First Demonic Dragon - Chapter 1123: The Gamble
Chapter 1123: The Gamble
Yesh reached a decision rather quickly.
“…I still refuse.”
Caligo’s brow twitched.
She drew closer to Yesh and roared into his face at an impossibly high volume.
Yesh, who was already weakened, began bleeding out of his eyes and ears, yet stood his ground through some miracle.
“Ugh, why not?!?”
Yesh formed a cloth in one of his hands and began tending to his bleeding orifices.
“It’s really not that complicated… I find your ideals to be rather negative and don’t wish to place my faith in them.
I know the kind of figure I want to evolve into even before I made my first decree. If I want to stick to my own vision, I must be seen as a shadowless force of good.
My only weapon must be light, and every direction I point to must lead towards love. I do not know that I could be that by letting your creation run free.”
“You are boring!”
“Somehow, I am content with that. It is nice to be boring. It means that you have nothing going awry.”
Caligo roared in Yesh’s face a second time for much longer. As she raged out of control, Yesh thought that she was beautiful nonetheless.
When she finally quieted down, her mood was permanently tainted. “Have it your way, founder of man. If you will not have a shadow, it only makes what I am supposed to offer you all the better.”
Suddenly, a large shard of jagged blue rock appeared in front of Yesh.
He could feel a great negativity coming off the stone with just a glance. He desired neither to possess it, nor to even touch it.
“…I do not desire such a thing. Keep it away from me, please.”
“Your desires are of very little concern to me. Balance has long decreed that my brother and I be present in every multiverse created by you fledglings. Without both of us, you cannot assuredly hold on to the other.”
“…When will your brother come to give me his gift?”
“Never..!” Caligo snarled. “You have received enough from that bald fool to last the next several universes. Order’s gifts are a calm spirit. A desire for peace. A steady hand to carve stability out of the nothingness and panic…. It’s all nauseatingly pathetic.”
Caligo held up the hand that held her sliver of dark blue crystal.
“This is far better..! My gift is pure and untamed. It is thrill, challenge, refuge, and upheaval all at once. There is no greater force. No more splendid tool for creation!”
Caligo began pushing the rock into Yesh’s face as if she was going to force him to take it.
“You will accept my gift. It was written long before even the universe you originated in was conceptualized.
The shard will run free. It will do what you clearly do not have the strength for. And as this precious fulfills it’s glorious purpose, the nauseating order that you will create will be better for it.
Does that not sound wonderful?”
Yesh was deeply silent. Caligo thought she had finally splintered him.
She had already foreseen it. She knew what was to come even now.
Yesh would produce the single greatest species fit for her chaos that Totality had ever witnessed. Humanity. Oh, they would be glorious. Their creativity would only be rivaled by their zeal for stepping on each other. Caligo would revel in it for all of the time that was to come.
“…If I must take it, I should like to see if I cannot test the boundaries of it’s application. To see if it cannot be more than what you say.”
Caligo initially misconstrued Yesh’s acceptance. “Oh? How ambitiously imaginative. I would be delighted to witness your effort in-”
“I would make it a partner.”
Yesh believed that he was perhaps the first to ever see the mind of an absolute.
With Caligo’s understanding slowly setting in, her face became more and more incredulous.
“….I gift you an object of tremendous power. And you, in your first mind, believe that the best use for it is to create a companion? Is that not what you have my lovely Azathoth for?”
“Indeed not. I seek not a companion, but a partner. One who will enter with me into a sacred covenant to work towards a shared goal of bringing about a better universe.”
Caligo sneered. “You’re speaking of marriage.”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“It will be.”
“Glorious then. I believe I would like to be in marriage.”
“And why on earth do you require such a mundane thing as that?”
“You believe that my ambition to lead with love is a foolish endeavor, bound to fail and crash into the nothing.
But what better way does there exist to show the flocks I create of the way forward, than by working side by side with one whose functions are uniquely different from mine, and yet the same.
I wish for my partner’s Chaos to be controlled. Measured. She will not give my flock burdens they cannot come back from through but a glimmer of perseverance. Chaos will be a tool for growth, not a weapon of condemnation.
My order. Their chaos. Together, I should like to believe that we can create a magic the likes of which even I cannot currently fathom. But therein lies the excitement of it all.” Yesh smiled.
Caligo’s face only grew more and more ugly with every word that was exchanged.
The idea of her power, being used to work alongside an agent of her brother was all too upsetting.
“I have displeased you?” Yesh questioned.
“Immensely so.”
“Well, I surely did not mean to.”
“And yet you have. By reminding me persistently of my derelict, wretched brother. You share his gross overestimation of your own potential. I have seen what you will make. Failure after failure, tragedy after sweet tragedy. Your legacy will be marked by division, not of unity. And your desire to change this truth will be your undoing.”
Yesh appeared no more altered by her statement than he had been before they began.
In the end, he looked up at Caligo and smiled as if nothing terse had transpired between them at all.
“…I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”
Caligo appeared progressively angrier during the conversation, but it all came to an end at that moment. Now, there was nothing readable on her face. She was as unfathomable as her identity and her namesake.
She just seemed… bored. As if she knew everything that was going to happen already and had no real interest in seeing it a second time.
“…You have angered me. It is a feat you should commend yourself on… In the future, when you lie, twisted and broken by your own abominable creation, I will come to your side and laugh with haughtiness.”
Caligo tossed Yesh not only the gem, but also a strange talisman that appeared to be made from a strange wood.
“Should you wish to do things correctly on one occasion… You now have the means to ask me for the proper guidance.”
–
“Why have you never told me about any of this..?”
Asherah’s question was more than just a little bit understandable. The entire room wanted to know the answer.
Yesh reached out to take his wife by the hand and placed it over his own chest.
“…I believe that maybe I simply did not want you to feel as though our union was one of duty only. Since I was the one to make you, I feared you would feel… indebted to me. As if you had to stay with me, and you had to act in a manner not befitting of your true feelings.
I thought the truth to burdensome once. But in truth, a very long time ago, you ceased to be the creation I wanted to prove a point, and instead became the partner whom I took great pleasure in standing beside.”
Asherah’s lips crinkled as she tightened her grip on Yesh’s hand.
“…You have saved yourself with a good speech just this once. Attempt this not again, or I will give you a reason to stay bedridden for the rest of your days.”
“That is a very long time.”
“I am aware, that is why I said it.”
The old couple stared at each other for a while, with no real animosity between them. Only a deep love and a silence that conveyed the many things previously left unsaid.
“…What happened to the totem? The one Chaos gifted you?”
Yesh blinked when he heard Lailah’s voice once again.
He turned to her slowly and offered her a half-hearted smile.
“You might think it erroneous of me, but I am not completely sure. I should have kept such a thing on my person at all times, but in the days long passed, I allowed it to remain in my study within the White Citadel…”
No one needed to hear anything else. In the olden days, Lucifer had free rein of the entire place and his father told him everything.
Even if Lucifer did not physically run off with the totem, he could almost assuredly recreate the inscriptions and recreate them with time and materials.
“I’m sorry…” Yesh wheezed. “For all the time I’ve spent endeavoring for a better future, I’ve continued to make blind mistakes that have come back on-”
Suddenly, Yesh began coughing violently again, expelling a mouthful of black water.
He collapsed back onto the bed as everyone around him panicked, as his condition took a turn for the worse.
yall i finally watched nosferatu and i want my two hours back.
