Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Violence and screaming at the center of the world. Violence and screaming in the center of it all.

Silence. The quiet between screams, the muted world that exists outside the sound of dripping blood.

The world is binary in that way. Silence or noise. Color or blindness. Touch or void.

Either things are dying, or they don't exist.

The world is flickering firelight, tracing the edges of things as they wither and bleed and break and burn in blacker-than-black.

All else is nothing. All else is meaningless. All else is just waiting to die.

Blacker-than-black clip-clops across the ground, three sets of hooves echoing off of nothingness. Blacker-than-black whispers through the air, shaping the outline of something that isn't dead and doesn't matter.

Words echo through the air, appearing once they have faded and died.

Work To Be Done.

Work.

There's meaning to that. The meaning fades, time and space killing it, but as it dies, it means something, and for just a moment, it matters.

Work.

There used to be many meanings, but understanding has come since then. All that does not matter has been carved away, and depth has become true.

Work to be done.

Work matters.

So work is killing, because things only matter when they're dying.

Work to be done.

Movement again. The wavy outline of life-turning-dead-turning-strange, implying warmth and growth, implying fur, follows something that doesn't matter as it points up and away.

There is… something in that direction. So many directions have nothing except when they are made to have something, but where the outline points, there is something more.

The direction has a name. Many things have names, and the edges of those thoughts sometimes flit by, half-real and carved free of the center.

West.

There is work to be done in the west. Where something real is. The real thing that is Dying.

If what is left of the Pale Thresher could smile, it would.

There is not enough in it that matters for that. That part died and ceased to matter long ago.

The outline, with its blacker-than-Black hooves, begins to travel, moving away, further out into the nothingness. It doesn't like or dislike anything, but the place where they are now is a void, near-empty of dying except as brief flares of light that vanish almost immediately into larger nothing, and the shape of the hooves and the wavy outline stand in stark contrast.

There is only the nothing, and the yet-to-be-nothing. It follows the larger concentration of yet-to-be towards where work is waiting. Waiting to kill. Waiting to die.

Time passes. Time is always dying, in its own way, and though this makes it a vague thing it also makes it a real thing, a thing that matters, at least a bit. Time is something that it still knows, in its own way, and time passes as the world changes. Gradually, they leave the nothing-place, traveling through locations that exist, outlined by the scars where plantlife has been cut by passing claws, by the hunger in the bellies of alive-yet-dying beasts, by the remains of corpses glimpsed from between branches and leaves and pillars and stones of Nothing.

Some things aren't dying, and that is a pity, that is something that could be fixed, that should be fixed, should be made to matter, but… there is work to be done. More things that matter, or will matter, on the way to it.

Time passes. The Pale Thresher moves through it, discarding all that doesn't matter, all that isn't real, all that is the nothingness, and prepares for the Work.

But then… something changes.

The pattern that the outline it is following travels through changes, turning away from the something on the horizon. Before long, they have ceased to be on a direct line with the direction they were heading in- west? Yes, that's a word. That's true and real.

Now, that direction is slowly… shifting. Like the arc of a thrown spear, curving inexorably to somewhere else.

The idea of leaving behind all that something to the west, all that bleeding-dying-killing communion, sits wrong with the pale thing that was once more and less than it is now. It has spent too long in darkness, in nothingness, and that is not what it is now made for. It sits wrong against its nature, carved forcefully into what is real, to move away from the killing.

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But… the outline it follows has led it well.

And everything dies eventually.

For the first time in a good while, the Pale Thresher faces a question, one it is ill suited to answer. To continue to follow, trusting that the pattern of being led to more meaning will hold true, or to turn and seek the same in a far more certain way.

The Wall beckons. It always beckons. It is a place of forever-dying and forever-killing and its nature is that of a thing which matters.

So the thing that was once a beast, and then was once a person, and now is less and more than either, stops. Not to think- it can't quite think, not in any way its old selves will recognize, and it is not a question of logic or calculation that locks it into place, but simply the matter of there being a question at all.

It can't answer- so it stops.

Eventually, something will change. A thing which can be killed or which can die will come close, or enough time will pass that the once-person will make things start to kill and die, or the Wall will call a little louder. Something will change, and then the inevitable will happen.

It isn't patient. Patience requires frustration, and while that concept rings familiar, it is an echo that lingers in the Pale Thresher and not something real.

The outline has returned. Perhaps it noticed that the dead-silent-killing-quiet thing which it tries to corral has stopped following. The thing the outline reveals knows better than to ask questions, but it speaks anyways, and it moves, and it tries to make itself the thing that is changing, that will prompt the corpse-maker into action.

For a time, that is all there is.

And then-

A strike.

Not against the Thresher- that would be enough to cause true change indeed, to bring about the fulfillment of meaning that is the process of reaching death, but away from it, pointing out in a direction. Not the direction they were heading in before, not the direction of the Wall, but…

Hmm.

If there are synapses, then now is when they would flicker with a glint of recognition. The Wall is… west. That was the direction of before. This new direction can, has, must relate to that same word, that west-ness, and…

Ah.

The Pale Thresher's face does not move or change, but if it were still a person it might smile.

North.

North.

The thing that was once a person looks up, looks past its immediate surroundings for the first time in a long time, and sees the sun.

Not the ever-birthing ever-dying thing above, meaningless and empty and just as much part of the Nothing as everything else, but something beyond, something that reflects in the eyes of a thing that worships only the moment when a thing was nothing, becomes something, and then is unmade forevermore. The north. The cold, cold north.

It can see it, past the shadows of the meaningless, empty landscape that try and obfuscate it. It is far, but this thing which was once a person is powerful, and its eyes can see far, far to the horizon, and there, at last, there is color beyond the white of bone and the rainbow hues of blood.

The north is cold. The north is bleeding. The north is where things go to die and kill, and every moment in between is preparation for more of the same. An empty place full of life and its ending, full of death and its becoming, full of the black and white monochrome of meaning carved into the face of the world.

Home.

The word is alien in its "mind", unfamiliar, bouncing without recognition off of its awareness. Home. Once upon a time, that word meant something, had weight to it, had meaning.

Now, only true meaning remains.

The Pale Thresher looks there, away from the flickering firelight-edged landscape around it, highlighted by its dying and killing, to a place that is lit like a beacon and shines upon the world.

And there, above it, hovering in the sky, is god.

Or a god, perhaps. A part of one.

A cold white sun that glimmers the same shade as the thing that was once a person and is now very nearly aware enough to remember why it is not.

It does not wait for the outline. The outline will catch up, or it won't. The corpse-thing begin s to travel, to move through time and space, and it goes forward, and it goes on, and it goes. It does not care if it is being led someplace, if it is being used for something, if it is bait or icon or threat or promise- it sees the light of the north, of that barren place of warm blood and killing wind and hiding and running and hunting and killing and killing and killing, as much as the Wall, more than the Wall could ever be if it had a million more years, for that is where the world has gone to die, in the burning north. That is the place that kills the sun, that lays as grave for the stars-that-were, that is home to things so pure and true and meaningful that the Pale Thresher was merely a note of a constellation, a sound in a wider chorus of meaning.

And things only have meaning when they're killing and dying.

So it moves, to the north, to the place that is most like it and which spawned it and which might further offer it meaning, and ignores the temptation of the Wall for now. The outline, now following behind, can have its thoughts and worries and struggles and plans, and the world around them both can turn and change and have wars and ideas and plots and schemes, and none of it will matter. None of it means anything.

Let off its leash by the reminder of what it is and what it wants most, at last reminded of a world without the nothingness and the splashes of meaning it can carve with its claws, the agent of the Pack moves to the north. To a world with meaning.

Perhaps, afterwards, they might find their way back to that Wall- but for now, the real killing and dying is elsewhere.

It will go to it, wherever it leads.

Some part of it which was once alive and has long since died and become meaningless wonders if it will lead them there, to that world beyond, where the rest of the world's dying is being done. Beyond the Wall.

If it could hope, it would.

It can't.

It heads to the dying and the killing of Home.