Chapter 242: Into the Chaos River
The void trembled under the impact of two wills. Igaris’s gauntleted fist met Primus’s open palm and the shockwave rolled outward like a new dawn breaking across dead worlds. For a heartbeat everything stilled. Then the battlefield answered in a thousand roars: the outer beings howled, the allied gods cried out, and even the broken stars seemed to hold their breath.
Primus’s face flickered with something he had not expected: surprise. The leader, who had once crushed Igaris and made gods bleed like children, staggered under a force he thought inferior. Igaris pressed, the Ancient Titan transformation amplifying his power until his brow was lit with molten light. Each muscle was a mountain; each breath bent the rules that bound lesser beings. He was not merely a god fighting a god. He had become an inevitability.
"You were always loud," Primus said, voice like grinding voidstone. "You talk of fate, of love, of protection. You are loud and sentimental. That will not stop me."
Igaris did not answer with words. He answered with motion.
"BANG!"
He slammed Primus into the carcass of a shattered moon and followed through. Space warped. Time skipped. Dozens of outer beings that had risked closing upon the Overlord were flung like rag dolls. Primus tried to rise, and a black curl of voidfire crawled along his ribs where Igaris’s attack had opened him. The leader tasted blood for the first time this war. He was not used to that sensation.
Primus snarled and struck back. His claws tore at the very fabric of law. Where they touched, the air hissed and whitened, reality flaked away as if under acid. He had drawn power from the Chaotic Cosmos. But even Primus’s terror-fueled ferocity could not keep pace with the methodical, inexorable force pressing down on him.
Igaris moved like a judgment. He brought not only fists but law itself to bear: genesis to repair, ruination to rend, fire to sear, space to fold. Each blow carved holes in Primus’s defenses.
Around them, the war twisted and burned. The wives and generals fought with a fury born of desperate love. Evernight’s dual flame shredded swarms into ash and light; Shirley’s music bent minds until battle-born rage turned inward; Diva’s dream-lands trapped clusters of enemy vanguards and broke them on the anvil of her will; Lilya loomed as a colossus, every wingbeat a hurricane that scattered ranks. Jian Longchen became a blade of moving history; Malthius raised dead legions that stormed and fell and rose again; Serynthia’s dragonfire cut swathes through the tide.
For a while the tides turned in Igaris’s favor. Outer cohorts fell back. The elation that pulsed through his ranks made Igaris’s heart ache with both pride and sorrow. He had come so far from the man who had bled and begged. The universe seemed, for an instant, to tilt toward salvation.
Primus’s eyes went cold. "You think you can press me to death with parlor tricks, he spat. Your wives, your generals, your little child in some hidden nest. You think my kin will not feast? I came to a banquet, and I found an empty tray. I will take revenge."
He hesitated a benediction, not to grant grace but to summon infection. The Chaotic Cosmos answered like a hunger fed. The barrier that had trembled earlier opened just a hair more; a black tide slithered through, carrying voices without language and colors that stroked minds like knives.
Primus drew that tide into himself and then flung it outward. The tide was not pure power. It was contamination. Chaos leeched at the bedrock of order. It did not simply burn flesh; it rewired meaning. It made edges blur. It poisoned law. A light that had been certain of itself fell into doubt. A blade that had cleaved heaven turned back and bit its wielder. The first wave hit like a storm of winter knives.
"Ahhh!"
Screams rose; different screams than battle had birthed so far. These were not calls of rage or pain as much as the sound of being unmade from within.
Evernight also convulsed as black and white fire clashed inside her chest. Her angelic wings flickered and her demonic halo cracked. Shirley’s fingers bled where her strings snapped; the melody that had bound enemy minds broke into shards and sliced her palms raw. Diva’s dream-world warped; she staggered back as nightmares she had made turned on her, memories of sorrow folding into the landscape and clawing at her throat. Lilya, enormous and invulnerable, threw her head back and roared as scales fell off like molten peels. The Mountain King’s great axe twisted in his hands. Jian Longchen’s blade, brilliant enough to cut foundations of galaxies, vibrated and split with a sound like the world breaking.
The outer beings cheered, for Chaos answered them like a banquet bell.
"My lord," one of the generals managed through cracked lips, "we are..."
Igaris’s voice cut over the tremor. Stay with "me. Hold fast."
But the infection was insidious. It touched body and soul both. Some were felled instantly; others remained standing but their eyes were distant as if their memories had been removed and replaced with empty catalogs of pain. Malthius’s undead legions stilled as if filaments had been pulled from a puppet. Even the allied Supreme Gods found their faith rotting at the roots.
Igaris felt it at the edges of his perception. His laws were pure, but purity alone was not a shield against a force that sought to rewrite the concept of purity itself. He could hold. He had a body like forged world and will like a mountain. Pain burrowed in him, but the core remained. He saw, with a clarity sharpened by the Architect’s Eyes, the pattern that would save them. He would not let those he loved be ground under chaos while he stood and did nothing.
"Come with me," he said, voice like command and lament. "You will not leave this place to die."
Evernight tried to refuse. "I will not hide, she said. This is my battlefield. My child—"
"She is safe. It’s your turn," Igaris interrupted gently. "The sanctuary waits. Your arms will hold her there safe."
Evernight’s eyes flashed frantic, but memory and trust tempered her. She embraced him for a moment that tasted of a lifetime, then with a motion born of sorrow and steel she yielded. The seal opened. Igaris wrenched a pocket of stable space free, the doorway into the inner cosmos glaring like a polished black gem. One by one, wounded and exhausted, they were swept through.
Shirley’s fingers were slick with blood, but she trusted him and went. Diva vanished from the battlefield muttering a single, strange gratitude into his name. Lilya’s enormous claws curled around a husk of enemy and then, unable to stand, she dove through like an island plunging into midnight.
Others spouses also followed.
After them Jian Longchen, broken but proud, bent his head and stepped through. Malthius marched like a funeral procession and was gone. Even the Mountain King’s great shoulders hunched and he passed into the heart of Igaris’s realm.
When the last of them went through, there remained only smoke and blood and the ragged, bitter hope of survivors left broken on the field.
"It’s futile," Primus said, voice a serrated promise. "You cannot save them forever."
Igaris closed his eyes and inhaled the battlefield into himself, not literally but in intent. A tidal feeling of everything he loved and everything he had lost anchored him: the soft shape of Evernight’s cheek, Shirley’s music, Diva’s laughter, Lilya’s primal roar, the Mountain King’s gruff oath, Jian Longchen’s steady hand. They were stitched into him. They gave him a shape a banquet of fidelity that no chaotic hunger could digest.
"No. They will be safe within me," he said, voice like the cutting edge of a new world. "But you will not.."
Then he ran.
He bore down on Primus with every law he could wield. Space snapped like a net. Fate rethreaded connections so that the leader’s movements lagged behind his intention. Genesis folded to create walls that bound and bruised; ruination unmade the things Primus relied on to stabilize himself. Fire roared down, lightning forked, wind shredded. Entropy—the law Primus thought his ally—was twisted back to abet Igaris’s strike: entropy here meant collapse of Primus’s constructed order into unrepairable nothing. Karma weighed him down. Darkness and light both tore at his essence until he could no longer maintain a coherent self-image. Even Time, that cruel river Primus believed he could ride, recoiled and slammed back at him.
Primus screamed and tried to draw more chaos, to tear the laws asunder with an unhinged will, but with every desperate summons he only became more exposed to the inevitability of Igaris’s judgment. It took time, patience, and a ferocity as absolute as any storm. The Overlord did not merely strike. He rewrote, remade, and then struck again.
When Igaris finally poured every law he owned into a single, focused blow it was not a strike in the bodily sense. It was an edict. It carried the weight of genesis and ruination, of fate and entropy, of all forces that had been his to command. He gave the blow a name in silence and let it carry the faces of those he loved.
Primus’s form snapped like a staff broken by the hands that had once wielded it. There was no more regeneration. The void-beast fractured into geometry he could not hold. Flesh pealed away like bark. Memory unwound. The outer being’s screams folded inward, then they folded outward, then they ceased.
"You were powerful once," Igaris said softly to the nothing that had been Primus. "You were the monster that taught me to become this. Thank you for the lesson."
Silence came and it rang like an empty chapel. For a sliver of time the hollow universe held its breath and thought itself safe.
Then the Chaos returned, not as a tool in Primus’s hands but as a tide, parentless and hungry. The shattered barrier bled raw chaos into the hollow space like a ruptured wound. Primus gone, its last defense removed, the Chaotic Cosmos poured its rivers of dissonant energy in and they did not stop. They flowed across the battle, into the shattered remains of starfields, into the inner sanctum of gods, and like a sickness they drank at the last remnants of cohesion.
Igaris felt the pull. He had won, and yet nothing seemed to have been gained. Victory tasted of brine in his mouth. He staggered, feeling the first true exhaustion wash through him. The laws he had bent were wounded. He had laid down the foundations of new orders in the same breath he had torn old ones apart. That cost more than muscles and will. It cost the fine threads between things.
Igaris reached outward, tried to weave the tide back to him, to fold the Chaos into a pattern where it could be studied, contained, maybe even healed. His hands reached and closed and found nothing but teeth. The river of Chaos was not like other forces. It had no hunger that could be negotiated with. It had a hunger that used the shape of negotiation to devour.
He thought of Celestara safe inside his inner world. He thought of Evernight folded like a shield about her. He thought of Shirley’s songs and Diva’s stubborn, stubborn courage, Lilya’s hot breath and Jian Longchen’s calm. He thought of all that he had collected and built. He was certain he had saved them, but he also knew salvation came with a price.
The Chaos found that price and tore at it.
Igaris cried out, and the cry was not only for himself. It was the sound of a father, a lover, a sovereign, a man who had swallowed gods and still felt small in the face of that instinctive hunger. The tide seized him. He was not consumed in the annihilating sense. He was carried, tumbled, and unstitched in a thousand small ways by currents of raw unmeaning. He drifted. The battlefield blurred. Voices became faraway echoes and then silence. His last thought before blackness took him was not strategy or law or the ache of battle.
He saw Evernight’s face in memory, luminous and fierce, and Celestara’s tiny hand clutching a father’s finger as if the world could be held between them.
"Protect them," he thought with the last solidness of conscious will.
Then the chaotic river closed over him and he was gone.
Igaris drifted in the Chaotic River, undestined, undisturbed, unconscious.