NOVEL NEXT Chapter 430: Time, Life, And Death
"Let's begin."
The ground cracked as they moved.
Death sent a sheet of annihilation rolling across the stone ahead of them, creating a tide that unmade the world from ankle height to waist.
The concentrated energy of death ate through the corpses, erased pebbles from the ground, and gnawed the skirts of buildings, sending them toppling to the ground.
Aurelius stepped into it and shifted the paving stones under his feet to the time they existed before the tide.
He slipped forward as the air froze in a false facsimile of time stop, the tide breaking around him like a river parting around a sealed jar of yesterday.
Death's aura met a bubble of before, the two forces snarling and splashing around each other. Where they touched, the world smoked and reality crinkled.
Luna's beasts came on at the same moment, moving right at home through the aura of death.
The root wolves leapt into the air, with the thorn stags lowering their heads in a charge not far behind.
Not to be left out of the charge, the pale made-from-flesh things loped forward unnaturally, their joints bending in extra directions with astounding speed.
Aurelius turned his left palm towards them and opened it slightly. A grid of moments unfolded out of thin air, creating square cells of slowed time that caught the beasts as they attacked.
The energy of life infused into them tried to resist, but the roots that had formed them dried and crumbled in a blink as he accelerated the span of their growth, then their lifespan, then their decay.
He sent others backward, back to seed, back to dirt, and back to empty stone. Life met statute and was filed into "not yet" or "already done."
Death arrived in the gap that had been created and slashed. Aurelius parried with a sword he'd swung a second later and earlier at the same time, the scythe failing to bite not because the metal was weak but because it could not find a present moment that contained both itself and Aurelius' guard.
Sparks of light infused with temporal frost and death scattered through the air. Dizzying effects appeared wherever they landed.
"Tell me, Warden," Death said, his voice as gentle and deep as a grave shovel's first bite into a grave. He moved with no wasted motion, no fury, only programmatic execution of the end.
"What is it you seek to keep? Power?" The scythe hissed for Aurelius's throat and missed to graze a different now.
"Legacy?" The second blade carved a pillar into two histories, and in both, the marble fell.
"Order." Aurelius said, and his rebuttal was a series of strokes that cut the world into stacked sheets of time, each sliding half a breath sideways.
Death's aura drained each layer as it touched them, the layers dissolved in a descending sequence of silences.
In the past, three people fell inexplicably dead as they were touched by Death's aura in that moment in time in the bustling market of Carthage.
Luna came from the side. Vines shot up around Aurelius's boots and calves, but they did not manage to bind him. He'd already written himself out of their future.
She changed tactics, pouring vitality directly at him in order to seize control of his body, even as Death drowned the edges of it.
Life tried to crowd his cells and pack histories of growth into him, while Death tried to levy a tax of end.
Aurelius ran his gauntlet from knuckles to elbow in a thick cuff of time that kept his tissues at their preferred second. Vitality struck and slid around him, and entropy leaned in and was refused.
They battered him anyway.
Luna's homunculi sacrificed themselves to expose angles.
Death's scythes were too honest to lie. Each stroke presented a solved problem, its solution immediate and unadorned.
Aurelius countered with as many complications as he could create.
A nick here that would undo a follow through two moves later, a step there that denied Death a future footfall unless Death chose a different present line.
The plaza fractured around them, their attacks falling into different places in time in the history of Carthage.
Inexplicable destructions that had happened and could not be explained in that specific spot, decades before they were even born, had their origin from this very moment.
Aurelius slashed high, and Death put his forearm blade up. The edges kissed and tried to unwrite each other's paragraphs.
For a moment they held, the world buckling between contradictory editorials.
Luna dove through that collapsed beat and drove a stake of living wood towards Aurelius's ribs.
The Warden twisted and let it pass through a version of space where his torso hadn't occupied yet, then let his current self settle back around the shaft like a scarf dropped over a coat stand.
The stake was in him, sort of. He was around it and not, at the same time.
He seized it with his left hand and aged it a thousand years in a thousandth of a second. The wood cracked to brown flakes and sifted out of him.
"You are not the first fanatic to swear you'll tear down Carthage, boy," Aurelius told Death, voice perfectly even behind the silver mask.
He pivoted and swept his sword in a wide arc, and Death's aura peeled mortar from walls like old scabs. "Do you know what you are? A symptom. A scab from a wound that we're already healing."
"And you," Death replied, raising his blade for a cleaving cut that even the wind held its breath to hear, "are a speck of dust in my ambition."
Their blows met and the stones around them stopped pretending they were structures. Buildings failed. The plaza unmade itself politely.
A sub-level slid into view briefly before choosing not to exist. Citizens who had occupied that space hours before were unmade without pain, and without time for fear.
Others were remade as creatures of vine and sinew and died inside a breath when Death's womb of ending touched them.
The entire layer, from fountain to bell tower, was simply reduced to rubble.
Only three figures remained stable in the storm of primordial forces.
The Warden wrapped in time.
The Lover wrapped in stubborn life.
And the Man who would be death and already was.