Chapter 5663: How To Kill An Immense One? II
Chapter 5663: How To Kill An Immense One? II
"Ages passed. The company of Provenance Lifeforms prospered, and grew, and became a lineage, and the lineage spread its light across the early dark. But existence does not let the sovereign prosper unwatched. There came a day when that lineage crossed another company of Provenance Lifeforms, and this second company was not alone. Behind them stood the aura of one of Those Who Remain, an architect who had taken them as its own, and lent them the edge of its immensity."
"It was not a contest as much as it was an extermination. The lineage that had once shown mercy to a dying stranger was driven to the edge of unmaking, cornered, their light guttering, an entire bloodline of sovereign existences about to be scattered into the dark with an Immense One’s weight pressing down to make certain none survived."
Descartes stopped walking.
"And then another aura rose."
"It came out of the deep dark, vast beyond the reckoning of anyone present, and it was the unmistakable, existense-bending weight of a second Immense One. It fell across the doomed lineage and it stood between them and their end, and the enemy company broke and fled, and the architect that had backed them, an Immense One in its own right, took one look at the aura that had risen to oppose it, and it fled as well. It fled, Youngest. One of Those Who Remain looked at what had come to defend a handful of sovereigns, and it chose flight over ruin."
"The lineage was saved. And they looked up at their impossible savior, this Immense One who had scattered their doom, and they waited to see the face of the architect who had chosen, for reasons none of them could fathom, to spend its immensity on their behalf."
Descartes let the silence stretch to its breaking point.
"It was the dying man. The one from the stone. The one they had fed and forgotten Ages before."
BOOM!
The word landed soft and landed heavy, and Noah’s endlessly blue eyes had gone very still!
"He had not died," Descartes said quietly. "He thanked them. Can you imagine it. An Immense One, a thing that architects now flee, and the first words out of it were thanks, for a store of food left against a stone in a forgotten Age. And the lineage, on their knees before the being that had saved them, asked him the only question that mattered. The question you would have asked. The question I asked, when I first heard this tale. They asked him how. How does a dying sovereign, fading against a stone, refusing all help, become in a few short Ages a thing that Those Who Remain flee from?"
"And he gave them an answer of four words, or near enough, and it is the answer I have carried across every Age since."
Descartes turned to face Noah fully.
"He said: I lived truly. Unfathomably. To exactly who I was. I was true."
BOOM!
The subtracted dark rang with it, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.
Noah understood, now, why the old philosopher unmade Primevals with doubt, why he asked a man to prove his own waking life, why he had raised Noah’s own Trueness simply by making him examine it. It was all one lesson. It had always been one lesson!
An Immense One was not a different kind of thing from a Provenance Lifeform. It was a Provenance Lifeform that had lived so completely, so unfathomably true to the whole of what it was, that existence itself had stopped being able to argue with it. That was the difference of degree. That was the only difference there was. The architects were not born above the sovereign!
They had simply out-truthed the sovereign, across Ages, until their truth became the floor everything else stood upon.
And Descartes watched the understanding move across Noah’s still face, and he nodded, satisfied, and delivered the point of the whole long telling.
"So." The old man’s eyes glittered with a cold, absolute logic. "You asked me how to kill an Immense One, and I told you I could not answer that until we had simplified the equation. Now we have simplified it. An Immense One is only a Provenance Lifeform that has gone all the way. So the question is no longer a blasphemy. It is no longer even a large question. It has become a small one, and a plain one, and I will now ask it of you, since you are the one thing in this room built to answer it."
He leaned in, and the weight of it pressed against the very root of Noah’s existence.
"How does one kill a Provenance Lifeform?"
BOOM!
"Would you be able to tell me that, O Provenance Lifeform?"
The words hung in the subtracted dark, unbearably heavy, and Descartes simply waited, patient as stone, for the being he had crossed a threshold to test to reach for its own throat and describe how the cut was made!
At times, there is a moment in any real question when the person asked stops looking for the clever answer and starts looking at himself.
He wasn’t surprised that this being found out he was a Provenance Lifeform. So he instead thought about what anseer he could give.
Noah did not rush it.
"There are two ways that I’ve thought about," he said finally.
Descartes said nothing. He only waited!
"The first is the obvious one. You cannot out-power a Provenance Lifeform. Not really. Pour enough weight onto one and you flatten the body, but the body was never the thing. A Provenance Lifeform generates itself. It is a well. And you do not kill a well by emptying the bucket, because the bucket fills again from below. So the first way is not to strike the water. It is to strike the source. You have to reach past everything it has made and get your hand around the act of making itself, and you have to convince it, at the root, to stop."
He turned the thought over as he spoke.
"A Provenance Lifeform is a thing that answers to nothing outside itself. That is its glory and its single flaw. Because if nothing outside can command it, then the only thing that can stop its generation is the thing inside. You do not conquer a sovereign. You make the sovereign issue the order against itself. You corrupt the well at its head so that it poisons everything it pours. You get it to doubt its own truth for one full breath, and in that breath, its generation turns on itself, and it unmakes what it was still in the middle of making. It does not die of a wound. It dies of a contradiction. It becomes a thing that is generating and un-generating in the same instant, and it tears itself apart trying to be both."
Descartes’ eyes had gone very still!