NOVEL NEXT Chapter 222: Choose.
"Nicholas," Creed whispered, the name falling from his lips like a prayer to gods who clearly weren't listening. "Oh shit, Nicholas, what are you doing here?"
The implications hit him like a physical blow to the chest.
If Nicholas Grey was here, trapped in this nightmare realm just as he was, then whatever force had dragged Creed through that portal hadn't been acting randomly.
It had been selective, purposeful, gathering specific individuals for reasons that he was beginning to suspect he really didn't want to understand.
But the horror of seeing his rival's familiar silver hair protruding from that living cocoon was nothing compared to what happened next.
As Creed watched in growing dread, more of the cocoons began to move. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, but with increasing agitation as if whatever was inside them was beginning to wake up.
The web itself began to vibrate with a low-frequency hum that he could feel in his bones, and the pulsing light of the organic strands grew brighter and more urgent.
And then, silence.
Not the absence of sound, but the presence of something so vast and patient that noise itself seemed to recoil in respect.
The very air grew thick, pressing against Creed's eardrums with the weight of epochs. When the voice finally came, it was not heard but felt, reverberating through his bones, his blood, the spaces between his thoughts.
"Child."
The single word carried the authority of continental drift, the patience of geological time. It did not echo—echoes were for lesser sounds in smaller spaces. This voice simply existed, had always existed, would always exist.
Creed opened his mouth to respond, but found that in the presence of such absolute certainty, his questions felt trivial, insignificant. The voice continued, unhurried as the formation of stars.
"You wear names that are not yours. Call upon powers you do not comprehend. Walk paths carved by others."
The web began to shift, not violently but with the inexorable motion of tides. Nicholas's cocoon descended deeper, and as it moved, Creed caught sight of his rival's face through the translucent membrane.
Nicholas's eyes were open now, staring directly at him with an expression of such profound resignation that it made Creed's stomach clench.
Nicholas mouthed a single word: Run.
"The Grey speaks wisdom, though it comes centuries too late. There is no distance in this realm that matters. No direction that leads away."
As the voice spoke, the landscape around Creed began to change. The dark hills in the distance weren't shifting—they were revealing themselves.
What he had taken for natural formations were structures, impossibly ancient and vast. Pyramids that dwarfed mountains. Spires that pierced dimensions. Architecture that followed geometries his mind couldn't process.
"Observe."
The command was gentle but absolute. Creed found his gaze drawn inexorably to the other chasms.
From this new vantage point, he could see that they weren't separate formations but part of a single, impossibly complex design. The screaming chasm, the chasm of chains, the web-filled pit—they formed three points of a triangle so large it encompassed continents.
And at the center of that triangle, where the lines of force would intersect, stood Creed.
"The Orphan finds his heritage. The Summoner discovers his purpose. The Key approaches the Lock."
The words hit him like physical blows, each one carrying implications that his conscious mind rejected but his deeper instincts recognized with growing horror.
The entity wasn't explaining—it was announcing. These weren't revelations but confirmations of truths that had always existed.
In the web-filled chasm, something began to rise. Not the entity itself, but a memory given form. Creed watched in paralyzed fascination as images materialized in the air above the pit like smoke given substance and meaning.
He saw a woman with his eyes standing in a laboratory that defied the laws of physics, her hands working with instruments that seemed to exist in more dimensions than three.
Beside her, a man whose face was hidden in shadow, but whose presence radiated the same otherworldly authority as the voice that now addressed Creed.
He saw the woman's belly swelling with pregnancy, saw the way reality itself seemed to bend around her unborn child. Saw the monitors and devices that tracked not just vital signs but dimensional fluctuations, temporal distortions, the very fabric of existence responding to whatever grew within her.
He saw the moment of birth, when the child's first cry shattered every piece of glass in the facility and opened spontaneous portals to seventeen different dimensions. Saw the parents' faces—not joy, but terror. Not celebration, but desperate preparation.
And he saw them running, the child in their arms, reality fracturing in their wake as forces beyond comprehension gave chase.
"The Convergence has begun. What was separated must reunite. What was hidden must emerge. What was sacrificed…"
The voice paused, and in that pause, Creed felt the weight of cosmic attention focusing on him with laser intensity.
"…must be reclaimed."
The images in the air shifted, showing the three chasms as they truly were—not prisons but incubators. Not torment but transformation. In the screaming chasm, he saw Lilith suspended in a cocoon of crystallized darkness, her form shifting between the succubus he knew and something far more primal.
With each scream, reality around her rewrote itself, darkness learning to take new shapes, shadow discovering forms it had forgotten.
In the chasm of chains, Tierra hung suspended in bonds that weren't restraining her but connecting her to something vast beneath the earth.
Each rattle of the chains sent seismic shocks through dimensions, waking things that had slept since the universe was young.
And in the web-filled chasm, Meredith danced between the strands, her movements weaving new patterns in the fabric of time itself.
The other cocoons weren't victims but witnesses, observers needed to anchor the process of temporal restructuring.
"They remember now. As will you."
The voice carried finality, inevitability. Not a threat but a promise. Not a choice but a recognition of what had always been true.
Creed felt something stirring in his chest, something that had been dormant his entire life but was now awakening with the inexorable force of evolution itself.
His skin began to glow with the same inner light as the landscape around him. His bones hummed with harmonics that matched the frequency of the web, the chains, the screams.
The orphan who had never known his parents. The summoner who could only call forth "succubi." The student who had failed his greatest test.
All lies. All misdirection. All necessary deceptions to keep him hidden until the moment of Convergence arrived.
"Choose."
The word hung in the air like a sword waiting to fall. Not choose between options, but choose to accept what he had always been. Choose to step into the role that had been written into his genetic code before his parents had fled into the space between dimensions.
Choose to complete the triangle and bring about whatever cosmic event his birth had set in motion twelve millennia ago.
In the distance, the ancient structures began to pulse with synchronized light. The web descended further into its chasm, carrying Nicholas and the other witnesses to depths where human consciousness could observe the Convergence without being destroyed by its magnitude.
And Creed stood at the center of forces older than civilization, younger than time, feeling the weight of destiny pressing down on him like the gravitational pull of a collapsing star.
The choice had never been his to make. But the making of it—that was the only freedom he had left.