Chapter 5630: Authorities and Fluff!
Chapter 5630: Authorities and Fluff!
The embodiment ended grandly.
Dark gold drained back out of the crimson, the tyrant’s stature settled into the emperor’s, and the burning gold eyes cooled to endless blue as THE Provenance of the Closed Crown withdrew to its small folded-arm seat at his temple, looking satisfied with itself.
|The embodiment has ended. All attributes have returned to 20.|
And behind that prompt, more rose, and they did not stop rising!
|Your VERITAS has risen tremendously. Your PONDUS has risen tremendously. Your PROVENANCE has risen tremendously.|
|Cause: your current actions, weighed as truth lived at the deep Transfinite, and THE Infinite Provenance Baryogenesis, which has not paused once through battle, embodiment, rewriting, or erasure. Quarks remade within THE PROVENANCE REVERIE continue to exceed all prior conversions.|
|Assessment: the wall past 20 was meant to be hard. It was meant to be arduous, and long, and to break most of those who ever reached it.|
|At your current pace, it will likely be climbed within the next few minutes. Hours, at most.|
Grand actions gave grand results!
And Noah, restored and unhurried, looked around the ruined celebration hall of a sealed pocket Dimension, at seven kneeling Veiled and one kneeling Enforcer and one kneeling instrument, and decided that since nothing could leave this box, nothing needed to leave it just yet.
There was one more piece of work to do here.
"Up," he said. "All of you. And you..."
He looked at the thing that had been Warden Yrsa.
"Come here. Hands and knees."
She came, and folded, and Noah seated himself upon the back of the Warden of THE PAX the way kings seat themselves on thrones they have not finished judging, one ankle across the opposite knee, entirely comfortable.
Among the Descendants, no one objected. Why would they?
"Now." Noah settled back. "The battle was too fast. Multiple Descendants of Those Who Remain moved in my service and I saw perhaps a tenth of what any of you are. That will not do. I intend to know my instruments to the last thread."
His cold blue gaze traveled the hall. "Show me your lineages. One at a time. Baelgrim."
The mountain grinned, and rolled his shoulders, and looked around the cluttered hall for something worth the showing.
He chose a Loomwrought Shroud.
"My line runs from THE Sleepless Fiend," he rumbled, walking toward the slumped artificial soldier. "And our Father’s gift is simple, Cure-Giver. He owns everything he has ever touched."
Both huge hands closed around the Shroud’s wrapped frame. "So do we. For a while."
HUUM!
White light shuddered through the Shroud’s body, and its core, a thing grown and keyed and sworn to THE PAX across centuries, simply changed hands. It stood at Baelgrim’s gesture. It knelt at Baelgrim’s gesture. It turned its wrapped head toward its own racks of collars with an obedience its makers had never installed, and Baelgrim released it, and the ownership drained away over a few breaths, and the Shroud slumped back into the Pax’s inventory none the wiser.
"Touch, and tithe," Baelgrim said. "Weapons. Armaments. Authorities, if my grip is deeper than their seat. My cousins can do it to stranger things."
The two Fiend-line loungers demonstrated. The first laid her palm flat against the ambient dark and claimed the sliver of Infinity threaded through it, blue rising off her skin in a brief stolen sea.
The second pressed one finger to the marble floor, and for ten long seconds the entire terraced garden was his the way a hand is his, stone flexing when he flexed.
"The Fiend’s blood claims...okay" Noah observed from his seat.
"Kharvel."
The watcher rose, rested and terrible!
"My line runs from THE Unblinking Shepherd," he said quietly. "And the Shepherd’s gift is that the flock is always found."
His eyes closed. And every Loomwrought Shroud in the pocket Dimension straightened at once.
"I am seeing through all of them," Kharvel said, eyes still shut. "Forty-one Shrouds, nine functional. I am seeing through all of them."
His eyes opened, and they were pale-rimmed now, ringed in faint white. "Anything that has ever been watched, my line can watch from. And anything I have marked..."
He looked at Noah, and inclined his head slightly. "...I would find across Dimensions, until one of us ceased. The Shepherd does not lose sheep. THE Argent Loom itself is a trail to us."
Othrys followed his lineage-brother, and his display was the inversion of eleven thousand years of sentence. He walked the length of the hall and was not noticed doing it, not by the seven, not by the instruments, a presence folded out of every attention in the room at will, and then he stood at its center and unfolded, and every eye arrived on him at once.
"They cursed me with the broken half of my own gift," he said, and for once he did not perform the words. "Attention, with the ownership stripped out. Thousands of years of it."
He bowed low to the man seated on the Warden. "It is mine again."
Noah nodded and looked at the next one.
"Sylvaine."
She drew no blade. Instead she raised one hand, and reached into the unseen, and pulled.
Threads of THE Argent Loom came down into the visible.
White rivers, the same authority that ran the collars and the roads and the Inhibitors of the whole towering institution outside, gathered into her palms in obedient skeins, and she began to build. Blades first, a hundred of them, forged of braided loomlight.
Then the blades became ribs, and the ribs became an architecture, a vaulted lattice of white edges assembling itself above the hall, vast and precise and strangely beautiful, a cathedral-frame of pure cutting authority filling the pretend sky.
And it keened.
A low note ran through every strut of it, soft and unresolved, a construction that mourned its own standing, and Sylvaine looked up into her own work with an expression that held old questions.
"My line runs from THE Weeping Architect," she said. "We build with THE Argent Loom the way our Father built before us. And everything we build... grieves. We have never learned why. Our messages arrive as sorrows. Our works arrive singing them."
Her hand closed, and the lattice folded itself away into nothing, and the keening stopped.
The shadow-cursed lounger built after her, a fortress of layered dark raised and razed in half a minute, its walls weeping slow black light at every seam.
And through all of it, Noah sat on the back of a Warden and watched.
"Claim, watch, build," said the Crown. "The Fiend takes, the Shepherd finds, the Architect makes. Three weavings, and THE PAX runs on all three of them..."
At last, Noah’s gaze settled on the final kneeling figure.
"Enforcer. Your turn."
Mahishasura rose with his torn coat and his quiet old hate, and did not choose a Shroud or a thread or a trick.
He simply opened his hands.
And the entire pocket Dimension’s Loom answered.
Every river of white in the sealed abode rose at once, out of the collars and the racks and the slumped Shrouds and the seams of the walls, an ocean of authority lifting into the air in perfect surgical order, and it turned above them all, and where it turned it worked: a broken Shroud on the far table unmade itself to threads and remade itself whole, the shattered colonnades of the Yrsa battle knitted stone by stone, hairline order sweeping the ruin out of the hall in a single conducted pass.
He closed his hands. The ocean settled home. The hall stood repaired.
"My display," he said flatly, "is that Those Who Remain use THE Argent Loom, and I understand it immensely. If not for being swarmed and sneak attacked, I would have not been defeated..."
It was straightforward and grand!
Noah rose from his seat, unhurried, and stood at the center of the repaired hall, and delivered the lesson.
"You have all shown me wonders, but..."
"Existence is terribly fond of novelty. It offers an endless, glittering weaving of abilities, authorities, and specialized tricks, all of it designed to make us feel clever. But in the grand, infinite weavings of existence, all those infinite variations are usually just theatrical fluff. When the curtain falls, the entity with the sheer, crushing weight of raw power wins the battle. Nine times out of ten... mass breaks nuance."
WAA!
"Except, of course, for that rare, terrifying creature who carries the one authority that unmakes everything entirely. A truly unique authority will rewrite the rules before you even realize you have sat down at the table."
His endless blue eyes moved slowly across seven reverent faces and one hateful one and one empty one. "I mean... look at what happened to all of you, when put against me. You were more powerful than me. You had more abilities than me. Every one of you, deeper, older, richer in gifts."
He spread his hands slightly, taking in the hall, the kneeling, the grammar none of them could see.
"And here we are."
No one answered!
Noah looked down at the Warden still waiting on her hands and knees, patted her head once, twice, the maintenance of furniture, and turned for the sealed door with his hands loose at his sides.
"Prepare, all of you. Soon, we begin corrupting THE PAX."
...!