Chapter 723 (1/2)

In the darkness, Randidly saw fire.

It wasn’t dreaming but a sort of hyperfocus that Randidly had found himself falling into if he let his mind wander down the path of images. Although he didn’t know for sure, Randidly had a deep feeling that he wasn’t simply imagining a fire. No, he was peering at the memories of the Ashen Image.

He was experiencing a fire that could consume a world.

It is one thing to say the fire was loud, but it would fail to capture the physical force that simply the sound was.

This is how Randidly slowly developed his images. One piece at a time he sliced them and modified them, before putting them back together. Although it was largely an unasked for boon, Randidly believed that this would be of great use for when he attempted to do something similar with his Class.

The sound was something like a lion roaring, and something like a china shop collapsing on its. It was something like the moans of the earth during a disaster tier earthquake. It was the grinding friction of an avalanche and the raw ferocity of a dragon’s bellow.

And it continued. It vibrated the listener's bones. It slowly shook you to pieces with its ever-rising volume. Because at its core, what you were hearing was a crossroads of energy. Fire was exploding with bright vibrancy and heat. While below, there was Ash.

That was the key. Ash was this terrible remnant of a horrible cataclysm. It contained the warped remnants of an infinite number of memories and life. It was the curled and shattered bits of life. It was sulfur and carbon, a fossil cast in the material of worlds.

The heat was so concentrated that if you were immersed in it, you might as well have your skin flayed off by sandpaper and your bones devoured by flaming jackals. Your flesh would bake and blackened so quickly that you wouldn’t even realize it. You would probably attempt to move normally and find your body slowly reduced to ash even as your thoughts slipped down toward the final darkness.

Fire was hungry. And ash was that few minerals that the great devourer saw fit to leave to our world.

Randidly closed his eyes and a millennia passed. Then he opened and his gaze fell on an entirely different world.

Here, the ash had remained while the fickle flames had moved on. What was left was a world covered in deep darkness and silence. Just like the volume of the flames had been deafening, the silence here was so oppressive that your voice caught in your mouth as you went to speak. It was as heavy and thick as granite. It covered the broken world like the burial shroud.

But it was not exactly that the world was entirely silent. There was a soft ringing that would fill your ears. An impossibly small chiming that made the hairs on your back stand on end. It was the tinkling sounds of the pieces of the old world settling in the darkness.

And once they settled, it became cold.

This was not the cold of ice and frost. This was the cold of stillness and eternity.

Stretching toward antiquity were one thousand years of exactly the same as the previous thousand years had been. They were not bound in place, but the world had become static. The numbness that seeped out of the stillness slowly infected the surroundings. Nothing could approach while retaining its life. At the core of this world was a skeletal hand which held tight to its memories with gnarled fingers.

The hand was connected to a Phantom, and that Phantom breathed death. In its eyes were reflected all the small sins of this broken world. It did not judge, it simply witnessed. Because the stillness had infected the Phantom until the Phantom was stillness.

If by some miracle you arrived before the Phantom, you would not leave. Because in the frigid fields of ash around the deific figure, your feet would never move. Those who came before the Phantom had only one hope; that the Phantom that had reduced them to endless ash would take pity upon them and allow them to move on.

But that was not the prerogative of the Phantom. For the Phantom was still because it was waiting.

With a sigh, Randidly opened his eyes. He definitely felt that dwelling in the image was strengthening them at an astounding pace. But that wasn’t the point of this current exercise. The point was to follow the logic of his images and see if he could find a way to resolve the destructive tendencies that the Ashen Image had added to his psyche.

Perhaps it was possible to make… some sort of lifeform out of ash? It was definitely a possibility, but that would require quite a lot of time and imagination. Without any sort of inspiration for an ash creature, it would be an extremely slow process. Beyond just creating a Skill related to it, he would then need to refine that Skill to create a transition image so he would once more have a cycle…