Chapter 5314: Emotion I
Chapter 5314: Emotion I
"Come on, let me show you a few things."
Sir William rose, and Noah rose with him, and together they moved across the dying expanse of Chernobyl.
Anything apocalyptic and dying always had his full attention as he loved exploring new things!
The first region they crossed had been a place of war once. Noah could feel it in the residue, THE Bellum Cause of this Observable Existence still present in faint traces across the torn landscape, but the Cause was failing.
Where his own integrated Bellum Cause burned with the clean war-truth that conflict drove change, the Bellum Cause here flickered, its expression stuttering, the foundational truth it had once asserted no longer held steadily by the Observable Existence that had birthed it. Crimson light guttered across the ruined terrain like a flame running out of what fed it.
"A Cause...does not die quickly," Sir William said as they passed over it. "This is the first thing the uninitiated misunderstand about the death of an Observable Existence. They imagine a sudden ending, a single catastrophic moment. The truth is slower and considerably crueler. A Cause that has lost its foundation continues asserting itself out of habit, the way a body continues twitching after the thing that animated it has gone. THE Bellum Cause of Chernobyl still tries to express the truth of conflict. It simply no longer has the foundation to express it correctly, so it produces only this. Flickering. The memory of war without the substance of it."
They moved on.
The next region had held knowledge. THE Cognitio Cause’s residue ran through it, libraries of folded information that had once organized the understanding of an entire Observable Existence now coming apart, the structured knowledge dissolving back into undifferentiated noise.
Noah watched vast archives of Cognitio expression unravel in slow motion, eons of accumulated understanding losing its organization and becoming meaningless.
"THE Cognitio Cause governed how this Observable Existence understood itself," Sir William said. "What you are watching is not the destruction of knowledge. It is something worse. It is knowledge forgetting how to be knowledge. The information remains. The capacity to organize it into understanding is what has failed. The beings who once lived here, in their final ages, could perceive everything and comprehend nothing, surrounded by the full record of their civilization and unable to read a word of it."
Noah said nothing. He filed each observation, building a picture of what the death of an Observable Existence actually looked like from the inside, because this was information his Civilizations of endings could use and because the dying around him was teaching him things no intact domain ever could.
A man could always continue learning!
They passed regions where other Causes failed in their own ways. A Cause of growth that produced only decay. A Cause of binding that could no longer hold anything together. Each one a foundational truth that had lost its foundation, each one continuing to try and continuing to fail, the whole Observable Existence a collection of broken promises that existence was still attempting to keep out of momentum alone.
"You are wondering how this happened," Sir William said.
Noah was. He had been since he arrived. An Observable Existence did not simply have its First Cause undone. THE First Cause was the foundational axiom the entire domain was built around. Undoing it required something that Noah’s understanding of existence did not readily account for.
Sir William slowed as they approached the torn dimensional fabric near the burning golden mountains, the glass-like cuts across reality catching the terminal infinity’s light.
"Then I will tell you of The Records of Chernobyl," he said. "It is worth knowing. The Swords of Existence use it as instruction, because it teaches the single lesson that matters most about the beings we exist to oppose."
He floated, and he spoke, and his measured cadence filled the dying air.
"In the ages when Chernobyl lived, it was a domain of considerable abundance. Its First Cause was strong. Its Causes expressed cleanly. The Lifeforms within it climbed and flourished and produced civilizations worth remembering. And among the beings who reached the highest tiers of this Observable Existence, two fell in love.
One was an Infinite Lifeform. A being of this domain who had cultivated Infinity to a height few ever reached. The other was a Source Lifeform, ancient and powerful, carrying THE Primordial Source in the direct way that Source Lifeforms carry it.
Their love was, by every account that survived, genuine. It was not a strategic alliance dressed as affection. It was not a transaction. Two beings of immense power found in each other something that the immensity of their power had never been able to provide on its own, and they chose each other, across the difference in their natures, against the considerable pressures that such a difference produced."
Noah listened.
"Love between beings of that tier is rare," Sir William continued. "Beings who climb to such heights tend to lose, somewhere in the climbing, the capacity for it. Power and intimacy are not natural companions. That these two retained both was, in its way, an achievement greater than the power itself. They did not harm anyone. They did not threaten the order of their Observable Existence. They simply loved each other, two beings of different natures, in a domain large enough to hold them both."
He paused, and the pause carried the weight of someone arriving at the part of the story that mattered.
"There was a third. Another Infinite Lifeform, of comparable tier to the first. And this being looked at the love between the Infinite Lifeform and the Source Lifeform and saw an abomination.
The reasons matter less than you would think. Perhaps the third loved the first and could not bear to be unchosen. Perhaps the third held convictions about the separation of natures that the love offended. Perhaps it was simply the specific rage of a powerful being who encountered something it disapproved of and could not tolerate the existence of a thing it disapproved of. The chronicles disagree on the reason. They agree entirely on the result."
The burning golden mountains roared in the distance.
"The third Infinite Lifeform moved against the lovers. And the lovers, being who they were, did not simply submit. What followed was... a war between three beings of the highest tiers an Observable Existence had ever produced, and a war at that tier is not contained by the participants. It spread. It pulled in allies and forced choices on beings who wanted no part of it. The Source Lifeform’s nature drew responses from across existence. The Infinite Lifeforms’ war tore at the foundations of the domain that held them.
And in the height of it, when the three of them brought everything they were against each other with no remaining restraint, they struck at THE First Cause itself. Whether by intention or by the simple inability of a domain to contain that magnitude of conflict, THE First Cause of Chernobyl was wounded. And a wounded First Cause, unlike a wounded being, cannot heal. It can only unravel.
The lovers died. The third died. And the Observable Existence they had fought within received its death sentence in the same moment, the First Cause beginning the slow unraveling that you see around you now, the Causes failing one by one, the domain forgetting how to be a domain, the whole of Chernobyl placed on the path toward an ending that no being remaining within it had the power to prevent."
...!
BOOM!