I did not wait for them to come to me; I took my storm with me as I headed towards them. A part of me knew that this action I was making was the wrong one. What I should be doing now was to stand in place and let my storm spread unchecked.
I had become a natural disaster, and in time my storm would cover the world, and every moment I spent outside combat was gaining me greater advantage because the truth of the matter was that I was no longer satisfied with scrounging above the earth when I could head to the heavens and pull those oh so bright stars down.
However, this path of mine that urged caution was being silenced, replaced by the need to never back down against any force arrayed against me; it was what my lady would love.
I moved through the continent, aware that I was passing vast areas that were filled with beauty and culture. Countless tribes, stories, institutions, homes, and all sorts of wonders were on this continent, but all of these were soon replaced by endless fields of screaming skulls.
In a blink of an eye, I reached my destination, and I saw that they had built a wall across the sky.
Before me were thousands of Arcanists arrayed in tiers across the western sky from the ground to the cloud, and between them and behind them and rising out of the earth to meet them were vast mechanical wonders.
This forced me to acknowledge the fact that I had barely scratched the surface of magus society. The mechanism of the loop and my abilities have pushed me rapidly to the peak of this world, and I had to pay for such growth with ignorance, all because my growth was not natural.
A brief flash of silver fur brushed through my mind, "But we cheat every time, Elric"
I would not call what I did across the loop cheating, but power always comes with a price, and my ignorance was an expected price. But this weakness would not last forever, and so I brushed this useless thought from my mind and focused on what the enemy was bringing against me.
I had not known there were machines like these, and my eagerness to learn pushed back the cold a little. I had no more heartbeat, and I no longer breathed, but for a moment, I think there was a brief window where I could hear a phantom heart beating beside my dead one.
These machines were vast siege-engines of black iron and bound Law walking on legs the size of towers. I saw magic spires raised in a single night out of the bones of the land, floating fortresses hung with a hundred cannon-mouths of gathered essence, whole structures of war that dwarfed the Arcanists tending them.
As I watched, I could see the subtle changes in the designs of these war machines, Aelmar and Vothar. Two different continents and magic systems, and they were bringing the full bounty of their magical knowledge to me.
I understand that I may be looking at some of the tools that had been used to kill gods, and I wanted to possess this knowledge. I smiled; all of it was waiting for me, if I had the power to take it.
With five million dead souls, I went ahead to seize my destiny... for Death.
They did not wait for me to reach them, and there was no way for me to hide my presence, but even if there was, I did not wish to hide.
A deep silence suddenly spread across the entire world, as if time had been paused; even the souls in the storm went quiet for a moment, and this was the only warning I got before the entire wall of power arrayed in front of me screamed... and the sky came apart.
∞
I have been in a Tribulation that none of my peers would be able to survive. I have stood under a Sovereign’s rage and survived it; I thought I knew what massed power felt like... I did not know this.
This was every Arcanist on two continents and every engine they had built, firing together, a coordinated volley from thousands of tiers of Law and a hundred fortress-cannons and towers that bent space to aim all of it, all at once, converging on a single point in the sky that was me.
The first thing it did was take my storm, a power that for a brief moment I thought was untouchable. But what I had failed to realize was that you can fight weather if you bring enough, and they had brought enough.
Ah, I wanted knowledge and information about the secrets of my world, and here they were being unleashed before my eyes.
The fortress cannons fired columns of what I could only describe as anti-essence, which, when I thought about it, were the perfect counter to my storm.
All of this unmaking light was braided by the towers into lances a hundred miles long and a mile wide, and where they hit my storm, the red cloud deleted. The lance punched through in shafts, as whole regions of my sky simply ceased to exist, and the souls in those regions guttered and went dark on their chains.
And every soul they extinguished, I felt die. They had been ripped away from me, and my chains could not hold them before a force like gravity drew them into the heavens where they were scattered.
The loss of the weight torn off my back in chunks by the lance should have been relief, but it was agony, because Death hoards everything, and nothing was supposed to be torn from her possession, it was taboo, and this caused a wave of incredible pain of a sort I had never felt before, causing my massive body to freeze in place, as I tried to process the fact that this world had stolen my possession away from me.
The chains snapped where the lances hit and whipped back into me, and I screamed as a hundred thousand souls were ripped off my back in a single volley, and the recoil of it went through my storm.
However, I was the target for this lance of unmaking, and in my pain I could not even respond before the lance slammed into me, carrying all the laws that had unmade my storm.