Chapter Text
The scene burned blindingly from his vantage point, but he watched carefully, without looking away for a single moment should he miss anything important, as the two discussed the members of the Garden of Recollection who had infiltrated Amphoreus, and how they had either died to Evernight or become husks of the black tide. It was interesting. These creatures didn’t look like your average black tide monster, with the pearl of what their soul once was resting where the head was supposed to be. No, they looked more like animated statues, a fancy artist’s masterpieces come to life. Yet the Antikytheran’s reaction seemed to be nothing more than a simple ‘Oh, they look a bit different’ when he rummaged through the thoughts flowing out of the screen.
“I suppose you aren’t going to help get rid of them?” Dan Heng deadpanned.
“I have no reason to.” Zandar responded pleasantly. “Besides, I’m still under the scrutiny of the two geniuses. I would hate for my actions to be misinterpreted as ones of aggravation.”
Dan Heng gave Zandar a pointed look, letting out an exasperated huff, but he let it go in the end. “Oh—alright, fine.” He turned away from Zandar to face the monsters of the black tide. “Step back, I’ll clear the way.” Moments later, with a few simple slashes of the spear he called Cloud-Piercer, Dan Heng fulfilled his word, and the monsters collapsed to the ground, now nothing more than a few unalived corpses strewn across the path like worthless sacks of potatoes.
The two continued up the path to Kephale’s soul. Once arriving at the final station, Dan Heng and Zandar spoke about the nature of the cycles of Amphoreus. Every time Zandar brought up the extrapolation device, δ-me13, there was a small ripple within his thought process. In one ripple, was a faint, dark swirl from fear. At that moment, Anaxa stopped paying any attention to the conversation. He tracked the path of the fear and began tracing it back to its origin. He walked his consciousness upstream along the flooding river of thoughts. He met a convergence point, and paused there to continue tracing the wisp’s origins. It was obvious. One led to Zandar’s fear, and the rest led to other information about δ-me13.
He wasn’t going to mess this up. The geniuses were counting on him to make this Antikytheran’s life miserable, and he had millions of ways to do so. Now was the perfect opportunity to exercise that ability.
The answer he arrived at near the end of the search was a very foreign concept, never once mentioned in the history of Amphoreus as far as he could remember. What exactly could it be, and why was Zandar so terrified of this word buried so deep in the network of thoughts within his mind?
Holding onto this thought, he turned his attention back to the conversation at hand and watched silently as Dan Heng stepped forward and awakened Phainon/Khaslana, convinced the former Deliverer to uncover the scars of this cycle’s Amphoreus, and as Dan Heng left for the Grove of Epiphany once Phainon had completed his final goal to search for his Trailblazer companion.
He took that chance to reveal himself to Zandar and ask the question.
“Zandar, tell me this: What, exactly, is the Demiurge?”
The original object of δ-me13’s extrapolations. A limitless library used to hold simulations of life cycles. The subject that the device used to compute the answer to the question: What is the prime mover of life?
According to Zandar, the Demiurge had long since been destroyed. The reason it was buried so deep in his head was because he had forgotten about it. And yet…
What genius would simply allow themself to forget something that had once held such importance? Why not turn off the Demiurge, rather than destroying it and potentially miss things that might continue to power the subject? What made Zandar think that, if it was simply destroyed in the real world, it would hold no threat to his experiment?
Or maybe… Zandar was bluffing. Given the lengthy explanation, Zandar clearly obsessed over the Demiurge, or had at least done so in the past. “Hmph. Seems I made a misjudgement on my part. Just mentioning the Demiurge isn’t enough, is it?” Now that Anaxa knew what the Demiurge was, he could send a quick report detailing it and its purpose, along with its current state. Anaxa had to do this before Zandar inevitably deleted his consciousness from his mind and severed connection to the two security cameras known as Herta and Screwllum.
And sent. As he’d explained several times before, he had millions of ways to make an Antikytheran suffer, and this was but one of those many ways.
After a long silence following the brief exchange, Anaxa spoke. He might as well indulge in a pointless endeavor in his last moments, now that he had but a few seconds to exist. “Tell me, Zandar, what color were my eyes right before I transferred myself to that philosopher’s stone?” In any case, that event had been long after Cerces had left his body.
“Blue.”
Oh, so Cerces had decided to leave her mark on Anaxa before disappearing. Maybe he would take a page out of her book.
“Then allow Anaxagoras to leave a mark you will never forget.”
Likely a fruitless endeavor to Zandar, but something that Anaxa would gladly strive to achieve. After all, he was very much willing to learn one more way to make an Antikytheran suffer.
“When the Bough of Rift is born in the Era Nova, watch closely as they dive into the unending truths and spare no effort along with the other Titans to prevent Irontomb’s descent.”
“When?” Zandar repeated. “My, such confident words. How very intriguing.”
Anaxa simply gave Zandar a knowing smirk, and with that, his vision went black.
After what seemed like an eternity, he noticed a faint flash of deep blue, and something vaguely resembling two black horses approaching him, dragging something large behind them. In the background was the striking shape of the full moon, colored in a sharp, everlasting green.