Chapter 1800: How Long Would You Feast? The child-Thenos, now the size of a young stag, crouched on the cold, nourishing surface of the World Stele. His seven arms braced against the stone, each finger tasting the history of slaughter etched into it. His feast was a banquet of stolen power—the silvered resilience of the Celestials, the deep-rooted greed of the demons, the shattered spark of the gods. Each essence was a new color on his palette, a new note in the song of his becoming. His form, a chimera of mottled, bruise-like flesh and shifting, metallic sheen, pulsed with voracious life. The silence was his dining hall. It was then that a new sound insinuated itself into the feast, a sound of the void. A stress fracture only a being like him could sense “CRACK—CRACK!!!” 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞 His head, too large for his growing body, tilted back. The two pools of absolute blackness that were his eyes turned upward, and he looked past the dimension he inhabited. And he saw. The heavens above the dimensions were the inner skin of Reality, the dome that separated what is from what is not. And pressed against that dome, from the outside, were faces. There were seven gigantic faces. They were not faces of flesh or light or energy. They were concepts given terrible topography. One was a shifting geometry of enforced silence. Another was a vortex of endless, recursive time. A third was a web of all that had ever been forgotten. The rest were too alien for him to comprehend, as his storehouse of knowledge was exhausted just understanding a bit about the first three faces. They were vast beyond the scale of the Primordials. Where the Primordials were forces within the system of existence, these… these were the pressures outside the system. Their faces were frozen, not in stillness, but in an impossible, slow-motion effort. They were pressing inward. “CRACK—CRACK!!” And as Thenos watched, his ancient Titan consciousness recognizing a predator of an order he had never conceived, he heard it. The slow, granular crick-crack of Reality’s walls beginning to yield. It was not the explosive shatter of the Abyss. This was the sound of continental plates succumbing to a pressure that had been building since before time. Each faint crack was a universe-ending event in miniature. These were not beings who fought for dominion within Creation. They were beings for whom Creation was an eggshell to be peeled away and the yolk within consumed. His hunger, a moment ago all-consuming, suddenly felt small. Profane. He was a maggot feasting on a corpse, and had just looked up to see the jaws of the wolf that had made the kill beginning to open. A voice spoke behind him. It was not loud. It did not echo. It was simply there, a fact as undeniable as the cracking sky. “You see what is coming for us, Thenos.” Thenos did not startle. His body, composed of a billion stolen reflexes, remained perfectly still. Only his black eyes shifted, though his head did not turn. He knew the voice. It was the flavor he coveted above all others. The reason he had woven his resurrection in this specific graveyard. Rowan. “How long would you feast,” the voice continued, calm and weary, “before you are consumed?” Thenos’s seven hands slowly uncurled from the World Stele. The stolen essence within him churned, the arrogance of the Titan warring with the chilling evidence of his senses. He had returned to become the ultimate power, to consume the gods and Primordials and rule the ashes. But the ashes were not his to rule. They were about to be swept away by a wind from outside. He finally turned his head, his neck creaking like old leather. Rowan stood a dozen paces away, a figure of scarred spacetime, looking not at Thenos, but up at the terrible faces pressed against the firmament. He looked… tired. Not weakened, but burdened by a truth he had carried for far too long. Thenos’s voice, when it came, was a dry, multi-tonal rasp, like stones grinding together. It was the sound of many voices, many deaths, speaking as one. “I taste their hunger,” Thenos said, one of his arms gesturing weakly upward. “It is… old. It is not for power. It is for the end of all things. There is no flavor they seek. Only the emptiness that follows the last bite.” He looked down at his own hands, at the power he had so greedily devoured. It felt like gathering sand against a tide that would wash away the entire beach. “You knew,” Thenos accused, the black voids of his eyes fixing on Rowan. “This is what you fought. Not for dominion. Not for vengeance. You fought to keep the walls standing. I could have remained in the peace of death, but you drew me from my grave.” Rowan’s gaze lowered from the heavens and met Thenos’s. In that look, there was no forgiveness for past sins, no offer of friendship. There was only a stark, shared assessment of an impossible threat. “Vengeance was a luxury,” Rowan said. “A distraction we can no longer afford. They are the reason the Primordials grew stagnant. They are the fear that made them try to control everything, to prevent any change that might weaken the walls. In their desperation to maintain a perfect, static order, they became the very thing that made the walls brittle.” He took a step forward, his presence not threatening, but urgent. “You consume to grow. To evolve. They consume to leave nothing. Not even silence. They are the end of consumption itself.” Thenos felt a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature. His entire purpose, his reason for being, was rendered moot by the sight above. What was the point of becoming the ultimate life form if all of Reality was about to be unmade? His resurrection was not a triumph; it was a timing error. He had been reborn seconds before the apocalypse. “How long?” Thenos rasped, this was a cry for help, a genuine, desperate need for data. Rowan looked back at the cracking sky. “The battle against Primordial Demon… it was a ripple. A loud noise in the dark. It drew their attention. I can silence the cry of dying Primordials, but not for long. The cracks were always there. Now, they are widening. Years? Centuries? A millennium? Time has little meaning for them, or for what is to come.” He turned his full attention to Thenos. The weariness was still there, but now it was forged into a blade of resolve. “So I ask you again, Titan. How long will you feast on the scraps of a dying world? Or will you use that stolen power to help me shore up the walls?” Rowan gestured to the World Stele, to Thenos’s own chimeric body. “You are a being of integration. Of taking disparate things and making a stronger whole. That is a power that is the opposite of their nullifying hunger. It might be one of the only powers that can resist them. It is the reason I kept you alive.” Thenos was silent. The hunger that had defined him since his first breath was now curdled by a profound existential dread. The ultimate predator had just discovered he was prey. The feast was over. The long, desperate fight for survival had begun. And the only ally offered to him was the one being he had returned from death to destroy. He looked at the frozen, pressing faces and then at the steady, grim countenance of Rowan. The Titan’s answer was not a word but a slow, deliberate act. He raised one of his seven hands, not in a fist of challenge, but with the palm open. And he began on the fraying edges of Reality itself, trying to feel the texture of the cracks, to understand what he would now be forced to fight for. “This body is a fragment left behind on your Singularity. When you are ready, it will lead you to me.” Rowan said, “Do not take too long, my patience is limited.”