Chapter 5523: Fear and Doubt! III
Chapter 5523: Fear and Doubt! III
<THE Recorder of Wilds>
Upon a golden cloud inside a sealed killing field, an old woman refilled her tea and could not remember the last time an afternoon had given her this much.
She had drifted along inside the formation the entire way, unseen and unsensed, and now she floated barely above the coils of the great Serpent as the party finally cornered its target.
"Well now. Let us see what the target was..."
Her ancient gaze swept the trapped golden island, and it snagged, immediately, on the crowned figure at its heart! She read him the way she read all creatures, peeling the layers with eyes older than the frameworks beneath them, and for the first time in an age...the layers pushed back!
"Hm. Now that is unusual. A young thing. A very young thing, barely into its Trueness, and yet it smells of my own kind. There is Primeval weaving threaded through it, which should not be entirely possible..." She sipped, and her wrinkled eyes narrowed with genuine delight.
Her gaze drifted to the flame-wrapped titan beside him, and paused again!
"And this one. Oh my. This one is not a creature at all, is it. It is a place wearing a shape. The weavings do not stop at its skin, they continue outward into everything nearby, quietly claiming, and behind it..." Her cup stopped halfway to her lips, for her old eyes had found the faint outline folded at the titan’s back, the seated colossus of worn gray stone resting just beneath the surface of the visible.
"...well, I shouldn’t pry too much on that."
And then the scholar!
She looked at the man in white robes floating placidly amid apex predators, and her reading found...nothing! Simply nothing, an absence shaped like a man, as if existence had agreed not to write anything down about him at all!
"...I have no shelf for that one," the old woman admitted to her tea.
"A lifeform that reads as no lifeform..."
But it was when her gaze landed on the fourth figure that the old woman set down her cup entirely.
The woman standing at the crowned cub’s shoulder. She was the biggest oddity on the entire battlefield!
"Oh. Oh my. Now what do we have here." The Recorder leaned forward fully, ancient eyes wide with the purest fascination they had held in eras!
"Is that a Steed? But it can’t be a Steed...what...? Is she the target of the Jarl all along?" Her voice dropped to a marveling hush.
Below her, the confrontation unfolded!
"Ah, and here we observe a cornered animal. Twenty-one hunters, a sealed range, no exit. Every creature in nature has a response to this moment. Some bolt. Some freeze. Some bare the throat and hope."
A slow smile folded through her wrinkles as the crowned figure drifted forward, alone, ahead of his own protectors, radiating borrowed enormity!
"Look at him go. He has unbanked every drop of that Primeval scent and is parading it before the colony like a bird spreading feathers it barely owns..."
Then the blade in red cut him, and the old woman clicked her tongue softly.
"The predator does not argue with the puffing bird. She simply cuts it, to remind the flock what is real. Beautiful, in its way."
Then her ancient brows rose, for the cut thing did not diminish! The cub’s blood rose off him in swirling ribbons of stellar light as his aura climbed, wounds feeding something in his marrow, and the old woman laughed softly into her sleeve.
The second cut came. The story about the king and the dam rolled out over the killing field, and the Recorder listened to the whole story with her chin in her wrinkled palm, thoroughly entertained!
And then...the storm parted.
HUUM!
The old woman felt it before she saw it, an ambient sovereignty descending through the sky that did not belong to the gray colossus below, and when the white shape came down through the parted currents, THE Recorder of Wilds, Primeval One, watcher of eras, unsensable and unsurprisable...
Was shocked!
Her cup rattled against its tray!
"Oh, you patient, magnificent creature..." The old woman was on her feet upon the cloud now, tea forgotten, ancient eyes drinking in the white dragon’s descent with open shining eyes!
She had only began looking when the crowned Emperor below began erupting as he screamed out...I AM!
She watched the burst of living Causes bloom across the graveyard-dark. She watched the gray colossus lift its head for the first time. She watched the white Steed’s cold eyes pass straight through the cub’s magnificent puffery and land on the woman beside him!
And then the white light erupted, and the entire party, cub and woman and titan and absence and golden island all together, vanished from the sealed space, carried countless distances in a single sovereign fold!
The killing field rang with sudden emptiness! The blade in red stared at vacancy. The Serpent howled about blame! The gray colossus bellowed its first words in ages at the point where the light had gone, and upon her golden cloud above all of it, the old woman stood in the ruins of the afternoon’s expectations with her eyes gleaming and her mind turning, deliciously, toward a decision!
Which way now? The fled party, carried off by a powerful Steed? Or the abandoned hunters? She reached down for her tea, weighing wilderness against wilderness, and was just about to choose when a nanosecond later...
BOOM!
The sky above the killing field filled with Steeds.
Eight of them!
Eight dying colossi burst through the storm in harness formation, terminal weavings guttering, ancient eyes burning with impossible rejuvenated hope, and behind them, dragged through the parting dark on chains of cursed lightning, came a throne!
And upon the throne sat a titan of rot and lucidity.
Jarl Skallagrim!
The old woman’s brows climbed as she took him in! The Cursed Descendant rode through the sky above Lissana’s frozen party with his fissures glowing dull red, his titanic frame draped in the casual grandeur of a being who had stopped performing madness and no longer cared who noticed, and in his open palm, brilliant waves of possibilities churned and folded like a sea of unwritten pages!
He did not slow for the party below. He barely glanced at them! His cold, terribly sane eyes swept across twenty-one shocked and fearful True Lifeforms!
And then Jarl Skallagrim turned his head.
Before his throne passed through the far edge of the killing field, the dying titan turned, unhurried, and stared straight at her.
At HER!
At THE Recorder of Wilds! At a Primeval One whom the Steed of Oblivion could not sense...and this rotting, dying, cursed thing looked directly into her ancient eyes across the open sky...
And nodded coldly!
Then he tugged on the chains of lightning, and the eight rejuvenated Steeds roared, and the throne surged forward through the dark, following exactly where Hvitrmarr had disappeared towards!
...!
The old woman stood very still upon her golden cloud for a long moment.
Then she shook her head slowly as a smile spread across her wrinkled face that was pure, undiluted interest.
Her golden cloud turned, and followed the eight Steeds pulling a throne!