Chapter 5664: The Thing Beneath The Fruit! I
Chapter 5664: The Thing Beneath The Fruit! I
"That is the clean way," Noah said. "The philosopher’s way. You would like it. It is almost bloodless."
"And the second?"
Noah’s endlessly blue eyes cooled.
"The second is not bloodless at all."
"A Provenance Lifeform is true. That is what it is, all the way down, a truth that generates itself and owes nothing. But a truth is only a truth as long as it is whole. So the second way is not to argue with the truth. It is to divide it. You do not try to overpower a sovereign existence and you do not try to trick it into doubt. You get inside the one indivisible thing it is, and you split it into two things that are each almost it, and then you make those two halves true against each other."
His voice stayed level.
"Because a Provenance Lifeform cannot be commanded from outside, but it also cannot survive being two sovereigns in one skin. Set half of its own truth against the other half. Make its generation fight its generation. It will pour its entire infinite wellspring into winning a war against itself, and it will win, and in winning it will have spent everything it was on destroying half of what it was, and what remains will be a sovereign that has already killed the thing it most needed to stay whole. You make it the murderer and the murdered at once, and you simply wait for the survivor to notice it cannot live as half a truth."
The dark was silent.
"One way corrupts the source until it poisons itself," Noah finished. "The other divides the truth until it wars with itself. Both of them work the same way underneath, if you look. You cannot kill a thing that answers to nothing. So you make it the only authority it will ever obey. You turn the sovereign into its own executioner, and you get out of the way."
Descartes nodded.
"Yes," the old man said simply. "Those are...theories and possibilities, but they are possibilities. Keep them in mind, Youngest. Keep them very close, for what is to come."
He turned his face away, toward nothing, toward the whole grinding architecture of the Train that lay beyond.
"You and I should never have met," Descartes said. "In all the vastness of existence, the odds of two beings like us occupying the same small Dimension at the same small hour are so thin as to be a joke. We are ants. Rare ants. The kind of ant that might one day look up at the boot and decide to bite. And existence is very large, and it scatters its rare ants very wide, precisely so that they never meet, never talk, never add themselves together into something the boot has to actually fear."
He gestured, one slow hand, at the sealed borders of the rushing Dimension.
"And yet here we are. Because THE Immense Ones have a way of undoing their own precautions. They cannot help themselves. They gathered us. This Train they built, this grand moving pageant of chained Dimensions, they call it a Narrative, and the young ones aboard it believe they have been offered a stage to win glory on. They have not. It is a prison. You and I have been swept into a prison."
Descartes’ voice grew heavier with every word!
"And it is not even a prison, when you look at it plainly. A prison keeps things alive. This is not built to keep. It is grounds of an execution, and we are the condemned who have not yet been told the sentence, marched together down a hallway that only runs one direction."
Noah listened without a word, and his mind was already moving ahead of the old man’s mouth!
"That tree," Descartes said.
Noah’s gaze had already gone to it.
"Some may think it is a prize. Existence told everyone it is a prize, a Pure Blood Fruit, a ladder to greater Dimensionality, a treasure worth crossing doors and killing for. And it is those things. But that is not why it is here." The philosopher’s eyes glittered.
"It is a lure and it is a net at once. Pure Blood is the blood of the architects. It calls to what is like it. Get near that tree, reach for it, consume it, and the thing wakes and it knows. It knows that something of Immense blood, or something with the audacity to reach for Immense blood, is standing in this Cabin. It is not a fruit. It is a nose. The architects planted a nose in your Dimension to smell whether anything worth executing had washed up in the back of their Train."
"Or so it should have worked," Descartes murmured. "A quiet nose, sniffing for one thing at a time. Except."
He almost smiled.
"Except that I am here. Standing beside you. Two of us, in one small confined space, both of us the exact thing that tree was set to smell. And a nose built to catch a single scent, given two at once, in the same room, does not simply catch them. It grows suspicious. It begins to wonder whether it is being tested, or fooled, or walked into. And even if its suspicion is entirely wrong, even if it decides there is nothing here at all..."
The old philosopher’s calm did not waver, but something in it went very cold.
"I have found, across a great many Ages, that Those Who Remain are thorough. They do not investigate a suspicion. They resolve it."
HUUM!
The words finished, and the dark released them back into the world, and Noah’s gaze was already fixed on the distant tree.
He watched it change, and it had been changing this whole time as it wss supposed to be producing a fruit!
At first it was only the light. The slow ecstatic pulse that had rolled off the crimson canopy stuttered, dimmed, and then went out entirely, as though something had closed a hand around the tree’s heart. The obsidian crimson of the trunk darkened past crimson, past black, into a color that had no honest name, and the canopy began to draw inward.
Then the tree buzzed.
BOOM!
The trunk split, not broken but unfolding, and the blood inside it stood.
Obsidian crimson blood rose up out of the tree and held its own shape in the air, thickening, hardening, gathering into a body that had never been meant to walk.
It climbed on limbs that formed as they climbed. Four of them, vast and jointed wrong, each one ending in a single tapering claw as long as a spear, four spear-claws unfolding from a torso of dark wet crimson that drank the light and gave nothing back.
It rose over the courtyards, and it kept rising, until it stood taller than the mountains, a fiendish crimson thing of obsidian sheen and terrible cold stillness, and along the ridge of its featureless head, nine eyes opened.
Nine flat gold eyes, evenly spaced, each one holding no rage and no hunger and no thought that any living being would recognize, only a cold and total attention. They opened one after another down the length of that awful head, and when the last of them opened, all nine turned, slowly, and looked down at everything in the Dimension at once.
The cold that came off it was a judgment!
Every Veiled Descendant in the courtyards went rigid, and this time Noah’s Sanguine Mark did not fully steady them, because the thing gazing down was not asking for reverence. It was taking a measurement, and being measured by it felt like being read for a sentence.
Noah stood on his ground and looked up at it, and he turned the full weight of THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard upon the thing, demanding to know what had just uncoiled out of an Immense One’s bait.
And the Records answered him with almost nothing.
|?????|
|VERITAS: ?????|
|PROVENANCE: ?????|
|POTENTIA: ?????|
|PONDUS: ?????|
Question marks. A wall of them, the way there had been for Rosalia. But beneath the blank attributes, where a name should sit, the Records gave him one thing, and only one after a little while!
|THE Sundered Scion of Sovereign and Immense.|
Noah’s eyes very still.
A Scion. A child!
Not a Provenance Lifeform and not an Immense One, but a thing born where the two had been forced together, the sovereign and the architect bred into one body and one blood, and something in the making had gone wrong, had come out sundered, had come out as this cold nine-eyed abomination that the architects grew on a tree and used as a nose.
They had not planted a fruit in his Dimension.
They had planted their own broken child, and told it to smell the room, and now it had smelled two of the exact thing it was made to find, and nine gold eyes were looking down at a company of the condemned with the cold and total patience of a thing that had been made for exactly this and nothing else.
Descartes, standing at Noah’s side, exhaled softly, and it was almost weary.
As if this old man...was truly tired.
"Ah," the old philosopher said. "There it is. I did tell you they were thorough."