The battle against The End

The destroyers broke the outer defences, their leader came, and one of the guardians answered by turning himself into a prison.

What happened

An alarm tore through the Ink-sphere. The destroyers had breached the outer defences faster than Ink expected, in multiple coordinated incursions, which they had never managed before (ch. 1).

Ink ordered Zero to stay close to Dream and not to engage the leader. Zero agreed.

For about an hour the defence held. Then Blueberry was cut off, surrounded, shielding a populated universe and failing. Zero broke formation to reach him, against the order, and built a barrier that held. Blueberry got out.

The lesser destroyers then parted, and The End came through the gap.

The exchange

The End erased rather than destroyed: what it passed had never existed. It broke through Zero's defences and parts of him "simply ceased to exist, not destroyed, but retroactively erased from the multiverse's memory" (ch. 2).

It told him all resistance ends, and all existence ends, and called this the immutable truth of the multiverse.

Zero's answer is the thesis of the whole saga:

"You claim to be the strongest force in the multiverse. You're wrong. The strongest force isn't destruction. It's my will to protect what I hold dear." (ch. 2)

What he did

He inverted himself. The being who had contained a universe turned that containment outward and closed it around The End: "both implosion and explosion, both creation and destruction" (ch. 2).

His form shattered into fragments of light. One remained.

What it changed

• The End is contained, not dead. The prison holds for as long as there is existence.
• The destroyers retreated and dissolved back into the void.
• The world began. Ink laid the last fragment in Point-Null, and it seeded a universe. See ../locations/point-null.md.

The chapter closes on "The 1 that became many."

The shape it sets

Both halves of the saga end this way. Zero contains The End at the cost of himself. Arthur, centuries into the future of the world Zero became, contains the Ruined God with his blade rather than destroying him. In the author's far future notes that second containment leaks, and a war follows.

Nothing yet says whether the first one can.

Open questions

• Whether The End is inside the world of the story, since the prison was made out of the being the world is made out of.
• What "in forms neither of us can yet imagine" (Ink, ch. 2) is pointing at.