Chapter 1747: Xylos, the First Doubt The world was a tomb of obsidian and silent screams. Telmus knew this because he had built it himself, stone by agonizing stone, deep within the cavern of his own mind. At first, the exercise had been to amuse his mind, but slowly it began to transform into a thing of necessity. Telmus had never been one to do things by half measures, and he plunged into the depths of his psyche, creating blocks of Will that were impossible to destroy. Without any guidance or a path forward, Telmus was forging his Destiny using nothing but sheer stubbornness and his innate arrogance. And he had no idea what he was doing... had no idea he was rapidly crossing dimensions while imprisoned in his mind. Talents such as these were enough to make all geniuses despair. Here, there was no sun, no wind, no sensation of a body. There was only the chamber—a vast, circular arena of polished black mirror, reflecting a darkness so complete it seemed to swallow its own reflection. At its center, he sat, or rather, the essence of him sat, chained not by iron but by filaments of pure will, each one thrumming with a corrosive, alien energy. This was his prison. His mind, the warden. His soul, the inmate. And he was not alone. Across from him, coiled in the space that was not space, was the demon. It had no true form, for it was a thing of concept and primordial hunger, but in the theater of the mind, it needed an avatar. It chose something vast and serpentine, a beast of shadows and embers, with eyes like dying stars and a voice that was the sound of continents grinding together. Its name was Xylos, the First Doubt, the Last Silence, the Primordial Demon. "You persist in shaping this place," Xylos rumbled, the sound vibrating through the floor and up through Telmus’s intangible being. "This... austerity. This bleak monument to your futility. You could imagine a sun-drenched meadow. A quiet library. A lover’s embrace. Yet you choose this as your foundation." Telmus did not open his eyes. This demon took many shapes and had too many voices. He instinctively understood that the best method to deal with a Primordial Demon was to find its black heart. To open his eyes was to see the thing’s reflection a thousand times in the polished floor, a legion of dying stars staring back. Still, Telmus did not back down from a battle, and clashing his mind with the demon had an unexpected benefit for his mental growth. Knowing that time seemed to always be meaningless in the presence of the demon, Telmus took his time to reply, "A meadow would be a lie. A library, a distraction. This is the truth of our situation. A cell. I will not decorate my cage for your amusement." A sound like a mountain cracking in half—a laugh. "Amusement? Mortal, you have been the source of my amusement for decades. Your stubbornness is a diverting comedy. Your ’truth’ is a child’s simplistic drawing of a thing it cannot comprehend. This is not a cell. It is a confluence. A meeting point. The place where a river of mortal struggle finally joins the infinite, stagnant ocean of my being." "Poetic," Telmus said, his voice flat, worn smooth from the internal erosion of this endless conversation. "For a parasite." "Parasite?" Xylos’s form shifted, coils of smoke and promise tightening around the periphery of Telmus’s awareness. "I did not invade a healthy host. I did not seek you out. You plunged your hands into the well of shadows, you drank deep of the waters of power I represent, and you are surprised that the well drank back? You called me. Your rage, your ambition, your desperate, clawing need to be more than a speck of dust in a hurricane... that was the invocation. I am not a parasite. I am the answered prayer you were too shortsighted to understand you were making. You had the choice not to use your talents, a part of you knew you were drawing closer to me, but you could not resist the allure of my power." Telmus finally opened his eyes. The thousand dying stars flared in unison as Primordial Demon grinned. He did not flinch. "I took the strength to protect my people and my child. To turn back the tide of annihilation from a pantheon of mad gods." "And I gave it to you," Xylos whispered, and now its voice was intimate, a caress of ash against his soul. "Did I not? The Battle of the Crying Fields, that’s what they called it. You, a single man, against the Trion Gods, abominations made into divinity. You stood where countless had fallen. You fought where too many had been broken. Your blade was a blur of impossible light, your voice a thunder that shook the very firmament. You became a legend that day. I became that legend. That was our bargain." "It was no bargain!" Telmus’s shout was a spark in the immense dark, quickly swallowed. "It was a trick. My power was always meant for me, my birthright. Still, I should have known that there are no free gifts in this world. This moment of weakness would not be one you can easily exploit, Xylos." "Weakness?" Xylos’s amusement was a palpable pressure. "Is that what you call it? I call it clarity. In that moment, as you lay broken amidst the corpses of your world, you saw the utter randomness of your existence. There was no grand plan. No benevolent god guiding your hand. There was only chaos, meat, and the inevitable victory of the stronger predator. You saw the truth of Destiny: that it is a story the living tell to comfort themselves about the brutal, meaningless nature of death. And in that clarity, you did not pray to your silent gods. You screamed into the void for the power to impose your own story upon the world. And the void, which is me, answered." Telmus fell silent. The memory was a fresh wound, even here, even now. The coppery smell of blood, the cold mud, the grating sound of the God King’s Golgoth voice as he announced his death with a single slash. The profound, soul-crushing understanding that it was all for nothing. That all the valor, the honor, the love, amounted to less than the dirt beneath a conqueror’s boot. A part of Telmus knew that there was something wrong with this memory, some subtle distinction that he was missing, but no matter how he clawed at it, he could only see a scene of devastation, where he had to continuously pull power from his bloodline, yet was still unable to stop the ambitions of a mad god. How could he have failed so much? How could he have fallen so far? "I wanted to save them," he said, the words hollow. "You could not save them," Xylos countered, its voice losing its mockery and becoming, for a terrifying moment, simply factual. Absolute. "They were already dead. The machinery of their demise was in motion long before you were born. You could only avenge them. Or you could join them. Those were the only two truths available to you. I merely offered you the choice to embrace the more satisfying of the two truths." "And what is the price of that satisfaction?" Telmus gestured around at the obsidian prison. "This? An eternity of debate with the embodiment of nihilism?" 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦 "The price," Xylos said, "is understanding. You wielded a power that fundamentally rejects the fragile narratives of mortal life. You channeled entropy itself. You cannot touch that fire and not be burned. Your body, out there in the world you so valiantly ’saved,’ is a monument. They built a marble statue of you, did you know? It stands in the very field where you fell. They call you the Godslayer. They leave offerings. They pray to you for protection." A sliver of something—pride? Longing?—pierced Telmus’s resolve. He quashed it. "And what of it?" "And your body is a hollow, breathing shell, kept alive by the same power that devours you from within. Your mind is here, with me. You are their holy icon, Telmus. And you are my... dinner. We are both consuming you. They consume the myth. I consume the man. The question is, which of us will get the last bite?" The simplicity of the horror was breathtaking. He had saved his world and in doing so, had become a resource for it, a story to be told, and a meal to be eaten. His Destiny had not been to die a hero, but to become a permanent, paralyzed feast. ’Something is not right... I have a legacy better than this, what has been taken from me?!’ "Then let it be over," Telmus whispered. "Finish it. Consume the last of me and be done." "And deny myself the pleasure of your company?" Xylos cooed. "And more importantly, deny myself the one thing I truly crave from you?" "What could you possibly crave? You have all of me." "No," the demon said, its star-eyes burning with a new intensity. "I have your resistance. I have your anger. I have your fear. These are spices, seasonings. The main course... is your consent. Your genuine, willing acknowledgment that I am right. That your life, all life, is a brief, frantic noise in an eternal silence. That your Destiny is what you claw out for yourself before the darkness takes it all back. I want you to look at the masterpiece of meaning you built—your honor, your love, your sacrifice—and see the scaffolding of random chance and desperate fiction that it is built upon. I want you to agree with me." "Never." "Then we have time," Xylos said, settling back, its form blurring at the edges like smoke. "An eternity, in fact. Let us discuss. Let us peel back the layers of your cherished convictions. Let us start with something simple. That first memory you cling to, the one that you think set you on your path of righteousness. The memory of your mother giving you your first wooden sword. Tell me about it."