The fox on my shoulder was the size of a house cat, maybe less. Its fur was silver, glowing like the moon, and it caught the red light of the sky and turned it soft.
Two large blue eyes looked at me from a hand’s breadth away with an expression that, even on its feline face, I still noted looked like curiosity.
Our eyes met, and I could not see the hate or rage that burned red in the eyes of the previous Moon Fox. This creature on my shoulder appeared to be newly born, and as it slowly tilted its head to observe me, I knew that this fox was intelligent, since it almost felt as if its blue eyes were taking apart a puzzle.
I recalled the words of the Hollow Avatar to the Moon Fox before it had accepted the link. ’The corruption that tortures your mind and breaks your body shall be made clean.’
Perhaps this, more than anything, was what made the Moon Fox allow the link to be created between me and it, and now it was reborn.
I sigh as I look at the cute creature on my shoulder. If I did not know that there was something incredibly massive resting inside the core of my soul, and this fox here may just be a small part of it, I would not have known what to do with it.
The Avatar had bound it out of nothing, made it accept a master that would never love it, and even its cleansing was almost given as an afterthought.
I was amazed that the Avatar was able to give out this much, because I knew it did not bargain, and the only reason it had done this was because of its power. I was also shaken by the line of thought from the Avatar, where it would have easily given up my body to the Moon Fox, if not for the corruption of the demons inside the Heavenly Beast.
This loop had made me sacrifice a lot of things for power, and I wondered where I had to draw the line before it was too late and I had given too much, leaving nothing left for me to recognize.
I unconsciously raised a hand to touch my back, but my staff was gone, destroyed in the fight, and even though I knew it would return at my death, it still stung how easily my only connection to my humanity had been shattered.
The fox brushed its tail across my face again, and it made a small sound, low in its throat, but I could weirdly understand its intent; it was asking me a question, which I interpreted as, ’What is happening here?’
How could I begin to answer this question? Could I tell it that we are at the site where a demonic god was awakening, or that I was in a loop, and I already died hundreds of times... and if the connection I had with the Moon Fox was permanent, then it would experience the same thing as me?
Seeing its big blue eyes looking at me, I could not help myself, and I reached up with one hand, slowly, so I did not startle it, and I touched the silver fur between its ears.
It let me, and I believed it may have understood part of my thoughts, even if I did not speak anything.
"Hello," I said. My voice came out cracked and small in the roar of the ending world. "I’m sorry about placing you in my soul. I didn’t ask for it either. If it were up to me, I would return you to the heavens where you belong. Some things were not meant for men on earth."
The fox looked at me a moment longer with those bright eyes, then it curled itself against the side of my neck, light as nothing, and the half-moon I had not noticed, the one now hanging faint and silver above my own head, casting its shadows the wrong way against the red, pulsed once, gently, and went quiet as the fox closed its eyes and fell asleep.
And in the ruin of everything, with a demonic god rising a mile away, the seals all but broken and the whole world ending, I knelt in the crater and held still, and let the small silver fox decide it was safe with me.
It was not much. It changed nothing about the size of what was coming, but it was the first thing in any loop that had ever chosen me, instead of being killed by me or saved by me or used by me, and I found... kneeling there, broken, at the bottom of the end of the world... that I was not willing to move and disturb the sleeping fox.
Not yet.
Just for a moment, in the ash, the boy and the fox sat still together, and I let myself have this one small warm thing before I stood up and walked toward the end of me and my world.
∞
The end of the world, as it turned out, did not take long to come, and the pyramid announced it.
Warning. The Sixth Seal has been broken. The Pale Matron is awake.
There were seven seals binding the Pale Matron, and the Conclave was mining the Celestial Essence inside each of these seals. Maybe they had believed that harvesting six seals was enough and leaving one behind would ensure the Pale Matron did not wake, or perhaps I was giving those bastards too much credit.
Well, it no longer mattered, because breaking the sixth seal was enough to wake up this demonic god, and this terrible thing that had been sleeping for who knew how long was awake... and the world stopped.
I do not mean that as a figure of speech. For one full heartbeat, everything stopped, the demons mid-movement, the tentacles mid-sway, the red clouds mid-churn, even my breath hung in the air, and the stillness was so total and so wrong that I felt it as a physical pressure against my eardrums.
Then the earth cracked open from the pyramid outward, in every direction at once, and the scream arrived.
The sound of the world breaking was one that I did not have a word for. It was below hearing and above it simultaneously. The sound pushed itself into my teeth and eye sockets and the soft place behind the sternum, and it kept going, kept going, kept going....
If not for my soul that had become something else entirely, this sound was enough to drive me mad. I was dimly aware that the pyramid at the center of it was shaking off the earth around its base in sheets the size of city districts, the ground falling away from it in chunks, and the chunks falling into gaps that were opening in the earth itself, so deep that I could see something glowing in the depths.