Chapter 5633: The Provenance of Existence! I
Chapter 5633: The Provenance of Existence! I
The shaking deepened.
And beneath it, running under the quake of every surface, there came a sound that was not truly a sound!
A sensation of something cracking. Something vast and old and everywhere at once, fracturing along its whole length!
Noah looked around slowly. Across the trembling marble hall, the Descendants were doing the same, seven cured faces and one hateful one all tilted toward a pretend sky, because every one of them was feeling it too!
|A vast structure is breaking across existence.|
|Certainty is not possible, but weighed against everything in your records... that may be the fracturing of Vakochev’s Scales of Existence.|
...!
The prompt was a heavy one, and existence went on quaking around it!
The Scales. The framework that covered Observable Existences and Dimensions and vast reaches of THE Infinite Carcosa and THE Source Lands. The ladder that even free beings paradoxically kept climbing, the measure so old that entire civilizations had never conceived of standing anywhere else!
He had heard its maker’s voice minutes ago, wrapped in obsidian lightning, admitting defeat. I retreat. I persevere. Rage!
And now the ladder itself was coming apart across the whole of everything.
At such a time, Noah heard nothing at all.
But through the Descendants his existence controlled, through seven Veiled lines and one bound Sovereign whose senses were his to share... he heard it.
A voice, echoing out within the lineages themselves. Booming and serene at once, feminine, filled with an immensity that made the fracturing sound small, arriving not through any air but through the blood, through the unbroken written lines running back through every ancestor, a message into existence itself of the kind that Descendants received once in a lifetime if they were fortunate.
Every Descendant in the hall went rigid as one.
|Rejoice, O Progeny of Immense Ones.|
|For you will be first to learn of the coming of the new Ruling of Existence itself. No Scales shall sit above anything ordained by THE Immense Ones, by Those Who Remain. There is only our Rulings, that all of existence shall follow and thrive from.|
|There is only, and will only be... THE Provenance of Existence.|
...!
Noah’s gaze became terribly heavy.
Vakochev’s message, and then this, in the same hour!
That grand lifeform had failed at whatever his plans had been, had broadcast his defeat through a specific few, and Those Who Remain had answered his retreat by making their move at last!
A replacement of the measure of everything!
Just what did it entail?
THE Provenance of Existence.
They had taken the word Provenance!
The name of what THE First Lifeforms were, the name of what he was, the name of the one power in all of existence that owed nothing, borrowed nothing, and was granted nothing... and THE Immense Ones had taken it!
The voice went on. And what it delivered next, only the Descendants of all existence would receive freely!
Every other lifeform across every Dimension would feel the Ruling settle over their lives tonight and be given nothing at all, left to learn its shape by stumbling through it for Ages.
|Hear the mechanics of the Ruling, O Progeny.|
|Existence is woven of MANTLES. They have always been there: roles woven through the living since the living began. The Ruler. The Peasant. The Tyrant. The Mender. The Shield. The Blade. The Watcher. The Betrayer. The Wanderer. The Usurper. Every age and every Dimension has worn them, and until this day, wearing them earned nothing.|
|As of this day, the Ruling answers those who wear them.|
|When a lifeform wears a Mantle so truly, and for so long, that its own weavings and the Mantle’s weavings can no longer be told apart, existence shall record the union. That recording is an ORDINATION. The Ordained draw standing, power, and depth from the Ruling itself, owing nothing to any framework of authority, and so the humble may rise through their roles where no ladder of power would ever have carried them. This is the gift.|
Around the marble hall, seven cured Descendants stood frozen inside a message only their blood could hear, and Mahishasura had gone very pale!
"They have never done this before..." he said softly, to no one. "In all the records of all the lines. They have never once addressed us all!"
HUUM!
The voice was not finished.
|And know the two roads of the Ruling, for every lifeform shall walk one.|
|THE ORDERED are those who live their roles in service of the ordained order. Their EXISTENTIAL MOIRAI shall gather steadily: the favor of existence itself, chance leaning toward their steps and the door that opens at the needed hour. Their Dimensionality shall rise with their observance, slow and without ceiling. Existence favors stability. The Ordered ARE stability. They shall thrive from the Ruling, and the Ruling shall thrive from them.|
|THE WILLFUL are those who wear their roles for their own ends, or worse, who refuse all roles and author themselves. To them the Ruling gives its other face. Existence also has the undeniable fact of instability and entropy. Their power shall come fast and grand. And their Moirai shall burn or flicker without notice, and chance shall lean away from them like the unstable things they are. They shall thrive from the chaos of Existence. The Willful are permitted. The Willful are even needed.|
...!
The hall was silent inside the quaking.
And Noah stood at the center of it, unheard-of things assembling themselves behind his cold eyes!
They had built an order that rewards its own believing and likely benefitted Those Who Remain!
His eyes flashed, and he turned THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard on the nearest Descendant.
|Descendant Baelgrim|:: VERITAS: 24. PROVENANCE: 0. POTENTIA: 23. PONDUS: 26. MOIRAI: 14. No role.|
There it was. A new line!
He swept the Regard across the hall. Sylvaine, MOIRAI: 11. Othrys, MOIRAI: 9. Kharvel, MOIRAI: 22!
Mahishasura, MOIRAI: 31, an Enforcer of order weighed richly by an order he had never heard of until this minute.
And then, slowly, Noah turned the Regard inward, upon himself.
|VERITAS: 25. PONDUS: 24. PROVENANCE: 23. POTENTIA: INFINITE.|
|MOIRAI: ?????|
|The Ruling has attempted to weigh you unsuccessfully. The Ruling is still attempting.|
...!