Return of the Runebound Professor - Chapter 760 (Patreon)

Noah remembered. The endless beat of dragged footsteps. The winding golden light of the path. The darkness that swallowed everything but the

Noah remembered.

The endless beat of dragged footsteps. The winding golden light of the path. The darkness that swallowed everything but the way forward. He remembered the Line. He remembered the grindstone of time that had milled his mind away. He remembered the monotonous commandment of existence that dragged him forward, one foot after the other, into eternity.

There was no end to the memories. They melded together, the sound of every individual footstep layering over each other until it was a booming roar echoing through the cracked recesses of his soul.

The past and the present were one and the same. There was no distinction between what had once been and what now was. Time itself became a mere suggestion — and then it became nothing at all.

He was in his soul.

He was in the Line.

He was in Arbitage.

He was on Earth.

He was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Eternity didn’t have limits. It didn’t have boundaries. Mortal concepts were nothing more than distant memories. And those memories sank within the ocean of his crumbling mind. The core of a mortal — everything that made him who he was — it was all nothing more than a droplet in a sea of footsteps.

For every memory Noah had of anything at all, he had a hundred of the Line. A thousand. A million. It was all the same. There was no difference between any of the memories. There was no distinction between one step and the next.

No boundary between where Noah ended and the Line began. No limit to the rivers of water pouring into the ocean, their crash drowning out the distant screaming within Noah’s mind.

Nobody could hear him screaming in the Line. There wasn’t anyone who could scream within the Line in the first place. There was only a single action permitted to all who inevitably walked its path — and it was the next step.

Everything faded away. All memory of what he’d been doing, of what he’d been fighting for and against, it was all irrelevant. None of it mattered anymore. Such things could not be brought unto the next life.

They were lost.

Forgotten.

They were ordained to be. The sea would be purified until nothing remained. It would be pure.

So what is that?

Thoughts twisted back into Noah’s mind. Within the sea of nothingness was… something.

A patch of black like an oil spill. It glistened, undiluted, waiting. The memories of the Line beat against it. They crashed in great waves and sought to swallow the darkness.

But still it remained, floating upon the surface of the endless ocean that was his mind.

There was silence. Just how long, nobody could have said. But time passed. And the memories remained. They stuck out against the fragments of what had been a mind and floated in wait for someone.

In wait for him.

In wait for the one that had once been Noah.

His mind brushed across the patch of darkness. It was so small that it might as well have been nothing more than a tiny blip. A single star in a black sky, insignificant to anyone but one who stood under its light.

There wasn’t much within it. Certainly nothing of note to anyone else. A few faces. Names. A pie and a bird and a violin. A smattering of mortal memories. They couldn’t have covered more than a year or two at the absolute most.

That tiny bastion of thoughts that should have been long forgotten stood in defiance of the Line. They stood in the face of the waves of eternity.

The Line reared up. It drove down upon the tiny spark of resistance to crush it out with the sound of a million different falling feet.

There was a brilliant, ringing crash. It was a thousand fine plates shattering against the ground, the howl of wind through the still peaks of a distant mountain, the crackle of lighting flame in the pitch black night.

And the Line shattered.

A name carved itself into being with a certainty that could be denied by no god. One that ordained its existence in a command that even eternity could not swallow.

Noah Vines existed.

There were people waiting for him.

A ragged scream tore from his lips.

There was no ocean. No Line. There was only him. There was only Noah and the memories that had been carved into his soul. They could never be sealed away again. They were part of him. They were nearly everything.

Everything but a single patch of black oil.

But, right now, they were in the way.

Noah’s eyes snapped open.

Golden light burned within them like liquid honey. It cut through the darkness of his soul, waves of glistening light like King Midas had cursed the very air. Massive white cracks split open all throughout the darkness around him.

The Prophet’s work undid itself in an instant, unable to contain the full might of the soul bearing down on it for an instant longer.  

An agonized scream tore through the air.

But it wasn’t his.

“No!” Father begged. The man’s voice was raw and raspy.  His voice box had been torn to shreds from over usage. He knelt on the ground before Noah, his eyes glassy and distant. Bloody furrows ran down the sides of his face where his fingernails had dug into his skin, carved in the pen of agony. “No! Stop! Free me from this hell!”

“You can withstand it enough to think,” Noah said. His own words were distant, as if they’d been spoken through someone else’s mouth.

But they hadn’t been. They were his.

Father’s gaze didn’t quite focus, but it managed to shift so it was directed toward Noah. He panted like a rabid dog, saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth as he staggered, trying and failing to rise to his feet.

“What is this?” Father said, his words something between a demand and a plea. “What have you done to me? What have you done to yourself? What are you?”

Noah stared down at Father.

“I am Noah Vines.”

Father stared back up at him. His lips trembled, parting in horror. Noah knew what the man was seeing. He didn’t have to guess. Father was crumbling. His incredible soul didn’t make him immune to the Line.

No man could stand against eternity.

And Father, above all other things, stood alone.

There was only one thing that could give pause to the Line. It wasn’t a Rune. It wasn’t some Imbuement or soul manipulation technique. It wasn’t a formation — and it certainly wasn’t a tool.

It was the one thing Father had absolutely nothing of.

“How?” Father whispered. “I feel you. You… survived this? It isn’t possible.”

“Not for you,” Noah said.

Father staggered to his feet. His breathing accelerated, coming out in rough, ragged gasps. He swayed on the spot, his soul shifting and lurching in every direction as he tried to free himself from the Line.

But there was nowhere to run. The golden magic carved through the shadow in a web that was just as endless as the darkness itself. Its waves rolled within his gaze and spilled from his lips with every breath. The Line wasn’t just inside Noah’s soul. It was his soul, carved so deeply into his being that there was no separation between the two of them.

“If I kill you, it’ll stop,” Father whispered. He lurched forward.

Noah stepped out of the way.

A footstep echoed through his mind — no. Hundreds of them. They beat against his sanity, trying to drag him into the maw of the swirling golden serpent that wound and wove through him.

But he couldn’t allow that to happen.

Not yet.

Moxie was waiting for him. Lee was waiting for him. His students were waiting for him.

Noah’s mind had to remain intact for just a little longer. The Line would have to wait its turn. There was a patch of black within his soul that could not be allowed to be damaged. Not in this life, and not in the next.

Father lurched for him again. It was a sad attack, little more than a stumbling shuffle. There was little trace of the terrifying, dead-eyed monster that had once inhabited Father’s skin. Panic and terror welled in Father’s eyes. His hands swept through the air as if searching for something to hold onto. Something to help him bear infinity.

All that remained of Father was a scared old man.

“Help me,” Father whispered. “I — power. I have—”

“You have nothing,” Noah said.

“Spider. You’re being a fool,” Father rasped. “Order. Chaos. Don’t you understand? The fate of this world. I hold the keys. I have seen it all. The Order will destroy everything if the Chaos keeps grows stronger. I can show you. The Song of the Night’s Shadow—”  

 “I don’t need it,” Noah said. He stared down at Father, disgust twisting his features.

“Please,” Father begged. He grabbed onto Noah’s shirt, bloodied fingers leaving streaks across the jacket as his glassy eyes bore up in desperation. “I have power. I could be—”

“A tool?” Noah asked. “I don’t need tools, Father. And I don’t need you.”

The ground started to crumble. Father stiffened. His eyes jerked down as fragments of darkness fell away beneath them.

Regal yellow light tore through the shadows, swallowing them whole as more and more of Noah’s soul was turned to glimmering gold.

“No!” Father screamed. “Stop!”

Noah drove his foot down into the ground.

The final shards of the darkness shattered. They fell away, leaving behind only a winding segment of the Line.

Father’s fingers lost their purchase. He fell, plummeting to the Line below. His soul wasn’t even struggling anymore. There was no longer any difference between this reality and the world outside. His soul shrank in on itself, shredded apart as his mind frayed.

There was a difference between walking the Line one step at a time and experiencing enormous swathes of it within mere seconds. Father may have been a Rank 7 — but he was not a god.

And now he never would be.

Noah watched, the dim candlelight that was his own mind flickering and fading, as what had once been Father was shredded away to nothing. He still existed, but not in any manner that could have been living. There were no more memories. No more schemes or plans.

There was no more Father.

All that remained to him was the Line. Or, rather, this version of it. An imprint of the Line, identical in every way except for its ending.

Because, unlike the true Line, there was no goddess waiting for Father at the end.

There was only the next step.