Victory was transient, but its cost was immediate and unceasing. Holding the Silence impaled upon the spear of its own paradox required constant, active sustainment. Wang Chuan and Wang You became the living anchors of this conceptual prison, their divine forms burning at an unprecedented rate to maintain the fragile stalemate that allowed the universe a few more stolen breaths.
This was no longer a battle; it was a siege. A war of attrition fueled by existence itself.
"We cannot endure this indefinitely," Wang Chuan stated, his form flickering between solidity and the ghostly afterimage of pure record. "We are gods, not eternal foundations. Our 'being' is also finite."
Wang You did not disagree. He felt his creative power being siphoned, converted into pure sustaining energy, and it produced in him a sense of void deeper than the Silence itself had ever evoked. Yet, in that suspended, burning moment, something else seeped into their awareness.
Not a probe from the Silence. Something... fainter, yet more tenacious.
The logical burrs.
They felt Elara—the girl who remained kneeling where a gravestone had been, her entire being a vessel of memory for someone declared 'non-existent.' Her remembrance, pure and stubborn, was like a red-hot needle piercing the Silence's perfect domain.
They felt the final, instinctual affirmations from countless worlds undergoing 'logical revocation.' Not pleas, not wails, but confirmations of their own existence.
An old painter covering himself in the colors of a sunset, crying out, "I have seen light!"
Lovers embracing,whispering, "We met."
A civilization singing its epic in unison until the very last moment.
These voices, insignificant as dust motes, coalesced into a whisper, a background noise that interfered with the Silence's processing of the paradox. They were using the evidence of their own lived existence to add bricks of mortal defiance to the gods' conceptual wall.
"We were wrong, Wang Chuan," Wang You's tone vibrated with a newfound awe, his senses tracing the myriad pinpricks of light flaring and dying across the cosmos. "We sought to protect them with our divine power... but it is they, with their very existence, who are protecting the possibility of all existence."