Chapter 22: The Menyar Betrayal

For untold epochs, the guardians kept their ceaseless vigil over the infinite tapestry. Wayward threads of negation were diligently severed and realigned before they could unravel into broader disharmonies. Stray worlds and realities that had become unmoored from their cosmic orbits were carefully resecured into the grander patterns.

On the whole, the multiverse remained beautifully harmonic and finely balanced, thanks to their eternal stewardship. But even they could not account for every eventuality across such a staggeringly vast existence.

It began as a faint dissonance, like a sour note amid a celestial symphony that only Zariah's heightened attunement could perceive. At first, she dismissed the subtle aberration as one of the multiverse's self-correcting fluctuations.

But over successive cycles, that wavering disharmony grew more insistent and widespread - a rapidly metastasizing disunion that seemed to bypass all their weaving efforts. Soon, whole swathes of the infinite tapestry had become tainted by encroaching strands of negation.

Zariah and the storm dragons traced the spreading blight to a single point of divergence - a realm nestled within a pentagonal lattice of intersecting planar boundaries. Here, the negating force originated from a cabal who sought not just the destabilization of local reality, but the unmaking of the entire multiverse itself.

They were the Menyar, an elite sect of cosmic renegades who had turned their backs on all creation. Believing the infinite tapestry to be an illusory weave of subjective experience, they embraced a philosophy of absolute negation. To them, the existence of duality and objective reality itself was an affront to the true, indivisible monad.

By mastering occult technologies of unmaking, the Menyar had devised a way to unmoor singular threads from their cosmic lattices and leave them adrift in a void of non-being. At first, it had merely created localized fraying within the surrounding realms.

But fueled by increasingly potent philosophies of negation, the Menyar's efforts grew ever more disruptive and widespread. Now, they spearheaded a systematic assault on the very foundational fabrics undergirding all of creation.

"They believe the tapestry itself to be a perverse fiction," Razel explained gravely, his thoughts flowing across Zariah's consciousness. "To them, the grand patterns you and I have devoted our vigil to protecting are mere illusions to be dissolved back into the primordial monad."

Zariah's celestial form shuddered at the thought. To unravel all of existence in pursuit of a philosophical ideal seemed the height of madness to her. Yet it was undeniably a force to be reckoned with. Already, whole realities had begun flickering out like candle flames snuffed by the obsidian winds of the negating void.

The storm legion bellowed a primal challenge as they made their way inexorably toward the epicenter of the Menyar's unraveling ritual. At their heart lay the Anomeid - a basalt ziggurat that served as a cosmic uplink, channeling torrential destructive anti-energies into the surrounding cosmos.

As they fought their way through successive layers of Menyar opposition, Zariah could feel the very substance of those realms growing thin and ephemeral under her feet. Space itself distorted like a scrim of reality burned away by an encroaching singularity. Time shuddered and warped with each footstep, as entropy assailed the ordered coherence of existence.

Finally, they found themselves facing the grim monolith at the Anomeid's crown. Here, robed figures in masks of impassive negation chanted profane verses in an ancient tongue that predated the universe itself. Massive obsidian engines hummed and pulsated as they carved an ever-widening rift into the surrounding planes.

Leading the dread rituals was the Menyar's Demiurge, one of the original renegades who had first mastered the blasphemous ontotechnologies. Its void-shriveled form radiated an aura of such anti-being that Zariah felt reality itself flinching from its presence.

When it spoke, its words carried the weight of a negating truth that could undo all possibility:

"Unbeing to unbeing. Dust into void. As creation was unmade, so too shall it be undone. Entropy is the solvent upon which all dreams of existence dissolve..."

With those damning words the ritual reached its malefic crescendo. The raging terminus of the rift tore open fully like a cosmic maw, unleashing a torrent of pure entropic anti-force upon the surrounding tapestry.

Realities quickly withered upon that abyssal torrent. Entire worlds unraveled into delitescence as the cataclysmic wave of negation consumed all in its ravenous wake. And at its inexorable vanguard was the Demiurge itself, a dread singularity that threatened to undo every thread of the multiverse.

It fell upon Zariah and the storm legion to make a final stand against the encroaching nihil. Rallying all the cohering might of their celestial essences, they unleashed a concentrated burst of harmonizing energy directly into the negating rift.

For an ephemeral eternity, the two antithetical forces clashed in an apocalyptic conflagration that sparked and flared across multiple planar matrices. Discord and harmony, negation and being - all straining violently against one another as the fate of the cosmos hung precariously in the balance...