Chapter 5527: Death! II
Chapter 5527: Death! II
Noah looked around the vaulted dark, at the nine ancient suns and the gnawing gray threaded through every one, and the decision assembled itself with the cold clarity of a craftsman surveying a ruin.
He would simply have to replace the Organs themselves, no big innovations needed.
Break down cursed anatomy seated by the makers of a Dimension. Grow new Organs from his own existence in the wounds left behind. Seat his Prime Causes into the growing flesh and hope that the grafts would take!
So much work. So much impossible work!
He proceeded ahead, and started.
"The Lungs first, and I will need as much help as you can give, Hvitrmarr!" Noah declared, and moved!
He descended through her inner vaults to the twin oceans of white flame, THE First Cause of Valor laboring beneath its gray threading, every breath of the great Steed dragging through cursed channels! And Noah set his fused existence against it as his Intent erupted.
THE Ananke Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian poured out of him in prismatic seas as his Osmontian Source Infinity followed in continental tides, and he began to BREAK the Organ down with the help of Hvitrmarr herself!
He did not do it crudely, not destructively, but the way a master smith unmakes a flawed blade, edge by edge, fold by fold, his Intent declaring each cursed weaving unwoven as his Infinity dissolved the freed matter into raw potential.
The cost was staggering! A tremendous portion of his Intent’s output and whole oceans of his Source Infinity vanished into the unmaking of a single Organ, his reserves screaming, his gashes tearing wider with the strain.
But he had boundless reserves.
And then came the replacing.
Noah raised his carved arms, and began to guide the blood raging around his body!
The Berserker blood! The swirling stellar regalia of crimson-blue-gold that had wreathed him since Lissana’s cuts, saturated with Primeval Osmontian Cells, and he sent it flowing in glorious rivers down into the hollow where Valor’s lungs had been! And into that flowing blood, he infused a portion of THE Primeval Osmontian Marrow itself, a seam of his own stellar blue-gold bone-architecture, seeded into the wound as the base of an Organ of a grand Steed!
The blood pooled. The marrow-seed took root. And flesh began to bud.
New lungs grew in the hollow, woven from his Cells and his blood and his seated Prime Cause of Adversity, courage-through-challenge pouring into the growing chambers, and then Noah’s eyes widened, for the budding Organ was doing something he had not designed!
It held a mixture.
His Prime Cause of Adversity burned through the new flesh, and threaded through it, refusing to leave, rising out of the dissolved ruin of the old Organ like a stubborn ghost, came THE First Cause of Valor! The two Causes were MIXING!
Adversity and Valor winding around each other in the budding lungs, his weavings and the First weavings of Those Who Remain fusing into something that was neither and both, and the new Organ drew its first breath with a sound like a war-horn learning tenderness.
...!
One. One Organ, budding and mixed and alive, and the cost of it had hollowed him his existence even with his boundlessness!
Noah steadied his carved body, turned toward the Heart of Fealty, and that....was when the Curse stopped defending.
And attacked.
THE Gnawing Remembrance of Nhaglfarr-Ythok had watched something dare to begin replacing it. Watched something dare to CURE! And the ancient sentence, offended beyond all measure, made a decision that proved beyond any doubt that it was cognizant.
It sacrificed itself.
Across Hvitrmarr’s vaulted existence, four of the nine Organs suddenly blazed gray-black as the Curse burned its own holdings! Its potent grip on the Eyes of Vigilance, the Ears of Obedience, the Claws of Mercy, and the Wings of Devotion, four First Causes’ worth of seated, ancient, concentrated Curse, torn out of those Organs entirely and converted, all at once, into fuel.
Into one attack!
ROAR!
The insidious eruption came from every direction at once, a tidal wave of weaponized sentence, four organs’ worth of three-thousand-year agony condensed into a single gnawing tsunami, and it fell upon the fused figure of Noah with the full offense of a maker’s malice!
It was not something he could possibly withstand.
His blue sea shattered! His Prime Cause lights bent! The wave crashed through his Intent and his Infinity and his budding triumph, and Noah felt it instantly, coldly, completely.
His collapse was coming.
Not a wound and most definitely not a setback.
His existence, fused and elevated and Berserker-burning, was going to break under this, and nothing he could run in any stretched instant said otherwise!
Death was coming.
And THE True Human Emperor...moved grandly.
There was no panic in him! There was no scrambling! Even as the Curse invaded his existence, gray-black threads chewing into his weavings, he kept his Prime Causes burning gloriously, nine colors blazing through the collapse like banners refusing to lower, and he looked, in the closing moments, not at the wave.
He looked at the four sacrificed Organs.
Eyes. Ears. Claws. Wings! Four Organs the Curse had abandoned to fuel its killing stroke, four First Causes sitting undefended for the first time in three thousand years, and Noah, dying, saw the trade laid bare upon the table and paid it with both hands.
He sent his blood.
Seas of gushing stellar blood erupted from his splitting frame, four glorious rivers of crimson-blue-gold roaring outward through the collapsing vaults, and even as he died, he began infusing his Causes into them.
Marrow-seed and Cell and Prime weaving poured into the Eyes as Quintessence met Vigilance! Into the Ears as Mana met Obedience! Into the Claws as Tyranny met Mercy, strength and gentleness winding together!
Into the Wings as Harvest met Devotion, and in the growing lungs behind him Adversity and Valor still burned, five Organs, five mixtures, five buddings seeded in the space of his own ending!
The wave closed over him.
His body split! His infinite seas of power were torn open down their length, and in the final fraction of the final instant, Noah made his last choice, and chose true.
He folded the collapse INWARD, taking the entire attack fully into himself, wrapping his split halves around the presences fused within him so that THE Infiniverse and Ruination, sheltered inside the breaking, would gain no damage at all! His ending would be his alone. Not his home’s. Not his crown’s.
And as everything came apart, THE True Human Emperor roared his last word into the dark!
"I AM QUINTESSENTIAL!"
BOOM!
The roar detonated through Hvitrmarr’s vaulted existence as the five seeded Organs answered it, budding flesh blazing with mixed Cause-light, his Cells igniting through Eyes and Ears and Claws and Wings and Lungs, five ancient suns rekindling in new colors even as their gardener was unmade.
His body split apart in halves of guttering light.
And within the splitting, untouched by the wave, buried deeper than any attack naturally reached, one small organ shone!
A liver!
THE Hepatarch of the Undying Root gleamed resplendantly even in death, a quiet steady star inside the ruin of an Emperor, holding, holding, holding!
But it would not act in this moment. It could not! And so, for the first time in his entire grand existence, across every era and apocalypse...
Noah died.
Immense darkness folded around him, soft and total, and the last thing that moved through him was not fear, and was not doubt.
He was Quintessential. He was also Human.
And to be human...was to die.
Somewhere beyond the darkness, snow was still falling across an ancient white stretch of ice, and inside a white Steed, upon the white of his own guttering light, a death was being written.
Three deaths must the deathless die before the door swings wide.
What was written in the white...was written from today.
---
<THE Infiniverse>
The Emperor was dead.
His split halves drifted apart through the vaulted dark of the White Steed, two ruins of guttering light trailing stellar blood into the black, and the Curse’s spent wave rolled onward past them, and for one single nanosecond, the inside of Hvitrmarr held nothing but silence.
Then, from each of his split halves...figures rose.
From one half, woven strings of crimson-gold gathered themselves upward into the illusory body of a woman crowned in her own circlet, Ruination, untouched, unharmed, exactly as her Master’s final fold had ensured. And from the other half, cerulean threads spiraled up into the illusory manifestation of THE Infiniverse, whole and undamaged, standing upon the broken light of the being who had wrapped his own ending around her like armor!
Two figures. Two halves. One dead Emperor between them.
And the rage that rose off of both of them was unfathomable.
Ruination’s illusory face was perfectly composed as her strings spread out from her in their thousands, and every single string was pulled tighter than a blade’s edge, her fury expressed in pure, cold, absolute function! And THE Infiniverse, the efficient one, the serious one, the one who rarely smiled and never wasted a motion, stood over her Master’s ruin with her hands slowly closing into fists as her cerulean eyes burned, and the realms within her, thousands of them, countless lives, all of it, tilted toward wrath like an entire existence leaning into a storm!
He had taken it alone. He had SPLIT rather than let one thread of it touch them!
"We continue!" Ruination said, and her voice had never been colder.
They moved!
The two of them poured their wills down into the dead Emperor’s cells, and the cells answered! For THE Primeval Osmontian Cells did not know their maker had died, they knew only their work, and Ruination’s strings threaded through the four blood-rivers still flowing toward Eyes and Ears and Claws and Wings, guiding, weaving, holding every budding graft in its proper form! THE Infiniverse’s authority flooded the growing Lungs where Adversity and Valor still wound together, feeding the mixture, steadying its first breaths!
And when the Curse came creeping back...they were waiting.
Gray-black filaments slunk toward the five budding Organs, the gnawing sentence reaching to reclaim what it had sacrificed, and it found the way barred! Ruination’s strings cut the filaments apart with surgical, vicious precision, no wasted force, no mercy, each thread of Curse unwoven the instant it extended! THE Infiniverse’s dimensional weavings sealed around each budding Organ like the walls of her own realms, and the Curse pressed, and probed, and found five fortresses where five wounds had been!
New Causes had already bloomed!
The five Organs budded on, safe, mixing, growing, tended by the two loyal existences of a dead man.
And then THE Infiniverse went a step further.
Her burning eyes rose from the defended five, and fixed across the vaulted dark upon the vast drumming Organ at the Steed’s center, still wrapped in its full portion of ancient Curse.
THE First Cause of Fealty. The Heart!
The Cause that beat for another. The sworn bond given muscle! And what was SHE, if not exactly that?! A living Observable Existence whose every realm turned around her Master, whose every Cause had bent toward him since her birth, whose loyalty was not a feeling but her fundamental architecture.
If any Organ in this cursed being answered to her nature, it was that one, and her Master had died five Organs into a nine-Organ war, and she would not stand guard over his work.
She would ADVANCE it!
And so, THE Infiniverse roared out.
The sound tore through the vaulted existence of the White Steed as, deep within Noah’s broken body, the hidden Infiniverse herself, the true her, the living Observable Existence seated through his weavings with her thousands of realms and her nested skies and her billions of burning lives, shone brilliantly and erupted!
Hvitrmarr felt it all as it felt like her body was warring with itself, but she felt the hope ever so close as she lent all the help she could against the Curse.
BOOM!
Cerulean light detonated out of the dead Emperor’s halves in a pillar that split the inner dark from vault to vault.
The full unfurled presense of an Observable Existence poured across the distance toward the cursed Heart of Fealty, realms condensing into radiance, Causes massing into tides, a loyal existence hurling her entire self at the center of an ancient sentence in her dead Master’s name.
The Curse rose snarling around the Heart to meet her.
And beneath all of it, in the quiet ruin of the split halves, drifting in the dark where no light reached and no war touched...
The glimmering liver began to pulse.
Once.
...!