Chapter 5451: What’s The Point? I
Chapter 5451: What’s The Point? I
THE Great Usurper drifted silent in his borrowed body, hundreds of Unity-bound Gilded Ones floating dim around him, and for once the being who spread himself through the minds of others had nothing to say through any of them.
And Thalassarch Nereon coiled through the dark in his vast grief-warped immensity, looking at the scattered bubbles and the empty black, and the leviathan recognized what he was seeing with a terrible, complete intimacy. A protector, powerful past reason, floating in the ruins of the thing he had failed to protect. Nereon had lived this exact moment once, alone in a dead ocean, and he had spent ages drowning in it. Watching it happen to the being who had resuscitated his grave, the Drowned Sovereign felt something he had thought long extinct in himself. It was the oldest kind of pity, the kind that came from knowing the road ahead.
THE Creature’s obsidian flames billowed with unfathomable coldness.
He said nothing either, but the dark around his burning frame had dropped to a stillness that made even the Gaps feel warmer by comparison. His birthplace was gone.
He thought of THE Infinite Unfurling. THE Earliest Folds. His Early Veiled Shore. THE Living Existences. THE Wyld.
He thought...of many, many things.
The place where Existence itself had first risen out of a Bounded thing, eaten by a flower, and THE Egoic Intent of Existence had felt every mouthful. Whatever THE Creature was deciding inside that cold, it was being decided slowly, and completely, and it would not be undecided!
And at the center of it all, Noah floated.
He held every bubble steady. He kept every survivor breathing. His Osmontian Source Infinity ran flawless and unwavering through all of it, because his power had not failed, his power had done everything power could do. That was the precise shape of the wound. He had been strong enough to save everyone he could reach and not strong enough to matter, and the distance between those two things was where he now floated, motionless, staring at nothing.
Then a small voice reached him, threading across his bodies from far away in the Gaps, from the body that traveled with his family.
"Mister Noah??" Seo-yeon asked quietly. "Why did Existence go quiet? Why is Chernobyl going quiet?!"
HUUM!
...!
She felt dying Observable Existences the way other children felt thunderstorms. Somewhere out in the dark she had sensed a vastness simply stop, two vastnesses, and she was asking him to explain it, the way children asked the adults they trusted to explain the world!
Noah opened his mouth across that distant body, and found nothing there.
He had answers for Mesozoic Ealdor and Source queens and patient ancient liars. He had answers for everything existence had ever thrown at him, and he had no answer prepared for a child asking why the existence was going quiet!
THE Sealed One had promised Chernobyl would die within the next nanosecond, and Noah’s body had already been racing toward it before the sentence finished landing.
He tore across the Undefined Gaps alone, faster than he had ever pushed a body, his Osmontian Source Infinity burning down to bare purpose, and the whole way there a small voice trembled through his other bodies, because far away Seo-yeon had gone rigid, her eyes wide and welling, feeling it happen in real time!
Another body of his had arrived at where Chernobyl had been, and found nothing at all.
There was no ruin. There was no wreckage. There was not even the corpse-glow of a Terminal Observable Existence guttering out. There was only smooth, unmarked dark, the Gaps closed over the place like water over a stone, and the silence of it was worse than any battlefield he had ever stood on.
|Chernobyl has been devoured. The Observable Existence you resuscitated, THE First Cause you rebuilt, the nine Prime Causes you seated with your own authority, all of it has been consumed in its entirety. No foundation remains. No fragment remains. The devouring was total, and it concluded moments before your arrival, precisely as promised.|
Noah floated in the empty place with cold eyes, and then he waved his hand, and Temporal weavings buzzed to life around him.
Illusory scenes bloomed across the dark, time run in reverse, the recent past of this stretch of the Gaps replayed in ghostlight. He watched it backward first and then forward, and forward was worse. A vessel arrived, not Borys, a different one, a tall unfamiliar figure with the same aloof cruel eyes, and above it the same flower unfolded, gigaparsecs of pale weeping petals opening in slow rings around the whole of Chernobyl. The Observable Existence he had brought back from death, the realms he had watched bloom again, the countless lifeforms who had begun their new histories inside his nine seated Causes, all of it drew inward through the ghostly replay, folding and liquefying and condensing, until the flower closed and the vessel held three small grey pills in its palm.
Three pills. An Observable Existence he had saved, and everything that had ever lived in it, reduced to three unremarkable spheres with tiny faces frozen in their shells.
The illusion faded, and Noah hung alone where his first resurrection used to be.
And far away, in the body with his family, Seo-yeon broke.
She had felt every moment of it, the dying and the eating and the silence after, and she stood there with tears pouring down her small face, her hands pressed over her chest as though the death had happened inside her own body. She had been deeply connected to Chernobyl! She had been keeping its Cause as it was for too long! Amelia reached for her and she did not even feel it!
WAA!
"If...if so much death happens this easily," Seo-yeon whispered, "this freely, then should we even bother? Maybe we shouldn’t do anything at all. Maybe helping just makes bigger things to die."
Her voice cracked apart. "Because now I have nothing. Not even the home Ama left me. It’s gone, Mister Noah. Something ate my home, and everyone in it, and I felt all of them, and now I...have nothing left anywhere!"
Noah crossed the space between them and knelt and pulled her into his arms.
She was so small!
He was reminded of how small she actually was underneath everything she carried, THE Mirror Sovereign, the anchor of a dead Cause, a being of impossible heritage, and also just a girl who had not truly lived. He held her tightly against his chest and let her sob, and when he spoke, his voice came low and steady and absolutely certain!