"In a sense, one has to keep falling to handle said backlash," Solgrave preached to Zack in a proud, all-knowing tone.
"Ten seconds," Virith grimly reminded Solgrave.
"Fuck—forgot." Solgrave chuckled, his grip loosening alongside Zack's hold on Infinity.
The boundless cosmos that had unraveled within Zack began to collapse. Stars he once commanded flickered out—the threads of reality he could weave snapped and dissolved into nothingness. The sensation of absolute power drained from his veins, leaving behind something puny, fragile—mortal. He staggered backward, gasping, as if he'd been drowning in an ocean of divinity and was now coughing up his humanity. His knees buckled, the weight of existence itself having just rested in his grasp, and now, it was all gone, vanished like a dream.
He looked down at his hands, once filled with the ability to create or erase entire universes, now just flesh. Weak. Limited.
Zack clenched his fists, trembling. His heart hammered wildly, finally remembering how to beat. His lungs burned as he sucked in breath after breath, as if trying to hold onto something—anything—from that fleeting moment of divinity. Alas, there was nothing. Just him. A boy, standing before the being who had just let him taste omnity, only to rip it away.
Zack's eyes snapped up to Solgrave, who wore a devious grin with a calm demeanor. Unbothered. Somehow expressing two diverse emotions through a single face, his intent clear as day: Zack tried on a coat that didn't belong to him.
Solgrave handed him the universe, and then reminded him that he had never truly owned it. Nor did anyone else, for that matter. Any of the beings at Solgrave's level could change reality on a whim, yet for some reason, they never did, staying low, close to mortality or whatever passes for mortality in the Soul Realm, away from becoming the one true god.
A bitter, awful feeling curled in Zack's stomach. He had never felt more powerless, so... insignificant before.
The entity in front of him snapped through time, pumping him with courage—or whatever it is that gods do—for that was the only way to break Zack's stupor.
"What was that!?" Zack took long, deep breaths, gawking and feeling everything around him through a unique sense he had never heard of.
"Power," Solgrave smirked. "The one and only source of power!"
Solgrave pushed a day, a month... two, three, four months' worth of rest into Zack's mind, to soothe his soul from the trauma. "Immortal to mortal; Are you back yet?"
"Yeah. I'll get there," said Zack, waking up from a bed he never remembered getting into. "Strange dream."
"Humans and their denial," Solgrave spat, disgusted by the notion. "At max, we've got forty more seconds, kid. By then, you need to learn to control yourself and maintain said control for the rest of your life. One tiny slip and you're a goner."
"But I am... immortal, aren't I?" Zack argued.
"Yeah!" Solgrave rolled his eyes back into his head. "If you want to stay that way, I'd suggest control. A lot of it... and forever."
Zack maintained that question mark on his face. Solgrave's explanation went through his soul and into an abyss, never to be registered.
Witnessing Solgrave's patience wane, Lux jumped in to explain the situation. "Think of our magic as 'The Power': pure and absolute. One can tap into this power and do absolutely anything.
"Now think of yourself as an omni-tool that can change into anything. Say you were a tube light at first, that also has the capability of acting as a fan, but never could because of the missing accessories.
"Once you learn to tap into this power, you truly become an omni-tool, changing your base components to fit your dreams. Your vision of reality.
"You wish to be a light—you stay a bulb. You want to make wind—you become a fan, and so on. Keep turning the dial of imagination to the max until reality is nothing but a lucid dream.
"Until you have access to this power, the lucid dream is in your control. It is your reality. Similar to how lucid dreams are rare, so is this power. And once you lose connection, the dream is never the same.
"Let's say you didn't lose the power. Backlashes of—" Solgrave interrupted with a grunt, and Lux rephrased the previous sentence to satisfy their sponsor. "The power has no negative effects..." He waits for approval before continuing, "while you still had control over said power... let's say you went crazy and transformed yourself a bunch. Now you don't have a clue whether you were a fan, light, human, dog, or pure energy for that matter."
"Oh...!" Zack's face brightened. "So I have to keep the essence always present at the back of my head while doing whatever upfront."
"Yes!" Everyone cheered, except for Solgrave.
"You do realize your essence is an amalgamation of all your memories, present thought process, analysis skills, way to emotions, and more... right?"
Zack fell back onto the bed, his mental fuses frying and blowing out smoke through his ears.
"That's new," said Pinky, chuckling.
"That's cartoonish," said Lux with a frown.
'The dream of dreaming forever crushed into nothing.' Zack remembered a weird quote, without knowing its origin.
"Still not an impossibility," Virith encouraged Zack by completing the quote.
"Yeah!" Azrith added on. "With unlimited power in your grasp, you can create a palace in the back of your mind. Filled with everything that is you, right now!" She slowly rekindled hope in Zack.
"And a tiny misstep will erase everything," Solgrave deflated Zack. "Turning you into pure energy. Not to worry, though, energy never dies; it just changes. You'd be amongst the energy people consume to have a proper wank."
By the end of their absurd good-news/bad-news, motivational gibberish, Zack was lying flat against the wooden floor, drooling like a zombie out of energy to search for brains. Because apparently, no one had one. Or if they had decided not to use it during the explanation.
Bazuka picked Zack up with one hand, summoned her bazooka, and placed him on the barrel's opening. "Quite opposite to your mortal self, your immortal self has all the power but doesn't know what to do. Mix the two to have direction. Otherwise, you're just a blob, floating around in the vast space of energy."
"Also, a term we used for those who went beyond... and puff," said Pinky.
"Smart kids," Solgrave was impressed.
"In short, the longer you can keep yourself within the 'God-You,' the more godly sh*t you can do!" concluded Bazuka, dropping Zack off her weapon before he crawled inside and hid.
Zack ignored the fall and perked up, looking at his diary. But before what he thought was an ingenious plan was formed, Bazuka smacked his head into the floor by dropping the heavy weapon on him.
"I like that one more...!" Solgrave grinned.
"What was that for‽" A muffled voice came from underneath the floorboards. Zack didn't feel anything because of the remnant energy still dwelling within, yet the thought of having pain made him feel the blow.
"You did that to yourself." She showed him an old, erased memory of him hitting himself against the weapon, then climbing inside it, begging them to blast him away. "Do you trust this?"
"Obviously not!" Zack declined the memory.
"What makes you think a diary would do any better?"
"A...h, that's right," Zack says, looking down the barrel etched with runes. "What's even the point? What if someone like him gets bored and blasts everything to kingdom come anyhow?"
"Hey!" Solgrave genuinely looked upset, and he perfectly expressed the emotion through his face, as if it were the only expression he'd been practicing every day, for his facial muscles to have described it without any flaw.
Solgrave's immense pride at being ignored as the ultimate being quickly deflated, replaced by a chilling sensation creeping up his spine. "What did you sense in the ultimate state?" he asked Zack, his tone serious, banishing any lingering humor in the air by forcing a new concept inside their secret, rundown base. "And don't say something stupid like 'everything'! Look deeper. Concentrate. Find me the fear I'm looking for. A sense even a god couldn't escape."
With only truth and seriousness left in the room, Zack focused on Solgrave's question. He closed his eyes, reaching out to cradle the remnants of energy, attempting to touch Infinity on his own. Though the sensations, memories, and power still resided within him, he could only gaze at the stars, unable to reach out and grasp their essence.
'Bazuka and the others were right,' he concluded with a heavy heart: without the entity in front of him, even with mystical power, this endeavor would've been useless.
Mortals are destined to remain mortal, and any grasp of immortality was merely a fading dream, lucid or otherwise.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Ten. ———<>||<>———