Chapter 5617: THE ETERNAL PAX! I
Chapter 5617: THE ETERNAL PAX! I
Purple gold strings surrounded everything.
Noah stood leashed and chained in an area walled by them on every side, countless strings pulsing and thrumming as they moved at tremendous speeds through the dark, each one racing along its own path as though it had a set destination it had crossed a billion times before, and his senses read them quietly from behind an expression of nothing at all!
The Argent Loom. Expressed differently here, dyed purple gold and woven into roads!
Around him, the incursion force stood in loose formation as Warden Yrsa gave her orders, clipped and efficient, and group after group of shrouded ones bowed and stepped onto the racing strings and vanished along them, dozens of departures in moments, until the transit dark held only four figures: Noah, Yrsa, the vast clay-skinned Primeval with a pale band at its own throat... and the being wrapped in turning halos.
And at this time, prompts rose before Noah’s eyes alone!
|You have remained quintessentially true to your Provenance.|
|You were threatened, and you did not bend. You were collared, and you were not contained. You walked into the hands of your enemies as an act of your own design, wearing their chains as instruments of your own aim, and at no point did your existence argue with itself. To be true under freedom is common. To be true under a leash is generation.|
|Your attributes have increased.|
|VERITAS: 15. PROVENANCE: 11. POTENTIA: INFINITE. PONDUS: 17.|
...!
Growth! Here, of all places! Chained at the wrists and collared in gold at the center of an enemy formation, and his existence had weighed all of it and called it truth, and grown!
As he read the panel, Yrsa moved!
Her leg swiped at his feet without warning, and Noah played along perfectly, his stance breaking as he fell back and sat down hard against the dark, chains rattling, and Yrsa lowered herself to sit beside him, entirely at ease, and when he looked at her, her pale eyes were shining with open interest and wonder!
"What an interesting thing you are." She studied his face. "Capable of curing the Cursed Steeds and the Cursed Descendants made so by THE Sleepless Fiend himself. And you ran circles around THE Sealed One to obtain the Remnant Existential Treasure he wanted so badly." Her gaze dropped to his chest. "Is that it, by the way?"
She reached out to the Aurate Collar!
And the moment her finger touched the ancient bone...
SSSS!
Her finger singed!
It was a reaction of touching the sun itself! Pale skin scorched black at the tip in an instant as a thread of smoke curled up between them, and Yrsa pulled her hand back with genuine surprise crossing her face for the first time since the crossing-dark, shaking her finger once as the burn slowly closed!
Noah looked at her coldly.
"A treasure such as this is bound to me by my blood." His voice stayed level. "As long as I live, even grasping it will be an issue for you."
...!
Yrsa smiled at that.
"Is that right?" She flexed her singed finger, unbothered, almost pleased. "You are definitely interesting. Your power may even be close to Axon, or even me, if that Descendant was made what he is under you."
Her smile cooled a fraction. "But all that power means nothing if it is inhibited now, hm?"
Noah felt the golden leash sit against his neck, and he kept his voice calm.
"I saw the prisons and the leashes you almost brought out for THE Ymnaros Dimension." His cold eyes held hers. "Are you doing this to others too? What exactly do you want?"
...!
Yrsa smiled coldly, and then she sighed, and for the first time, she truly began to talk.
"Authority." She said the word with an old, cold weight. "In the hands of the unworthy, existence suffers. It has always suffered. It suffers right now, in a hundred thousand places at once, because some random thing climbed a random ladder and was handed a hammer at the top of it, and existence never once checked what would be built."
Her pale eyes did not blink. "I am an Enforcer. One among many. Our task is stability, and our method is subtraction: we take away the capability to utilize authority, from the many who should never have held it. Existence’s randomness hands authority to too many, too easily, with no test and no ledger." She turned her head to him.
"We are the answer to that randomness."
Noah listened to all of it, and then he spoke, grand and quiet.
"And who are you to pick and choose who is unworthy of authority?" His chained hands rested still in his lap. "Line up every being you have ever collared, and every judgment you made over them. Who weighed YOU? What gives you the right?"
"Why..." Yrsa’s answer came without a heartbeat of delay, serene and total. "Existence gave us the right, of course. We would not have the right otherwise."
Noah gazed coldly at her.
"Then I can assume one of Those Who Remain paved the way for all this. Or several of them." He let it land. "You should be just the hounds of someone with a true vision."
Yrsa laughed at that, one short breath of it, and she waved her hand as she pointed lazily across the transit dark, at the haloed being, at the collared Primeval!
"Others may be hounds." Her smile spread. "But some of us have that glorious vision ourselves. Haha! And you will see a glimpse of it, as we... are here."
HUUM!
The purple gold strings around them pulsed once, brilliantly, and faded!
|You have crossed an unfathomable distance. You have arrived in an unknown Dimension.|
And existence opened up around Noah.
He stood upon a purple gold floating mountain! Its slopes fell away beneath him in terraces of radiant stone, and it was one among MANY, dozens of serene floating mountains drifting upon endless seas of white clouds, each one glowing softly in gold and violet, arranged in a vast outer ring around deeper reaches where more mountains rose, grander and brighter, ascending toward some far center that burned too radiant to look at directly!
It was beautiful. It was serene past anything an incursion force had any right to come home to!
And then Noah looked outward, past the ring, at what surrounded the mountains.
Cages.
Countless stacked cages extending for light years!
They filled the skies beyond the outer ring in every direction, gray cubical prisons of that same seamless metal stacked upon each other in columns and walls and gigaparsec reaches, tier upon tier upon tier, an architecture of captivity vast enough that his eyes could follow a single column of cages upward until it thinned into the distance and never find its end!
And they were full!
Some cages held clusters, dozens of Source Lifeforms crowded together in one box, their dense patient light guttered to almost nothing, or huddles of Infinite Lifeforms whose silver seas lay still, or crowds of Gilded Ones whose brilliance had gone out entirely, dim golden figures sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark of their boxes!
Other cages held lone figures, single True Lifeforms in single boxes, beings who had crossed the threshold of Trueness itself sitting alone with their heads down! And other cages, set apart and wound with extra bands of loomlight, held lone PRIMEVAL Lifeforms, ancient things older than frameworks, lying motionless along the floors of metal boxes!
And as Noah gazed across them, what struck him hardest was not the count.
It was the stillness!
So many of the jailed looked despondent past all reaching, without any will left to live at all! Beings sat unmoving with their eyes open and empty. A Source Lifeform leaned against its bars with one hand stretched out through them, reaching toward a cage across the golden road where smaller lights huddled, and the hand simply hung there, unmoving. It had been reaching for a long, long time!
His eyes flashed, and panels unfolded across the nearest of them!
|A True Gilded Lifeform|:: VERITAS: 0.8 (0, Inhibited). PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 0.6 (0, Inhibited). PONDUS: 0.7 (0, Inhibited). She has stopped counting the days.
|A True Infinite Lifeform|:: VERITAS: .4 (0, Inhibited). PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 1.9 (0, Inhibited). PONDUS: 1.1 (0, Inhibited). He no longer remembers the sound of his own Pantheon.
|A Primeval Lifeform|:: VERITAS: 11.6 (0, Inhibited). PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 5.8 (0, Inhibited). PONDUS: 8.2 (0, Inhibited). It has been lying in the same position for ?????.
...!
Decimals! His sight resolved them now, fine measures it had never needed before, and the numbers rearranged many things about the mighty of existence!
Beside every true value, in the parenthesis, flat and total: (0, Inhibited). What they were, and what they were now permitted to express!
And then he saw the roads.
Down the wide golden roads that ran between the cage-walls, shrouded beings were leading rows of inhibited lifeforms!
Lines of them, hundreds long, collared and chained wrist to wrist, shuffling between the stacked prisons toward open cages waiting with their doors ground wide, and the lines moved in silence, and the silence was the silence of beings who had already learned!
Because as Noah watched, one did not move in silence!
A Gilded Lifeform midway down a row stopped walking! It turned at an open cage door and refused, planting itself, shaking its dimmed head, and its mouth opened.
"I am SUPERBIUS! Do you understand this? My pride burns even now-...!"
Two shrouded ones descended on it instsntly, and they beat it! They beat it down onto the golden road with blows that cracked across the distance, methodical and unhurried, and the row around it stood still and stared at their own feet, and when the Gilded Lifeform still dragged itself up one more time and reached for the shroud of the nearest one...
It was killed.
One blow, dispensed with the same clerical efficiency as all the rest, and a being that had once been brilliance itself splattered across the golden road, its dimmed light bursting apart and raining down over the stone and over the feet of its own row, and the shrouded ones stepped over what remained and gestured the line forward, and the line moved!
The golden road drank the light, and did not change color!
Noah looked at all of it. The mountains. The cages. The reaching hand. The road.
And he turned to Yrsa, and his voice came out heavy.
"Is this... your vision?" His chained hands did not move. "Lifeforms in cages? This brutality, occurring all around?"
...!
Yrsa harrumphed!
She looked around at the whole of it, the columns and the roads and the stillness.
"I do not like this any more than you." She said it plainly. "But things must be done for prosperity. All are chained for NOW, because we are in the process of collecting. Do you understand? This is the middle of the work, not the end of it. Domains and Observable Existences are being prepared and cleared out at this very moment, and we have already begun transporting the collected to them, where, with no authority at all, they will learn to build their own Civilizations again. As normal lifeforms."
Her voice steadied into the cadence of a thing recited and believed. "Farmers. Workers. Soldiers. Protectors. All of it without a shred of authority anywhere among them, and no hammer for existence to hand to anyone ever again. We usher in an era of peace."
Her pale eyes moved to the stain on the golden road below. "Those who rebel against this vision, even after they are told not to be unruly... those are the only ones that can make things here seem brutal. But we..."
She looked back at him.
"We are good. We are good."
HUUM!
She rose, and moved behind Noah, and kicked him forward!
He stumbled ahead as a white cloud of Argent Loom formed beneath their feet, catching them both, and it began to float across the mountain’s radiant terraces as the wind of the heights moved over them, and Noah focused his senses outward as they flew!
And he felt them!
Terrifying auras, many of them, seated across the deeper mountains! A presense of weight after weight that he had rarely felt anywhere in existence, each one settled on its own peak within the inner rings, patient and immense!
"Now that you are chained," Yrsa said behind him, conversational, "you will be brought before an Enforcer a level above me. It is for one of them to decide what is to be done with someone who can go against the words of one of Those Who Remain. Enforcer Mahishasura. Or really... Descendant Mahishasura. He would love to understand someone like you."
...!
A Descendant! An Enforcer above her, and it was a Descendant, inside the same order that collared Primevals and preached against every hammer existence had ever handed out! Noah set the contradiction atop the growing pile of them, and gazed around at the mountains as the cloud carried them higher.
"You could at least tell me where we are," he said, "and what you belong to."
Yrsa smiled.
And she rose to her full height upon the flying cloud as she raised her hands wide to the mountains and the clouds and the countless cages stacked against the sky, and her plain voice rang out across the radiant heights with the pride of a believer come home!
"Welcome... to THE Serenaros!" Her arms spread wider. "One of the seats of stability across existence! The answer to every unworthy hand! Welcome, O Blood-Crowned One..."
Her pale eyes shone down at him.
"...to THE ETERNAL PAX!"
...!
"The Pax provides, The Pax protects, The Pax subtracts! The Pax is here for the glory and stability of Existence!"