Music for today:
still waiting
https://youtu.be/soLKu7M9LQA
Chapter 485: Waiting
N/A - N/A : Year 39 (2nd Year in Void) : Within The Void
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- Zachari ~
-Who.. am I..?- Sat on what felt like the edge of infinity, my mind never could find rest. -Where.. am I..?-
No matter how deep the stillness.. how vast the darkness.. I'd find myself asking questions I couldn't understand in a voice I didn't recognize...
In that space.. in that manifestation of eternity.. fragments of memories would come and go as they pleased—visualizations from a life that eluded me coming in and out of familiarity as if I had stuck my paw in a barrel of fish, trying to recognize them by the passage of currents alone.
It was only ever fruitless, but for some reason, I always tried... When one surfaced, I'd reach for it with everything I had—stretch every mental thought to its limit as if to try and hook something.. anything...
But it never worked.
Floating in that place, I found home in silence, and with time, began ignoring whatever inklings surfaced.
I was forgetting something.. I knew I was.. but after so many fruitless eons.. I had stopped trying...
Feeling visions come and go, I let them drift away, growing blurrier and more infrequent with every passage.
There was simply nothing else I could do... The more I tried, the more I simply.. ran out of energy... -I.. want to sleep...-
But I never could truly drift off.
Waking me with a sensation, thought, or mental twitch, I'd tighten the grip on my thoughts abruptly and sporadically every time I felt myself drifting to sleep.
Every.. single.. time...
No matter how much I ignored.. how much I tried to quiet that turbulent mind, the visions would always wake me, yet disappear before my eyes opened...
With enough time.. it became tormenting...
But... -You must.. hold on...- Deep down, an exhausted voice held me together. -You need.. to stay awake...-
The thoughts felt foreign.. coming from a place I didn't recognize.. and yet every time I listened as if out of instinct.
But with the passage of countless eternities, that voice too weakened into silence...
It too lost the energy to torment me...
And eventually.. nothing was left to wake me...
In that space.. that empty infinite.. I could finally let go...
I could finally rest in the embrace of silence...
*tink*
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- Vasilias ~
*tink* The noise echoed through the silence louder than any disturbance ever should have—like the crack of a bullet on a silent night.
It made me jolt—my eyes shooting open with disbelief so thick it made my whole body freeze.
But that was when I saw it with my own eyes—that tiny, fragile soul gently turning with life... "~M..Mom..?~"
My words never reached her consciousness though.
Feeling her soul tug on the tether, I began pushing some mana through it thinking that's what she wanted, but the tug only grew more intense. -Is it.. not the mana..?- Her soul was wanting something else. -Then...-
Putting slack into the tether itself, her soul instantly began absorbing everything it could, pulling whatever slack I gave it into its core, piling and winding it up like it was a singular strand rather than a complex string.
But worried it'd stop if I changed anything, I just kept it going, giving her soul as much as it could pull without having any idea what would come of it.
Until finally... *Snap*
Shearing the tether as her soul stopped tugging on it, the coil of divinity that rested within her core began splitting and unraveling—spreading, winding, and weaving through her soul, and in turn, the lifeless hatchling that still occupied the same space.
It wasn't the spiritual binding I had wanted or expected, but as her soul was sewn back together with a complex weave of divinity, not even an intrusive thought could surface a complaint in my mind.
Seeing her soul, once so fragile a sigh could blow it apart, reform itself with a new weave of strength, only the purest hope could surface in my mind.
It was only a single step.. one of countless she would still need to make...
But that one step was all I needed to know that... -There's a chance...-
Even if her consciousness wasn't there, something deep within her held on...
She wanted to survive.
Giving her soul a chance to stabilize what it had, time passed in a blur.
Days, weeks, months.. it all blended together.
Refusing to take my eyes off her for a single instant, I watched as the movement of her divinity reestablished a flow within her soul, and before long, even began influencing that isolated space's mana.
Mana that had remained stagnant for years.
*Woom* Supplementing the space with enriched mana, the flow ever so slowly picked up speed, accelerating from something essentially invisible, to a steady, firm flow like gasses around a star.. accumulating and condensing.
Until eventually, at the most microscopic of scales.. something changed...
*Woom* With a sudden, subtle wave, the air shifted—the mana changed.
It was so subtle I had to question if my mind was simply playing tricks on me—an illusion forming in stillness. Nothing appeared to move or shift physically, but deep in my subconscious, the air felt.. off...
Until finally, I found it...
Deep within the hatchlings abdomen—within the core of her soul—something so small it was comparable to the nucleus of an atom had formed.
It was.. a bundle of liquid mana...
A... -Mana core...-
It was smaller than any possible in normal conditions.. so small it hadn't even the thinnest crystalline shell.
But a forming core, no matter how impossibly tiny, was a core nonetheless.
Attempting to nurture it, time blurred in a flash. With the constant supplementation of enriched mana, it grew and grew, widening beyond the reaches of electron clouds before beginning to crystallize as it neared the size of larger molecules.
However, that was when something happened...
Not expecting anything, I watched and nurtured that microscopic core no differently from any other time, supplying mana wherever needed, and doing everything I could to not let my aura so much as brush against hers.
But that was the moment her core's shell crystallized.. and promptly ruptured. *KRAKOOM*
The surge of mana that followed was immense. Like someone suffocating gasping for air, the suction of mana that followed was thousands, no, tens of thousands of times stronger than anything I had felt from her prior—vacuuming the mana in the space before I could blink.
But had never been happier to flood something with mana.
That was it. That was the moment I was looking for.
She, while still not bonded to the flesh of the hatchling, was undergoing something no different from a dragon sleep.
Her soul churned rapidly, blending and morphing within the turbulent mana as it had before, yet instead of scattering, tightened everything with crystalizing divinity as if to squeeze it into the growing accumulation of liquid mana at its center.
It was a truly insane sight.
However, still not truly bonded to the hatchling, the sudden burst of mana wrought havoc across the largely untempered body.
Without strengthening fit for the immense burst of mana, its cells were sheared, organs were torn, and muscles were tangled into an unruly mass to make way for the mana flows. Cellular function in those areas collapsed, and before you could react, the organs themselves appeared to dissolve and scatter, rapidly mutating and changing as if adapting to the new flows.
Until eventually, after rapidly growing for what was likely years, the structure of every cell in that body was unlike anything I had ever seen—form fit for a constant, intense flow of mana—and her core finally bound itself to flesh. *Woom*
Seeing that body tense, and twitch as its nervous system and brain lit with activity, my mind simply silenced itself.
I couldn't be certain how far the changes would spread—if they'd compound or equalize after her soul had rebound itself...
But in that moment, the unfathomable mass of emotions I felt simply.. equalized...
From that moment, I.. didn't know what to feel...
Watching over her, I waited years—decades—for her eyes to open.. helping her through dragon sleep after dragon sleep, attempting to assist her however I could, merely hoping that when she opened her eyes, she's recognize me...
But time made sure that wait was excruciating. Without keeping track, years turned into decades, and decades turned into centuries.
Her body was growing incredibly slowly, sitting in the dense, mana filled space as if to appropriately marinate herself in preparation for her next sleep, but before long, she had well surpassed her old body.
Holding at nearly 60 meters tall, she looked nothing like her old self—her scales were whiter than snow, her feathers as fluffy as fur, and her horns curled and forked with a flowing glow of mana beneath the surface.
And on the inside.. she was even weirder...
But physical appearance meant little to nothing to me.
What truly mattered was her. If she'd know.. or if she'd remember...
And while it certainly took time, with a healthy body and soul, I was certain she'd one day wake up...
Though, even with centuries to prepare.. I can't say for certain that I was ready for that day.
...The day she opened those sky-blue—mana-glistening eyes...
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