Chapter 5498: White! II
Chapter 5498: White! II
Why do those living in chains never break free?
Enslaved being were far too many across existence, and some, while enslaved...did not even try to fight.
The unchained believe the question is "can I break free?" They believe capability is the whole of it, that every bound thing strains against its bindings, that the moment strength arrives, freedom follows! But ask anything that has actually worn chains for long enough, and a truer question emerges from beneath the first one.
The question is not "can I?"
The question is "what will I become on the other side of the breaking chains?"
For chains, given enough centuries, stop being restraints and become architecture. A being organizes itself around its bindings. The pull of the harness becomes the shape of the day. The lash becomes weather, endured the way mountains endure rain. And the self that might exist beyond the chains becomes a stranger, unmet and unknowable, while the self within them is at least a known thing, a survivable thing! This is the secret the unchained never learn: that the deepest bindings are not forged of cursed metal. They are forged of certainty. The chained thing knows its chains. It knows nothing of what waits after.
So what does it actually take, to break what one has always been able to break?
It was not strength. Strength was never the missing piece! It takes a reason that outweighs the known world. It takes something on the far side of the breaking that burns brighter than the safety of the familiar cage. It takes, in the end, a glimpse, however faint, however distant, of a thing worth becoming a stranger to oneself for!
For three thousand years, Hvitrmarr had possessed the strength.
For three thousand years, she had lacked the glimpse.
Now she had it!
CRACK!
The lash of cursed lightning rose above the harness of nine, whistling down through the storm toward pearl-white scales as it had fallen ten thousand times before!
And this time, the White Steed moved.
Between one heartbeat of the mad Jarl’s laughter and the next, three thousand years of conserved power erupted through her frame in a single silent bloom as her Cause, the slow-dying architecture of the First lineage, flexed for the first time in millennia, and the chains of screaming crimson metal that had broken every creature ever fitted with them...
Shattered!
The sound was not a crack but a scream, the unraveled weavings of dead Steeds crying out as the bindings burst off her throat, her wings, and all four titanic limbs in showers of dying crimson light! The lash itself froze mid-descent as its cursed lightning guttered against a wall of white flame, and Hvitrmarr turned her massive head, slowly, deliberately, and gazed up at Jarl Skallagrim with her vast golden eyes!
There was no rage in them.
There was only coldness. The cold of a being looking, for the first and last time, directly at the thing it had pulled across a Dimension for three millennia, and finding it unworthy of even hatred! Her ring-pupils turned once, slowly, taking the measure of the rotting titan upon his throne.
The other eight Steeds stared at her in absolute shock!
Eight pairs of ancient, dying eyes fixed upon their white sister standing free amid the raining fragments of her chains, harnessed minds struggling against the sheer impossibility of it, and in the space of their staring, Hvitrmarr spread her white-flamed wings once!
And disappeared.
Space folded around her pearl-light frame as she stepped onto a road none of them could perceive, and the storm rushed in to fill the vastness where she had stood, and the harness of nine was a harness of eight, and the throne of Jarl Skallagrim drifted to a slow stop in the dark!
For a moment, madness reigned upon that throne.
Jarl Skallagrim lurched upright as his rotting fissures flared, his eyes bulging with the crazed shock of a broken mind confronting a broken possession, and a howl began building in his titanic chest, the howl of a dying lunatic robbed of his favorite toy, ready to split the storm itself!
But the howl never came.
Because moments later, something far more terrifying happened upon that throne! The madness... faded. It drained out of the Jarl’s bulging eyes like floodwater finding a drain, and what settled into his ancient face in its place was a calmness so total, so intelligent, so utterly lucid that any being who had watched him rave at stars for the past century would have felt their blood run cold!
The madness had never been the whole of him. It had merely been the part he stopped fighting!
Jarl Skallagrim sat back down upon his throne, and his cold eyes turned in the direction the White Steed had vanished, and behind them, a mind that had dissected ten thousand lifeforms began, once more, to work.
He had always known she was special!
From the first century, he had known. A Steed whose Cause failed at a fraction of the proper rate, whose deep weavings his cursed eyes could not fully read, whose scales carried patterns that appeared nowhere in the breeding records of any Jarl’s archive! He had studied her in secret for a thousand years, cut samples from her, tested her, and found nothing. Her secret sat below the reach of his instruments, layered beneath white scales like a carving at the bottom of a lake, and eventually he had accepted the only strategy left to a man who cannot open a lock.
Watch it. And wait for it to open itself!
So he had waited. He had let the madness in because waiting with a clear mind was unbearable, and he had whipped her with the rest to keep his watching invisible, and the years of his cursed life had drained away one by one until fewer than two remained. His time to die was coming! And still he had waited, because a special thing only reveals itself when it moves, and in three thousand years, she had never moved.
Now, at last, she had!
And where, o where, would she lead him?!
Something had called her. That was the only reading! Nothing within his harness had changed, nothing in the geography, nothing in the storm, which meant the change had come from without, from far away, from something new enough and potent enough to make a three-thousand-year statue finally spend its strength! A thing that could stir the First patterns he had never managed to read. A thing that a dying Steed judged worth being hunted by every Jarl in existence for!
He needed to escape this accursed life. He had less than two years to do it in.
And his best instrument had just aimed itself!
For now...
Jarl Skallagrim rose from his throne, and took up the lash of cursed lightning, and brought it whistling down across the backs of the remaining eight!
CRACK!
"Follow where your brethren is going!"
His voice rolled out over the harness, and there was no madness in it at all now, only a cold command.
"She is special. I have always known it, and now all of you have seen it with your own eyes! And I know that you can inherently sense each other, all you children of the broods, all you dying wonders. So sense her. Follow her!" The lash coiled back into his titanic fist as his cold eyes swept across eight ancient, beaten faces.
"And think, while you pull. If she is unique enough to break these chains, as you have all just seen... why do you think those cursed like us would make a move at all?"
...!
The question fell upon the eight Steeds like the first rain after a drought!
Why. Why would a being that had conserved itself for three thousand years suddenly spend everything? Why would anything cursed to die, anything whose every road ended in the same collapse, ever bother to move at all?! There was only one answer, and every dying mind in that harness arrived at it in the same shuddering instant!
They would only move... if there was a glimmer of salvation!
The change that rolled through the harness was immediate and absolute! Eight pairs of dying eyes lit up with a light that had not burned in them for centuries as broken antlers lifted, as ruined wings stirred, as terminal weavings pulsed with something that was not health but was very much like hope, and the eight Steeds of Jarl Skallagrim threw back their ancient heads and roared!
The roar shook the storm itself!
And then they moved, not as beaten cattle dragged by chains, but as hunters, the colossal throne surging forward through the dark geography with a speed the harness had not produced in a thousand years, eight dying wonders chasing the wake of their white sister and the glimmer she had aimed herself toward!
Upon the pulled throne, Jarl Skallagrim sat back calmly.
The rot of his fissures glowed softly in the storm-light as his cold, lucid eyes watched the darkness ahead, and he waved one titanic hand, and upon his open palm... brilliant waves of possibilities churned!
They bloomed and folded over one another like a sea of unwritten pages, countless futures shimmering in and out of shape above his cursed flesh, the last great art of a dying lineage, and the Jarl gazed into them with the terrifying serenity of a man who had stopped raving because, at long last, there was something real to think about.
"Will I live, or will I die?" he asked softly, to the churning light, to the storm, to the Dimension that had cursed his blood before his birth. "O countless weavings of existence... what say you?"
...!