The offer, if it could be called that, landed with the weight of a collapsing mountain.
Collect him.
Not destroy. Not punish. Collect. He wasn't a problem to be solved; he was a resource to be acquired. In the space of a single, telepathic sentence, Archon Vyr had reframed their entire conflict. He wasn't a hero facing down a world-ending monster. He was a unique asset in the field, and a hostile corporate takeover was in progress.
[Your dissonance is a crude tool,] Vyr's thoughts continued, cool and precise. [Untrained. Uncontrolled. Under my tutelage, it could be honed into a sublime instrument of unraveling. Entire realities could be… unwritten. We are not enemies. We are an equation, waiting to be balanced.]
This was the devil's bargain, stripped of all poetic pretense and delivered like a technical manual. Join me, and we'll break the universe together. The Archon wasn't offering power. It was offering purpose, a cosmic-level validation of his very nature as a contaminant.
Lyssara's frantic voice erupted from the comm-stone, which he still held forgotten in his hand. "Ravi, what's happening? Why aren't you fighting? My slate shows no energy exchange, but Kaelith says… he says you're conversing."
He couldn't answer her. He couldn't speak. He was locked in a psychic negotiation with a sentient law of physics.
"So that's your play," Ravi thought, focusing his intent, his own mental voice feeling raw and weak compared to Vyr's crystalline transmission. "You don't want to destroy Vaelorra. You want me to do it for you. To be the key that opens the 'quarantine'."
[An astute observation,] Vyr replied, a sensation akin to intellectual approval flowing from it. [This world's 'insulation,' the very atmospheric medium that your body rejects, is a formidable barrier. Direct assault is… tedious. A slow erosion over millennia. But you… you can bring it down from the inside. Willingly, or unwillingly. Every time you defend yourself, you strike a blow against the cage. Why serve the prison when your nature is to break it?]
It was the most terrifyingly logical argument he had ever heard. Vyr was weaponizing the core truth of his existence. He didn't have to beat him in a fight. He just had to wait for Ravi to defend himself, and the world would pay the price. A war of attrition where Ravi was the only combatant, and his every victory was a defeat for the world he stood on.
He thought of the First Crack, the humming, permanent wound in the sky. Proof of concept.
"What if I refuse?" Ravi projected.
The psychic pressure from the Archon did not increase. There was no anger, no threat. Only the calm, unassailable logic of a superior power stating a fact.
[Refusal is a temporary state. This world will continue to press against you. Nobles will seek to use you. Priests will seek to worship you. Wardens will seek to cage you. You will be forced to react. Each reaction will create another crack. And I will wait. Your survival is synonymous with this world's destruction. The outcome is inevitable. I am merely offering you an active role in the process.]
It was a perfect trap. The perfect checkmate. The only way to save this world from himself was to die. To stand still and let the first thug with a rusty knife end him. And Vyr knew, with a certainty that was absolute, that the survival instinct of a creature as flawed and terrified as a human would never allow that.
The Archon extended its hand further, the gesture of its palm-up invitation unwavering.
[Come, Anomaly. Embrace your function. Why protect the dust mote that rejects you when the symphony of the void awaits?]
He looked at the Archon's hand, a perfect void, an offer of a different kind of oblivion. Then his gaze drifted past the monstrous figure, to the edge of the square. To Kaelith, standing like a lone, defiant statue, holding his pathetic gray flag. The man had taken a paralyzing blow for him. Not for a god. For him.
He thought of Lyssara, of her sharp, brilliant mind, of her furious and desperate attempts to forge a sanctuary for them in a world of predators. He thought of the terror on the faces of the families fleeing the tenements—families he had endangered, then saved, a cycle of breaking and mending that was all his fault.
They weren't a dust mote. They were real. Their pain, their hope, their stubborn, fragile lives… they were real. And his own selfish, desperate survival had put it all on the chopping block.
Vyr was right. The logic was flawless. The outcome was inevitable. A normal man, a sane man, would accept the inevitable.
Ravi Arundh had never been normal. And he was quickly learning he was no longer sane.
"You're wrong about one thing," Ravi thought, a strange, new and dangerous calmness settling over him. It wasn't the peace of surrender. It was the focus of a man who has finally found a target big enough for his own self-loathing.
[An error in my logic is… improbable.]
"You said destruction is inefficient," Ravi projected, a cold, feral smile touching his lips for the first time. It felt utterly alien. "I'm about to prove to you… that I'm very, very inefficient."
He had been holding back. Always. Using the minimum force. A touch to break a sword. A shove to collapse a foundation. He had been terrified of his own power, of the damage it caused to the world.
But Vyr had just shown him the truth. The damage was happening anyway. Controlled or uncontrolled, the cracks would spread. His restraint wasn't saving the world. It was just prolonging its death. The equation had been wrong all along. He had been trying to solve for his own survival.
He had to start solving for theirs.
He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. And for the first time, not by accident, not in panic, not with restraint, he decided to truly fight. He let the wellspring of his dissonant power, the deep, terrible wrongness of his own existence, rise to the surface.
The air around him didn't just shimmer. It curdled.
[A fascinating, yet futile, emotional response,] Vyr's thoughts came, tinged now with a microsecond of genuine surprise. [You intend to engage in kinetic conflict? My corporal form is not of this reality. Your… unmaking… will have no effect.]
"You said your being isn't of this reality," Ravi replied, this time speaking aloud, his voice resonating with a low, humming power that made Kaelith flinch and the dust on the ground vibrate. "That's good."
He took a step forward, his hand raised, not in surrender, but as a weapon.
"That means I don't have to worry about breaking the world," he said, his smile widening. "Because I'm not going to be aiming at the world anymore."
The Archon's hand, still outstretched, was the only thing between them. It was a bridge between realities.
And Ravi was about to burn that bridge. He lunged, his hand a blur, aiming not to strike, but simply to touch. To connect. To introduce his own absolute, contaminating law to the absolute, predatory law of Archon Vyr. It was an act of pure, cosmic vandalism. A weakling from a forgotten world, about to graffiti his name on the side of a god.