Ripheus23

Ԙ: The Final Power, Part 2

The Shield defends Ripheus with a surety as of wild gold, and as true, for he alone holds it in valor. But this valor is only enough to preserve this one man as he ascends the last staircases of destruction's transfinity. Everyone else not here in the City falls and rises in the self-desecrating magma of the apocalypse, gasping for words of horror at each rise and fall of the crystal Forms of Evil and Nothingness.

Armirex stands alone at the base of the four towers, watching skyward in despair and hope.

Some of the others reach out, try to cross over to...

Like calliopes of massacre, the shifting stairwells up which Ripheus goes trespass upon themselves darkly. Again and again the Shield saves him from being smashed apart by their cataclysm of murder. Sinstone breaks in torrents, rocking the ascent to the parapet that runs parallel to Apollyon's ray of fire and light.

... as they live and die they live up...

Ripheus makes it to the parapet. He looks through an aperture onto the artificial plateau, bearing first witness to the ramparts of destruction's flame. Within which he intends to stand...

... to interpose himself between goodness and the Form of Evil...

... they live up, up, upward into the City...

... he braces the Shield for his entrance onto the parapet, slanting it as he passes the boundary of the Destroyer's radiant wake. Blocking the passage of that radiance, the Shield yet blocks only a small halo therefrom: enough for Ripheus to survive and endure through this end.

Already, however, he is driven back by the weight of the light pouring forth unto him. This is the fire of the Final Power enmeshed with the ferocity of Apollyon. Those words, "Nothing can be done to stop the one who comes to end that which does not exist," Ripheus thinks back to.

Hammered by the might of desolation, the Shield forms a wake of its own in the ray. As incandescence surges around him, Ripheus feels the stone on which he stands melting. Step by step, Apollyon raptures him towards the parapet's edge, and he sees the melting of the stone as a slow river carrying him along with the rapture.

... assembling at the base of the fourfold tower...

--And a flicker of Apollyon's power sails off, rams into the Shield directly. Gripping the Shield's handle, Ripheus flies off the parapet, down towards portals opening from the physical plane that reveal friends and enemies and others come to fight or not. Ripheus warps the Shield like a kite and after harrowed sailing amidst the sapphire period of the light he manages to hit ground at a safe velocity and angle.

The rest of the ensemble having arrived, one of them--[add name later]--runs up to the man of Troy. Talking to him while looking at the gem of Evil, she asks, "What is happening?"

Hanging his head, Ripheus explains the situation: and the gem explodes again: and again the nova of the seraph hydra floods the streets of the City.