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I wondered if it made any difference, either way.

“Perhaps,” I said aloud, deciding not to bore Malkuth with my final musings. “I suppose it doesn’t much matter now.”

A point of light appeared above and to the side of us, as blue as my eyes and shining with a brightness that couldn’t be described—couldn’t be confined—to the purely physical. Although the point was indescribably tiny, it cast enough light to illuminate what was left of the lands of Grimm out to the lefts of my basic perceptions, casting the sky in odd colors in the process.

And no sooner had the light appeared than did it start to move. Like a blade being taken to the fabric of reality, the point was drawn into a line before changing directions and tracing a different path until it formed a perfect square—and it was perfect, lacking anything but length and width for a single, solitary instant.

Then, that instant passed and it continued to expand, new paths tracing from the corners to encompass us in a cube, sealing us within. Then, the cube itself grew, branching out along new paths to become a tesseract, something that couldn’t wholly exist within normal space and so simply expanded beyond them. Moments later, it expanded to a penteract and then to a hexeract, multiplying in size each time yet staying confined to the same volume.

“What are you doing?” Malkuth asked, eyes widening. The process was occurring at speeds even he couldn’t track and we were already sealed in. I felt his power try to resist my own, but it seemed to struggle as it did, power over the physical realm slowly losing meaning as we my ‘cube’ spread—and drew us—into higher dimensions. Already, things like sound were becoming distorted, the words impossible to speak and thus simply conveyed by intent and idea, and it was only just beginning.

Even so, I looked at my brother and answered.

“Previous, I was buying time,” I told him without lifting my voice in the slightest. “Presently, I’m winning.”

To his credit, that was all Malkuth needed to hear to start putting the pieces together.

“This was your plan all along,” He said. “You could kill all the others, but you knew you couldn’t kill me, so you decided to…to trap me, like you said before. Lock me up alone in a box, far away from reality.”

I was silent for a moment as I considered how to reply, what I could and should convey, but in the end I chose to go with the simplest explanation. He could put together the rest.

“No,” I said quietly. “Not alone.”

Malkuth’s physical form was beginning to…not unravel, that wasn’t the best way to describe it. Instead, it was more like it was simply losing meaning. It was there, but it didn’t matter here. Even so, I could tell that he was surprised by my words and for a moment he seemed speechless.

“You’d lock us both in hell?” He asked. “Why?”

“Because you’re my Brother,” I answered simply. “And whatever you’ve done, whatever you’ve become, I had a part to play in it all…so I’ll help pay the price as well. Besides…it’s better than being in hell alone, isn’t it?”

He stared at me for a moment that I couldn’t really define, since time was starting to breakdown, too. Instead of waiting, I decided to continue to speak, while I was still able.

“This is the end,” I said. “You and I, locked up forever. The others will be reborn eventually and hopefully they’re find each other again—or, at least, find something like happiness and peace. They’re strong and they’ll be strong, perhaps strong enough to fix things, but who they’ll be I don’t know. But…I hope they’ll be good people, that being born and raised among Humanity will ground them and help them. But you and I, we always we the strongest, too strong not to shape the entire world around us, so…let’s just fade away into the storybooks. Okay? Perhaps I’ll never truly understand what you’d had to go through and live with, but…I’m your older brother. I’ll stay beside you until everything is over.”