23. Reflection on Consequences

"Ugh… My head fucking hurt… Uh, my head is back." I half groaned, moaned, and sighed in pain and relief as my senses came back, my rebuilt brain feeling as if I had a hangover but also like I repeatedly bashed my head against a wall.

Then memories of what I did and witnessed came down on me, and there was a lot, too much, even with my nervous system slowly getting back on track. So I did one thing at a time: dying physically, even under my terms, wasn't without short-term consequences such as weakness and the like it seemed.

It's not surprising, but nothing a few days won't fix.

"I did it," I said, my voice echoing in the surrounding void for seemingly eternity as a manic-fanged smile grew. I repeated my voice louder and containing untold emotions, "I did it."

"I killed her; I killed them all, destroyed their kinds, hopes, and dreams. I succeeded. Me, their guardian, one they had robbed from his world, they shattered him and all that he was to twist it into a monster. They underestimated a human potential for malignancy and paid the full price in blood and annihilation." I continued with a hearty chuckle, joy oozing from my body in rolling psychic waves.

I knew of their death with certainty as all their presence in the back of my head had vanished, an ever-present hitch now scratched. Though the likelihood some were still present and hidden by some unknown means to my senses was here, it didn't affect my joy at their genocide.

My chuckle grew in intensity to almost full-blown laughter as I stretched my regrown body to its full size, bones popping audibly, muscles bulging, and tail swishing left, right, up and down in response to my joy vaguely reminiscent of a dog wagging its tail.

It was incredible… Words failed to describe it; who had said vengeance was not fulfilling? A bunch of nonsensical moral bullshit that was what it was, well there was some truth in it, such as the price, the price… What I did was not without cost or repercussions on others and myself.

The price was one I was paying at this very moment as I studied myself and the world around me.

"A curse… As expected of 'Mother,'" I spat with the beginning of a snarl and growl that disappeared soon after. Dead, no, erased from existence, she held no sway over me anymore, and there was no reason to continue.

'Never again will this be allowed. Never, never, never.' I repeated internally, flashes of memories of what she had me done appearing and disappearing by the thousands.

Never will something similar happen; she didn't only see me as a tool but also as a toy, an experiment for her own sadistic pleasure and twisted curiosity. The least I could be happy out of it all was that she was an empirical person with actions sporting clear goals as horrifying as some were.

And that I learned from them as well.

'Now the bitch died if only she had suffered more. Alas, that is life. I can't have my cake and eat it too.' I thought darkly, and my state of mind stabilized soon after.

If she hadn't built me to endure the highest level of duress, I knew how I would have ended, and it wouldn't have been pretty. However, now was the present and future.

And what she did as a last act was an ingenious little thing, filled with malice, and from her understanding of me, would lead me in a spiral of rage and even potentially despair. However, all it did was raise my irritation a tiny bit and cause me to chuckle darkly, my mood rising.

"Taking my hope for freedom, heh? Fitting, but quite unimaginative, thought it wasn't like you could have done much else." I uttered a sneer growing, denying it as I might. It still pissed me off, and not by an insignificant amount.

I knew she was going to fuck me up in some way. Still, the effect on my mental state proved yet again that my ability to control the consequences of my emotions didn't stop me from experiencing them at an intensity far beyond human comprehension.

"Six rings, the six keys, their locks, the six sockets of the bottle, my prison; once all unite, the new master shall open it, and I will emerge to obey. New master, huh? What a naive little curse that will be a pain for the foreseeable future." I hummed in a mix of annoyance and mockery.

The purpose wasn't to make me a slave. She wasn't foolish enough to think it was a viable possibility. Even at the time, I don't think she lost that much of her cognitive capabilities, not to realize it was asinine at best.

My hate for her knew no bounds, but it didn't blind me from acknowledging her qualities. After all, how could I hate something I did not understand? Hate was a powerful emotion only second to love with a few others, and it mustn't be misused or confused with others.

It was to imprison me, to reduce me to nothing more than an object, a common theme for her—a tool with no reason to possess free will and a life of its own but to obey.

If a 'master' were to come and 'sadly' depart from the world of the living, his or her death would begin the cycle anew, meaning I can't just go around killing my 'master' by 'grave mistake' due to a 'saddening misunderstanding of command' to free myself. Like the lizard bitch I knew I could harm them intentionally.

The irony of my title never hit harder, but giving wishes was not on my to-do list, particularly to someone to make me their yes-man. And that was considering all the rings that were found and brought.

Whoever brought the rings and freed me won't be weak or misguided.

The Milky Way was not an empty vacuum of spaces. Bringing the rings was a feat of exceptional proportion for anyone who was not me.

The rings were untraceable, no matter the means used, not even by the highest of divination; the only option was for me to point to their location or by sheer luck or

fine-combining of the galaxy.

I was aware of their location, but it was muddled, and probing more than necessary could and would attract unwanted attention, more than I supposedly was getting.

For now, that is, I just woke up and was vulnerable. But it's not as if anyone could go through the shields of Yuggoth that weren't Mag'ladroth, but that was no reason to make my awakening obvious and a common fact.

Back to the rings, three of them were in locations I didn't know the names of besides what the Old Ones used, a series of letters and numbers that followed precise codes and rules. They were unimaginative, but they were sedentary, and aside from a few star systems, the names were this way.

Two were at the edge of the Milky Way but opposite to the others, and the third was at the heart of the galaxy.

'The fourth was… Huh, is that a museum?' I thought with a raised eyebrow, feeling the little I could outside the force field holding the ring above a pedestal of Necrodermis.

This separate dimension was Necron owned, that much I could tell, and beyond this, it was arranged like a collection, a gallery where I was on exposition from a random object I had enchanted to my ring…

The only being popping into my mind was someone my favorite Astromancer had described in a plethora of terms, increasing my library of insults threefold. It was most likely Trazyn's collection.

For the last ring, well, I was pretty surprised, too, considering where it was—my favorite blue ball of dirt.

'It's on Earth…' I thought with an amused smile. Spreading my senses from the ring and stopping at my current limits of a few meters, I remarked I was in a nest, and a colorful bird was nesting two eggs while the whole was atop a flowering tree.

"The big guys are dead, it seems," I whistled uncaringly at one of the largest mass extinctions. It wasn't even a loss. In my Vault, I had samples of them frozen, so it was not a subject worth spilling tears over.

Humans were better, and the meteorite was premonished by the Old Ones who had fiddled with this planet in the past, such as to create the genes in certain mammal lineages that would lead to the great apes, notably Homo Sapiens. The bread and butter of this Universe if my memories are to be believed.

"Hmm, bring the rings together… But I don't need someone to open the Flask of Sealing for me to get out." I intoned merrily, warping myself to the extremity of my cell, two of my clawed hands popping out and trailing down the runes as I bathed them in darkness for them to waver and return to their initial state.

But someone with a good sense of detail and knowledge of these runes could tell the difference, someone like me. And it had weakened in its effect by a small amount, but it did, and little by little, they will wear out like mountains in the face of erosion.

The Flask of Sealing was where I was, and like the rings, be they the keys or my portals, it was an integral part of my existence. They were not quite like my arms, but in a conceptual sense, they were parts of what I was. It's through it that the Sequence of Renewal, how I regenerated after my kamikaze episode happened. And why I did it.

It's also through it that the curse exists without me being able to counter it. The one who cast it and the price paid only worsened my case.

But there was one thing that needed to be accounted for by me: this little bottle was not limitless. It did great, and many things, such as currently stopping me from influencing the world by the use of my portal rings. It contained and sealed my anomalous energy and greatly limited my psychic influences.

That was because it was at its strongest, and the second was true only to a degree; it was impossible to stop the darkness, the most potent aspect of my existence. Slowly but surely, it will trickle down, and droplet by droplet, my power will fill the bottle until it cannot hold it anymore.

The metaphor with a vase filled little by little with water until it tipped over was more factual than anything here.

However, before this critical moment, the Flask of Sealing will show signs of 'bugs' to put it into simple words, and from then on, my prison will show cracks no matter how hard it tries to repair itself, and the restrictions will be shattering one by one.

Nothing was eternal. All journeyed through the magical existence given to oneself and ended in the embrace of darkness, be it cold or warm. It was a universal constant that the Universe itself was not abstained from.

But there was one major problem; it would take time, one I wasn't sure of, but from what I was seeing and what the lizard bitch taught me and I learned it would be between twenty to a hundred million Earth years.

It's a rather immense time range, if I may say, one I will shorten.

However, it didn't take into consideration some important points. It didn't take into account my suicidal betrayal. It wasn't prepared to support my reformation, meaning it atrophied part of itself as a safeguard mechanism, and it wasn't used normally, meaning it wasn't put somewhere to seal me definitely and enhance the flask's abilities.

And it had been modified by her curse destabilizing area for me to exploit. Overall, it transformed millions of years into a fraction of a percentile of the time to wait, still many and many millennia, but better than the other options.

But first, my immediate future.

Spreading my senses around Yuggoth, I studied the rocky planet in detail to note that it had barely changed for what had happened; life, be it fungal, vegetal, animal, or all in between, was flourishing.

For the civilization part, cities, structures, and monuments of all kinds praising the oh-so-inspiring greatness of the psychic toads that remained in pristine conditions bare of any uncontrolled nature. Any damage done by the Krell or panicking saurian healed through the psychic matrix imbued into all materials.

As for the Krells themselves? I made the shields with their existence in mind, and less to be said after they did their pest control, the auto-defense system disposed of them. Their fate was to be popped like fleshy balloons by needles of darkness.

I did free them from their cage, but rabid animals needed to be treated as such, though for the cage itself, the remaining one had likely escaped with my siblings. I didn't doubt they would cull the psychic parasites.

'Hmm, siblings…' I thought and was somewhat conflicted about it all. To say I didn't have the most friendly relationship with most of them would be an understatement, but what I did… It must have shaken them to their cores.

But that happened; I betrayed them for my goals and will do so again if necessary. The most surprising aspect is that Khaine wasn't still repeatedly trying to break the shields to kill me. He did try; the defense systems had surveillance functions, and I had close to eight hundred seventy-six billion hours worth of his rage in stock as proof. So, around a million years, an unhealthy amount of anger.

I pissed him off, to say the least, and the only reason I could think of why he wasn't still bashing his head on my doorway was Asuryan. And the fiery bird was likely pleased to be without a master but wouldn't miss a chance to use everything against me.

Rightly so, I would have done the same if more directly in his position. What bothered me the most was the trio of love, dreams, and wilderness, but that was up to time to tell. I did take a liking to some of them, and it wasn't hard to think what must have been their reactions to what I did.

I wouldn't go that far as saying it hurt. That would be false and a bit too hypocritical even for me, but that was very unpleasant that there wasn't any other way. Or any other way I was willing to take if I wanted to be honest.

Godly family drama aside, the protection of Yuggoth won't be up forever. It wasn't that they would break. It was that time who would win over them as I couldn't take care of them to the extent needed, and once they were gone, I would be in a terrible spot.

They were within the range of turning off in the next two hundred millennia if my modus operandi is to be the most stingy with energy expenditure and I lower the shields' powers. So, it was to say that there would be no defense before I was free.

Actions and plans needed to be weaved and taken. I didn't want my future to be as my oh-so-dear eldest brother's new pet, after all, or anyone else.

And to do so, I will need helping hands, or claws in this case. I was asleep for too long, thanks to Mag'ladroth's little fucking toys and the lizard bitch petty vendetta. Fifty million years, I had been out of the game, to be accurate, and I had a lot on my plate.

But it wasn't as if I didn't prepare in advance for such a case. A good magician had more than one trick under his hat, and I was the best of them all.

*

My P@treon is up to chap 31 if you are interested.

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