Chapter 5627: The Unfinished Command!
Chapter 5627: The Unfinished Command!
Seven libraries of memories opened at once.
Of course, from the outside, nothing at all was happening. The hall roared on around the sleeping body of Kharvel, wine moving, Othrys’s name still being said for the joy of saying it, and at the edge of the celebration stood the Cure-Giver with cold eyes and a stillness that read as weariness to anyone who bothered to look.
Inside that stillness, along seven threads written into the grammar of seven existences, Noah read.
And the first thing he learned was that memory has architecture, and one Descendant in particular had the clearest memory!
The others gave him texture. Kharvel gave him everything.
The structure of THE ETERNAL PAX assembled itself across his depths, memory by memory.
At the bottom, the Loomwrought Shrouds. Made, not born, grown in batch-halls around cores of refined Argent Loom, the labor and the soldiery and the furniture of the whole institution, and no one above them thought of them at all!
Above The Shrouds, The Wardens. And here the memories grew thick with ambition, because Wardenship was a career. Wardens earned their standing in counts: collars logged, collections completed, incursions closed without loss, every capture entered into ledgers that followed a Warden!
Wardens competed. Wardens were sponsored, patron Enforcers lifting promising collectors out of the field, and a Warden whose records ran long and clean enough might one day be raised to a mountain.
Because Enforcers like Descendant Mahishasura held mountains!
Each Enforcer of THE Serenaros kept a peak of the inner rings as seat and fief, with Wardens sworn beneath them and Shroud soldiers of their own!
Above the Enforcers sat an Arbiter, one to a Dimension, governor of the whole of it, and the memories of the Arbiter of THE Serenaros all shared one strange quality.
They dimmed near the center.
Every memory that approached the blinding heart of the inner rings lost its edges, detail sliding away the closer any Descendant had ever walked toward that radiance.
’Even their memories avert. Interesting.’
And above The Arbiters, spoken of always in lowered voices, sat THE Still Conclave.
Nine seats. The summit of the whole Pax, its members almost never seen. Nine beings who answered to nothing beneath them and to only one thing above.
The Voice.
Kharvel had not been there at the founding. But Kharvel had watched a Descendant who had.
And the memory of the founding was a grand one!
A gathering of beings of terrifying depth assembled on a bare plain of purple gold, Descendants among them, Primeval things among them, and every one of them standing the way children stand when summoned. No figure appeared. No shape descended.
There was only the Voice.
It arrived without direction, from everywhere and from inside, and it was not loud and it did not need to be, and the memory itself still shook at its arrival!
"Too many unworthy things are playing with authority."
Noah shuddered!
His actual body, standing in a marble hall gigaparsecs from any memory, shuddered, once, from the sheer registered weight of a voice heard thirdhand!
"Reduce the count across existence, meaningfully."
’Who...’ Even his thought came unsteady. ’Which one of them is this?!’
But the memory did not know!
The Descendant who stood on that plain had never learned it. None of them had. The gathered terrors of that day had gone to their long lives and their eventual sentences without ever knowing which of Those Who Remain had spoken!
"And only stop when you are told to."
The Voice ended. The memory ended.
And Noah stood in the celebration hall with cold sweat at his temples and rage arriving right behind it, rage at the fear itself!
He had shuddered from a voice of Those Who Remain!
He shuddered like a Finite thing in a storm as he was enraged!
’How dare I feel fear from merely hearing the voice of such a being? They are not beyond existence. They are lifeforms! Grander Dimensionality, grander depth, and nothing more than that. Nothing more!’
HUUM!
And beneath the rage, he replayed the last message of whatever one of Those Who Remain had uttered
Only stop when you are told to.
He searched Kharvel’s archive for it as...
No stop order had ever come.
The whole towering machine of THE ETERNAL PAX, The Wardens and their records, The Enforcers and their mountains, the Arbiters and the Conclave and the cages running gigaparsecs in every direction, all of it was still executing the last sentence of a command spoken by one of Those Who Remain!
An unfinished command. An engine with no braking instruction, collecting existence piece by piece, waiting with perfect institutional patience for a word that no memory suggested was ever coming.
He internally shook his head as he continued.
The memories of their Lineages came next, because the cured seven carried three of them in their blood.
Descendants, the memories confirmed, did not descend from Those Who Remain generally.
Each line ran back to one architect, one specific being of that grander Dimensionality whose spoken sentence had become a bloodline, and the lines differed the way their architects differed.
Messages into the existence from Those Who Remain were rare for all of them, a fortune or a catastrophe once in a lifetime if it came at all. But the shape of the silence differed.
THE Sleepless Fiend, whose line Baelgrim and two of the couch-loungers carried, spoke seldom and transactionally, bounties and bargains, an architect who treated its own blood as a workforce.
THE Unblinking Shepherd, whose line ran through Kharvel and Othrys, never spoke at all. Its Descendants lived their whole spans inside the feeling of being watched, a pressure of attention with no message in it ever.
And THE Weeping Architect, whose line Sylvaine and the shadow-cursed one carried, sent no words either. Its messages arrived as griefs. A sorrow with no source, settling into a Descendant’s existence for a year or a century.
Three architects!
Noah held the pattern up against everything else he carried.
This was basically a workforce of Those Who Remain!
And then, in a certain memory, he found the exception.
The memory belonged to the liar-cursed Descendant as it told a grand story.
Wardens and Shrouds by the thousand, Inhibitors in racks, the single greatest collection operation the archive held. Target: the great Infinite Lifeforms of a far reach.
Among the targets: THE Infinity Eater.
And....the operation failed.
The only recorded failure of THE ETERNAL PAX!
And after it, the order had come down through THE Still Conclave, and the order was the true treasure:
Cease all operations against THE Infinity Eater. Cease all operations against the Infinite Lifeforms in specified areas!
Noah’s eyes shone brightly as he understood why!
Collaring Infinite Lifeforms stifled their draw of Infinity. And their draw of Infinity was the Eater’s harvest. Every great Infinite Lifeform the Pax subtracted was income subtracted from a fellow Descendant of Those Who Remain, and so the word had come down from somewhere above the Conclave, and the word was stop!
And right now...
Noah was drinking from the Eater’s protected watershed at this very hour, thread by imperceivable thread.
’What does the farmer do when he notices a second hand on his crop?’
...!
One more thing surfaced before he closed the seven libraries, small and sharp, from the gossip that every institution carries.
Warden Yrsa.
The memories of the cured held her at ceremonies but always slightly apart, always slightly deferred as she was a...
Progeny of a Descendant and a Primeval One. And the Primeval One sat on THE Still Conclave.
One of the nine.
’Well.’ Noah watched the plain woman across the hall, the woman who had broken his finger to check a seal, whose death he had decided on a battlefield gigaparsecs ago.
It didn’t fucking change a thing. She would still die!
Around him, the hall roared on as he...began seeing budding outline of a plan!