All around, reality trembled, seeming on the cusp of collapse. The air simmered with a dread as ancient as the void itself. In the moment between heartbeats, Noctis realised, with all the clarity he could muster: he had brought ruin upon himself. The weight of his folly echoed through every fibre of the world.
He had set something in motion far above him!
Watching the bubbling surroundings as if in slow motion, his body slowly glided towards the ground, where an ocean of Void waited, ready to consume him.
"Shit"
Looking around, his pupils moved inhumanly fast, analysing every crevice around him, every object that could be of help to him.
At the same time, the bubbles began to converge toward a single point.
Then, suddenly, they stopped, and everything grew quiet.
"Blup"
"Blap"
"Blup"
Hearing the all too familiar sound of fewer and fewer bubbles arising and popping, Noctis's eyes stopped their frantic search, focusing on the place the bubbles had converged. No, it wasn't fewer; it simply seemed that way since a smaller part was affected.
There, a more formed pile of black liquid began to take shape, at first looking similar to the rising mounds seen before, like a column fighting against the realm's rejection, and yet there was a difference; this time, the mound seemed smaller, the part sticking out looking more like a cone, or a thin, reversed shovel than its formless brethren.
It was the upper part of a beak.
While more and more of the formless sludge started taking shape, converging and giving birth to some kind of eldritch horror, Noctis's attention flicked to a large, untainted plank of wood drifting several feet away—one of the last solid remnants of his shattered raft. Unlike him, the plank was being pulled steadily upward by the erratic surges of gravity that warped the whole area, making it bob and twist through the thick, distorted air. He reached out and, despite the resistance of the strangely viscous atmosphere, managed to snag the plank with his fingertips. Every movement felt like swimming through oil; he had to drag the plank inch by inch toward his body against the upward pull, muscles straining. Once it was secure in his grasp, he rotated it, pressing its length beneath his feet. Balancing atop the uneven, splintered surface, he adjusted his stance, legs bent and arms shifting for balance as currents of shifting gravity threatened to knock him loose. For a moment, he steadied himself, standing on the plank as both he and his makeshift raft floated amid the chaos.
For a heartbeat, he balanced there, legs coiled.
At the same time, he shifted his grip on the object into one more suitable to pull, the threads he had carried with him from the beginning, pulling at something with great force, the resistance palpable. He hurled himself upward, yanking with every ounce of strength on the cord in his hand. The combined force flung him high into the air, felt merely through the loud winds racing past his ears and his hair waving wildly behind him, slamming into his body. Away from the sea of Void below, buying him a precious moment above all of the chaos.
The object obscured by a veil of fog, far away, not buckling under the meager force he could muster, unexpectedly.
Frowning slightly at the sequence of events, Noctis thought, doubts gnawing at him, further enhanced by the corruptive fog surrounding him, making deciding how to proceed much more difficult.
But somehow not as difficult as he had expected, Oroborus was doing something in the soulsea, taking some of the buden?
Disregarding the thought since it would not be of help now, his doubts bit deeper. Did I leave too much resistance? Should I have cut deeper?
Looking down towards the almost fully materialized creature below, halfway buried beneath the liquid still.
Its upper body resembled a gigantic bird, distorted and unsettling in every aspect. Where formidable talons might have gripped the air, the creature's limbs were slick and unfinished, trailing threads of black liquid that melted into the bubbling surface below. Its once-proud eyes were now hollow and only half-formed, empty sockets edged with faint glimmers that flickered in and out of existence. The bird's lower beak still dripped with viscous black fluid, twitching as if caught between solid and liquid states. Feathers that might once have shimmered with colour were now reduced to grotesque mockeries, clumped together and slicked with oil, the intricate patterns and runes they once bore completely washed away, replaced by an unbroken, flawless texture as dark and endless as the void itself. The creature's transformation felt unfinished, as though reality itself struggled to decide what nightmare it ought to become.
Opening its barely formed beak to seemingly let out a cry, preparing an attack of sorts, it breathed in deeply, just a moment away from unleashing some harrowing stream of vicious liquid.
Before it could do so, however, the atmosphere seemed to change.
Closing its open beak the next moment without making a sound, the creature seemed a bit uncertain, even startled. If one could describe the harbinger of death that way.
Was this the formless doing?
No, this is different!
It's stronger!
Feeling a bad premonition.
The force holding him up, strengthening suddenly, Noctis started reaching new heights, floating upward with startling speed, his balance so delicately held before, broken from one moment to the other.
The realm's retaliation was strengthening! The formless, revealing itself, had given the realm a clear target, but why now of all times?!
The Liquid Bird seemed strained as it fought back against the realm's relentless suction, its body rising and falling repeatedly, pulled down by tentacles of the formless substance. Its formless, ever-changing wings flapping, catching the wind, expanding as they did so, propelling itself downward.
Multiple mounds of black rising and falling, shealding the bird, in their attempts, holding it in place, similar to how Noctis had held himself in place when floating in the air.
Flying higher and higher, Noctis quickly found himself no longer seeing the ground, his body swaying and tumbelling through the air. Then, all of a sudden, he broke through the fog; he broke through the veil obscuring his vision, and the world was laid out before him, a clarity he had never before known reaching him.
Looking upon the once-obscured scene, mesmerized, Noctis could finally see its vastness, the greatness of the cataclysmic events happening around him.
Others might have felt fear, sadness, or despair, even, but Noctis felt entirely different. Taking in this scene, multiple unexplainable feelings rushed through him, a wide smile blooming on his face, a true smile, a hideous smile, the barely healed scars on his face beginning to ache.
He felt alive for the first time in a long, long time, so incredibly alive!
The fog before him was traveling away, sucked up towards the rift in the sky resting directly above the cut string, still slowly repairing itself. The leak, in reality, was expelling the void, or at least trying to, as shown by the stream of black foggy particles flying upward through the rift.
The layer of mist shrouding the Void sea was dispersing, leaving a far lighter layer, one less toxic.
This was not the end, however. All around the ginormous sea, the foreign substance, the corruptive void was being sucked up into the sky, similar to the fog before it, another force holding it back, pulling it back down to the earth, fighting the realm's expelling force. The vast majority of the power, concentrated on the formless being that had taken the shape of a bird.
The bird was not budging under the ginormous strain, fighting against the realm's rejection, with all its might.
Tentacles of black liquid floated up, breaking through the dispersing layer of fog, resembling a colossal maw, striving to consume Noctis, its infinite vastness slowly revealing itself behind the dispersing fog, a fog dispersed by the conflicting powers at play. No, he was a mere bystander at this point, like a child who had cast an ember into a field of dry spell-grass, kindling a blaze beyond his control, destined to be nothing more than collateral.
This was no mere clash between mortals; this was a strife ongoing throughout all of existence, a strife between gods. Such scenes occurred throughout the space realm daily. This was a mere glimpse into the vastness of a millennia-long war, a war for the continuation of this realm, of the concept it represented.
Watching this unimaginable scene of gods clashing, his arms stretched out restoring a delicate balance while falling upward, Noctis was… breathtaken? Such beauty. There was such beauty in the orderly chaos, such unimaginable heights and scenes to be seen.
The tennticales thought back against the repulsive incorporeal force, strumming very slowly towards the hole, fighting the realm to a standstill.
This was to be expected; the void sea had a beast controlling it, while the expelling force was merely that, a force. A mindless power, trying to instinctively expel any intruders.
That the void beast was gaining ground did not mean it was strong enough to remain in the space realm; it merely showed that the expulsion had not yet reached the later stages, and the servants of space had not yet designated this a significant problem.
Once they did, however, the situation would drastically change; this was, after all, the home turf of the beasts of space.
How laughable it was that a clash that he could not even stand to be in the proximity of was not even significant enough for the Overlords of the realm to take the prongs into their hands. The insignificance of his, on clear display, a mere speck of dust in the vastness of this universe.
Looking around him, Noctis watched the gods clash, waiting for an opportunity to reach the string, not so far away, the safety of solid ground, dodging the flying tentacles of black sludge pulling at the pieces of rubble scattered across the air, and being sucked upward, like him.
Desperately holding on for dear life, he weaved between the columns, more and more of the fragments of his raft, more of his movement options swallowed by the moment, one thread after the other cut and consumed, his insignificant self not even able to withstand the display of power.
The situation had left his hands long ago.
"Hold on for a few more moments; it will reverse soon."
Hearing the voice, Noctis was overjoyed. Straining his eyes for a moment, meread golden strings fell into his vision. He could see again!
Having no time to analyze the surrounding strings, Noctis trusted Oroborus and simply fought for time, every second a desperate struggle.
Then, a few moments later, it all stopped, the awesome clash between two entities far above him in every conceivable way stopped all of a sudden, the pull upward slowing down. The Black liquid tentacles completely halted.
Feeling a new change in atmosphere, Noctis adjusted his position, holding onto the thread connected to some far-off place with both hands, planning on giving them a final tug, his last attempt.
Boooooom!
The tentacles, extending to the sky, collapsed, and the last figments of fog pressed downward, a few birds, then more ten, twenty, thirty… plummeting from the sky, consumed by the ocean below. The world fell, everything fell, and the space above the void sea was pressed downward with terrible force.
Gravety had returned, stronger than ever before.
Feeling the pull of gravity, Noctis did not fight it, pulling at the thread he was tightly grasping, the one and only that had survived the harrowing journey by some miracle, the one that was connected to a far-off ginormous tree.
A tree that had grown brittle under the corruptive force of the void, a tree, Noctis had left a deep cut upon, on his journey to the void, a tree large enough to span the entire distance between him and the fallen thread of fate.
Pulling with all the strength he mustered, the gravity propelling him downward, his muscles protesting loudly, just about to rip. He felt a ripple spread from far away, a groan of sorts, something far in the distance bending slowly.
It's not enough!
Feeling the string buckling under the pressure, his body quickly closing in on the corrosive substance below, Noctis looked desperately for a way out.
Shit! Do I really have to do that!?
Not having the time to think it over, Noctis concentrated on his eyes, a golden web reflected in them a moment later, the tapestry of fate surrounding him. A magical sight with golden threads surrounding and taking in every facet of the world.
He was less than enthusiastic about the plan he had come up with, Oroborus staying strangely quiet, maybe already aware of what Noctis planned.
Looking at the golden strings surrounding him, they seemed strangely strong and thick, the lustre they emitted brighter than ever before, maybe because of the proximity to their physical counterpart.
Some wrapped around him, parting from him, extending towards the large golden string, taking seemingly random paths; others went in a straight line towards some far-off place, a thick bundle growing in a certain direction north.
Taking one last deep breath, Noctis parted the pale white string he was holding, which connected to the tree, at its base, and from there took a convoluted path wrapped around hundreds of branches high up, until it eventually reached him.
Well, not so high up anymore since Noctis had been floating far higher than the tree had ever grown, just a few moments ago.
With one last suppressed sigh, Noctis let the splitt white thread wrap around a random golden thread with a pale core, all of the other pale cored threads pointing in the same direction.
As it wrapped around the golden thread, the white one extending from Noctis took the same colour as the golden one, its before tearing self, strengthening, no longer giving the feeling of a movable object, seeming more like the other golden connections between people.
Hanging on the golden string, a new immovable hold, Noctis felt his mind being sucked into that newly formed connection.
Before fully succumbing to the notion, however, he moved his body with all his power, throwing himself upward, finally finding something hard and immovable to draw strength from a clearly better type of leverage than the easily moved debris floating around. Throwing all his strength into a pulling motion, before the world went black, the outcome of his action now set in stone a wide smile illuminating his face.
The ancient, immovable tree, that had stood for ages to come, finally moved under the new, far more strengthened strings, strings that were previously unseen, now visible with a clear golden light emitting, rejuvenating and complementing its blue lustre wrapped around its base, the hundreds of threads travelling along its branches to the very top before converging into a singular golden line, leading into the unknown to Noctis.
The loud reverberating sound of wood cracking and groaning under great pressure could be heard even throughout the awesome clash, throughout the entire dark sea. The liquified bird briefly glanced over in response.
The tree that had withstood the ages was going to fall today, a mere child having led its end.