Chapter 5525: Fear and Doubt! V
Chapter 5525: Fear and Doubt! V
Because through the contact, through his hands upon her warm ancient scales, he had become capable of fully sensing just what was inside a Cursed Steed.
It was horrendous.
|I have identified the curse. Designation: THE Gnawing Remembrance of Nhaglfarr-Ythok, of Those Who Remain. It manufactures pain from the victim’s own capacity to feel.|
|Its function, as I read it: the Curse converts feeling itself into agony. Every emotion the victim experiences is seized and reforged into pain before it finishes being felt. Contentment burns. Memory of joy burns worse, the Curse replays the victim’s finest moments through their weavings and chews each one, so that everything they ever loved becomes a returning blade. And hope... Hope burns worst of all. The Curse prices hope above every other feeling, and the moment a victim dares to hope, the gnawing sharpens tenfold. This is why the Steeds of this Dimension stopped hoping ages ago.|
|It never permits adaptation. Every nanosecond, the Curse refreshes the victim’s sensitivity, resetting their weavings to feel the pain as if for the first time. There is no dulling. There is no growing numb. Even a thousand years in, the pain is as first-day fresh as it was at the seating. And it forbids escape through death: it sustains the victim at the edge of their existence, feeding on their feeling, and permits their ending only when the Cause is fully consumed.|
|And for the Steeds, it is worst of all. Their Causes are organs of feeling, many living channels through a single existence, and the Curse is threaded through EVERY one. They do not feel the gnawing once. They feel it through every Cause they carry, simultaneously, every nanosecond, from seating until death. The one before you has endured this for three thousand years while choosing, every single day, to keep the capacity to hope, which the Curse punishes above all things...|
...!
Noah’s existence winced in pain as merely identifying it made the edges of the Curse taste him back.
And at this time, from beneath his palms, murky dark tendrils began leaking out of Hvitrmarr’s scales! Thin filaments of obsidian gray seeped up through the ancient ivory and began stretching onto Noah’s hands, and onto the hands of THE Infiniverse, curling, probing, patient, reaching for their weavings as if to infect them.
"..."
He had to make a choice here. A gamble!
If he continued, there was a high chance of being branded with a Curse he could not do anything about, a sentence from Those Who Remain hooked into his Causes, into THE Infiniverse’s Causes, forever! But if he succeeded...he would reverse the Curse of an utterly unfathomable being while seating his Prime Causes inside a Cursed Steed whose origins were so grand that success would catapult him tremendously.
Noah breathed slowly.
And for the first time in a very long time...he felt Doubt.
Doubt! He had given away his Everything of Doubt a while ago, traded it out of his existence entirely, and yet here it was, regenerated quietly among his many Human emotions, standing in his chest like an old tenant returned to a rebuilt house.
Because should he fail here, it would not only be him. THE Infiniverse would be Cursed alongside him, alongside all their Causes, alongside every realm and every life she carried. His entire path...his whole journey...everything could end against these warm ancient scales.
As he thought of this...
"Ah..."
He blinked, in an epiphany.
He was also... feeling fear.
Him? THE True Human Emperor? Noah Osmont, who had walked into apocalypses on purpose and priced adversity like a delicacy? He was feeling...a trace of genuine fear?
Was doubt and fear such a potent human condition? Was it so potent that he regenerated their Everythings to now feel even them? Was this...true of who he was?!
DUM!
He felt the heavy beat of his heart!
And at this moment, from beyond himself, he felt a wave of resonance answer it. Faint flickering flames of the very same feeling, mirrored back at him from the colossal existence beneath his hands.
Hvitrmarr.
Through the contact, through the resonance of fear meeting fear, Noah saw. Deep inside this Cursed Steed, far beneath the scales and the sovereignty and the three thousand years of patience, there was a figure.
A white-robed woman, coiled small in the dark of her own vast existence, arms wrapped around herself, pained! Frightened! This grand Steed, this lifeform who had shattered chains and overruled the Steed of Oblivion and spoken of death with a level voice...also felt fear.
Fear of the oblivion that was coming for her. Fear of feeling nothing and seeing nothing...when she had spent her whole cursed existence feeling everything.
Noah couldn’t help but shake his head at that.
And at this time, without him even realizing it, his expression changed. It settled into something that only the true kings and emperors of ancient eras ever obtained, the ones who had learned that leading was never about standing above fear, the quiet certain warmth of a ruler who goes first into the dark so that others may follow, and he spoke softly, to the trembling woman coiled inside the mountain of scales.
"Let me in. I will help you, and you will help me." His hand pressed gently against the warm ancient ivory as the dark tendrils curled around his fingers. "We are both fearful. But it is much easier to overcome this fear together."
...!
He said such words, and Hvitrmarr trembled.
Her colossal frame shuddered once through its whole length as her golden ring-in-ring eyes gazed down at him, at THE Infiniverse beside him, at the two small existences standing willingly against her Cursed chest with the infection already reaching for their hands, and after a moment, after three thousand years of tomorrows arriving all at once...
Her scales opened.
The great plates of ancient ivory parted along seams that had never once unsealed, folding back petal upon petal, and within...utterly sacred and unfathomable wonders revealed themselves.
Vaults of white flame turning in slow rivers! Horizons folded inside horizons, the interior architecture of something forged by the hands that predated every framework, Causes hanging in the deep like dying suns, and all of it threaded through with the gray gnawing dark of the Curse.
And Noah stepped in, alongside THE Infiniverse as his mind pulsed with an epiphany.
To lead was to walk point on the edge of the unknown. Some say that great leaders are fearless...monoliths of absolute certainty who move through chaos without a tremor. But that is a myth and not the reality of human nature.
A truly great human leader does not fear fear. They welcome it, understand it, and transmute it.
BOOM!
Instantly, light detonated across existence!
Endless blue light gushed out of one half of Hvitrmarr, cerulean brilliance erupting through her parted scales and her weavings and her very frame as Noah’s Intent and Osmontian Source Infinity and his Prime Causes poured into the ancient interior, painting half of her colossal form in radiant, living, boundless blue.
And in the same nanosecond, endless murky obsidian curse-light bloomed over the other half, THE Gnawing Remembrance rising to answer the intrusion, gray-black malice flooding through the opposing hemisphere of her existence.
It looked like existence in this whole area had been split in two!
One half, endlessly blue. Another half, endlessly dark!
—
Outside, Anaximander and THE Creature had heavy expressions as they looked out.
For the domain that had been constantly moving...came to a stop.
The pocket dissolved as Hvitrmarr’s flight ended, and the surroundings cleared to reveal where the long run had carried them, an ancient billowing stretch of ice, glacial plains folding to every horizon beneath a sky of falling snow, white flakes drifting down through the frozen quiet of THE Krazhor-Nul’s far reaches.
And across that white stillness, for light years...one half of existence was painted blue, and another half was painted black.
The colossal form of Hvitrmarr floated at the center of it all, split down her length by two warring lights, blue sovereignty and obsidian sentence grinding against each other through every Cause she carried, and the snow itself fell blue on one side of the sky and gray-black on the other!
And in the next nanosecond...
ROAR!
The cursed black half seemingly roared out with malice!
It surged! Where the two lights had stood at even halves, fifty against fifty, the obsidian cursed brilliance rapidly began to gain ground, swallowing the blue in great gnawing waves, sixty, seventy, covering eighty percent of her colossal frame with horrifying speed, and it only continued to accelerate, an ancient sentence rising to devour the presense that had dared to argue with it!
It was a Curse tracing back to Those Who Remain.
It was undeniable!