Chapter Text
Legends tell stories of destruction and creation prolonging each other. Cyclic existences reliant progression of the opposing party, a harmonious and profound state that is equally as uncontrollable. But truly accurate is only the singular account spoken by the avatars of each element by themselves, the Protector of each. Untouched balance is when chaos thrives and when hellfire rains down.
The flicker of a SOUL and the empty gaze of another kind of creature holds dominion over a smudged canvas, painted and destroyed with a mere flick of a wrist. It is not nothing, but there is a persistent lack of something. Hanging tree branches fluttering and rotting leaves crunching intertwine with the sound of a whistling gust brushing through torn fabrics. The start to an end lies in birth, and death is the final path to the new.
Stars falling out of the sky and setting fire to earth: the fall of the mighty. A Star and a Destroyer stood opposing one another on the remainder of the world they'd expected to see a completely different person in, only to encounter one another. Altercation and dispute leading to violent sparring, blood spilled over the crumbling carcass of life. A signature scarf sliced in half with anger burning behind lifeless eyes, a brush coated in red. Glasses shattered atop the gravestone of a tree: reduced to a stump. The Creator approached gradually, his bubbling rage made visible by the popping ink gradually pouring out from each strand of the brush.
Pigments flowed through the air with a simple swipe, painting the sky a miscellany of color mixtures. Beams of dye stained wood and grass into bright, colorful hues. Tints in every sort of hue, all in overabundance, accumulated spots that morphed until a clear shape was made. Bones like arrows slashing through air in a dance to the death. In retaliation, an ocean of clusters charged at him, neon blue strings controlled by the mere pull of a phalange. Several bones dissolved in thin air as a result of getting hit by an oncoming wave, rendering the puddles of ink left behind by broken bone useless until reclaimed. Fierce stances and blasters of ominous sizes were assumed, rays of destructive power wreaking havoc until craters erupted from the onslaught.
"Ï̴̑Ñ̶̌K̶̊̈́!" The latter roared in unrivaled hatred, startling his opponent in battle a fair amount. "𝕎ℍ𝕐 ＷＯＮ＇ＴYOU 𝙹𝚄𝚂𝚃 ᴸ⁻ ᴸ⁻ ᴸᴵˢᵀᴱᴺ 𝗧𝗢 𝗠𝗘?!"
Ink was shaken out of his focus, his attention suddenly diverting to Error's tone rather than movement. "Listen to you? Haven't I been doing that this whole time? You've just been spouting nonsense, in my opinion!" Ink questioned, uprooting more of Error's barely hidden rage by the looks of his reaction. He furrowed eye sockets, losing his lifeless stare and resuming to his neutral, careless grin. The skeleton's glistening beacons of light as substitutes for eyes flashed a variety of patterns before the incandescent red took the form of a refulgent, fair tangent dot over the left side, square-shaped neon green on the right.
Error twisted his phalanges around the cerulean cords, cobalt fibers tying in knots across an intricate web of static wire which hovered menacingly overhead. Stray malfunction notices clung to his skeletal form by thinly rimmed letters spelling out his name, flashes of light dispersing from his body, and reappearing elsewhere. The ground crunched as he set foot on a fractured glass shard belonging to his now worse than impractical pair of smashed spectacles. He nearly faltered in his movements for a moment, shrinking back at the uncomfortable sensation of a shard in the bottom of his sandal. His hands fastened the twine into a deathly grip as they tightened into fists, his rival's sealed fate dangling at a range not too far. He gnawed his teeth together as he spoke, eyes blinded by overlapping text that soon spread across him in his entirety. "That's because you haven't been paying attention. Do you think this is a game? Do you think we're all playthings? I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO EVER SEEMS TO CARE WHEN YOU JUST DILLY-DALLY AROUND WITH THAT STUPID YELLOW GOBLIN! Do you think I want to do this? I could be lounging away in the anti-void watching Undernovela right now!"
"Error, what are you talking about?! Are you being delusional agai-- WOAH!!" Ink yelped, almost being caught in a tangle as a fissure of wefts meandered past him, barely managed to avoid an encroaching attack. Thrums ravaged all that dared cross their path with monstrous celerity, missing him by an inch, only managing to scrape his cheek. The already wrinkly, thin trees fell at the will of the destroyer without much resistance, resulting in an obnoxious sequence of crashing boles. Ink tumbled backward and sunk onto all fours, his phalanges creating an unnerving scraping sound against the gravelly surface underfoot before hitting his behind against the hard trunk of a grey-scaled, mushroom-infected tree. He grimaced, recoiling in disconcertment at the grating screech, tremors darting down his spine at the sudden thump and solid surface. His brush was hastily retrieved back into his arms with one fell swoop of his arms to his back. He swung it around the way you would carry a sword between your hands, aiming it toward his opponent in a stance that made the large wooden stick bear striking resemblance to the ferocity of a weapon.
Error would stifle a snigger, his voice falling into a dreary and slow drawl, the corners of his mouth turning up and spreading from nearly ear to ear. Two hetero-chromatic, crazed eyelights seemed to swirl in the empty pools of blood-red behind the holes positioned over the two sides of his front skull. "Now you're listening, are you?" His amusement, though, seemed short-lived when his unhinged grin suddenly dropped as if a switch was clicked. He returned to his signature mildly-perturbed glower, his hands fidgeting with the stray ligatures. "You know, I'd appreciate it if you didn't interrupt me for once, but all that you ever do is yap, so really - what was I even expecting?"
Ink barely dodged another torrent of the strings that seemed to be gaining on him as he was gradually tiring out, having already gone on for hours. His nose hole took in the stench of the air, a wrinkle being forced upon it. It was like outdated and somehow yet active radioactive chemicals and putrid excrete waste. He wiped a sweat bead off of his forehead and flung his wrist towards the side to wet it off. Error, on the other hand, didn't seem to be doing quite as bad in terms of exhaustion. Although the same could not be said with his wrists. They were rapidly losing marrow, bones cluttered with harsh, bloody cuts and visible indents, all caused by the thin fibers that had been filing apart his own body after excessive use. "You're not making it too easy, either, Error." Ink called out breathlessly with an air of sarcasm, his strained voice lacking in his usual ardor and exuberance. "If you'd just let me take a second to breathe, I wouldn't need to focus on the calamitous TRIPWIRE YOU'VE DECIDED TO SO GRACIOUSLY SET UP FOR ME!"
With a gradual ascending motion, one of Error's wrists began to lift the strings high above into the air once more, seemingly clinging onto the sky itself as there was nothing holding them up. His head hung low, a deranged set of mismatched pupils fixated directedly onto Ink. Ink staggered backward as he watched the web of static wire rise far above, his bones rattling quietly as he took a tighter hold of his trusty Broomie. Error's words distorted before they could even form sounds between his teeth, the world around him shifting and bending out of his control the more tense he would appear. "Give me one good reason why I should [SPARE] you." Error's eyes glinted with restrained fury as he seethed, "What's stopping me from ending you this very moment?" He battled the impulse to charge forward and lunge at him, his fingertips tingling with the primal yearning to unleash his wrath. "I've offered you boundless patience, Ink. Are you asking me to reconsider and reflect? Imploring me to "quell the might of my stormy rage" and all of that? Proposing that I clean up after you yet again? Do you grasp the times I've spent trying to see your side of things? Do you comprehend the eons I've wasted enduring your careless antics and lack of responsibility?"
"Okay, okay, jeez. I get it. You're mad. Can you please just explain to me what the point of this whole fight is? I mean, sure, I broke your glasses, but that was an accident, and you know I'm prone to-"
"YOUR RECKLESSNESS IS MY POINT, YOU DIMWIT NUMBSKULL! If it weren't for your lack of care and complete neglience and inassertiveness, there would've been hundreds of universes that I wouldn't have needed to even consider destroying. You're piling enormous amounts of work on top of me and destroying the thing that you're meant to protect by only looking at the collective. You never bother to think about the stand-alone individual when you create, and you have no sense of foresight whatsoever, which means you're entirely clueless to consequences! I'M SICK OF IT, INK! I'M SICK OF YOU!" Error roared, strings tangling around his arms and tightening until his clothes burned over his skeletal form.
".... So you want me to stop creating? You know I can't do that, Error." Ink squinted, scratching the back of his neck with a disappointed sigh as he pushed his paintbrush-for-weapon underneath his armpit.
"GH- YOU! You're missing the entire point! Didn't you hear a word I said?! What is it you don't understand, Ink?!" Error retaliated with a vexed jab, gesticulating wildly as he erupted into what could only be assumed to be electrical charges zapping around and exploding mid-air.
The outline of his shape seemed to morph, the incessant buzzing and whizzing of his silhouette cresting gaps in space-time until the sky seemed to collapse. Flashes of white were visible amidst the sea of hawser, warning of the true extent of the calamitybringer's capabilities. His sandals scraped against the rubble on the ground, eliciting a multitude of different crumbling sounds as he sunk back down onto the ground and steadied his position. "You can't even care for your own stupid friends right!"
"Is that what this is about?! You don't even HAVE any friends, Error!" Ink avowed with a perfunctory whip of his wrist. His eyelights fluctuated between different forms and shades, eventually settling for contorting into a dulled red with targets directed at his adversary.
"Hah! And you think I need them? At least if I had friends, I would take the time to consider their health instead of mindlessly dragging them around the entire multiverse until they're fed up with the likes of your ignorance!" Error's stare was as intense as a bull's outrage, horrendous levels of rancour evident in his every word, the dotted pinpricks meant to be representing his eyelights flitting back and forth in the middle of his otherwise empty eye sockets.
"Wait, wait, wait- who's health...? Error, is this about Azure-- Actually, no, never mind that. You have no right to be judging me for how I handle my work when all you do is tamper with the universe, which is perfect as is. The Creators clearly have some sort of plan when they start creating, so hey, what right do we have to judge? We just keep the balance, right?" Ink's boney fingers wove together as he spoke in a fatigued tone, his smile taut and body language weary even as he tried to force on a confident facade.
"That's just the thing, Ink! You're disrupting said balance you claim that we're protecting by trying to fix those already doomed AUs! You're being such a hypocrite!" Error clutched at his skull as if escalating the conversation somehow was engendering some form of headache for him. The space around him was bestrewn with glitches, the outline of his anatomy inconsistent as parts of him ceased to be, only to reform within milliseconds. His voice distorted into a buzzing static yell, the intensity and tone vibrations as randomized as his shape. Oh, and how am I exactly doing that? Rather, I'd say YOU'RE the one causing the most trouble for me here. You're all talk when you say that every move you make is thoroughly thought through, but in reality, you just go around destroying whenever you want pretty often, don't you?" Ink raised objection to him by lifting up an accusatory index finger, pointing straight at his chest but standing his ground. Despite never invoking another round of physical combat, the tension still rose as he took on the more offensive stance in the squabble.
"Excuse you?" Error couldn't help but almost laugh, his voice shaky as he tried to process what Ink had just thrown at him. His eyebrows were raised, a delirious grin spreading across his entire face. His sharp, golden fangs gleamed under the empty silver sky.
"Oh, don't act clueless. You know damn well what I'm talking about. I'm not the only one using questionable methods, alright? Neither of us is innocent, Error. I think you're just scared of owning up to the amount of death you actually leave behind you." Ink's eye sockets narrowed, two blazing red dots trying to burn holes into Error as he glared openly at him.
"Oh, so I'm the bad guy now, Ink? Is that what you think?" Error began to approach, the strings being tugged at, crackling with destructive energy as he ramped up his walking speed like a bulldozer crushing everything in its wake.
"Wait, that's not what I-" Ink stuttered, realizing his verbal mistake only to be caught off-guard by Error's charge towards him. He backed away with his arms raised in the air and apart like a criminal, his eyes back on the strings close enough to kill.
"Fine. I'll be your bad guy. How's that for you? I'll show you some real destruction. Wouldn't that make you happy, Ink? To prove me wrong?" Error interlocked his hands with a clap, several thousands of webbed intricacies waiting to crash down like nets.
"WAIT, ERROR-" Ink shouted aloud, his right eye flaring up a deep, dark purple in a triangle shape whilst the other resembled an exclamation mark in yellow.
As the Destroyer aimed his armies at the Creator's brush, the Creator swung. The sky became blindingly bright. Colorant was daubed over the crumbling excess of a filament surface. Pops of luster painted resplendent scenes upon an open mural battlefield, a fragmented soul pounded in the absence of another - and then the world came to a stop. Emulsion left as the sole one standing, a disharmonious fixture of brazen radiance. The fabric of reality twisted, bent and tore, tangling and ripping at the seams. Puppeteering hands lost their steady supports, falling into fractals like porcelain china crushed after restraints loosened, freeing of suspension but submitting to imminent destruction. The sky itself gave way to something much greater, something far beyond their understanding. Luminescent beams of pure light flared out of the gape of a continuously expanding, uncontrollable aperture. The rift slowly started to crackle outwards, displacing reality around it and throwing the world into limitless tumult.
Blades of light left shadows of the past to mountain in the fray as the two skeletons were crushed in its grasp. The hole carved its way into reality with claws of indiscernible code lost to the flashbang as gravity seemed to lose its hold on them both, the weights of the world finally letting loose of their shoulders. Like a wounded animal fighting for survival, the split breached into surface ground, tearing trees from their roots and churning them to dust in its deadly maw.
The terror-stricken screams, the deranged, overwrought hysterics, and the shrieks of superlative excitement came into chorus with the appalled shrills of many a year of suffering. Walls of impending doom closed in as the mob of endless blank space ravaged and demolished the ruined forest. The ground crumbled and sundered, grinding itself down to specks too miniscule to differentiate from dust particles as the earth floated upward. Ink ducked back as the strings chaotically whirled around them both, resembling an electrical network clinging to all sources it could. Impulsively, he thrust out his wrist to hopefully reach the shaft of his brush, then biting back the urge to utter profanity as he registered the two broken pieces of wood on the ground as what, in fact, used to be his dearest Broomie. Ink raised his arm up to shield his eye sockets from the phosphorescent beacons warning of carnage, squinting to distinguish the empty silver pool from what remained of the exterior.
Swivel-eyed, Ink underwent several spikes of discomfort as something like worry crept into his very thin marrow, causing him to frenetically jostle his bones. The soft rattling noise was mantled by the blasts of the vortex he'd created, mighty winds whipping against his skull and pulling him... forward. It took a brief moment before the reality of his case set in, and the truth dawned over him; there was no fighting this thing. Deeming there to be no other path ahead for him, Ink patted his hand the way down along his hip where a throng of small-scale compact tubes of various paints waited for utilization. Ink didn't care to pay any mind to which ones he plucked out from their holsters. All that concerned him was popping the lids off and downing the repulsive liquid in an instant. He let it dissolve on his tongue as usual, disregarding the bitter taste as he instead shifted his focus to the major burst of energy he was rightfully awarded.
Empty bottle after bottle was hastily shoved back onto his satchel, contents dripping from the corners of his mouth after being sloppily swallowed down. Several glass containers ended up in muddled piles, shards strewn disorderly across what previously could have been a grass patch. The wilted flowers crumpled under his diligent soles would lie unmoving and dormant, even in the raucous wind. Ink's hands were dyed in splashes of color, an abrasive solution that corrupted and dirtied his bone. The nausea following his worrisome choice welled over him in a torrent, burying him under the influence of one too many sips of a power greater than he. A deluge of opaque secretions surged from his every orifice, the gushing fluid drowning the vast majority of the surface beneath him in black. His skull felt like it was caving in, a regular beat of painful throbs hammering against his temporals.
Ink doubled over, coughing and hacking to rid himself of the abhorrent tang left in the back of his tongue. His vision was having trouble cooperating with his reasoning. The foundations of the world blurred, and all he could see was the colours. Bright, powerful, free, blinding. Painful, overtly loud, oppressive, and profuse. He gagged, clawing at the source of the burning sensation in futile hopes of reaching inside to claw it open. His perception was separate from his cognizant functions, conscience overriding his ability to physically function. In a nebulous haze, his phalanges wrenched the broken paintbrush pieces into his grasp, two giant logs which he shoved under each arm. He swayed steadily, his body unreliable to depend on in his drunken stupor. The gaping rupture pursued him at staggering speeds, though not in time to atomize him before his departure. The winds made a last-ditch effort to follow the guardian. Their attempts cut short at his swift escape into the bold nothingness. The air itself was furious, whipping and lashing about in a sort of childish tantrum like a toddler furious that it did not get its way. As Ink's line of sight started to fade, he could see a glimpse of movement, a string-tied silhouette struggling against the tide of crazed gale. Alas, he was finally toppled, thus plummeting into a hollow chasm of his own making as his consciousness slipped away little by little.
Ink meandered through unending umbrage, the darkness surrounding him assimilating every inch of him and redrawing him into an integration of fluxional appendages and protuberances. The dull pang in his parietal bone subsided with thanks to the floating amassment shaping his limbs back together until he was fully reformed, approaching a faint light. Subsequently, he was spit out of the esophagus of the chamber, lying limp in a splatter of his magic atop a bleak surface. He narrowed his gaze, cloudy eyelights proving it to be difficult to discern a layout of anything at all. He was looking at.... a blank slate.
Empty. The guardian opened his eyes. It was white, not blindingly so. The area was as full of color as a blank document. ...That was to say, there really was no color around at all. It felt... unsettling. Ink, dazed and disoriented, lie there in the remote spot inside of the timeless area, nary a word slipping from him. Gritting his teeth, he pushed, forced himself to roll onto his back. ...Perhaps it was not all white space after all.
He gazed up at a tapestry of spiderwebs that made up some sort of ceiling. He doubted there even was a ceiling to this place, but there surely could have been! Maybe! But that wasn't important. ...Probably. Unless there was some other thing connected to it that he should've remembered. But who cares about that, right?! Sure, it looked a little odd for a modern art collection, but it who was he to judge?! It wasn't like he knew much about souls anyway, considering he didn't have much of one to begin with.
Speaking of SOULs, Ink found himself unable to recognize many of the ones strewn about, tangled in a mass of baby blue... Did that indicate he went here often?
He kicked his feet idly, wondering why exactly he found it was significantly more nostalgic than he considered logical to feel for a place he couldn't remember the name of. He just couldn't put a finger on why exactly he liked the place so much. What was he returning to? Quite frankly, it was... boring. The artist was absolutely stuck on this particular question, and now it spread across his non-existent brain like a virus until it was all that consumed his thoughts. He rubbed his chin in deep consideration, trying to connect the place to anything he could put a description on.
Eventually, he shrugged and brushed it off. He heaved, pushing him up to a sitting position, assuming a cross-legged lounging one before he came to the conclusion that his bones were sore! Strange. He rolled his achy limbs, grimacing at the slightly uncomfortable 'crack' he heard in his neckbone and upper spine while stretching. "Guess I must've tired myself out, huh?"
"What do you think, Broomie?" He dropped in instinctively while thinking of his previous monologue, the thought almost slipping him by before... "OH, RIGHT!" He nearly smacked himself in the forehead. "BROOMIE!"
Ink whipped his head around, multicolored eyelights flitting ubiquitously throughout every quarter of vacuum prior to descrying the completely smashed hardwood chunks which previously stuck together as the brush's shaft. Ink drew in a shaky breath, taking a moment to recover his tenacity hitherto climbing to his feet. He scampered so as to near the sorry excuse of a utensil and dropped to his knees in front of it, holding it in his vicinity like the corpse of his own child. "Broomie, what have they done to you?" Ink beseeched the Gods (but doesn't that include himself...?), enfolding his dearest little lad in his arms.
Ink would look down to analyze the remains, his fingertips brushing alongside the many sharp splinters across the new end of the top half of the paintbrush.
Soon enough, a skeptical expression formed on his face, as it did not take long to notice the various fragments of what appeared to be glitching material. It had been previously concealed by the rough texture of the darkened wood, however upon closer inspection, miniature, vague text messages spelling out ‘ERROR’ were flowing in and out of sight.
The painter’s eyes widened. He immediately brought the end of the other half to face himself. Surely enough, there were signs there, too. When comparing the two, it was like a copy paste.
Ink now furrowed what would've been his brows in utter bewilderment, repeatedly blinking a few times. What exactly happened before they landed here?
Defeated, he set the halves back down again in front of himself. Strangely enough, the residue of code seemed to be reacting in a rather erratic manner. The ‘ERROR’ signs gave the impression to be shaking more vigorously, even appearing somewhat larger. Without any hesitation, Ink grazed over the rough edges one last time, curious to see whether the glitches would respond in the same way. Maybe he had just not noticed it before, but surely enough, the signals would only become more and more violent.
The various cluttered lines of code began to expand unpredictably from the chipped wood into its surroundings. Rapidly, the ‘ERROR’s would consume everything in its entirety. Black, then white; Ink shot up an elbow to cover his eyes defensively. The neon white of the anti-void was already enough to make any ordinary person go blind, but the added flash from the glitches burned even the Protector himself.
In the same manner as Ink had to earlier adjust to the fulgent lustre exhibited by the explosion, he briefly had to shut his eyes as well as wait for the ringing in his mind to subside. The prevalent white of the anti void was blinding, so much so that recovering anterior to acclimatizing was burdensome. As he squinted back open his skeleton alternative eyelids, two shape-shifting eyelights were laid upon what appeared to be Broomie, broken parts reattached without a single scratch visible. Ink gawked silently with his jaw unclenched and hanging wide open, stupefied at the mind-boggling view. Even after taking two, three glances, he couldn't process it. He had certainly not done that. Had he?
Ink stared open-mouthed, eyes vacant as he studied the finer lines of the carved wood. His initials were still there, pristinely preserved with not a singular scratch to them. There were no signs of breakage anywhere - there was something gravely amiss, and that fact made the already uncomfortable circumstances all the more off-putting. Ink traced the contours, searching the lineaments for a glimpse of an answer in a reality he couldn't comprehend. He found his fingers tangling with enmeshed ligatures, the strings curling around each other into heaps of havoc. Ink piped at the discovery, rotating his wrists to scrutinize the disorderly folds from all angles. Same as the ones the Destroyer had previously wielded, they were dappled with flashing white holographic code. Ink's sudden boutade of exuberance was not uncalled for, however, did not last long as what occupied his mind was the culprit of the blue bunches left behind. He could only think of one person, whose presence should've been obvious, considering he could recognize the sparsely decorated subspace as his.
"Error?" He called out, inwardly feeling his stomach - or rather, lack thereof, knot as a sense of unsurety crept in.
He waited. He bit his tongue.
"Error!" He yelled, louder.
....But nobody came.