Chapter 510: Never a Way
"I asked him... about the Key."
When Oathran realized he was wrong for feeling the way he had felt, his mind turned, almost instinctively, to Isaiah.
The Dragon God. The Father God. The being he had encountered by accident in the chaos of the dam incident, when his black flame had poured down from the heavens and he had glimpsed, just for a moment, something terribly vast and familiar on the other side.
That meeting had given him more than he had understood at the time. About what rifts actually were.
At this point in the scenario, Oathran knew approximately what Cecilia knew.
Their knowledge bases had converged through parallel paths. She had to go through research, Damon’s files, and the patient accumulation of data from a world more technologically advanced than their own.
But he got them through the implanted memories the scenario had provided, with the common knowledge any dragon of this world would possess.
It was debatably ’deeper’ so to speak, the foundational understanding of rifts and corruption and the physics of dimensional tears.
So, with this context, his questions naturally mirrored hers.
Would these rifts one day open en masse in their original world?
Would the same apocalyptic cascades that had turned this world’s land, seas and sky into broken realities one day consume their home as well?
Was this world a preview of their own future, like a warning written in corrupted krakens and zombie liches and obsidian leviathans?
As far as he knew, only two rifts, or doors, as he had always called them, had ever opened in their original world. The twin doors that connected their reality to Ierofey’s fallen world.
They were similar to the twin rifts that opened here, both twin doors connected to the same corrupted world. But those two doors were also a fundamentally different type of rift from the ones that plagued this world.
Their behavior was different and the method required to close them was different.
The twin doors of their world did not require the destruction of a rift core embedded in a monstrous host, they required simultaneous collapse. A wormhole loop, a closed circuit of space folding in on itself, both doors sealed at the exact same moment from both sides.
Oathran was not required to hunt down a creature, to tear through flesh and bone to find a pulsing shard of corrupted seed, he simply needed to collapse the hallway between worlds, to pinch the connection shut. The doors closed, and the cycle reset, and the world was safe for another hundred years.
This was how he realized that the function of the Key was similar to the function of a rift core. The parallel was too similar to be coincidence, and yet the differences were also too significant to be ignored.
As we know, in this world, to close a rift, one needed only to find the core fused into the flesh and bone of a monster and destroy it.
But we also knew that the core was the source of the rift’s power. Like a battery of sorts, maintaining the dimensional tear. At the same time, it was also a cancer that strengthened its host, transforming ordinary corrupted creatures into something far worse.
The Lich they had encountered in the zombie rift was the clearest example. It had once been an ordinary undead, indistinguishable from the shambling horde that had poured through the portal.
But once the rift core embedded itself within it, the transformation began.
Uncontrolled growth, bodies molding together from other corpses, and even fresh limbs sprouting from places where no limbs should be.
The core gave it power, and the power demanded more flesh, more mass, more life to consume.
It had even spawned similar horrors, like the eyeballs with fingers creature.
But the Key was different. It didn’t fuse with Oathran’s flesh and bone or grant him monstrous power or uncontrollable growth. It also was not the source of the twin doors’ energy. It didn’t maintain the dimensional tear or strengthen the corruption on the other side.
The Key was not a battery. It was something else entirely.
And the most critical difference... was the permanence.
In this world, rifts opened randomly to random worlds. There was no pattern, no cycle, no fixed location or timeline. A portal could tear open in a dam one day and an ocean the next, connecting to the same world that had been sealed once before, reopening a wound that should have remained closed.
It was, Oathran suspected, similar to what Ierofey’s original world had once been, a nexus of doorways, a crossroads of dimensions, a reality so riddled with passages that it had become impossible to defend.
But once the Key was involved, that changed.
The twin doors connecting their original world to Ierofey’s fallen realm became the only two rifts that had ever opened there. They appeared only once every hundred years and only at the north and south poles. Fixed locations, fixed timeline, fixed parameters.
And most importantly, once sealed, no more rifts connecting to the same world would ever open again.
The Key was not merely a tool for closing doors. It was a lock. A permanent, absolute seal that prevented recurrence.
So what was the Key, exactly?
"It was a spell," Isaiah answered. "A spell made involving a rift core."
Oathran’s eyes widened.
"To create the Key, your ancestors found the cores of the rifts that connected their world to others. Then, they embedded the spell into it to stabilize many things at once," Isaiah explained patiently.
"It was such an intricate masterpiece of a spell. Something only a mage as brilliant as my dear sister, Morgen, could design."
He paused. His grey eyes, usually so steady, flickered with something that might have been grief. "But it wasn’t perfect. Nor was it her who designed it. She... would never design something so cruel."
Oathran frowned.
Cruel.
Why... cruel...?
Wasn’t Ierofey... the only one who sacrificed for the sake of the Key itself at that time?
"Usually, only one rift could be opened between two worlds at one time. If they closed it by destroying the core, another rift could open again connecting the same world in a different time and different location, using a different rift core."
Yes, the endless game of whack-a-mole that defined this world’s fight against corruption. Destroy one core, and another would spawn. Close one rift, and another would tear open. The cycle was endless, the battle unwinnable, an eternal war of attrition against an enemy that never ran out of doors.
"But once the Key spell infected a rift core, it became the fixed location and time of the rift. The rift would never be able to be moved, nor could a new rift connecting the same world be opened at a different location or a different time anymore."
Isaiah’s grey eyes met Oathran’s grey ones. "And once the Key is destroyed, no more connection can be established between the two worlds."
It was a lock that pinned a dimensional tear in place and forced it to behave according to rules it did not want to follow. It took the chaos of random rifts and imposed order upon it, fixed locations, fixed times, fixed parameters.
And when the Key was finally destroyed, the door would close forever. No more connection between that one particular world. It was, in its own brutal way, a solution. A permanent one.
"But child." Isaiah’s voice softened, and he reached out with one scarred hand, gently caressing Oathran’s cheek. "You... have been lied to."
Oathran’s eyes faltered. The world seemed to tilt beneath him. "What... do you mean...?"
Isaiah looked at him with sad eyes. Ancient eyes, eyes that had watched civilizations rise and fall, eyes that had seen the worst things gods and mortals could do to each other.
"Ierofey... wasn’t the only one who embedded his own soul into the Key. He was just the only one who had to close the rifts from outside his world."
Oathran froze.
Isaiah looked toward the distant horizon, his long black hair stirring in a wind that did not touch anything else. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.
"The Key... or the spell itself... always required a sacrifice."
There was no running away. Ever.
Cecilia’s eyes widened as the weight of Isaiah’s revelation settled over her now that Oathran told her. The Key was a spell, a lock that always demanded a soul to turn.
And Ierofey hadn’t been the only one.
Oathran’s ancestors had volunteered for it, feeding themselves to the spell so that other worlds could remain safe from theirs.
Oathran chuckled. Though, it was not a happy sound. He had spent a month drowning in fear and fury and self-loathing, only to discover that the truth was worse than he had imagined.
Cecilia didn’t speak. There were no words for this, no comfort she could offer, no logic that could make it better. She simply wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close, her belly pressing against his side, her face buried in the curve of his neck.
She held him wordlessly... until...
"Tell me everything Isaiah told you about the spell."