Chapter 5629: Idols!
Chapter 5629: Idols!
His left hand was seated in the chest of a Warden!
His right hand rose, and sanguine blades gathered along it, and came down, and split the chest of Descendant Mahishasura open to the sentence beneath.
The Enforcer did not scream as his hateful amber eyes stayed locked on the tyrant working above him, seven of his own collection pinning his limbs to his own marble, and Infinite Sanguine Mana poured into two opened existences at once, rivers of crimson gold running left and right from a single unhurried figure, and as he worked, the Crown-embodied Emperor began to talk.
"I once knew a guy who spent months carving an idol out of solid lapis lazuli." His voice ran calm, conversational, and almost warm. "Every morning, without fail, he bowed before it. Utterly convinced it was something special."
The blades moved deeper!
"Then one afternoon, another student struck it, and it shattered into a thousand ordinary blue pebbles."
Mahishasura’s jaw clenched. Yrsa’s dim eyes fluttered. The rivers ran on!
"You see, we have this tragic, almost laughable habit of manufacturing idols out of common clay. But the weavings of existence are remarkably egalitarian. If something possesses a physical shape... if it was brought into being... and if at the end of its long, inflated day, it can die..."
The blades reached the deepest clause, and held. "...then it does not deserve a single knee bent in its direction. Reverence is an illusion sold to those too terrified to stand up straight."
His burning gold eyes came level with the hateful amber ones.
"Those Who Remain are no grander than the dust settled on my feet. They do not deserve your worship." A pause, precise as a blade finding its seam. "And frankly... neither do you."
BOOM!
The rewriting began.
Crimson gold flooded both opened existences at once, and within Mahishasura, the work ran the way it had run seven times this day, but inverted, because there was no curse to unwrite and no consent anywhere in the room. The blades held the lineage open against its bearer’s will, clause by fighting clause, and into every reseal the grammar went, written in the script the sentence itself was made of, and Descendant Mahishasura felt every word of his own remaking and could not stop one letter of it.
|The lineage of Descendant Mahishasura has been opened by force.|
|THE PROVENANCE BLOOD MARK has been written as grammar of the line. Designation: VEILED. Nothing in THE ETERNAL PAX will perceive the writing.|
|Obedience: absolute. Cognizance: intact, at your choosing.|
|Descendant Mahishasura: a VEILED BLOOD SOVEREIGN, bound to command.|
And within Yrsa, the flood found less to fight. Her defenses were already collapsed, her Lifeline already held, and the Mark closed over the whole of what she was, daughter of a Descendant and a ninth chair, and gripped it, and waited for its instruction.
The hall settled. The rivers stilled.
And Noah rose to his full embodied height above the two opened bodies, dark gold pressure rolling off him in slow tides, and across the sealed pocket Dimension, every Descendant knelt.
For the seven, it arrived as their own hearts rising. Gratitude, awe, the plain sense that kneeling to the being who had unwritten years of sentences was simply correct, and Baelgrim went down first with tears still drying on his face, and Sylvaine followed, and Othrys, and the loungers, and Kharvel last among them, each of them certain to the root of their resealed lines that the kneeling was a choice!
For Mahishasura, it arrived as a command.
His torn body gathered itself off the marble against every screaming instruction of his own will, and folded, and knelt, and his cognizance was entirely there for all of it, his composed face wrecked around eyes that blazed with pure unwilling hate, an Enforcer of THE Serenaros kneeling on his own floor with his chest still open, and knowing precisely why!
|Descendant Mahishasura|:: VERITAS: 34. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 32. PONDUS: 33. A Descendant of ?????. He had never once been made to kneel. He is kneeling now.
The Crown read the panel slowly, savoring the last line, and then crouched again before the kneeling Enforcer, forearms on knees, casual as a man talking over a fence.
"Now. From your own mouth." His voice stayed mild. "Tell me just how I can fuck up THE ETERNAL PAX the most." He tilted his head. "And you know what. I will not even call it that anymore. Because it is not something eternal, and it will not be something eternal. Just THE PAX will do."
Mahishasura’s jaw worked against the grammar, and lost.
"...Slowly." The word came out of him dragged and furious. "You do nothing loud. Nothing fast. The Pax is not a fortress you break. It is a Record you corrupt." His hands shook against his own knees.
"I return to my mountain, cured brethren at my side, my credibility without limit after this day. And from that seat, I begin to extend... this." His eyes flicked with hatred toward his own opened chest.
"Enforcer by Enforcer. There are those who owe me. Those who envy me. Those who will come to see the cured and want to know how. Each one drawn into a room like this room, one at a time. And when enough Descendants of my standing carry your grammar in their lines... when the Enforcers of enough mountains are yours..." The grammar dragged the last of it out of him.
"...then, and only then, do you reach for the Arbiters. One seat-Dimension at a time. And THE PAX will go on reciting its creed in perfect order, provides, protects, subtracts, never once perceiving that its own hierarchy has become your instrument, until the hour you decide it learns."
BOOM!
The hall held silence around the counsel. Seven kneeling faces shone with reverence at strategy they believed their savior had inspired.
Noah smiled calmly.
"Good," he said. "You will begin tomorrow."
Then he turned his burning gold gaze down, to the body still hanging from his left hand, and the smile went away entirely.
"And now, Warden. Your account."
He drew her up by the chest until her dim pale eyes hung level with his, her feet clear of the marble, blood-drop light pulsing softly through her seized frame.
"I promised you a death," the Crown said. "I decided it in the crossing-dark, over a headless steed. That promise stands. But your collapse would ring, Warden. A daughter of the ninth chair, ceasing, would be felt in rooms I am not ready to visit. So." His hand shifted slightly within her chest. "You will be given another form of death. Quieter. Fuller."
Her dim eyes found his, and somewhere very far down in them, understanding surfaced, and with it, for the second time in one day, fear on a face that had never worn it.
"Your memories. Your sense of self. Erased." He said it the way she had once said protocol. "Warden Yrsa will continue to exist, to every eye of THE PAX. But Yrsa..." The blood drops within her began to turn. "...will no longer exist."
...!
"You..."
"I offered you salvation once. In the crossing-dark. I told you that moment was your fork in the road." The drops turned faster. "You chose your cause. I am merely keeping to my word."
HUUM!
Within him, at the edge of the embodiment, THE Open Hand said nothing at all.
And the erasure ran.
It was not violent. That was the cruelest part of its craftsmanship. The blood-drop light moved through her existence in slow, thorough tides, and everything it passed through, it settled, and everything it settled, it emptied.
A childhood in the shadow of a ninth chair. The pride of a plain woman among terrifying blood, shacklings, one broken finger, one kept promise, one shuddering Voice, all of it dimming tide by tide behind her pale eyes while seven kneeling Descendants watched their savior work and a kneeling Enforcer watched everything with hate that had gone very quiet and very old.
|The memories of Warden Yrsa have been erased.|
|The sense of self of Warden Yrsa has been erased.|
|What remains: a body, a rank, an obedience, and your grammar. Warden Yrsa will answer to every eye of THE PAX. Yrsa will answer to you. Yrsa, as she was, no longer exists.|
The hand withdrew from her chest at last, and the wound sealed behind it without a scar.
She settled to the marble on her own two feet, swayed once, and steadied. Her plain face composed itself, feature by feature, and her pale eyes opened, and there was nothing behind them of what she used to be. No rules. No cause. No count!
And in the center of a sealed pocket Dimension, ringed by kneeling Descendants, beneath the burning gold gaze of THE True Human Emperor, the last body in the hall folded smoothly downward.
Yrsa knelt!
And she knelt without a glimmer of hesitation!