Chapter 868: The Dragon’s Despair
"You can never really trust rumours," Arthur said as he stepped out of the Cosmic Gate and returned to the space beneath Yggdrasil, and hearing this, Barda raised an eyebrow.
"How did your talk go?" he asked.
"Much better than I expected. I went there thinking my offer would be dismissed as nonsense, but it was taken far more seriously than I thought," Arthur replied before turning his gaze to the mummified Nidhoggr.
"Seems things went well here, too. There was quite a bit of shaking earlier. Was that you?"
"Probably," Barda said, raising his hand and turning his wrist anticlockwise.
|Reverse.|
At his command, the flow of time rewound, and everything across the Nine Realms returned to the state it was in before he, Wyndella, and Arthur had arrived, including the conditions of all beings within it.
All except for the wolf Arthur had just spoken to.
In other words, Odin and Heimdall regained their sight, and to them, nothing had taken place beneath Yggdrasil.
Barda then turned to Wyndella and asked, "Are you heading off to meet him now?"
Wyndella silently nodded, reaching out to grab the sealed Nidhoggr by the tail and dragging her closer as she walked toward him.
"Handle this one for me."
"That’s why I came over anyway," Barda replied, reaching out to touch Nidhoggr and sending her into a specially crafted pocket dimension, and right after, Wyndella conjured a door with her power and opened it, stepping into the darkness beyond without a word.
"It never ceases to amaze me how she managed that. Creating a special Cosmic Gate even I can’t see through..."
Barda’s mutter made Arthur’s eyes widen, and he turned his gaze toward the man, who chuckled at his reaction.
"She doesn’t want anyone knowing where her boyfriend is. Not even the Old Man knows where that door leads."
The man spoke with a shrug, shaking his head, and at this, Arthur quickly connected the dots and concluded that Wyndella must have gone to where the last of the Four Great Sinners was sealed.
That was the only one of the Four he didn’t know about, but Barda didn’t seem interested in continuing the topic as he turned his gaze away and spoke.
"Why don’t you have a little homecoming while she’s busy? You did say you wanted to see your friends, didn’t you?"
As he spoke, he snapped his fingers and conjured a cosmic gate, causing Arthur to narrow his eyes silently at the view that appeared behind it.
It couldn’t be helped, after all, it was his room in the Devildom’s Royal Palace on Aeturn in Hell.
"How...?"
"Since the first time I saw that thing on your arm," Barda replied, already knowing exactly what Arthur was asking.
At this, Arthur glanced at the Cosmic Teleporter, and seeing the action, Barda explained.
"The coordinates you came from are stored in it, right? Due to my Dictum’s Sub-Edict, all the coordinates you have there were instantly revealed to me the moment I saw it, and I figured the only First Multiversal set of coordinates was your home universe.
Seems I was right."
"..."
Arthur was momentarily speechless at the dragon’s words, but recalling that this was the same person who could see past, present, and future simultaneously, sometimes mistaking the future for the present, he was able to regain his composure quickly.
Meanwhile, Barda ignored Arthur’s shock and expanded his spatial perception, his brows raising as he sensed familiar presences on the other side of the Cosmic Gate.
"Oh, that annoying Drifter seems to be around. I wanted to see Belphegor, so I might as well bug him too," he muttered, then turned to Arthur.
"You going or not?"
"I am. Been dying to see Nicole anyway..."
With that, Arthur stepped into the Cosmic Gate, and after Barda followed, the portal closed, leaving silence in the space below the Cosmic Nexus, where Nidhoggr’s now-empty cosmic armour lay quietly.
◇ ◇ ◇
Meanwhile, Wyndella floated in an empty world covered with chains and shrouded in darkness.
She looked towards the skies, where giant clouds of cosmic energy flowed between the chain links.
ORDERED cosmic energy, to be precise.
There was so much power from the Cosmic Force of Order in this place that one would think it was the headquarters of the existences governing the Ordered Concepts of the Cosmos.
And it would have been...if they knew where it was.
"The Planet at the Beginning of Existence, huh? That’s a very lengthy name..."
Muttering that, Wyndella descended through the planet’s layers, deep into its Core Dimension, shrouded in pitch-black darkness.
She glanced around with a sigh, then snapped her fingers, triggering a transformation in the pitch-black dimension surrounding her.
The darkness soon filled with pinpricks of light spread out in 360 degrees around her, stars arranging into dizzying geometrical patterns that illuminated the dimension.
Raising her gaze, Wyndella’s eyes fell on the immense figure of a massive black dragon, missing one eye and one horn, with both wings shredded to tatters.
The massive body hung in the darkness, suspended by countless chains that seemed like darkness made solid. It was so large that even the smallest of its scales was twice the height of Wyndella’s humanoid form.
The dragon remained silent, though Wyndella knew he had sensed her presence.
She didn’t mind, though.
"It’s been...a while?" she began, scratching her hair as she spoke. "Well, I’ve been sleeping all this time, so I couldn’t exactly come visit."
"I woke up a bit in the middle and tried a little dream sharing, but, obviously, you didn’t let me in your head..."
She sighed wistfully, walking closer to the bound dragon as she continued.
"A lot of things happened in the past billion years I’ve been dozing. For starters, the Candidate Selection has reached the 17th Round.
At this point, I’m starting to think Gaia is up to something. It’s insane how it’s gone 17 rounds when the other Selections barely lasted 3 rounds."
She crossed her arms over her chest, a finger resting on her chin as she thought about the recent major events on the Cosmic stage.
"There was this whole thing about Prophecies that spanned every known universe before the birth of a Progenitor.
Seems like it caused quite an uproar when it happened. I’m really curious to see how he turns out."
Wyndella sat down on the dark ground, crossing her legs and clapping lightly as she continued.
"In other news, Harlamagne’s grown up so big now!"
Her expression brightened, a smile naturally spreading across her face as she conjured a hologram of another dragon.
"He used to be so little back then. But now he’s bigger and stronger. I was so proud of him when I saw him."
She went on cheerfully, mentioning different dragons, what they’d done over the years, and the stories they’d shared with her.
Wyndella lost track of time as she spoke jovially, but eventually, she ran out of things to say and had to end the one-sided conversation.
"Well, I gotta meet Harlamagne in this place called Valmone so I can hand Nidhoggr over to him for the Old Man, so I’ve gotta go now."
She rose to her feet, dusting her white dress as she continued.
"I guess I’ll come and see you later. There’s so much that’s happened that you need to know about, after all."
She waved lightly before turning and walking away, but just as she did, a voice echoed across the dimension.
|Don’t bother.|
"!"
Wyndella spun around immediately, her eyes meeting the now open eye of the bound dragon, but seeing the lifelessness in that eye, her bright expression instantly turned sombre.
|Spend your time cherishing the fleeting life you have...the void would inevitably consume all of reality anyway.|
One could feel the extreme nihilism within that voice, clear proof that even its speaker didn’t see any point in doing what he’d said in the first part of his statement.
For he was an existence drowned in the abyss of Despair.
Many believed he was called the ’Dragon of Despair’ because of the despair he had unleashed upon the Cosmos during his rampage, which had required the combined power of several Primordial Progenitors to stop.
But that title actually stemmed from his own despair at the inevitability he had come to know.
The actions he had taken, driven by that despair, affected not just dragons but every race and existence across the Cosmos.
The despair he spread reached beyond any boundary because his goal wasn’t limited to his own kind.
He sought to end everything.
Faced with the truths he had uncovered, he cursed the creation he had once loved, believing it doomed to eventual annihilation.
In his despair, he decided that if all of existence was fated to be destroyed in the same CHAOTIC manner as the Previous Era, it would be better for him, a being born of this Cosmos, to end it all himself.
After speaking to Wyndella, he slowly closed his one eye, and at this, the Creation Dragon bit her lips, her fists clenching so tightly that her claws dug into her palms and drew blood.
White scales appeared across her arm as her human transformation destabilised, but once again, she displayed an extreme level of emotional control, instantly calming herself as she looked up at the dragon and spoke.
"I’ll be back."
With those words, she turned and vanished from the core dimension, and left in the darkness, the bound dragon heaved a deep sigh and muttered to himself.
|Why does she even bother?|
There was no one to answer, so the ’Dragon of Despair’, Bahamut, silently lowered his head and returned to his solitude in the darkness.
