Bab 23: Olethros
Drowning was a particular sensation. This a's so agonising, so marking, so altering that I don't honestly think it could be forgotten.
How could you forget, the way your lungs filled up with liquids, how they began to burn from the inside?
You try to fight it, your body instinctively tries to breathe, to take some oxygen, to survive against all odds.
That state of fighting, of pain doesn't last long but when every instant is one full of agony, not lasting long doesn't mean anything. It feels more like an eternity, a punishment inflicted by god on a sinner.
After a certain amount of minutes, the pain fades, replaced by serenity, by Nirvana itself, to a calm and peace that could only be felt by an enlightened being.
Your brain understands at this moment that nothing done by it would be able to change anything, that the reaper scythe would not be something you would be able to escape from.
That moment of serenity, of infinite between death and life, standing on that edge. I had hoped that I would never experience it again.
I was so much stronger, better than I could have ever hoped in my past life. I knew that if I wished just with a flick of my will, I could kill billions, I could reshape continents and destroy stars if I pushed myself as I did with Kagutsuchi.
That newfound strength didn't change anything. When the darkness had come, I felt scared. I had felt powerless.
My essence, the new weapon that allowed me to grow in strength was found useless before that monster.
I thought that it would be the end again, that this new chance I had received was being wasted.
I shouldn't be alive. I should be dead but something similar to the darkness came. Something crimson. Something familiar.
I opened my eyes to the sight of flying comets. I began to take my bearings. I was in something that felt heavenly soft, softer than anything this body had ever experienced and with the fact that I was literally a spoiled devil princess, that was very surprising and worrying.
I sat slowly my back leaving the sinfully soft fabric. I turned to see what it was. It seemed to be a red military coat. The one that would be put in an exhibit in museums, the kind the people living at the time of the founding fathers or Napoleon wore.
There was one thing I was sure of. That thing was now mine. I didn't care if it created problems. I felt as if I was a drowning man and this coat was my lifeline.
There was a man not far away from me. He was very tall like the kind of tall I towered over bears standing on their feet. He was muscular. It seems as if every muscle was defined by reality itself. This was what I knew Greek gods wished they could look like. He also had red hair and a beard of the same colour.
His hair's colour was different from mine. While mine looked like blood freshly spilt, his looked more mundane, more orange. I could see that He wore his hair in a ponytail.
I knew who it was. He was one of the fundamental aspects of this reality and a member of one of the most fucked up cosmic families after the presence and his children. Olethros, the prodigal he was called, Creation, change, Destruction of the endless. According to demonic books, he was called the great god Baal. It was not a coincidence that my grandfather was called Bael.
Of course, I knew that I would one day meet him. This was something I was sure of since I realized which reality I was living in. After all, my power wasn't truly mine after all. It was in the name. Power of destruction.
The comet flying in the cosmos was not natural I realized. The aspect of reality before me was painting on what seemed to be an endless canvas without end.
Every touch of his pencils changed the world. Every Aurora drawn became real. Every star no matter if its shape was wrong, took form as he drew.
This was beautiful. This was humbling. The canvas represented something I knew was behind my understanding. It was some kind of higher form of authority, what gods wished their domains could be.
'Your family,' a little voice whispered in my head. 'What do you think is happening to your family while you are?!'
I began to gather my demonic energy to open a portal to Kuoh. How could I have let slip out of my mind "I got to go. My family need me," I told the Endless a crimson teleporting circle appearing over me.
I felt something familiar like a wave, move at the edge of reality and touch my circle erasing it. "I stopped time. Don't worry. Also, do you think, the way you are, you would be able to help them the way you need to?" he spoke.
He wasn't wrong. My body was wrecked by shakes as if I was an addict going through withdrawal. I took a deep breath and tried to control myself. It didn't stop them but they became less violent.
"What do you think of it?" he spoke his back still turned continuing to paint on the cosmos itself.
"It's beautiful," I answered him truthfully.
"Many would say the contrary child. There are too many imperfections, places where I wasn't steady, firm enough," he spoke.
"You're trying though, continuing even though it's imperfect. Isn't this beauty in itself?" I asked him.
"Imperfection shouldn't be becoming of an Endless, one of my siblings would say," he spoke.
"Do their words truly matter though? The important question here is not what I or your brother think. What matters is how you feel regarding your painting," I told him.
"My sibling would not like to hear that someone disagreed with him. Fortunately for you and everyone you held dear, no one can hear us here," he spoke.
He let his pencil fall from his fingers in the void we were I now realized standing in. The coat was like the magical carpet of Aladdin. I hadn't realized it because of how comfortable it was but it was moving keeping me afloat in the void.
He turned fully toward me his gaze fixated on my form "You probably already guessed who I was but it is only proper and polite to present myself. I was given many names by lower beings. They called me in their language Destruction along with many other names to try to categorize and explain what I am. I have to admit that I'm fond of the one the Mycenaeans gave to me a long time ago. You may call Olethros."
"My name is Rias Gremory," I told him "but you probably already knew this."
"Gremory? Not Bael?!" he said with surprise in his voice. "It is a surprise knowing him that he didn't claim you."
One of his hands caught his chin "I wonder what does he plans to do? Well, there is no point in trying to know. I don't really care after all."
"You saved me," I told him. "Thank you" I spoke truthfully.
"Honestly, if it had been her fully present, I would not have been able to save you. If she had been completely present and had sensed your spark of destruction, I don't think that I could have even saved you," he spoke.
I felt a shudder wreck through my body and I had to resist the urge to puke. Just remembering the ordeal made me want to bleach my brain, to erase what had happened from my brain but it seemed stuck in my mind "That thing, that darkness, what was that? Nothing that I did worked," I asked him.
"Before there was light, there was darkness," he quoted. "There are a lot of things wrong in those supposed perfect books, mistranslations, modifications for personal or political benefit but they all were right on something. The night is old and full of terror child."
His eyes hardened "You had an encounter with my dear mother. When you modified reality itself to its very fabric with the divinity you usurped, you were unlucky to attract an infinitesimal amount of her attention. Even those cursed by luck divinity don't encounter her. Her presence, you must know more than most how dreary, how alien it is."
He took a step into the void and our surroundings changed. The cosmos was hidden from my eyes, replaced with a vision of gold and crimson.
I wasn't floating anymore. I was sitting on the soft grass. An invisible wind travelled through this realm and embraced me softly and continued as if welcoming me.
Looking at the horizon, I could see a giant sword bigger than a mountain, longer than what I thought the tower of Babel would look like.
It pierced this different sky and cosmos growing and towering in what seemed to be a never-ending way, an infinite one, an endless one.
The Endless sat at my side, his gaze turned toward the horizon. "My mother isn't what you would call the kindest being. The presence and my father understood this long ago and chose to seal her outside of reality. They betrayed her and trapped her but how could you trap the foundation of reality itself? How could you trap completely something older than this universe?"
"My mother can't directly enter this plane of reality," Olethros spoke. "She acts through avatars. The good thing is that they are so much more limited than her complete being. The bad thing is that it means that she kind now what is happening in this plane of existence."
He spoke of Avatars, limited avatars of the night allowing her to peer at this reality. When I thought about it, wasn't it a strange coincidence that so many different night deities' names from different pantheons were similar? Nox, Nyx, Nephthys, Nut.
Maybe I was reaching for something that wasn't there but in a world like the one I was living in, where every mythological being existed in one form or another, was I truly wrong to think such?
"She hates this reality, she hates the fact that she was trapped, betrayed. She hates the fact that we betrayed her," he said softly at the end.
"Do you know where we are?" he suddenly asked.
"Your realm, your equivalent of the realms of your siblings?" I spoke not sure of my answer and why he had decided to so abruptly change the subject.
"You're right. This realm," he spoke one of his fingers digging and drawing through the Earth at his side "is one of destruction. Here, I am omnipotent, omniscient If I wish to. In this realm, I am able to stand equal with a demiurgic Archangel."
My gaze travelled through all of the realm peeking, observing, analyzing and memorizing it in a way an artificial intelligence would be envious of.
"It looks peaceful, tranquil I would even say." I let myself lay down on the grass. "It feels like home," I admitted.
I felt at peace here and I didn't know why. It's as if a yearning part of me that I had never been able to satisfy was finally content.
A chuckle escaped Olethros "Few would think in such a way. They would instead try to flee, pray and beg to escape, pray for my sister who would never be able to reach them here but you're right to think of it as home. It is your home, after all, it is your promised utopia Rias".
"I closed my eyes. You don't make sense you know. Being cryptic isn't as cool as you think you are," I told him. I shouldn't talk to him this way. I knew that he could do it if he wished something similar to the darkness but even though it hadn't been long since we met, I felt at ease as if I was talking with Sirzechs.
I heard him groan "I'm working on it. It is just that I always fall into the same patterns," he spoke. Was that embarrassment in his voice?
Well, that was a confirmation of what I already thought. I could be sure that the endless didn't want to harm me. In the case he did want though, the darkness had marked me in many ways.
I could feel in my body my essence working now that it was not restricted anymore. It felt overzealous spreading through me as if trying to compensate for having been unable to have me from the night.
I didn't want to even come close to one of the avatars or the night. I didn't want to think about it but If the night tried to do the same thing, it would find itself with a nasty surprise coming from me.
My power of destruction had changed. It felt more. It's as if before it was like a material thing but now, it felt as if it was something more abstract.
My power of destruction could destroy things before both at the physical and metaphysical levels. Now, I knew that as long I fed it enough energy, there would be nothing I would not be able to destroy.
I searched for it, my mind grasping at the dark scarlet monster waiting to be called into my soul. This fear that I was feeling, this crippling dread, this crippling anxiety, I wished them to disappear and they did, swallowed in the maw of the abyss.
I could feel the gaze of the endless on me. I have just used the power of destruction. Of course, he would notice.
I opened one eye "You're staring," I told him.
"The way you grow In strength is fascinating. Watching how each instant, each second you're becoming more. It is something new, something I know wasn't planned in the book of my older brother. You feel like an outsider to this realm. I should do my duty and destroy you. Who knows what you could become? We don't need another Triangular beast," he spoke.
"I'm not worried because if you wished so, you could have destroyed me since the beginning or you could have let the darkness claim me but you didn't," I said to him.
"You should be more careful with the way you speak with being clearly higher than you on the totem pole. I may not care because of who you are but most do care. There are things worse than death," he warned me.
I knew what he was talking about. I could not forget the fact that his brother Dream, the one that embodied both reality and dreams sentenced to hell one of his ex-lovers for all eternity because she refused to be his queen.
Let's not talk about Desire that only wished to make things more interesting and by interesting, I meant ruining lives. They were everything Aphrodite was cranked up to infinite.
The less said about Despair who was literally despair and who had as a hobby making Suns suicidal to wipe out civilizations. Superman didn't exist in this universe. I had checked my memories or maybe didn't exist yet but canonically in the comics, Rao, the red sun of Krypton exploded because he was told by the endless that it would make him interesting if I'm not wrong.
When I thought about it, the only members of the dysfunctional family of Olethros I would not worry about being close to were literally Death, Delirium who was madder than a mad hater sniffing angel dust and Olethros himself.
"What was I saying?" he muttered under his breath.
I closed my eyes back "Something about Utopia, Home, stuff like that".
"I remember. I'm sure that you guessed that what you inherited from your grandfather wasn't called the power of destruction for nothing," he began.
"This is because billions of years ago, Helel came to me with a proposition. He wanted to create a being made of his own flesh and Lilith's who would be capable of wielding my essence, my power. Can you guess the answer I first gave him?" he asked me.
"You probably told him to go screw himself on a pike. At least, this is what I would done," I spoke. From what I remembered from every piece of information I knew on Helel both in this world and from my previous world, you didn't want to deal with him.
He was too powerful and too prideful to not try to fuck you over the moment he could. The only one he cared about was him first. Maybe, Michael came after but I wonder if he didn't care about them only because they were mirrors, copies of each other. They were literally what Cersei thought Jamie and her were.
They were two beings that held in both their essences fundamental to the universe. Helel was the shaper and Michael was the battery. Sure, Gabriel was the one to engrave concepts in This reality but when you think about it, he did like maybe 20% of the job while his brothers did 40% each.
Maybe Helel only cared about his twin because he saw him as an extension of himself or maybe I was completely mistaken and was doing a futile exercise in trying to psychoanalyse beings older than the universe.
"I did but Helel wasn't called The Trickster for no reason. He promised something, something he knew I would not refuse," Olethros spoke.
I opened my eyes "What did he promise you?" I asked the endless. What could Lucifer give to an endless for him to share his essence with the Morningstar?
"Freedom, he showed me freedom. He showed me a world where I wasn't restricted to the duty that was assigned to me the first instant of my existence," he answered.
"Did it give it to you, this freedom before he died?" I asked him.
A chuckle escaped him "Died, sure".
I didn't want to think about that. I would worry about this later. I really hope that I won't have to deal with him.
"The Morningstar never lied. He can trick and, manipulate but he never lied in all of his existence. He gave me the freedom I wanted. He gave me the possibility to be free," Olethros spoke. "He gave me Bael."
"Bael like my grandfather?" I asked him my mind halting at his words.
"Yes, your ancestor. Helel would have his little soldier and I would have somebody to take on most of if not all of the mantle of Destruction of the Endless."
"I'm pretty sure that if he was an endless, everyone would know, that every other Pantheon would have been crushed, subjugated by the demons."
"I never said that I gave him the power that came with it. Honestly, it would be more accurate to say that Helel gave me half of what I asked him. Your grandfather was the perfect successor, the perfect inheritor. I didn't care if he merged this realm with hell after becoming Destruction. When it was time to completely give my authority to him, to shackle him to my domain, he refused. More than the power that came with becoming an Endless, Bael also saw the duties that came with this power and he refused it. I couldn't blame his decision. How could I force on him something I hated? How could I force him when I understood?" he spoke.
"The deal I made with Helel seems to be a Faustian one, one where the devil was always the one to win. That was until your brother came. I don't know what kind of experiment Helel did but his existence changed the balance. Your brother's birth was enough to love most of my shackles. He wasn't wielding the power of destruction. He was born destruction."
"Does my brother know about all of this?" I asked Olethros.
"Most likely not but that's fine. Helel without knowing gave me a great favour. He gave me a candidate. Well, that was what I thought until not long ago, I felt you in what your race calls a rating game." A smile had bloomed on his face.
I don't know why but if I felt my heart drop at his words "What is a candidate?" I asked him.
"I was able to disregard my duties without any consequences because Destruction doesn't really exist anymore."
I lifted one of my eyebrows at him "Sorry. What I wanted to say is those cosmic laws are supposed to affect one being. They are very specific In the way they are. It also means that when a situation that was planned by those laws arises, what you could call a bug, a cosmic error happens."
"Those laws," he spoke "were supposed to restrict Destruction of the Endless and Destruction is supposed to be at his core one being but now, there is more than one Destruction of The Endless and the system itself crashes."
"Doesn't that mean that if something happens to my brother and me, you go back to being shackled like before?" I asked him a smile blooming on my face.
If what he was saying was indeed true, it made me less worried about what could happen to me or Sirzechs.
"It also means that if something happens to me and one of you, the remaining one would have to bear the consequences of my actions, the responsibilities of Destruction of the Endless," he spoke.
His gaze locked with mine "Remember, there are things worse than death," he told me. "Don't see it as a sign to be more reckless. This place is only safe for those with my essence running in their veins. Not even my sister can come here. Everything here that is not native to this realm is destroyed to nothing. If something happened to your brother and me, you would be trapped here alone for the rest of Eternity" he warned me.
Well, that was a bummer and now I was back to worrying about my brother because if anything happened to him and Destruction, I would be stuck here all alone punished because of the actions of Olethros.
"I wish I could forget everything you just said. Thank you for the existential fear," I told him.
"You're welcome Rias Gremory. Would you want a cream full of trauma on top of it," he spoke, what seemed to be a laugh waiting to escape from his voice.
"Nah, that's fine. I'll just get by with what you have already given to me good sir".
We stayed in silence him looking at the horizon and me watching the eery replica of the cosmos he had created in his realm.
"Can I ask you something?" I spoke breaking the silence.
"Yes but I can't promise that you'll find my answer satisfying" he replied.
"Since that day when I almost allowed my power of destruction to consume, it's as if each time I'm using it, I'm becoming someone different. I become colder, more apathetic and different. I stop caring about the ones I love when it shouldn't be like this. The worst is that realized that this is all me. This power, it is wrong to call it such. The truth is that this is me in my unadulterated form. Understanding this only made me stronger. Can I remain the way I am? My family, I love them but don't think they deserve and they should love the Rias I become when I use this power," I revealed to him.
"It's good that you understood the fact that this power is not separate from you because it is you. It is in our nature even if we may hate it to destroy. That's how we were programmed by reality. You can't remove or change that part of yourself," he spoke.
I stood my back leaving the grass "Then what can I do?" I asked, no I begged him. "That Rias don't care about them! That Rias would not care if they were hurt! That Rias would hurt them!"
"No one is more placed than me to understand this feeling you have. This feeling of powerlessness over the world around you, over yourself, your own thoughts. Even to this, I'm haunted by that same spectre of blind destruction. Do you know how I learned to deal with it? By accepting myself completely. Creation can not come without Destruction. Life can't exist without Death. As long as you fear that part of yourself, as long you push it down, as long as you don't accept it completely, it'll continue and it'll even maybe worsen in the future," Olethros spoke softly.
My gaze left him to turn to focus on the never-ending Horizon, one that felt so infinite yet so limited, one that reminded me so much of myself.
"What If I fail? What if I become something so different, so monstrous that they won't love me? I want to be better but I'm not sure that I will be able to," I spoke.
This was the truth. I was scared to ruin everything, I was scared to prove her right even in this world. It felt like a shackle that even followed me through transmigration.
"One of your first reactions when you woke up was trying to go to your peerage, to make sure they were alright. Your greatest concern about potentially losing yourself was hurting them. You were not scared for yourself but for them. If they can't reciprocate the love you have for them, what's the point? Would you give up on them if they changed?" he asked me.
"No…no, I wouldn't," I whispered.
"Do you doubt the love and the care they have for you?" he questioned me. How could I doubt them when they all suffered against Riser because of me? How could I doubt their love when even before and even after my transmigration, they did everything to make me happy?
"Thanks," I said to Olethros.
"I read in one book that mental health was important for the wellbeing of a person. It is in my interest that nothing happens to you."
I sighed "You had to ruin the moment."
With one of my fingers, I traced a line through the air. I imbued my demonic power in it and a portal opened. "You know before all of this war stuff, I wanted to write a manga. When all of this is finished and I'll be writing it, I'll put you in it."
"I hope that it'll be as the cool badass mentor who gives advice to the main characters when they feel lost."
"Nah. I'll make you a Hobo super pervert who decided to flee from his responsibilities and that can't bag any woman."
"That's cold and cruel even coming from a demon or whatever you became."
A chuckle escaped me "That's in the job description. Would I see you again?" I asked him.
"Most likely not and I hope it stays this way. We only met and talked because you needed help. If it wasn't because of your spark of destruction, I would not have come to help you," he said.
That was cruel but this was the truth. I had been lucky. Hope I won't have to count on it in the future. "Goodbye Olethros. Thank you for everything," I told him while I began walking in the portal.
"Goodbye Rias," I heard him say softly behind me before the portal I created closed behind me and I took a step into the ruins of what remained of Kuoh.
PERTIMBANGAN PENCIPTA 
allen1996
allen1996 The people who guessed that it was Destruction of the Endless himself were right. I love Sirzechs and he is strong but he isn't strong enough to battle something older than the presence at least for now. Only the dice god knows what the future reserves him. I got three chapters in advance on my Patreon. My name on Patreon is Eileen 715. Two of infernal comedy and one of demiurge. Anyway, I hope you all like it.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone