Chapter 5568: Four Numbers! I
Chapter 5568: Four Numbers! I
The hand trembled.
It stopped, fingers spread, a breath from the collar, and it shook there in the air as though caught between two winds, and the face of Anaximander contorted through astonishment into shock and then into rage as the thing inside him hauled at the arm with everything it had absorbed across every age, and the arm did not move!
HUUM!
|Impossible.|
The Voice tore out of the borrowed mouth.
|I accounted for everything. EVERYTHING. The wills of multiple Primevals lie atop his consciousness. Mine, and my friend’s, and every candidate of every age, all of it pressing down on whatever remains of him, he cannot simply...! I....!|
But he could!
Oh, Anaximander could!
Because not too long ago ago, a scholar had said the same thing to the only two friends he had ever made in different times.
Whenever you need me, call. Say, Anaximander, Come!
He had said it as law, a condition and regulation imposed upon his own existence, written into the same nature that let him go where he pleased and made existence conform around him, and no will in existence had standing to countermand a rule that Anaximander had set for Anaximander!
The body at the obelisk buckled.
It went down to its knees in the black sand with both hands grasping its head, and the cold ancient light in the eyes guttered and flared and guttered, and a sound came out of it that was two voices at once and then, by degrees, only one, a raw human cry of pain as the real Anaximander surfaced through everything lying on top of him and came, because he had been called, and coming when called was what he was!
The ancientness drained out of the figure.
The pressure of ages went out of the air around it. What knelt in the sand released no aura at all, carried no weight of epochs, read to every sense as a tousled man in white robes breathing hard with his hands in his hair, and when he finally raised his head, his face was his own!
And it was... profoundly sad as be breathed out. He was...disappointed, in the deep quiet way of a man who had extended trust as a matter of principle to something ancient and beloved by an entire people, something that had watched over every Superpowered Lifeform across every age, and had found, underneath all that long guardianship, this.
He looked at Noah with that sad face, and rose slowly to his feet.
"Thank you," he said. "And sorry about that."
He glanced back once at the collar, and then away.
"I thought things would be different. I knew the burdens would be heavy. I weighed that before I said yes, and I was prepared for the weight." His voice caught slightly.
"I did not anticipate greed to be such a profound condition. That it could encompass even something like him. A guardian. A being that spent its dying light saving its own people while it did this..."
Anaximander seemed lost.
Noah remained where he was, and his expression softened.
"Greed spares no one..." His voice came quiet and certain across the sands.
"Not the small, not the ancient, not the dying, not the good. It is the one appetite that grows best in the largest existences, because they have lived long enough to want one thing across ages. Greed...is a critical factor of existence..."
WAA!
"...!"
And then Noah’s body released a deep, resonant pulse.
The last of the gray filth stopped at his pores and did not come again. The transformation completed itself in a single settling wave, and what stood in the black sands afterward was a man whose fair skin was clear and unblemished from crown to heel, whose hair had gone pure dark, deeper than it had ever been, and whose stillness was the stillness of a thing with nothing left in it that did not belong.
His eyes opened fully.
The pupils in them were obsidian singularities, small and absolute, and they looked unfathomably old, the way the first idea anything ever had is old!
And they looked new!
Oh, so new!
Noah breathed in.
The air of the final domain came into lungs that had been remade at the level of cells, and it carried nothing to him. No ambient essence. No drifting weavings. Nothing his body reached for, because his body no longer reached outward for anything at all!
He did not absorb!
The hollow where an ocean of power once sat now held a single blue singularity, blinding within and silent without, humming its ancient hum through the whole of him.
He was himself! He had cast out the Primordial Source and Infinity and eighteen Causes and the Intent and a Scale of his own design, and after all of that, he still felt like Noah Osmont. More like Noah Osmont than he had ever felt in his life!
He opened his eyes, looked toward the distant obelisk where Anaximander knelt beneath the hanging gold of THE Aurate Collar, and took a step.
And...
BOOM!
The domain shook!
The obsidian sand beneath his foot did not scatter. It curved. It bent downward in a wide, smooth bowl for miles in every direction, sinking the way ground sinks when it is asked to hold something unfathomably dense, and the dark grains ground against each other with a sound like a mountain settling!
Heavy winds erupted from that single point of contact!
They tore outward across the flats in expanding rings, ripping the stillness of ages off the face of the domain, and far ahead even Anaximander had to raise one hand against the gale to remain steady, his white robes cracking around him like banners!
The golden obelisk light flickered. The distant landmass hanging in the sky groaned. All of it, from one step.
"..."
Noah stood in the center of the bowl his own weight had pressed into existence, and he frowned.
It was very hard to describe how he felt right now.
He felt normal. His arm rose when he asked it to rise. His breath came when he called it. There was no surging tide inside him, no roaring reserves, no pressure begging for release. By every internal measure he was a man standing on sand.
And yet every move he made exerted terrifying pressure on everything around him, the way a thing exerts pressure when it is far too dense for the space holding it, and existence itself in these surroundings was straining and creaking simply to contain him.
The cause of all of it was himself.
His Provenance was newly budding. It generated from him constantly, his own essence, his own authority, unique to him alone, and he did not yet know how to properly hold it in. It was new. He was new!