A Failed Hero's Voyage Chapter 19: Chapter 19: Fated Meeting

Read chapter 19 of A Failed Hero's Voyage by churro on NovelPedia.

Atherius tilted his gaze upward, fixing it on the immense, unblinking eye that consumed the sky of the fractured realm. Slowly, deliberately, it began to close, and with each fraction of movement, the world responded. Reality splintered along unseen fault lines, cracking like strained glass as entire sections peeled away into nothingness. As the domain unraveled, the celestial dragon’s voice returned, echoing within his mind with unsettling clarity. Hearing his own voice twisted into something mocking, ignited a quiet, controlled fury deep within him. “Heh… hero,” the voice murmured, laced with contempt. “What do you think this place is?” Atherius did not answer immediately. His grip tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the hilt of his blade as the fractures widened and the world thinned around him. Only when another shard of reality broke away into the void did he respond, his voice steady and precise. “A construct born of your power… a fabricated dimension.” A low chuckle followed, slow, amused, dismissive. “If only it were that simple.” The voice lingered for a moment, then sharpened. “Tell me, Atherius… have you ever heard of the Void?” His eyes narrowed slightly, though the instability surrounding him did not distract him. “The Void is a myth,” he replied without hesitation. “A concept of absolute nothingness, something that cannot exist by definition.” Silence followed, brief but deliberate. Then laughter erupted, unrestrained, manic, reverberating through his skull like something clawing to break free. “You truly are a fool,” the celestial dragon hissed. “First you believe your god is benevolent… now you deny the existence of the one place that exposes his greatest lie.” Atherius remained silent, but his posture hardened, tension threading through his stillness. “Oh, the Void exists,” the voice continued, almost delighted now. “And that precious blade at your side? It has fed it more than you could ever imagine. Nothing your weapon kills is erased, hero, it is discarded. Cast away. Sent to the most elegant refuse pit your god could conceive… a place beyond time, beyond change, beyond meaning.” The voice softened, almost reverent. “A place that has always been, and will always be. A place that exists outside logic itself.” Atherius frowned, his gaze sharpening as the last remnants of the realm trembled on the brink of collapse. “If only the divine can reach such a place,” he said slowly, “then what does that make you?” For the first time, the voice did not answer immediately. The silence stretched heavily. Then, as the final fractures spread and the world gave way, “I am its vessel.” Reality shattered. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, completely. The realm broke into countless fragments of nothingness, each piece dissolving as it fell away into oblivion. Atherius steadied himself on instinct, his senses recalibrating as a new environment took hold around him. Above stretched a boundless sky filled with distant, unmoving stars, their faint light swallowed by an infinite, oppressive darkness. There was no horizon, no ground in any conventional sense, only space, vast and indifferent. For a brief moment, he simply observed. Then a sound broke through the stillness, a ragged, deliberate breath. Atherius turned, then he stilled. A dragon stood before him, no more than a few dozen meters away, yet its presence collapsed the distance between them into something meaningless. Its form shifted continuously, scales flickering between absolute black and radiant white as though reality itself could not settle on what it was meant to be. The contrast was not gradual but abrupt, violent, existence rewriting itself across its body in real time. Four immense wings extended from its back, each ending in clawed appendages that flexed with unnatural precision, as if they were not merely limbs but instruments of control over the space around them. Four horns spiraled backward along its skull, framing a silhouette that felt both divin