I poured the essence inside her and watched for the change, hoping that she would awake and hear her voice again, even if it was just a whisper.
The essence went into her, and every single bit of it was absorbed, and my heart skipped a beat when I felt a stirring in our bond... and that was all.
Aurora did not wake up, nor did she grow a second tail, but she felt warmer, as if she was no longer at the edge of death, and the fear in my heart that I would not be able to wake up again after her sacrifice vanished.
Even though it felt as if I had just given her one spoonful of essence when she would need an ocean of it, I had still made the first step, and the loop changed everything for me.
I don’t care how many times I would need to harvest Vrakth, but Aurora must be ...
[ Warning... Fourth Seal has been broken... The Pale Matron is AWAKE.]
The warning from the Caelith cut my vow in half, and I looked up, opening my full awareness to the world before everything... stopped.
In the moments before the world froze over, I saw that I had been surrounded by nine white tentacles, and not one. It was a good thing I had seen this before, or the shock would have been mind-numbing.
The nine tentacles were spaced miles apart around the pyramid, each a mile thick, rising into the clouds, and they moved together, almost as if they were dancing.
Each tentacle was larger than anything should ever be, and since they were virtual, there was a certain dissonance in the mind when you saw something so massive that made so little change to the environment around them.
All of these thoughts briefly passed through my mind before the world froze. I had felt this sensation the last time I witnessed the Pale Matron awakening, the sense that space and time had ground to a halt.
And this was not my imagination, for as far as my eyes could see, everything was held in place; the blood I’d spilled hung in the air and did not fall. My own breath caught in my throat and stayed there. I could not move, not even a finger, while somewhere below me, the god that the demons worshipped finished waking.
This lasted for one heartbeat, and then it broke, and the end of the world began.
I had come to the realization that my two temporal anchors were situated in two different timelines. In this one, the Pale Matron awakens, and she triggers the resonance that awakens the other parts of her body all over the continent.
In the second timeline, I was captured by the Sovereign, and the world was destroyed in a different manner, since he no longer uses demons, but men. Each of them was bad, and I could not choose an end that I preferred. Hopefully, I would reach a point in the future where I never have to make this choice, but to create my own future.
∞
Perhaps it was my space resonance or the fact that I was an Arcanist, or most likely it was a combination of both that made me brace, a moment before a scream that was below hearing and above it, rippled through my body and soul.
I could feel it through my teeth and the backs of my eyes, and I knew that a mortal’s soul would have been instantly extinguished by this cry, and not even an Acolyte would be spared.
The air for miles shivered, and the earth shattered from the pyramid out to the edge of what I could see. Slabs of earth, the size of districts, tilting before dropping into the massive chasms opening across the earth as miles of the world fell into the darkness below.
This was what was coming; space itself had been tearing itself apart for a while now as the Pale Matron stirred, and now that she was awake and her body had transformed from virtual to real, all that chaos that only my Arcanist soul could sense had come to fruition.
I have burned a continent, so I know what I am capable of, but as I stood and watched the range of devastation that the Pale Matron was causing just from waking up, as if the world weighed nothing to her, it showed me how distant she was from me.
She could end the world by shrugging her shoulders, and that... scared me.
"Crack... Boom!"
Then the pyramid moved.
∞
Thirty kilometers of celestial stone tore free of the earth, and the sound of it flattened the air. The wind from this eruption hit me like a wall and threw me back before I caught the sky again, and when I steadied and looked, the pyramid was rising with a loud droning sound, while shedding sheets of earth the size of cities, lifting off the broken ground into a sky that was itself coming apart.
By all the lights in heaven. I had seen this thing once before, but I was in the ground, barely surviving, but now I was seeing so much more.
The Pale Matron was lifting the Caelith. I saw her five fingers, before her entire arm. It came up through the earth under the pyramid and lifted it into the air, and for a moment, I hung there and looked at it and could not make my mind hold everything that I was looking at.
I had seen this once, but even if I see it a thousand times, I don’t know if I would ever get used to it.
The pyramid kept rising, and I had a choice to make, and there was really only one. The loop could be considered to be over. I don’t want to know what would happen if I were to face a demonic god, but I had spent too long dancing inside danger, so I think I had become a bit crazy.
I gave a crazy laugh, and I flew up alongside the pyramid, tearing my way through the demons on my way, and dodging those that I could not fight. There was pure chaos around me, as every demon seemed to have gone insane, and in the midst of that insanity, I kept flying up, following the rising pyramid.