his eyelids his commendation of him, for avoiding making such a scene.
After they had gone another mile, his steps resounded with hoof-like clicks, for he had worn through the fatty pad, down to the foot’s calcaneus bone. Trailing away to the horizon behind them, the narrow grooves glistened with the slivers of himself he had left behind, body and soul.
Another mile on, he screamed and fell for the first time. A God’s soul seems solid, but there are nerves buried deep within its center.
He actually raised an eyebrow. Logos struggled to his feet and continued.
The second time he fell, he lay sprawled on the black surface, gasping and trembling. The light within him dimmed to cold ashen grey. His skin clung to the Road beneath him.
He knelt on all fours beside him. He slowly stretched out one shadowy limb towards the dark spike between his fingers, gently, like one offering to take a heavy load.
Logos jerked his hand away, and began to crawl.
The grooves sucked and pulled at him like leeches as he dragged himself across them. They seemed now to drain every part of him equally. As he went, his skin slowly shriveled and cracked like porcelain. His torso grew gaunt. His legs dwindled to short, boneless noodles flapping behind him.
Fate stood behind him, with an air of infinite patience, moving each foot one step forward every time he managed to wriggle, snake-like, another body length forward. His light dimmed like a fire burning down to the coals.
An observer might have said that this went on for a long time. But there was no standard by which to measure time other than the mind of Fate and Him, who was indifferent to it, and whatever mind remained in the ichorous pale serpent, which was enveloped in a fog of pain and concentration no longer anchored to the world of seconds and inches. It slunk forward. Its form crumbled away, its skin faded to translucent, and its limbs shrunk, inch by inch, as they were gradually absorbed into its body, or into the Road. It held the spike between its mouth now. The neutral stare on what was left of its face seemed to come from farther and farther away as its eyes clouded over and shrunk to pinpricks. Still it slithered onward, now only a dimly phosphorescent snake leaving a glistening trail behind.
One final line of grooves went halfway across the Road, and then stopped. Beyond, it was virgin, uncut, featureless and black.
The god reached his head sideways and out, lowering the sharp end of the spike to the smooth surface just beyond the last groove. Then it contracted its body, pulling its head back towards itself, dragging the end of the spike across the surface of the Road. As it did, it remembered. As it remembered, the memories, the laws flowed into the spike, heating it red-hot, and sparked and burned themselves into the surface of the road.
He remembered being one white speck among the vast dark swells of potential reality, drifting peacefully as they fled from the Center. He remember how the endless potential terrified him, how the results were infinite and therefor impossible. How, as the dark swells saw to fill, he saw to cut off; to limit. He remembered that the endless potential became limited: still vast beyond counting, but limited. This pleased him.
He remembered a part of itself that had needed room to grow, and more time. It had work. A vision.
It remembered the firsts. All of them, one by one, from the first to the last. Every child’s first step and first fall, every love, every fight, every dream, every final breath. For each soul, weak or strong, cruel or kind, a silver drop, brighter and thicker than water, spilled from the thing’s eyes and fell heavily to the Road.
When it had finished, its eyes had dripped nearly away and fallen inward into its eroded head like sinkholes, and there was one more shallow groove cut into the surface of the Road.
The laws of reality had no more reality here; it was just a story that had been told once, somewhere. But the deep power that Creation had been built on was still in force. The price it demanded to build a new world was slight, and terrible: Someone had to remember it when it was gone.
He reached out his hand again, and this time, the God of Order let him take the spike from his mouth and it disappeared into his smoky folds of skin or clothing or nothingness.
The ground shuddered. The world groaned, creaking and croaking, a low tired sound as the Laws were written. The others would come again.
Fate wavered slightly on his feet, and the serpent’s body rippled in waves, as the exhausted world hunched its shoulders and began to curl in on itself in the darkness around them. There was a slow rumbling tearing sound, like a god ripping off a crusted scab, as the world contracted and tore away from the Road. The blackness off to either side became deeper and blacker as the land fell away and in on itself.
This, too, might have been said to have gone on for a long time, if anyone with an interest in such details had been there to measure it.
When it was over, Reality lay huddled together in a cold, dark ball, there at the end of the Road. The only light left in the universe was a faint, glow deep inside the translucent belly of the serpent. If it went out there was nothing, anywhere, that could ever reignite it again.
Fate looked at the void, then turned down towards the serpent, and tilted his head.
“Look at the length of the Road behind you. So much pain. So much loss. See how much its memory has taken just from you alone. Multiply the pain and the loss you feel by a world. Now all is one again. You are Order. Have mercy on them, if not on yourself. No more suffering. No more indignities. Have the wisdom to accept your end. Be reborn anew. Dignity. Rest. Peace. For ever and ever.”
The serpent’s inner fire dimmed and dimmed, and all around them the darkness held its breath in anticipation.
Then the serpent raised itself up to its full height, opened its wreck of a mouth, and took a breath.
“Let us try this one more time,” it hissed, before biting its tail, and devoured who he was. And Logos was born anew.
An eternity before, at the end of all things, a god walks the last road by himself. As the ones who called him forth watch his path, a cycle begins anew and the laws written once more...
0 Might - 4 Used to bring Order to the Primal Chaos
Vec
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