Chapter 1909: Experiments With End (2) "Surely you must know what it feels like," Enoch started his last part of his tale, "the allure of being a Creator. With the aftermath of the absolute annihilation I unleashed, this power brought me my reward, and at first, I did not understand what it was offering me. But I reached for it and saw... End. Oh, Rowan, I wish you could see it as I once did at that time for the first time... I was the first to see this power, and I think it did not know how to appear in a mind that saw existence the way I did, how could it?" Rowan sighed and settled back on his throne. Enoch may not think he could see this scene clearly, but Rowan could; he could see much more than Enoch believed. He saw Enoch mutter aloud the word, "End," for the first time, and although Rowan did not get the entire meaning of that power as Enoch would have at that moment, he got enough, any more, and his cover would have been blown when his head exploded from holding all of those concepts in mind. End was not power like he believed it to be; instead, it was more like a revelation. It was older than light, older than the concept of old. It was the shadow cast by existence itself, the quiet that waits patiently for every story to finish speaking. When Enoch had forged his rebellion in the white-hot heart of his Lumina-forge, when he had shattered the unchanging perfection of the Luminous, he had not done it alone. He had unknowingly dipped his hand into this deeper ocean, drawn upon a power that had never been meant for any living thing. "The first time I called upon the power of End, I realized that it had let me borrow its power, and now it wanted the process to be completed, but I did not understand what this meant, I only knew that I had access to power beyond what I understood. I had ended existence to escape stillness and in the ruins that was left, I found motion, true motion, the kind that could only exist when something can cease. With all of this power in hand, I decided to pursue my life’s dream... I decided to experiment. A word that did not exist in the age of the Luminious." "I began with something small and familiar, because as much as I will like to believe I am creative, anyone born inside the society of the Luminious would find their creativity burned out of them. So I whispered my intent, and stars were born, but..." Enoch laughed, "It was not the gentle, golden stars of the Luminous, but a violent, screaming thing the color of fresh bruises. It ignited with a roar that had no sound, aged a trillion years in the space between two thoughts, and detonated into a nebula that, from a distance that did not exist, but looked like a mouth opened in agony. I watched it die and felt something I had never felt before: wonder. And so I did it again, and again... and again. All of existence pulsed with radiance and screamed in pain as I harshly tore into them with all he joys in my heart at discovering something new and unknown." Enoch snapped his fingers, a loud crack in this cave that resounded like the crack of lightning, "And I discovered even in the throes of my newfound joy that the power given to me by End had hardly budged. I had carelessly unleashed so much power, but I could as well be lighting a matchstick. At that time, I had not understood that the benefits gained from destroying existence could mean so much... and so little." "With so much power available to me, I began to create worlds whose size was so massive that Realities would be nothing but a grain of sand on their endless beaches. One planet was an ocean of liquid diamond under a sky of perpetual lightning and another was a desert of broken mirrors where every grain of sand reflected a different moment that had never happened." Enoch smiled almost fondly as if he was recalling good memories, and rowan simply remained silent and watched those memories blaze across his consciousness, filing him with dread and awe. He understood where the awe came from, and also the dread, because he could almost see what was coming next. "Bored with creating lifeless worlds, I began to make forests of glass that sang when the wind cut them, and the wind was made of memories that did not exist. It was natural for me to take the next step and move beyond plants to all manner of beasts that crawled, flew, and swam across these places. Things with too many wings and not enough mercy, things that loved and killed in the same heartbeat, things that aged backward from death to infancy and then to dust in a single afternoon. So much chaos, so many possibilities, but I knew I could still do more, and so I began to truly solidify all the concepts I was creating, ensuring that they become rules. That was the beginning of my downfall." Enoch closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, and when he opened them, all emotions in his eyes were gone, leaving only two cold, dead orbs of black. "Time, one of my favorite concepts because I believe it represents the core of change, was spread across all of my creation, and where once there was a still pond, now it raged like a river in flood. All the other concepts grew, and so consciousness was born from them, and life, chaotic and raw, bloomed all over existence. By the light, I was so fascinated by it all." 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺 "In this manner, I watched a moon I had made orbit its planet backward, trailing silver blood that rained upward into a sky that devoured it. I watched lovers on a crystal plain age into children and then into nothing while still embracing. I watched gods, and these were actual gods, Rowan, born from the chaos I had seeded, rise and fall and war and fuck and die in the span of a single cosmic breath. It was beautiful. It was everything I had ever wanted. And I did not notice the cost until it was too late." With these words, Enoch went silent for so long that Rowan almost believed that he would no longer speak, not after more than two hundred thousand years had gone by. At this time, Rowan had fully completed the seventeenth layer of the Nameless techniques, and he decided to wait for another hundred thousand years for Enoch to continue his story, or he would brave the threat of death and continue carrying the weight of all existence. However, he could not deny that the words from Enoch had begun to show him a different perspective on existence, and Rowan wondered if he should be worried about this. As always, when Enoch began to speak, there was no warning, "Creation is intoxicating when you have spent eternity in stillness. Each new world was a defiance, each dying star a slap aimed at the memory of endless perfection. I spun galaxies like coins on fingertips that no longer existed, shattered them for the pleasure of hearing something break, then spun new ones uglier and more alive. I made music that killed the listener and then resurrected them with the memory of their own death etched into their bones. I made colors that had no names and emotions that ate the minds that felt them... Why did I not notice when the edges of my being began to fray?"