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The Beginning of the End[/center]

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[hider=Summary]
This is the first post of a series that I’ll be doing to wrap up Mk. III.

Some of the Architect’s backstory and motivation is revealed in a flashback. Then, shifting into the present, he decides that the time is right to bring his plans into fruition. He begins moving his entire palace (which is a great hall buried within a small and hollow moon, if you’ve forgotten) through the Celestial Spheres and down towards Galbar.
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Upon a throne there rested a withered husk, once mighty of body, but now with flesh yellowed, wrinkled, and sagging. His throne had become his sarcophagus, his palace a tomb and his house of eternity. The thunderous pounding of footsteps reverberated through the stale and dusty room, rousing the sleeper from his sepulchral reverie. But even now, the god did not seem alarmed. Never was he surprised, for he claimed to have already seen all things. So it was with something resembling expectancy in his eyes that he looked to the visitor and whispered through the tongue of the mind, [i]‘I foretold this day. Your efforts were admirable, A̴̢̡͠͠ḿ̡҉̵ṕ̡͝͠ḩ̵̀̕͟ì̶̶͞b̶̛̕̕҉ò̸̵̡͟l͏̕e̢̕s͏̶҉̵ , but your toil ultimately in vain.’[/i]

The visitor never stopped his advance, calmly walking past row after row of golden pillars down a great hallway leading to the dias and the throne atop it. Nothing remained of the once-magnificent rug beneath his feet save for a few fraying gilded threads.

[i]‘Mortals are like the brazen wicks of so many candles; fickle, bound to fade away. On rare occasions one might be truly great and spread, and create a great inferno, but in the end there will be only ash all the same. They are flawed by nature, and can never grow to be greater than the sum of the might and labor that you put into the making of their wax, dousing of their wick, molding of their form...it, like all things, is bound to one day end, for not even gods have vigor enough to carry on for perpetuity.

‘And did I not warn you that when the toil became too great, as I see it now has, that you would release yourself of the burden and finally abandon your fruitless labor? I bid you look down now and witness for yourself: with the last of us departed, all heavenly and guiding voices have fallen silent; the fruits of the land rot, the soil turns barren, and the very air sickens in sullen stagnation. It is in this manner that old age befalls the world, as it already has done unto us. In this final age, darkness shall be preferred to light, and death thought more profitable than life; no one shall raise his eyes to heaven, the dead shall far outnumber the living, and finally there will remain nobody at all upon the mortal plane. Wind and weather shall persist, in a fashion and for a time, and aided by such forces ruin and disorder will claim the world. Only the remnants of temples and obelisks shall remain to tell of us and our acts, yet in due time even the stones are destined to become dust and then nothing remember. The world will return to Chaos, as if we had never existed, and none shall have been any better off for all the years that you had delayed what was inevitable.

‘That is why I counseled you to cease your rebellion; warring against Destiny is as foolish a task as one might expect to be conjured in the mind of a madman, and yet you did so and always insisted upon your sanity to the contrast of all your peers’ supposed madness. Do you accept now what I tried to teach you so long ago? By now even one so stubborn as you should have realized the truth of my words--the only purpose of life is to inward perfection, and to prepare yourself for death. Immortality is unattainable. Accept this wisdom and grow from it, and I suppose that your labors shall have then at least borne some small fruit, late as the harvest was.’[/i]

The visitor was mounting the steps to the dias, nearly upon the throned god now. He climbed, and stopped only when he loomed directly over the decrepit god. He narrowed his one eye, and asked, [color=lightblue][b]“And when the winds stop blowing, and we move and think no more, and the world slips back into its primordial state of Chaos, what is to come then?”[/b][/color]

[i]‘Perhaps there will be another tiny spark that spawns a great blaze, and for a time, there will be a new cosmos and a new world, and the wheel shall have turned once again until that fire burns out.’[/i]

Ả̶̢̬̻m̸̲͆̆p̷̰͕̠̔̚h̸̻̜̞͑̓͠ḯ̷̠̦̗̎b̷̯͓̐͐̾o̶̙͔̖̓̌l̶͍̉̎͜͠è̴̥̒ͅs̴͕̳̏̆͜ allowed the hint of a triumphant smile to etch its way onto his stoic face. [color=lightblue][b]“I think so, too. But you misinterpret my intentions, O Wise One; I would live through the long night to see this next dawn, for I have yet to abandon my greatest burden--that burning desire for eternity.”[/b][/color]

A frown might have appeared on the decrepit one’s face if his muscles still had the vigor to move. Instead, he conveyed his frustration and displeasure through telepathy. [i]‘Do you not listen? You remain blind, even now, to the impossibility and futility of your raging against fate? There is no way to sustain yourself long enough to see that day, no guarantee that it will even com-’[/i]

And with that the final brick crumbled, and everything collapsed with a sudden violence.

[color=lightblue][b]“I will MAKE a way! A new world will arise, for I shall be the Architect of its making, even if I must labor until the ages of ages and expend every last ounce of my strength...and of yours.”[/b][/color]

He raised a massive fist and struck down the God of Gods with a single mighty blow to the head. From the corpse of his oldest friend he drained every last ounce of power and might, all that could sustain him, until withered flesh became as paper and then as dust, and bones no more than sand. And then he collapsed, somehow wearier for it. In the days to come, he would do the same to each and every one of his fellows, and to what remained of the dying world’s mortal life. That grim task brought to a close, he found himself truly alone, sitting upon his former master’s stone throne.

He felt weak even after all of that. But his willpower was stronger than it had ever been; it was stronger than the foundations of the earth, than words could describe, than the imagination could even grasp.

The true work hadn’t even begun.

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The Architect wallowed in a fevered state, even if he masked it with smoke and projections of majesty and power. The great, bulbous, all-devouring eye about the center of his head was of course an illusion, for no eye could truly see all things and stare directly at a dozen gods at once. First it had been his skin; he had taken on a mummified look. His stone throne and palace, those that had been his former master’s, had been the only tangible relics of the past that he had brought to this new world before its foundation. He had done so out of practical reasons, in truth. The palace, buried deep within a moon, had been a suitable vessel for traversing the void of space, and time and energy had of course been of the essence. He hardly could have afforded to fashion his own vessel even if doing so might have freed him from carrying the burdens of the past.

And what burdens they had been! It was to his horror that his flesh had started to take on the dessicated and mummified look of his dead master; for a long time he had refused to so much as look upon the stone throne for fear that he would grow like the one who had sat on it previously. So he always toiled, confident that labor would spare him the fate of growing so decrepit, but instead the endless burdens of erecting the Seals around his chosen place and carving out an entire universe from [i]nothingness[/i] had left him even more broken. Muscles tore, and his body and strength had begun failing.

Dismayed but not dissuaded, he had compensated for the sickly constitution by relying more and more upon the power of his mind and magical might. The atrophy continued, and eventually even the ligaments and tendons below fell off or else rotted away.

Now his bones were ancient, yellowed, and cracked; exposed to the world save for a thin layer of slime and the vaporous illusions that he wove around himself and wore like clothes. The slightest movement required a telekinetic heave, and that was the true reason why he had collapsed upon his throne and not moved since he’d sown the seeds for this world.

Fortunately, none of the seeds that were to become caretakers seemed to have perceived his weakness. He thought back to the one with a head of fire; her challenging of his might had been terrifying, for he knew all too well that even the greatest of gods could be slain, but it seemed that through stifling her first acts of rebellion, any thoughts of rebellion that the others harbored had been slain in their infancy.

So he had waited in a half-delirious state while they had set themselves upon the field he’d built. They furrowed it and helped the other seeds to grow for generation upon generation and his plan had come to fruition. It was slow but sure by the notions of mortals and gods, but to his warped sense of reality, it had been hardly an instant before he could sense that the time grew near.

Roused by the scent, he shook himself out of the trance that he’d lapsed into. Fully lucid once more, the Architect ordered his palace to move, and so it began to journey its way through the Celestial Spheres and descend ever closer and closer to Galbar.