So…this was the throne room of the Shinigami.
It wasn't even a room, Lawliet mused, as they looked around. Mountains loomed on all sides, hanging broken and chipped over a flat, barren courtyard. The remains of walls lingered along the edges, but none of them were taller than a few feet, now, the rest of their stones scattered across the ground and eaten away by dry black shrubbery.
A raised dais ran all the way around the oval shaped space, with three shallow steps leading into the flat atrium below. Along the dais, white thrones lined both sides. Six on each side, Lawliet counted. They looked as though they had been carved out of gigantic bones, but they were otherwise without decoration: just thick, bulky shapes, cracked and worn and chipped away by the dead brown vines that clung to their sides.
And at the very end of the oval, opposite from Lawliet, a gigantic black throne loomed.
It wasn't truly a throne, Lawliet realized after a few moments of observation. It was the tree. The black monstrosity stretched up towards the flat gray sky, its spindly, twisting branches spreading out wide to either side of the throne space. As though grown into the trunk, there was a seat carved into it among the massive root structure that bubbled up from under the dirt. And in that seat, a shape was waiting for him.
It did not move as Lawliet approached, not until Lawliet stood right before it. Only then did it lift its head.
If Lawliet were still L, they supposed they might have been initially frightened. In this new state, however, they were merely fascinated. The Shinigami King—as it could be no one else—looked nearly a skeleton. Strands of skin and muscle were still stretched across its pale face, nose crushed flat and hollow against the visage. There were no lips to hide the creature's teeth, and so it leered at Lawliet in a toothy smile. There were holes were eyes should be, wizened and wrinkled around the empty sockets. Still, Lawliet could feel the gaze on them.
The King shifted in its seat, dragging its ragged black cloak around it with skeletal fingers.
"So you've come."
The voice emanated from the creature, but its teeth did not move.
Lawliet lifted their eyes upwards towards the snaking branches of the tree. It looked dead, and without power. It did not emanate any malice at all. Lawliet felt as though they simply resided in the shade of an old, ordinary tree.
"You were waiting for me?" they said, dropping their eyes back down to the king.
The creature let out a soft cough that might have been a laugh.
"I knew you would come eventually. These things happen in time. Always…everything is certain, except for death."
The King had the voice of an old, wizened woman, creaky and almost high-pitched. There was no strange, eerie reverberation or dire feeling in Lawliet's bones. There was only exhaustion.
"I think we say that line the other way around where I come from," Lawliet said.
The King wheezed softly, air rushing between its unmoving teeth.
"Then you have it backwards.'
The creature slumped a bit in its chair. Everything about it looked tired. It looked as though it might crumble into dust from a sudden breeze.
"I am not going to fight you.'
Lawliet pursed their lips, blinking with some faint surprise.
"What I am going to do may kill you," Lawliet said.
"You never believed that, not since you purified your friend, the Shinigami that was Tiramisu," the King wheezed. "You thought that only you would die."
Lawliet tilted his head.
"I have nothing to return to," the king continued. "I will not go back to the form I once took before I was a Shinigami. It no longer exists. I chose this fate for myself."
It wheezed, pressing one bony hand to its teeth for a moment.
"I will cease existence, and I will welcome it."
Its cavernous eyes looked back down at Lawliet again, however.
"But you. You will probably die. Or worse. You'll become what I am—an old creature, unable to die, scrubbed clean of your former self, your memories, your morality."
The king's eye sockets seemed, for a moment, to have a spark of fire in them, before it vanished.
"Is that what you want?"
"It doesn't matter what I want."
This time, it was certain—the king's wheezing was a laugh. The creature doubled over in its seat, a throne too big for its wizened shape, shoulders shaking with morbid mirth.
"This is my punishment, is it?" the creature wheezed. "To be undone by one as selfless as I was selfish. It is a fitting end."
The creature stared at Lawliet, and even in their state, they found themselves feeling uncomfortable.
"I wanted true freedom," the king hissed between its teeth. "True freedom—unbound to any destiny, to any soul in another world. I killed her—crushed her beneath my own hands, my soul's twin, so that I could not be held by her."
Lawliet felt briefly cold.
"It was beautiful, once," the king said, wistful. "I wasn't always a shell."
It moaned softly, tilting its head down.
"I am ready to die."
Lawliet blinked once, shocked in spite of themself. They had almost thought it would be more of a struggle. The creature lifted itself from the throne, and carefully eased itself down by the roots, until it was standing in front of him. The King was tiny, only just barely reaching Lawliet's shoulders.
"Well, Nameless," the Shinigami said, staring at him with its cavernous eyes. "Go on. Enter the tree, and purify it if you can."
It tilted its head.
"I will be dead before you come out. Unfortunate, that I will not get to see what this fool's errand turns you into."
The seat where the Shinigami King had once sat pulsed once, and then swelled. The bark peeled silently apart, revealing a hole in the trunk. The tree was open—and now, only then, did Lawliet feel the malice and corruption explode past him, like wind released from a suddenly open door. They took a half step back in the face of it—hot and cold all at once, feeling slimy and tingling, sending an ominous feeling down their limbs and spine.
But the Shinigami King was staring, and the part of Lawliet that was Seraphina bristled with the unspoken challenge. They would not be frightened off so easily.
Lawliet climbed up the roots and hesitated on the seat of the throne. They could not see very far in the darkness inside.
Feeling the eyes of the Shinigami King on their back, they did not hesitate any longer. They eased themselves through, and fell into the darkness.
This tree was much bigger on the inside than it had any right to be.
Lawliet walked on, though it felt as though they had been walking for years. The darkness never changed; there was nothing around them to see or feel save for the ground beneath their feet.
Nothing except for the memories.
There were sensations tangled up in the darkness, like flies trapped in webs. Every now and then, Lawliet found themself brushing against one, and like a video, the scene played back in his mind.
It started with darkness—not the same darkness as what they walked through, but a cool, forgiving darkness, a shadow that curled protectively around everything. Light joined it later, just a speck of it at first, and then more, before it split, shattered, and scattered across the darkness. Perhaps they were witnessing the creation of the universe?
Something lived here, in this moment of creation—something ancient, something scaley and breathing, eyes swirling with stars. It cried, softly, so quietly that it could not be heard by human ears, only felt, as an aching sense of utter loneliness.
God, Lawliet thought. Creator.
And then it was gone, and Lawliet was alone in the darkness again, and they knew, instinctively, that whatever that presence had been, it had ceased to exist long ago. The warm life of the being at the beginning of the universe had faded, and its body had disappeared into the spaces between the stars.
They brushed another sensation.
A giggle floated past their ears. They felt as though there was someone running past them, and they got the image of a pair, people-shaped, perhaps, fleeing after each other with their hands in each other's, dresses flickering around their feet.
"Keep up! Keep up!"
Lawliet turned to watch them go. They weren't anything that he could understand to look at—they seemed to change shape, one of them undulating and dark, the other glowing and bright, but nothing else about them ever stayed the same.
Gods.
There was no other word that they could come up with for the creatures. They were gods. Creatures of the beginning, things that had existed from the moment the universe took its first breath—light and darkness, the two forces intertwined.
But they vanished, and Lawliet found themself staring at unfeeling emptiness, and they felt an ache in their heart. Those twin gods were gone, too. They had been gone for a very, very long time. Their blood continued to pulse throughout the atoms of the universe, but they…? They themselves were gone.
Lawliet walked into another memory.
This one was much clearer. They could see actual shapes and details, and for a moment, felt as though they were standing inside it. They saw a grand, beautiful being, like a tall, broad-shouldered woman almost forty feet tall, clad all in gold armor, with wings like sunlight sprouting from their back. Another being at their side, huge, hulking, and dark, a slithering shadow that took on the shape of some kind of humanoid dragon, with a flat face, burning red eyes, and curled horns. The people gathered about the feet of the two great beings did not seem frightened, however, and neither creature moved to harm the tiny people far below. They shouted in languages that Lawliet did not know, but he understood their meaning. Worship. They were yet more gods in this lineage of ancient beings, but ones closer to human understanding, and closer to human existence.
But then the sky turned to black and embers, and Lawliet saw the golden woman struggling with the black dragon, the two of them screaming and bleeding at each other's strikes while people fled from under their feet.
They saw the golden woman's sword pierce the great dragon and sever it in two melting clumps of darkness. One clump dissolved, but the other, the other fled. Lawliet could see it disappearing into the distance, could see it planting itself deep into the earth. A seed.
Ah. So that's what happened to create this tree. That was you, wasn't it, Apep?
They saw the woman turn the sword on herself, then, grimacing as she plunged the blade into her own breast. He felt her vanish and split, and saw the three shards—red, blue, and yellow, scatter from where she had once been.
"It is the nature of things to disappear."
Lawliet did not know where the voice came from. They thought it might be an echo of the goddess he had just seen vanish.
They were back in the darkness again, but finally, there was something there.
A great, pulsating mass loomed before him, purple and black, bulbous and slimy. Sticky threads spread from it to walls that Lawliet could not see, suspending the mass in place. They felt a natural revulsion crawl through them automatically.
Apep.
This was it. The source of Apep's power. They had finally found it. Lawliet took a step towards it, hands raising. They would take the power into themself, purify it, return it to its natural state. Then Apep would lose his corrupted power, and the last god would fall.
At least, that was the plan.
Lawliet was prepared for many things, both from the part of them that was L, and the part of them that was Seraphina, and the part of them that was simply them.
What they were not prepared for was who stepped out of the shadows in front of them.
"You won't go any further," Yagami Light said.
A/N: god you guys, we're so close...we're so close to the end ;w; thank you to all who keep sticking with this project, tbh it's beyond me to understand how you could enjoy this one, but it means a lot to me to know that you do. but for real is this even death note OR yugioh anymore? lol XD
but for real thank you all so much, you readers make even the stories i don't enjoy so much worth writing :heart: