Chapter 5406: THE Hall of Swords I
Chapter 5406: THE Hall of Swords I
The borrowed hands worked the fishing line, and THE Sealed One mused, cruel and ominous and unhurried.
"The trouble with unique lifeforms," it murmured, to the crimson sea, to no one, "is that they are fed by exactly the thing you would use to kill a lesser one. You strike an ordinary being unprepared, and it dies, and that is the end of it. You strike a being like Osmont unprepared, and you have not attacked him. You have nourished him. Every adversity such anomaly survives makes him grander. His whole foundation is built to convert resistance into growth." The borrowed mouth curved.
"He cannot be fed adversity. So I will not feed him any. At least, not anymore..."
The line drifted in the red.
"When I move against that anomaly," THE Sealed One continued, soft and certain, "it will not be a contest. It will not be a glorious clash that he can survive and grow from and add to his record. I have had enough of beings underestimating things and dying for the underestimation. I will not be one of them. When I move, it will be with complete surety. Which means preparation. Which means more information, more pieces of myself gathered, more of his weaknesses mapped, more of his allies understood, until there is no version of the encounter where he walks away grander. The time to act is never when victory is merely likely. For a thing like him, likely is not enough, because likely is just another adversity for him to overcome. The time to act is when victory is already decided before the first move is made. When the only thing left to do is collect what was always going to be mine." It almost laughed.
"He is eating my hand. Let him. A hand is information too. Let him learn exactly as much about me as I am learning about him, and let us see which of us uses what we learn better. I have been doing this since before his Age had a name."
HUUM!
Behind him, infinity stirred, and a woman appeared.
She was a Mesozoic Scale Infinite Lifeform herself, burning with deep infinity, beautiful and grand, and she drifted up behind the vessel and wrapped her arms around him from behind, holding him close, her cheek against the back of his shoulder.
"My love," she said, and her voice was warm, full of an affection that had clearly been built across a long time. "The Council is yours to address, whenever you are ready. They are waiting on you. They always wait on you."
She tightened her arms around him, fond, easy, the embrace of a being who believed completely in the one she held. "But there is no hurry. Fish a while longer, if it pleases you. The crimson always settles you."
Her eyes were full of warmth as she said it.
And she had no idea. No idea at all that the lover she held was not there anymore, that the being whose robes she had shared and whose Council she helped him lead and whose existence she had braided with her own had been hollowed out and replaced an unknown time ago, that she was pressing her cheek against a coat with something ancient and patient wearing it. She held her love, and her love was a grave, and she did not know, because THE Sealed One wore him perfectly, the way it wore everything perfectly!
THE Sealed One turned in her arms.
It turned the vessel toward the woman who loved a dead man, and it looked at her with the borrowed eyes, and it took her lips the way the man she remembered would have. Her infinity flared in answer, trusting and glad. The borrowed hands rose and unclasped her robes, and infinity surged out across the whole of the region, deep and concealing, rising to blanket the endless crimson sea so that what came next belonged to no observer.
And amidst the endless adversity of existence, the patient cruelty and the long gathering and the war that had not yet begun, THE Sealed One continued, in its own monstrous way, to do the one thing it had always done.
It continued to live, completely and without apology, by its identity.
---
<THE Source Lands>
There was a place that could only be reached through THE Hallowed Demesne, and yet did not exist within it.
The gateway sat in the Demesne, somewhere in its deep ordered reaches, but the gateway was only that, a door. What lay beyond the door existed in its own separate Dimension of Existence entirely, a fold of reality that answered to itself and to nothing else, the way the grandest of the Mesozoic-tier beings each held their own Pantheonic dimensions. To stand inside it was to have stepped out of the Source Lands altogether and into a place that the Source Lands merely pointed toward.
It was a grand hall, and it was ancient, and it carried the glory of a thing that had held its purpose across more ages than most existences lasted.
THE Hall of Swords.
At its heart rose one massive obsidian throne, and the throne was not a single seat but a structure of blades, countless swords worked into its form, each one representing a Source Armament, each one a sword carried by a Sword of Existence somewhere across existence. The throne shone dark and deep, and the weapons that composed it caught a light that came from no visible source.
Before the throne, arranged in a half circle, stood entities of esteemed power.
The weakest among them stood at the Mesozoic Scale, the Fifth, and that was the floor of the gathering. The strongest were simply unknown, their power exceeding any measure that could be cleanly taken. Every one of them was covered by a shroud of vibrant Primordial Source, their figures obscured, impossible to discern with any certainty. It was not even clear whether their physical bodies were truly present in the Hall, or whether only their presences had been projected here, the beings themselves elsewhere and merely attending. Here, and not here, both at once.
The throne itself wore a shroud of obsidian and gold. This was THE Throne of Swords, where the one who commanded the vast network of the Swords of Existence customarily sat, and the vibrant shrouding upon it left the same mystery hanging over its occupant. Whether the physical body of that entity rested upon the blades, or whether only its will had come to preside, none in the Hall could have said for certain.
At this time, the mood in THE Hall of Swords was somber.
One of the obsidian-shrouded figures around the throne spoke, and the voice came out cold and grim.
"No mention of THE Sealed One has risen for eons," it said. "Not a whisper. The name was buried with the rest, and the burying was supposed to be the end of it. And now it surfaces, spoken aloud by a freshly sworn Sword in the open air of THE Hallowed Demesne, as though it were any other piece of information." A pause, heavy with what it did not say.
"His mention now. After so long. Did her Majesty pass the word to the others? Do the rest know what we know?"
Before the question could be answered, another voice interjected, sharper, and it cut across the first.
"Before even that," the second shroud said, "there is a question that should have been asked at the door, and was not. Should the one who uttered the name be brought here at all? Should we be discussing his report as though the source of it were sound?" The voice hardened.
"Think on what we are accepting without examination. Nothing survives THE Sealed One. Nothing. That is the entire reason the name still freezes the blood of beings who have forgotten everything else about that Age. Four Swords of Existence died in that mine, by his own account. And yet this one existence, this new Sword, this Osmont, walked back out of the deep alive, more powerful, and whole, and bearing the name on his lips like a gift." A cold silence.
"Why? Why would four Swords be killed, and this one spared? THE Sealed One is THE Primordial Deceiver. THE Sealed One is THE Infinite Liar. From all the stories our Elders told us of that Age so long ago where we weren’t even born, he plots, and he kills, and he has never once in his existence done a straightforward thing when a crooked thing would serve him better. So ask the question plainly. What if this survivor is not a survivor at all? What if Osmont is part of his plots? The herald sent ahead, wearing the face of a witness, bearing news of a return that we are meant to react to exactly as we are now reacting?"
...!
The Hall went still.
Every shrouded figure in the half circle turned, slowly, toward the obsidian-and-gold throne, awaiting its answer, awaiting the will of the one who commanded the Swords of Existence to weigh what had been said and rule on it.
And the throne, as it had through the whole of the gathering, remained silent!