Chapter 5626: Curing and Shackling!
Chapter 5626: Curing and Shackling!
Of course, the collar came off!
It was never truly a question, however long the silence had stretched after his demand.
Mahishasura had spent his credibility assembling this room, and made promises to every ruined lounger in it. What was a question, and an interesting one, was how frightened they would allow themselves to look while paying it.
"Remove it," Mahishasura said.
"...." Yrsa’s eyes looked at Noah as if in a warning as she did not yet nove.
"On my authority, and on my head, my dear Yrsa." The soft voice did not rise. "Remove it."
She crossed to Noah without another word, and her pale eyes held his for one long moment, and then she reached out.
CRACK!
THE GILDED CLAUSE opened and slid from his neck, and the golden chains uncoiled from his wrists, and every being of power in the pocket Dimension pulsed at once!
Mahishasura’s immensity rose behind his composed face. Yrsa’s twenty-eight PONDUS leaned forward against the air. Along the colonnades, Loomwrought Shrouds turned their wrapped heads in perfect unison, and even the Cursed on their couches gathered themselves, seven ruined powers coiling, a whole hall of drawn bows aimed at one unbound man!
And the unbound man released... a silent pressure.
Nothing so crude as power. He simply stopped pretending to be nothing, and let a measured portion of something settle outward through the marble and the pools and the olive trees, presence without shape, weight without direction, and the drawn bows found there was nothing to loose at.
He watched them all hold their eruption and then he raised one hand and beckoned, calm as a man calling for tea.
"Come."
WAA!
The mountain came.
He crossed the hall slowly, and sat where Noah pointed, and up close his curse was audible, a low ceaseless complaint from within him, eleven thousand years of a body demanding what it would never receive!
Noah’s wordlessly raised his hand as he didn’t care for small talk, he would find out everything he wanted soon enough!
Crimson gold rose from his palms and drew itself into blades, thin and precise and humming, and he set them to the Descendant’s existence and opened it, and the pocket Dimension held its breath.
What lay inside was a sentence.
One unbroken line of unreadable script, running backward through every ancestor to a hand that had spoken it before frameworks had names, and braided through it, black through gold, with a curse.
THE CURSE OF THE BOTTOMLESS TABLE!
Noah read it once, coldly.
Then he began to unwrite.
The blades moved. The curse fought, the manner in which all authored things fight their unwriting, clauses screaming as they came apart, and Baelgrim’s mountain body shook, and his hands crushed the marble bench beneath him to powder!
HUUM!
Noah was not at all gentle as the process took some time, the minutes rolling by a Descendant tried not to curse!
Clause by clause. Thread by thread. And beneath the visible working, in the same breath, in the same motion, invisible to every eye and every instrument in the pocket Dimension, his other work ran!
As each cleaned clause resealed, something else settled into the seal, written in the same unreadable script the lineage itself was made of.
|The counter-writing of THE CURSE OF THE BOTTOMLESS TABLE has been unwritten at the root.|
|The lineage of Descendant Baelgrim has been resealed. Within the seal, THE PROVENANCE BLOOD MARK has been written as grammar of the line itself. Designation: VEILED.|
|Nothing in existence perceives the Veiled Mark. It is not an addition to be found. It is the language the sentence is now written in.|
|Descendant Baelgrim: a VEILED BLOOD MONARCH. All bindings, boons, and options are withheld from expression until you call upon them. Available to you, at your choosing, forever: his senses. His memories. The option of command. The option of an ending.|
The blades withdrew. The opened existence closed!
And Baelgrim sat very still on the powdered remains of the bench, and his face went strange, and stranger, and his hands rose slowly to his own stomach.
"..."
"Baelgrim?" Sylvaine, half-risen across the hall.
"It is... quiet." The mountain’s whisper cracked. "My stomach... it is quiet."
His breath started coming ragged. "All these years, and it is... it is QUIET in here!"
He stood, and swayed, and looked at the endless table still heaped with food, and turned his back on it as he felt nothing!
Then Descendant Baelgrim, the Bottomless, put his face in his hands and laughed.
Mahishasura was already moving.
He circled the cured Descendant slowly, and his amber eyes had gone bright and sharp, and his long fingers traced the air around Baelgrim’s body, reading, testing, hunting.
This fucker was confirming that everything was normal and there was nothing they couldn’t see!
"The Curse unwritten...haha, that is nuts!" the Enforcer murmured.
He looked up at Noah, and smiled, and the smile held delight and something else. "You do clean work, Cure-Giver."
"I said what I take, I take from the curse." Noah’s voice stayed flat. "Who is next?"
...!
The next hours remade the room.
Sylvaine came to him with her eyes set, and left the working an hour later shaking, and stood in the middle of the hall, and drew the blade she had not truly used in an Age, and cut the air, and waited, braced, for the echo of harm that had answered every violence of her long life.
Nothing arrived!
She cut again. Again. Faster, wilder, a storm of edges in the marble hall, and nothing arrived, and she stopped with her chest heaving and tears running silently down her face!
Othrys could not sit still for his. He talked through the opening, talked through the pain, talked until the unwriting reached the clause that had eaten his name, and then he went silent for the first time since Noah had entered this Dimension.
When it was done, he stood, and looked around the hall at his gathered brethren, and asked...
"...Look away from me. All of you. Look away, and then look back."
They did.
"Othrys," Baelgrim said.
"Say it again."
"Othrys," said Sylvaine!
And the Descendant of the Unremembered Name sat down on the marble floor right where he stood and wept into his hands while his own name went on being said around him!
The three loungers from the deep couches came one after another, an hour apiece: a Descendant whose shadow had been cursed to strangle what she loved, a Descendant cursed to age one Age for every lie he spoke, a Descendant whose curse Noah did not name aloud, and unwrote just the same.
Each opened. Each unwritten. Each resealed, cured, and Veiled to the root of what they were, rising incredulous and radiant into a hall that grew louder and warmer with every rising.
|Descendant Sylvaine: a VEILED BLOOD MONARCH.|
|Descendant Othrys: a VEILED BLOOD DUKE.|
|Three lineages resealed. Three VEILED BLOOD MONARCHS.|
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing notes what is being given. Grand salvations, granted to beings of the Transfinite Dimensionality. What pools within the Tide has moved past its prior precedent, and continues to grow. It has not yet been asked for.|
And then only one remained.
Kharvel crossed the hall unhurried, upright, and awake. He sat where the others had sat, and folded his hands, and his unsleeping eyes held Noah’s from an arm’s length away, and for a long moment he said nothing at all.
"One question, Cure-Giver." His worn voice came level. "Before you open me. If I see something inside your cure that I was not meant to see and you wish to quiet me... what happens to me?"
The hall’s warmth thinned. Across the marble, Mahishasura’s amber gaze sharpened, and Yrsa’s pale one, and the cured Descendants went quiet.
"There will not be anything not meant to be or see," Noah said.
"I have not slept in many years. I see everything. It is the one thing I do."
Noah remained quiet and didn’t reply!
The unsleeping eyes searched him for one moment longer.
"...Begin."
The blades rose. The existence opened. And this working ran longest of all, and Noah unwrote all of it, clause by clause by clause, while the hall stood silent and the grammar settled invisibly into every seal.
|The counter-writing of THE CURSE OF THE UNSLEEPING WATCH has been unwritten at the root.|
|Descendant Kharvel: a VEILED BLOOD SOVEREIGN. The Veil holds. Nothing perceives it.|
The blades withdrew. Kharvel sat still.
Then his shoulders came down from a height they had held for eleven millennia, and his unsleeping eyes blinked once, slowly, and blinked again, and a look of pure animal disbelief crossed the most watchful face in the pocket Dimension.
"...Heavy," he whispered. "My eyes are... heavy."
WAA!
He did not make it to a couch. Descendant Kharvel, twenty-nine of VERITAS, the watcher of watchers, lay down on the marble floor of the hall right where he was, and closed his eyes, and slept for the first time in many years, and the sound that came out of him was a snore!
HUUM!
The hall broke into celebration around the sleeping body. Wine and roaring laughter and Othrys’s name still being said, Baelgrim’s empty quiet stomach toasted by the whole roaring hall, Mahishasura moving among his collected brethren accepting their gratitude with elegant modesty, every promise he had ever made them kept in a single day!
And at the edge of it all stood the Cure-Giver, unbound and uncollared, watching the celebration with eyes that had gone entirely cold.
’Seven Descendants. Dance! Laugh! Rejoice! You are can be puppets or be killed...at any moment!’
...!
Apart from being able to collapse their Existence and control it, he could also peruse their memories!
Of course, he did not need their permission, and he did not need their waking, and no instrument in THE Serenaros would register so much as a whisper of what came next!
Somewhere beneath the laughter, along seven threads written into the language of seven existences, the option he had built for himself opened quietly for the first time.
Noah gazed at his cured, celebrating, unknowing Veiled.
’Show me...your memories.’
And he began to read!