Chapter 1798: Seed’s Final Testament Except for the charging of Major Eras, destruction of this scale had never been witnessed before. Escaping from that destructive event was a miracle. But the battle was not done. The backlash from the Demon’s failed Dance of Final Silence reached them even here. A wave of unmaking, the death scream of the Great Abyss, washed over the area. The tree-gate that was Seed glowed brightly, a final act of defiance, and then shattered into a million motes of green light that were instantly extinguished by the expanding nothingness. The portal winked out. Seed was gone. Utterly. His sacrifice had saved them, but the path back was sealed forever. They were alone in the barren wastes: a pale dragon, a phoenix god, five broken children of Eos, and two traumatized mages. Behind them, where the Arena and the Great Abyss had been, there was only a swirling, chaotic nebula of dying energies—a scar on the face of Reality. They had witnessed powers that treated their immortality as a fleeting curiosity. They had seen two of their companions, ancient and powerful in their own right, snuffed out like candles. They did not speak. There were no words. The stability of Vraegar had been replaced by a cold, grinding horror. The fiery spirit of Fury was banked, embers of shock and grief. The harmonious light of the Elythrii was fractured into five separate pools of sorrow. The mages sat in stunned silence, their understanding of magic irrevocably broken. They were survivors, but haunted not by ghosts, but by the enormity of their own insignificance. The memory of that battle—a conflict beyond all comprehension, beyond myth, beyond divinity—was seared into their souls. They had escaped with their lives, but they had lost something far more precious: their certainty. And they knew, with a chilling dread, that the shockwaves of that battle were only just beginning to spread. The last embers of the green portal, the final sacrifice of the being called Seed, have faded into the grey. One of the mages, Lila, stares at a small, smooth object in her hand: a single, petrified seed, dark as obsidian, which she found resting where the gate had vanished. As her fingers brush it, a whisper, thin and dry as a dead leaf, fills the silence around them. Everyone here stiffened as they felt the voice brush across their mind; it is not a sound, but a thought projected from the last fading spark of Seed’s consciousness. “I had always known that this would happen, and I did not want to leave any message behind, but my life has been long, and if it deserves nothing, perhaps a testament to send me off to oblivion.” “You are safe. For now. That is the only victory this old man could secure. I do not do this for you all, but for my daughter and my… grandson. Ah, who am I kidding, I do not deserve to call him that.” “Even though I don’t think it is likely, I would like to point out that you should not mourn for me. The tree does not mourn the leaf that falls to nourish its roots. My ending has a purpose. Yours will be, I am sure, in the future. Well, that is all I have to say… hmm, perhaps a final gift. You know that I saw the Great Abyss end, so let me tell you what I witnessed. Knowledge like this is not something lesser immortals like us should come across, so I take great pleasure in telling them to you.” “I could not see the battle as you all would, our perceptions are different. I have no eyes for such light, such fury. My sight is… different. I feel the soil. I feel the roots of the world. And what I felt… I must describe, for it is a horror that must be remembered, even if the memory is a poison, but I am the Tree of Wrath, and my Will is strong.” “I wish I could accurately describe to you the end of the Abyss. This Primordial Domain… simply… wilted. Like a plant whose roots are cut. The weight of all that had happened here—the pride, the history, the very reason for the conflict—it grew thin. It became a ghost.” “I felt the story of that space being unmade, page by page, until only a blankness remained. It was a violence done not to the body, but to memory itself. To make a being a stranger in his own life… that is a cold art.” “You should know that they were both still fighting, and I was witnessing extinction across Abyssal dimensions. Then… the stillness came.” “The storm of their fighting… it froze the air, the light, the very possibility of sound… it was caught, like a fly in amber. In that terrible, motionless silence, only one thing moved. A shadow, perfect in its purpose. And it was hunting. I could hear his laughter, Rowan, and the core of my being shuddered.” “I felt the future in that place, maybe it was because Reality had gone thin here. The might-be, the could-be… I could see it all, like a field of shimmering light. And I felt that light go out. Not all at once, but strand by strand, like a web being unpicked from the end back to the beginning. The paths of possibility, the choices not yet made, they were… pruned. Cut away until only one branch remained: a dead branch, leading to a cliff over nothing. It was the murder of hope. Not the feeling, but the very thing itself.” “At this moment, I thought Primordial Demon must have won their terrible battle. The idea of it was a thought pressed upon Reality itself. A simple, terrible thought that says it is all for nothing. It was not an argument. It was a… a truth so empty it made a mockery of struggle, of love, of sacrifice. Why hold a gate open? Why cling to life? The darkness is the true host, and we are but fleeting, meaningless guests. I felt my own purpose, my long ages of tending and growing my Wrath, turn to dust in that wind. “Then, I felt him… unravel, Rowan, and I knew that all was lost.” “To my senses, his end came like a rope coming untwisted. Like a painting dissolving in the rain. The colors of his being—his rage, his grief, his love—they began to run, to bleed into one another, losing their form. The coherence that made him, him, was being gently, patiently loosened. He was being returned to the raw, silent stuff before the first word was spoken.” “My mind nearly collapsed at this sensation, and finally… it came to an end, but something worse took its place. A pressure, gentle as a sigh, against the last, bright spark. A promise of no more pain, no more loss. The comfort of the void. The ultimate surrender. It was the most merciful and the most monstrous thing I have ever felt. And then… what word should I use? Ah, yes, consumption. The great maw of the Abyss, which had held it all, began to close. The perfect, terrible equation was complete.” “It was flawless. It was the most beautiful and awful thing I have ever witnessed. A work of art that used existence as its canvas and uncreation as its brush.” The narration paused here, and the audience that had been held spellbound by the voice of Seed feared to breathe; they did not want to break whatever delicate balance kept this memory of Seed alive, and they understood that this might be their only chance to experience what battle at such a high level would look like. This was a gift that no amount of riches could buy. When the voice of Seed resumed, the fear that it had ended dissipated, and they listened, none daring to make a sound. “Whatever Primordial Demon did should have killed anything, I believe even another Primordial might have died here, but he… Rowan… he broke it.” “I don’t know how he did it. I wish I could, and one of the many regrets I take with me to the grave is how much I did not know of him. How much I lost because of my nature. I had the chance to know him, but I wasted it for so long. I saw him as a force of chaos, a storm that would break the world. In my arrogance, I always thought the stick I held was bigger. I was a fool, tending my garden while the moon swallowed the sun itself.” “I regret… I regret that I did not see the seed of glory in him sooner. I regret that I did not offer water to that root when I had the chance. Now I know why they feared his power, but I have seen what Primordial Demon unleashed in this battle. I understand that the true danger was the emptiness that opposed Rowan.” “So, hear the last lesson of this old seed that I learned in my death. Power that seeks only to dominate, to erase, is a harvest of ash. It is a price that should not be paid. The pursuit of such power is a disease that will leave you ruler of a graveyard. The true strength… the only strength that matters in the end… is the strength to stand. To remember. To hope. Even when the universe itself whispers that you should not, the storm is not over. It has only begun. Tend your gardens. Be defiant. Rowan is the key to the future… take my message to all of creation.” The petrified seed in Lila’s hand crumbles, not to dust, but to a fine, dark soil that smells of rich earth and something older. The whisper is gone. The silence that remains is no longer heavy with despair, but charged with a terrible, sober purpose. “Well,” Fury sighed, “that was something.”