Untitled (Final)

   The eyelet opened up below him; The gale that always accompanied the looking glass's activation buffeted his ornately decorated clothes, their gold threads glimmering. He stepped down into the eyelet, down into the open air above the last of the Centurions. This was a fight he had done eight times before, though the precision required grew massively from battle to battle. All eight times he had lost, and his loss had destroyed him and his opponent. With a weapon that guaranteed victory such as his own, losing was an art. A needle he had to thread.
   As he fell, his opponent came into view. His clothes mirrored its billowing body, entirely a fabric-like gold material. The billions of strips of cloth bloomed across the ocean’s surface and the bright sky above like rays coming from a single point, though of course these rays of gold were coming towards a point, the man challenging the final Centurion. Before the first of the rays reached him, he made a wide arc with his sword. The dark gray blade cut through the air with no sound at all, a swath of gold flung itself into the path of the weapon and was torn. Its individual threads came apart and bolted towards the man, thinner than needles and immensely sharper.    This was how the first minute of the fight went. The man fell, the Centurion's composite body struck at him. He evaded through a loop in space and struck out at the empty air, only for his sword to find a patch of gold to pierce nonetheless. The Centurion couldn't land a blow on the man, and he wasn't being allowed to miss one. Many of the threads were frayed or torn too greatly to continue, though in comparison to the totality of the flowing clockwork god it was negligible.
   Things changed as the man's steep fall finally ended, plunging into the salty ocean water under him. His movements were slower, though he knew the Centurion's would be impeded too. It was a change in locale he needed to make his failure possible.
   The gold threads sliced through the water, delving under him to surround him from every angle. They deftly weave together into innumerable layers of cloth, though its shimmer is gone in the darkness of the water. The man continued his assault, opening looking glasses to displace swaths of fabric or himself or to strike into the empty blue, though the final of those 3 was never successful. As the two combatants sank further into the ocean, no light filtered through to them. The Gold Silk had no need for sight, the man could see nothing at all. He felt nothing other than the cold water and the weight of the Cloudkiller on his arm. As he had received more pieces of his weapon, the stems and roses that sprouted from it had grown. They wrapped around his left arm like a mother holding a child. Not a single of the blade's black thorns faced inward. The weapon was forged for him, or it had caved to his will, if there was a difference.
   It was with this Unity with his excalibrous rapier that he learned of the opening. With each jab of the sword, he felt the resonance of the Centurion's fibers communicating. In the amorphous tapestry that surrounded him, there was a hairpin point that was unguarded. He understood more than ever in this moment the gravity of this moment. He was the last of himself, as was this the last of his blade. There was only one possibility for a way for this encounter to go, he was determined to decide it.
   Lead pierced down through the space, though its tip receded quicker than the rapier travelled forward. Like rust, the black metal flaked off of the sword. The heavy liquid inside lost any type of form, though it sank fast in the seawater. It soaked into his shirt cuff in a way completely seperate to its saturation with water. Its droplets flowed downward. Glowing like moonlight in the dark, the mercury ate away at the Centurion's body and the man's clothes. The shed rose thorns pierced his bare flesh and the seawater stung the wound.
   Like reeling in pain, the gold body of the Centurion constricted inward toward the melt. The threads sank into the mercury in a whorl, something of the consumption creating a vacuum. The thrashing thread diced the man and the ocean's flow dragged his smithereens into the core of the tumult. In an inversion of his goal, his engineered failure erased him before anything else. The pace of endless the ocean's drain into the mercury pool advanced exponentially, quickly unbound in speed by the death of the Centurion. Though infinite, the ocean was made barren in preparation for this moment. Boundless volumes of seawater and cold air poured into the pool, yet it did not grow. The pool rippled and thrashed violently as if struggling to take in the entirety of the ocean, though its waves did not break.
   The water’s pace quickened, though in an infinite volume any change is negligible. The vortex centered in the puddle of quicksilver ate up everything. An infinite torrent of water into something without scale. It appeared to any form of logic that an infinite thing could never run out, but it did.
   In the killing of bounds, boundlessness was given free reign to eat itself alive. Left in the wake of this show of divine autocannibalism was a droplet of mercury. Its waves turned to ripples, then ceased. It shrank, consuming the last of itself as it ceased to be.
Like a ship pulling up an anchor, everything was let free.