The vibration was the last thing to fade.
It was not a sound, not in the conventional sense of the word. It was a reverberation in the very structure of nothingness, the aftershock of an impact so fundamental that the void itself had shuddered. Now, that manifestation was dissipating, absorbed back into the absolute, indifferent silence that was the natural state of that dimension.
Here, there was no up or down. There was no starlight or distant galaxies to offer a point of reference. Only an infinite and oppressive stillness, an absolute void where existence itself was an intruder.
Two presences remained in that stillness, suspended in the center of their eternal prison. They were not bodies of flesh and bone, but living concepts, ideas with enough will to manifest a form.
One was a point of light, a warm, compact sphere that radiated a constant and serene glow. It was not a blinding light, but the kind of radiance that infused warmth, order, and life. It was Creation.
The other was a patch of darkness, an absence of light so profound it seemed to have gravity, pulling in and devouring the very blackness that surrounded it. It was not a shadow; shadows are mere absences of light. This was an anti-light, an active force of annihilation. It was Destruction.
They had been motionless since the last vibration had faded, each recovering in its own way. For Creation, it was a process of restoring its cohesion, of reasserting its orderly nature against the chaos it had just faced. For Destruction, it was a readjustment, a contraction of its expansive power back to its core. They had been doing this for eons. The routine was as familiar as existence itself.
Finally, Creation's light pulsed gently, a single wave of peace in the stillness.
"Are you finished?" His voice did not boom. It simply was, existing in the space between them, a calm, masculine sound, but with a hint of immemorial exhaustion.
The darkness flickered in response. It was not a movement, but a ripple on its surface, a disturbance that betrayed a pure, unadulterated annoyance. If nothingness could have a texture, at that moment it would have felt like glass about to shatter.
"We never finish," she replied. Her voice was a feminine, ethereal whisper, cutting and glacial, a sound that seemed to absorb heat rather than produce it. "We only pause."
A silence deeper than the last settled between them. Her words were the truth, a truth so undeniable that no argument was possible. Creation felt the oppression of that truth like an almost physical force. Each "pause" was merely the prelude to the next meaningless confrontation, a cycle designed to wear them down until one finally made a mistake. A fatal mistake.
"We could," he said, his voice barely a murmur, clinging to a possibility he knew was almost nonexistent. "You know we could."
He didn't need to explain. He didn't need to speak of laying down their arms, of accepting their fate, or of finding another way. After countless eras sharing that cell, complete sentences were an unnecessary luxury. She knew exactly what he meant.
Destruction's darkness swirled with impatience.
"But you won't."
It wasn't a question. It was a statement, a final judgment. It was the summary of their entire history, the conclusion they always reached. She knew his nature as well as she knew her own. He was Creation. Sacrifice was fundamental to his nature, but the act of killing, of annihilating another conscious being—especially her—was a contradiction he could not resolve. And she knew it. And she hated him for it.
The silence that followed was different. It was no longer a stalemate. It was charged with the finality of her words. It was the silence of a conclusion repeated a million times.
It was Destruction who broke it.
Her form began to change. The diffuse patch of darkness began to contract, to pull its own essence toward a center. The blackness grew denser, more absolute, until it looked like a perfect hole in the fabric of reality. The pressure in the void increased dramatically, an unimaginable implosion of power.
"I'm tired of pauses," she said, and her voice was no longer a sharp whisper but a low, dangerous murmur, filled with a determination that made Creation's light waver. "I want this one to be the last."
The sphere of warm light faltered. For the first time in centuries, its constant glow flickered. The heat it radiated diminished by an imperceptible degree, but in the perfect sensitivity of their connection, the change was alarming.
"You know what that means," he replied, his usual calm tinged with an urgency he rarely showed.
"It means one of us will be free," she answered instantly, her voice devoid of any emotion but a desperate, selfish yearning for the end.
"And everything else will burn."
The statement hung between them, heavy with the weight of countless worlds. As he said it, Creation felt a ghostly connection, a fleeting trace to the trillions of lives that existed beyond their prison. He felt the pulse of civilizations being born on methane planets, the silent photosynthesis of forests on floating continents, the first breath of a creature emerging from its shell. Everything he was meant to protect. Everything her freedom would consume.
Destruction's darkness rippled with contempt.
"Let them burn. They never did anything for us."
Her resentment was a palpable force, a wave of bitterness that crashed against Creation's light. To her, every life, every star, every galaxy, was nothing more than the components of her prison, the reason the multiverse had locked them away and condemned them to this eternal struggle.
She moved then, the dense sphere of darkness drifting slowly toward him. The void around her twisted, protesting her proximity. She didn't expect an answer to her last statement. She knew there was none he could give that would satisfy her. Instead, she went to the root of the matter, to the knot that bound them tighter than any dimensional prison.
"Fight me," she said, her voice softening dangerously, becoming almost intimate. "For real. For once."
She stopped at a distance where she could almost feel the warmth of his light.
"If you truly feel anything for me," she whispered, and the word "anything" held eons of history, of battles, of silences, and of a connection that neither of them could name, "give me an end."
It was a plea, a challenge, and a manipulation, all woven into a single sentence. It was the cruelest weapon she possessed, and they both knew it.
Creation did not answer with words. His light intensified, not with anger, but with a deep, painful resignation.
The answer was enough for her.
The void contracted around Destruction's nonexistent hand, nothingness itself obeying her will. The darkness folded in on itself, solidifying, chilling to a temperature below conceptual absolute zero. An instant later, she held a blade of pure darkness, a weapon that did not reflect light because it devoured it. Then, another just like it formed beside it. There were no flourishes, no flash of power. Just the raw, efficient manifestation of her purpose.
In response, Creation's sphere of light elongated, flowing like liquid metal. The light stretched and solidified, not into a weapon of war, but into a tool of order: a long, elegant spear. It shone with a gentle, almost sad radiance, its tip so sharp it seemed capable of dividing not matter, but ideas.
There were no more words. The time for words was over, as it always was.
Destruction lunged forward. Her movement was instantaneous, a flicker from one point to another. There was no sound to betray her advance, not even the displacement of an air that didn't exist. The first sign of her attack was the high-pitched shriek that occurred when her blades clashed with the spear. It was not the sound of metal on metal. It was the sound of two fundamental principles colliding, the act of creating and the act of undoing meeting at an infinitesimal point with incalculable violence.
The battle that followed was not a chaotic whirlwind, but a sequence of precise, lethal movements. A macabre choreography perfected over countless repetitions. Her every thrust was expected, his every block, anticipated. They moved with a terrible grace, their weapons weaving patterns of light and shadow in the void.
Creation's spear was an extension of his being: precise, efficient, purely defensive. It did not seek to wound, only to intercept. The tip deflected a thrust aimed at his core, the shaft blocked a sideways slash that sought to split his form. He moved with the minimum necessary energy, a stable defense against her uncontainable fury.
Destruction's swords were the complete opposite. They were relentless, chaotic, each strike imbued with millennial frustration. They did not seek a clean death. They sought to erase, to undo, to annihilate. The edge of one of the black blades passed inches from Creation's side. He felt no pain, but he felt the space the sword had passed through tear apart. For a fraction of a second, reality was ripped open, revealing an abyss of unreality and conceptual chaos before the void healed itself.
That was the power she wielded. The power to make things simply cease to be.
They continued like this, in a perfectly balanced stalemate. Days, weeks, years... time was meaningless here. The fight was their only measure of existence. But something was different this time. Her demand, "give me an end," echoed with every clash of their weapons.
Destruction's frustration began to grow. Her dance became less precise, more brutal. Her strikes were wider, wilder, sacrificing technique for brute force. She was trying to break the pattern, to force an opening where there had never been one.
"Fight me!" she hissed, her voice strained not from physical effort, but from sheer exasperation. The sound was absorbed by the void as soon as it was uttered.
He did not answer. He deflected a double slash that would have split a moon in two and used the force of the impact to push himself back, creating considerable distance between them. For a moment, the battle paused again. They floated in the nothingness, two fundamental opposites, their energy crackling in the space that separated them. He could feel her fury burning coldly from a distance, a fury directed not just at him, but at the futility of it all.
It was always the same. Her relentless attack. His unbreakable defense. The eventual exhaustion, not of their bodies, but of their wills. And then, the pause.
But she had said no more pauses.
Then, Destruction did something that broke the choreography completely.
She dropped one of her swords.
The act was so unexpected, so contrary to her nature, that Creation froze completely. He watched as the blade of pure darkness fell, not downward, but simply away, losing its cohesion as it distanced itself from its creator. It dissolved into nothingness without a trace, as if it had never existed.
The change in the routine, however small, deeply unsettled him. It was a new variable in an equation that had remained unchanged for eons.
"What are you doing?" he asked, and for the first time, his voice held a note of genuine uncertainty.
Destruction did not answer immediately. She raised the single sword she had left, holding it with both hands. She did not aim it at him in an attack stance. She held it vertically before her, tip upward, in a solemn gesture. Her entire form seemed to concentrate behind that single blade.
Her voice, when she finally spoke, was calm. Terribly calm.
"I will give you an opening. A single one. Perfect and clear."
Her eyes, which were not eyes, fixed on him, and for the first time he saw no fury or frustration in them. He saw absolute resolve.
"If you don't take it..." she paused, letting the weight of her promise settle in the absolute silence, "then I will show you what true destruction is."