Chapter 5625: Cure-Giver!
Chapter 5625: Cure-Giver!
As his existence advanced and began to expand his rulership across Lifeforms...his body in one of the domains in THE ETERNAL PAX continued its role of a Prisoner.
There was a door in the back of Mahishasura’s workshop that did not look like it went anywhere important.
Yrsa walked him through it on his golden leash, Mahishasura leading with a host’s unhurried pleasure, and between one step and the next, the workshop was gone.
Sunlight fell from no sun.
White marble colonnades. Terraced gardens. Olive trees older than some frameworks, shallow pools mirroring a ceiling pretending to be sky, couches of carved marble circling long low tables, the smell of crushed herbs and old wine!
Compared to the cage-fields outside, it was a paradise. Compared to anything honest, a display case.
And lounging through the whole of it were Cursed Descendants.
’Seven,’ Noah counted behind his cold expression. ’And not one curse is the same....’
At the longest table, a mountain of a being ate. The table held enough to feed a citadel. He worked through it with both hands, steady, joyless, and the food replenished itself, and so did his emptiness!
By the largest pool, a slender Descendant lay with a wine bowl on her stomach and her eyes shut, two silent Shrouds refilling it, and her stillness had nothing of rest in it.
Near the entrance, a lean flushed figure declaimed poetry to three Shrouds that had not been built to applaud, his voice pitching louder whenever a living gaze drifted off him.
And at the farthest couch, apart from everything, one Descendant sat upright with his hands folded, watching the door they had just come through.
"Brethren." Mahishasura’s soft voice carried without being raised. Every head turned. The eater paused with his hands full.
"You have waited a long time, and you have heard me make a great many promises. Today, I have outdone them all as...The Pax Provides."
HUUM!
He stepped aside. He gestured to the leashed man, and made the gesture a small ceremony.
"I have brought you... your cure."
Silence.
Then the wine bowl slid from the slender one’s stomach and rang against the marble, and she was sitting up, and the hall broke open with voices!
The mountain at the long table looked the leashed man up and down slowly, and did not stop chewing.
"...Are we supposed to eat him?"
"Baelgrim."
"It is an honest question. You say cure, and you point at a creature." He swallowed, and his voice came down flat and hard. "That is a man on a leash, Mahishasura. The fuck is this?"
"I have brought you the being who unbound a recent Curse from our distant cousins in THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension."
The dice stopped rattling.
The poet’s mouth hung open mid-verse. The slender one rose from her couch entirely, and when she spoke, her voice had gone quiet and careful!
"We heard only weavings of rumors of that. Nothing more."
"Weavings of rumor are how such truths travel across Existence, across the thoughts of our Fathers."
Mahishasura drifted toward the couches, one hand trailing the marble. "I confirmed it through memories Yrsa here obtained herself. A Cursed Descendant of THE Krazhor-Nul walks free of his sentence, alongside a rather unfortunate dead Steed that died for those memories to be obtained."
...!
Yrsa’s expression did not move.
His eyes quietly flashed, and the room unfolded into panels.
|Descendant Baelgrim|:: VERITAS: 24. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 23. PONDUS: 26. Cursed by the ire of Those Who Remain: THE CURSE OF THE BOTTOMLESS TABLE. He has not felt full in eleven thousand years.
|Descendant Sylvaine|:: VERITAS: 27. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 25. PONDUS: 24. Cursed by the ire of Those Who Remain: THE CURSE OF THE SHARED WOUND. Every harm she authors arrives in her own flesh first.
|Descendant Othrys|:: VERITAS: 21. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 22. PONDUS: 20. Cursed by the ire of Those Who Remain: THE CURSE OF THE UNREMEMBERED NAME. Whoever looks away from him forgets him. His deeds remain; his name does not.
|Descendant Kharvel|:: VERITAS: 29. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 27. PONDUS: 28. Cursed by the ire of Those Who Remain: THE CURSE OF THE UNSLEEPING WATCH. He has been made to require sleep and has not slept since the sentence was spoken. He sees more than he wishes to.
Each one was uniquely cursed as the curses themselves tremendously interested Noah!
"Then why is the supposed thing capable of stripping away curses leashed?" Othrys had crossed half the hall already, hungry-eyed, planting himself where the most gazes would have to pass through him.
"If it can do what you say, it is worth more than...many, many things. Why is a thing like that wearing a collar? Or is thst precisely the reason why?"
"Because before he is the cure, he is the Pax’s prisoner."
Hungry gazes all honed in on Noah from many sides!
And then, from the far couch, without rising, a voice worn smooth by many sleepless nights.
"What does it cost?"
The hall quieted. Sylvaine glanced back at the watcher, then at Noah.
"Everyone who gives something wants something," Kharvel continued, patient, terrible, calm.
"Cure-Giver....What does your cure cost?"
Every gaze in the pocket Dimension settled on the leashed man.
And at both sides of Noah’s head, his own voices echoed out in his mind!
"Look at their power and standing," THE Closed Crown said, low and appreciative. "We can cure their curses while applying our marks on them, being sure to entrench our Provenance Essence so deeply into their existences and code that they don’t even sense it. They will purposefully not get a high tier as at our choosing...we will command them to begin going against this domain and The Pax overall. Descendants...at our beck and call."
HUUM!
"Brother," THE Open Hand said, with something close to warmth, "there are times I like you. This is a sound plan."
HUUM!
Both sides of him agreed!
So he lifted his gaze, chains ringing softly, and answered the only question that had been put to him.
"Healing a Curse of Those Who Remain is unfathomably difficult work. What sits in each of you is not an illness. It is authored weaving of existence, braided through every clause of what you are."
His cold eyes traveled the couches, the pools, the mountain of food, the unsleeping watcher.
"I will need access to the entirety of your existence while I do it. All of it. One of you at a time. And if I face any rejection from you while I am altering the weavings of your existence and releasing the curse... your existence itself could collapse."
He let that settle across the marble.
"And in doing all of this is my freedom. Yes?" His gaze moved, slow and level, to Mahishasura. "Which means I will also need this collar to be removed so I can access my authority."
...!
The pocket Dimension went very quiet, and every Cursed gaze in it swung from the leashed man to their host, and their host’s composed face gave back nothing at all.
Silence held for one heartbeat longer.
Then Baelgrim laughed, huge and hollow, and shoved his endless table back with a scrape that rang down the colonnades.
He rose to his full mountain height. "I will go first, Cure-Giver!"
...!