POV: Haruki Yamashiro
It had never been a question of whether Tezcatlipoca would attack, only what form the attack would take. This was his divine domain, a world built from his own authority, and here the first move belonged to him.
The hall had already begun changing around them slowly enough that Yasaka did not seem to notice at first. The polished obsidian beneath their feet darkened until its reflection disappeared, and the ceiling above them opened into a sky without dawn. Stars appeared across it by the thousands, then by the millions, their light thin and cold, the moon hanging among them as a pale disk stained black around the edges.
Divine domains had rules, and every god imposed some portion of himself upon the space he manifested. Here the night was Tezcatlipoca's night and everything hidden beneath the skin of the world was an extension of his will. Yasaka's fingers tightened around Haruki's sleeve as the floor shifted beneath her feet.
He glanced toward her and saw dark veins spreading along the stone below her sandals, thin as roots at first, then thickening into branching lines that climbed toward her shadow. They were trying to enter through it.
Haruki raised one hand and snapped his fingers. Light appeared beneath Yasaka's feet in a clean white circle, and the dark veins recoiled before they could touch her. He could have erased them, but there was little reason to waste attention on the symptom when the disease was sitting several hundred meters away upon a throne built from skulls.
Tezcatlipoca smiled.
"How tragic it is to watch a supreme being choke the life out of his own divinity," he said. "Don't you find it exhausting? This endless scrubbing at the bloodstains on your soul as if the opinion of the dirt beneath your feet actually mattered. Look at you. The great savior of the Youkai, trying very hard to believe the role suits you." His smile widened as the stars above them shifted into the shape of a vast open eye. "I am almost moved to tears by the sheer majesty of your delusion. Tell me, young god, does the blood of the innocents you shed still stain the soles of your feet, or did you wash it away before putting on your hero's boots?"
Haruki looked at him for a moment, then toward the darkness crawling along the edge of Yasaka's circle. "I know what I am," Haruki said. "I have never needed to pretend otherwise. I am a monster who intends to build a better world."
Tezcatlipoca raised one hand, and in an instant the world around them vanished.
Haruki stood inside the bedroom of a sleeping child. A small boy lay beneath white sheets in a narrow hospital bed, his head bald beneath a knitted blue cap, his breathing shallow and irregular. Machines glowed beside him. A woman slept in a chair with her forehead resting against the mattress and one hand wrapped around her son's fingers.
The boy dreamed of his cancer as a city. Towers of swollen flesh rose beneath a purple sky and beat with the rhythm of his heart, their surfaces stretched with veins large enough to serve as roads while red rivers flowed between them and carried white cells like drowned bodies.
The central tumor towered above the rest, a mass of folds and pulsing lobes that had grown crooked teeth along one side and smiled whenever the child whimpered in his sleep. Tendrils reached from it through the streets, smashing houses, pulling whole neighborhoods into the central mass until everything that had once belonged to the boy's life became part of the thing killing him.
Tezcatlipoca had taken the boy's cancer and made it mythic, while his dominion over mysteries and the unknown allowed him to turn the fear that illness inspired in others into a weapon of his own, for such was the nature of a god who waged war through symbols and forces that existed beyond ordinary human comprehension.
Haruki frowned. "That's cheap," he said.
Haruki reached into the future. He followed millions of possible lines until one became distinct enough to hold. In that same city lived a young girl who was currently three years old.
She would grow older, enter university, study medicine and molecular biology, become involved in research that would fail repeatedly, and eventually help develop a treatment capable of targeting the same kind of cancer growing inside the boy's skull.
Her work existed only as possibilities among countless futures that might or might not come to pass, but the mere possibility that it could happen was enough for Haruki to use it as an argument. He took the principle of that cure, stripped away everything contingent around it, and brought the idea backward into the dream.
The fleshy city convulsed. White-gold light appeared inside every tower and spread through the red streets like dawn passing behind stained glass. The tendrils shriveled, and the crooked teeth protruding from the tumor's surface cracked and fell away.
Cancer cells turned transparent as the conceptual cure marked them one by one, and the great cancerous metropolis collapsed into harmless dust that blew through the boy's dream like pollen carried on a summer wind.
The tumor's last mouth laughed before dissolving. "You're a monster who wears a halo made of your victims' bones. You look into my mirror and you see a villain, refusing to acknowledge that the reflection is your own twin. We are carved from the same dark jade, you and I. We are the ones who turn brother against brother just to watch the kingdom burn. The only difference between us is that I am honest about it."
"I am nothing like you."
Tezcatlipoca dragged them somewhere else, and Haruki found himself beneath a Japanese night sky near the end of the Second World War. All of humanity gathered beneath that sky as the nuclear bombs fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fear drawn from those who witnessed the devastation firsthand, those who saw its aftermath, and every generation afterward that learned the shape of a mushroom cloud before understanding what had created it.
Tezcatlipoca drew the terror that nuclear warfare would end human civilization into his hands and threw it across the sky.
A thousand atomic flashes appeared at once. Their mushroom clouds climbed from every direction, each one filled with human faces stretched across fire, mouths open beneath expanding shockwaves as the fear of annihilation became a weapon independent of any physical bomb.
Haruki felt Yasaka beside him again, and her spiritual power flared in instinctive defense when the first wave approached. Haruki raised one hand before she could waste the effort. Humanity's fear of nuclear destruction belonged to Tezcatlipoca's argument, but fear was not insurmountable.
Haruki invoked the indomitable human spirit - the will to endure any catastrophe and keep moving forward.
The faceless mass of humanity below gained faces, a Japanese infantryman imagining himself seeing his daughter again while a survivor planted flowers. Humanity had built the weapons, feared them, and still continued raising children beneath the knowledge that civilization could erase itself in an afternoon. Annihilation had become a real possibility, but life went on, and people continued planning futures they had no guarantee of reaching.
Haruki seized that refusal to surrender existence simply because destruction remained possible.
The first shockwave reached him and converted into clear water. The transformation spread backward through the attack as though reality had discovered an error in its own equation.
Fire became rain, radiation became harmless warmth, and the screaming rainbow of death passed overhead before breaking apart into millions of transparent bubbles that drifted above the city, each reflecting a human face before bursting into clean droplets. Haruki let them fall until the frightened people stood beneath a gentle rain drawn from the fear that had been intended to destroy them.
Tezcatlipoca stepped through one of the descending bubbles. "It must be exhausting, dragging that heavy corpse of a conscience behind you wherever you go," he mocked. "Why not stop choking on your own hypocrisy? You are a supreme power, a god born from the ashes of empires you personally cremated. Embrace the glorious depravity of your nature. Show me the god who slaughtered the Underworld, not this fragile boy wearing his skin."
Haruki said nothing in response. The battlefield collapsed and the floor of the hall ruptured beneath Haruki's feet, and from those cracks erupted an all encompassing darkness that devoured everything around it. Haruki could still feel Yasaka behind him, but her presence became muted as if several walls had been placed between them.
Then the darkness began to fill with eyes. Some belonged to animals crouched beyond ancient fires. Others resembled the reflective eyes of strangers seen through windows at night. Thousands appeared farther away, too large and too widely spaced to belong to any organism Haruki knew.
Fear of the unknown? Interesting.
Tezcatlipoca had gathered humanity's fear of darkness and fused it with their fear of the unknown, feeding both into his authority over mystery and the cosmos until his divine kingdom itself became an altar to primal fear.
Above Haruki, shapes emerged inside the blackness. Astronauts floated in orderly rows, every body severed through the waist and arranged with gloved hands pressed together in prayer. Their torn suits leaked frozen globules of blood that formed crimson rosaries around them, while their reflective visors faced the same point in the void.
Hundreds became thousands, then millions, until the entire divine Kingdom seemed populated by mutilated explorers kneeling toward an enormous disk of obsidian. The smoking mirror hung where a moon might have been, and within it moved outlines that refused to resemble anything familiar.
"Look at them," Tezcatlipoca said, his voice coming from the obsidian moon. "This is where your beloved little species arrives when it follows curiosity far enough. Silence, and darkness without end. Humanity escaped the cave and discovered that the cave was the universe. Every light they kindle only reveals another boundary beyond it, and every answer gives birth to a larger question. They will understand how insignificant they are in the grand tapestry of the cosmos eventually and they will fall to despair."
Haruki raised his hand. "Let there be light."
And there was light, for it belonged to him. The light of revelation and guidance, of truth and salvation, carrying every meaning mankind had ever bestowed upon it throughout the ages. The divine kingdom resisted for less than a second before white brilliance burst from Haruki's palm and spread in every direction.
The severed astronauts became silhouettes, then disappeared. The enormous obsidian mirror cracked down the center, and the shapes hiding behind it recoiled as their outlines became visible enough to lose some of the mystery that empowered them. The floor returned beneath Haruki's feet. Yasaka stood inside the shield he had left around her, her nine tails spread and trembling as black roots continued clawing at the boundary.
The stars remained dark, however.
Countless black stars covered the sky, each one an opening filled with dim teeth and diseased light, their surfaces pulsing with corruption as though the heavens had developed tumors of their own. Twilight radiated from them and devoured the illumination Haruki had created. They were stars under Tezcatlipoca's authority, symbols of cosmic night and dying ages, and the god had layered enough corruption into them that ordinary destruction would scatter their influence throughout the domain.
And so it was that Haruki called upon his authority over time and hastened their appointed hour; millions and billions of years passed over them in moments, their cores consuming their fuel and passing through every stage Tezcatlipoca had ordained, until the god sought to hold them in the instant before their death, but Haruki's light bore the brilliance of the first light, and the first star went supernova, and the others followed.
The sky flowered and dark stars exploded into rings of rainbows that overlapped across the entire divine kingdom. Their corruption burned away inside their own deaths, and the remaining energy descended as harmless sparks.
Haruki continued accelerating each destructive wave until its force had spent itself across absurd stretches of artificial time. For one brief instant Tezcatlipoca's kingdom stood illuminated from end to end, everything within it stood exposed beneath the death of its own stars.
Tezcatlipoca struck him before the last one faded. The jaguar arrived from the horizon with a speed that did not belong to a creature of its size. The mouth opened wide enough to swallow cities, lined with sacrificial blades in place of ordinary teeth. Haruki pushed Yasaka backward with a barrier of light and planted his feet before the first paw descended.
He caught it with both hands. The impact drove him through several layers of the divine kingdom and opened a crater beneath him whose lower reaches contained a sea of smoking mirrors, but Haruki stopped sinking before the jaguar could force him farther. Haruki tightened his grip, twisted the enormous limb, and threw Tezcatlipoca across the horizon.
The jaguar crashed through several mountain ranges and transformed before the rubble had settled. A serpent made from obsidian smoke rose where the beast had landed, its body carrying thousands of mirrors along black scales, and from those mirrors emerged hurricanes filled with knives and the wrath of every storm that had destroyed an Aztec settlement made manifest.
Haruki observed the hurricane approach until he could feel the authority holding its rotation together. Then he introduced an error, and the storm forgot the direction in which it was meant to turn, one half rotating clockwise while the other twisted against it. Both sections collided, tangled together, and collapsed into a confused vortex that spun harmlessly around Haruki's ankles.
Tezcatlipoca came through the failed storm in human form with a sword already descending toward Haruki's neck. Haruki accelerated the strike through time. Tezcatlipoca's sword completed ten thousand swings in the space of one motion, exhausting the attack's momentum until the final blow touched Haruki's shoulder with the strength of a falling leaf.
Tezcatlipoca began another spell through the smoking mirror replacing his foot, and Haruki struck him across the face before he finished casting it. The impact sent the god backward through the side of a temple and across several miles of black forest.
Haruki followed before Tezcatlipoca could recover. Their next exchange lasted perhaps less than a second from Yasaka's perspective and considerably longer from Haruki's. Tezcatlipoca created a spear from night whose point carried the concept of endless conflict, allowing the weapon to seek any opponent simply because opposition existed.
Haruki fractured the concept and split conflict into argument and internal struggle until the spear could no longer decide what category of opposition qualified as its target. The weapon broke apart in Tezcatlipoca's hands.
Haruki answered with the [Power of Destruction] gathered into his right hand and drove it into Tezcatlipoca's ribs. Black-red power tore through the god's side and opened cracks across his divine body before the Obsidian God transformed into smoke and escaped through a mirror on the ground.
Hundreds of mirrors rose around Haruki at once. Each one reflected a different version of him. One wore white robes soaked with blood up to the knees and carried a crown built from devil horns; another had abandoned human shape almost entirely, his body covered in eyes and wings while worshippers crawled beneath him.
Others appeared older, maimed, worshipped, feared or alone. The mirrors were not simple illusions, Haruki knew. He could feel the possibility running through them, each reflection attached to some path his future could conceivably take. Tezcatlipoca wished to weaponize unrealized versions of Haruki himself.
The glass opened and they stepped out together.
The first attacked with holy fire. Another froze local time around Haruki while a fourth accelerated its own movements. Several reached directly toward Yasaka, which immediately clarified Haruki's priorities. He broke the time stop by creating a crack through the authority sustaining it, redirected the destruction into a mirrored duplicate, and allowed the holy fire to pass through an error in space that returned it to the reflection responsible.
The false Harukis adapted quickly. Haruki looked across them and understood that fighting each possibility separately would only legitimize Tezcatlipoca's premise. This is already starting to feel like a masturbation, he thought with distaste.
"No," he declared. "There is only Me, and beside Me there shall be no other Haruki."
Every possible Haruki existed because a future choice might produce him, but that didn't make them likely to happen. Haruki refused every claim the reflections attempted to make upon his identity. He refused the version that became a tyrant, the version that became a saint, the version that surrendered to the Outer Gods, and every other road Tezcatlipoca had dragged into temporary existence.
The reflections slowed as their connection to his future weakened. One after another they broke apart into fragments of light and black glass, until the final reflection dissolved, and the hundreds of mirrors surrounding him shattered in the same instant.
Their fragments fell across the plain like black rain, though Tezcatlipoca had already moved beneath them. He appeared several hundred meters away and drove both hands into the ground. The entire divine kingdom convulsed. Haruki felt the inchoate to be larger than any mountain begin rising from below, and the broken plain became transparent as an Earth emerged through it.
The planet looked indistinguishable from the earth he knew at first glance. However, Haruki only needed a moment to see the corruption in the details. Tezcatlipoca had created a mirrored Earth in which morality had failed to develop as any stable human institution. Murder and betrayal existed as entertainment and dispute resolution.
The world was functional in the loosest possible sense. Billions lived upon it, fought, desired, consumed, and died while every impulse competed for temporary supremacy.
Tezcatlipoca raised the planet above himself as easily as another man might lift a stone. His body had returned to the form of the beautiful sacrificial youth and black smoke poured from his eyes and mouth while the mirrored Earth revolved over his head.
"What is this greater good you whisper to your conscience in the dead of night?" he asked, and his voice dropped into a rich, melodious purr that vibrated through the ruined kingdom. "It's a phantom born of fear, a miserable tether binding a cosmic entity to dust. You have inherited the throne of heaven by climbing a mountain of corpses, so why do you weep for the stones that bruised your feet along the way?"
Haruki watched the planet begin to descend. "I will not justify myself to anyone, least of all to you."
"You say you will not justify your actions, yet every beat of your heart is an argument you keep having with yourself. I am offering you a cure for that internal noise. Imagine the freedom of a mind that no longer asks why and simply proclaims, 'I will.' You have spent your short divinity playing the reluctant butcher, washing your hands in tears while counting the heads you have severed. Cast aside the basin. Stop pretending you serve the light when your footprints leave ruin behind you. Let the storm rage without a master. Become the beautiful monster the universe has already prepared you to be."
The mirrored Earth fell, and Haruki shed His earthly flesh like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, unfolding into a divine majesty for which shape was only metaphor, a profusion of seraphic wings and infernal pinions, eyes burning within black suns, horns crowned in golden halos, sacred fire threaded with demonic corruption, while storm and sunlight, destruction and healing, time and change, secrecy and revelation, error and law wheeled within him like constellations around some primordial contradiction, terrible and holy and measureless, whose very existence seemed an error in creation.
Tezcatlipoca's kingdom tried to contain him and found no law by which the thing could be done. The attempt was as hopeless as commanding parallel lines to meet within Euclidean space. Haruki's true form admitted contradictions that creation had been built to keep apart and preserved them all without dilution.
The sky split apart in fractures hundreds of miles long, obsidian mountains cracked from summit to root, smoking mirrors burst across every horizon, and rivers reversed themselves into the heavens while Yasaka dropped to one knee beneath the pressure, sheltered only by the golden sphere Haruki had placed around her.
The mirrored Earth reached Haruki's divine form and settled into one open hand. At this scale the world covered only part of his palm. Haruki closed his hand, and the mirrored Earth shattered between his fingers as continents fractured into drifting plates, oceans spilled into space and flashed into vapor, and the core collapsed into glowing fragments. Billions of symbolic lives vanished with the artificial world that contained them, and the remains fell through Tezcatlipoca's disintegrating kingdom as a storm of dust and molten stone.
The Obsidian God assumed the shape of the world-eating jaguar, a monstrous beast whose arched spine rose beyond the broken heavens, while jaws vast enough to engulf constellations opened upon a darkness without end.
Tezcatlipoca began devouring his own divine kingdom to sustain that apocalyptic form, drawing rivers of sacrificial blood, and endless fields of smoking mirrors into his maw and transmuting them into flesh and power, until Haruki felt the connection to Kyoto tighten one final time as the dying realm reached through Yasaka and sought to feed her spiritual power into its ravenous god.
Haruki severed the connection. Every corrupted strand between Yasaka and the divine kingdom snapped simultaneously. Golden light surged around her as Kyoto's leyline recoiled into its proper course, and the black lesions feeding Tezcatlipoca began dying where their connection to the source had been cut.
The jaguar charged.
Haruki created a sun in his palm. The first spark contained only light and heat. He fed it the accumulated symbolism humanity had attached to the sun across thousands of years. The sphere expanded until its surface filled his hand, then grew beyond the scale of cities while golden prominences arched from it in loops large enough to swallow planets. Tezcatlipoca continued forward through the collapse of his kingdom, his jaws opening around the newborn star as if he intended to consume that as well.
Haruki drove the young sun into the world-eating jaguar's open maw and the two divine forces collided.
BOOM!
A detonation like the birth of creation tore through the divine kingdom, white fire flooding from boundary to boundary as the mountain of skulls vanished into vapor, every surviving smoking mirror melted or burst apart, and space folded beneath the pressure while the conceptual foundations of Tezcatlipoca's domain collapsed around them.
Haruki saw hopelessness enter the War God's face when he understood that even his world-devouring form could not consume the star burning inside him, and whether driven by terror or sheer desperation, Tezcatlipoca divided his existence in two to escape the destruction of his kingdom.
One half remained inside the world-eating jaguar and accepted the sun directly. That portion of the god burned away along with the collapsing kingdom, body and authority disintegrating into the expanding light. The second half escaped through a smoking mirror smaller than Haruki's human hand, carrying enough of Tezcatlipoca's identity to preserve survival at the cost of immense power.
Haruki returned to human shape as the remains of the divine kingdom broke apart around them. Yasaka stood nearby inside the fading sphere of protection, breathing heavily while clean golden power returned through her tails. Tezcatlipoca fell from the last surviving mirror and struck the broken ground on one knee. Half of his body had been burned black. One arm hung without movement. The smoking mirror that replaced his foot had cracked through the center, and every breath carried gray vapor from his mouth.
He still managed to smile.
"About your… magnificent portrait of cosmic liberty," Haruki said. "Does the script you recite so eloquently belong to you, or did you have to translate it from the incoherent gibberish of your masters?"
The smile remained on Tezcatlipoca's face for several seconds, though no answer followed immediately, and around them the last surviving pieces of his divine kingdom continued falling apart into light.
"At least I can say I regret nothing," the broken god laughed, though the sound came wetly through the blood filling his mouth. "I pursued what made me happy. I lived according to my own will instead of burdening myself with duties that would only bind me and make me… frail."
"How did that work out for you?" Haruki asked, looking over the god who could scarcely remain standing.
Tezcatlipoca laughed again, quieter now. "I'll tell you when we meet again, in excruciating detail."
A black sphere opened behind him, swallowing light as it expanded, and Haruki immediately felt the foreign powers reaching through it from somewhere far beyond the remains of the shattered domain. Tezcatlipoca began to lean backward toward the opening, but the darkness suddenly shuddered and distorted, its perfect circumference becoming jagged as black veins of error spread across its surface, and the broken god's laughter died when he realized the passage was failing.
"Oh, come now, Tezcatlipoca," Haruki said with a smile. "You didn't think I'd let your distress call go unanswered."
Haruki looked into the black aperture and saw a congregation of silhouettes gathered like witnesses around an open grave, some grinning beneath crowns and horned helms, some leaning forward in evident confusion at the failure of their little passage, and among them stood Loki of the Norse, lean and pale and smiling his crooked smile, and Set of Egypt with his strange long-eared shadow and the old scent of desert storms about him, and Angra Mainyu looming blacker than the blackness wherein he stood, and beyond these were gods greater and lesser whose names Haruki knew alongside others whose names had perished with the peoples who once prayed to them, renegade divinities and dispossessed powers and ancient things drawn into communion with the Outer Gods, while farther still, behind that profane assembly and almost beyond perception, moved shapes of such impossible magnitude that he could discern them only by the stars they obscured and by the dreadful suggestion of eyes opening where no eyes ought to have been.
The assembled gods stared through the broken passage, some amused, some visibly perplexed by the failure of whatever power they had extended to retrieve their ally. Haruki met their gaze and waited. None stepped forward. Nor could they.
"I'm afraid you won't be joining your friends," Haruki said, turning back toward Tezcatlipoca with a cold smile. "I've never made a habit of letting enemies escape to become tomorrow's problem."
Tezcatlipoca ran. There was little dignity left in the attempt, for the Obsidian God stumbled across the broken ground with one hand pressed against his ruined body, reaching desperately toward the trembling aperture where his allies continued to watch from the other side. He stretched out his hand toward them, fingers opening in a final demand for aid, and no answering hand emerged from the darkness.
Holy fire kindled around his remaining foot. Tezcatlipoca looked down and screamed as the flame climbed his leg like a hungry hound, his entire body burned white within its embrace. For one final instant Haruki saw the outline of the world-eating jaguar inside the flames, vast and furious and helpless, and then that too collapsed into light.
The scream ceased. The black aperture closed upon the silent faces of his allies, and nothing remained of the Obsidian God whose name had once been enough to make pantheons hesitate.
"Is it over?" Yasaka collapsed to her knees, one hand pressed against her chest as she struggled to breathe. "I can't feel him," she whispered. "He's not there anymore. I can't feel him touching my mind."
Whatever willpower had carried her through the terror of the past months finally gave way. Yasaka bent forward as the sobs came from somewhere deep enough to hurt, one hand pressed against her mouth while the other clutched uselessly at her robes, all the fear she had hidden from her people pouring out of her at once.
"He's really gone. Oh God… he's finally gone."
Haruki said nothing. There seemed little worth saying. He rested a hand upon her shoulder and remained beside her while she wept, feeling through the remnants of the shattered domain the distant golden current of Kyoto's leyline beginning to move freely again.
Yasaka caught his hand between both of hers and held it tightly, her forehead lowering against his knuckles as another broken sob escaped her.
"Thank God," she whispered through her tears. "Thank God it's finally over."
AN: This was a very experimental chapter. I wanted the fight between the gods to feel bizarre and far more grand in scale than anything we've seen so far. It's also the chapter where I had to cut quite a lot because the conceptual attacks started becoming redundant at some point, it was basically turning into a game of UNO where everyone kept playing increasingly ridiculous cards. It also got a bit too abstract, so I had to tone it down. Those who have read LOTM or watched The Sandman will probably see what I was going for here.
And while the POV is technically Haruki's, this is probably the least personal chapter I've ever written. There is very little direct thought or introspection from Haruki himself.
Advanced chapters are available on my Patreon. If you want to read ahead, vote on which story gets updated each week, or simply support my writing so I can focus more on it, you can check it out here: abeltargaryen?