Chapter 5707: Powerless! I
Chapter 5707: Powerless! I
<THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering>
Far from where a Human Dreamer walked with a golden scale in his hand, the silk was being torn.
Nine riders moved through the deep nebulas at a pace that did not belong to this place. The Chrysalis was slow. Everything in it drifted. These did not drift. They drove forward through the falling strands in a wedge, and the strands parted ahead of them and did not settle behind, and the kaleidoscope itself seemed to hold its colors still until they had passed!
They were Descendants, and then, there were these Descendants.
Not the cursed kind with rot at the fissures and salvation begged from a Father who never answered. These were the other thing, the thing the cursed ones had been bred as a shadow of! Each of them stood the height of a small mountain, titanic and ancient, and their bodies were carved of the same substance that Jarl Erling’s had been, bronze and stone and old fire, but nothing in them was cracking.
Their skin held no fissures. Their eyes held no fear. They sat their mounts with the posture of beings who had never once in their existence had to ask whether they would wake up tomorrow!
And their Steeds burned with glory.
Every one of them akin to a living Observable Existence, bred exactly as Hvitrmarr had been bred, and every one of them was whole! Their First Causes did not fail. Nine or more in every mount, seated in the organs, pouring light out through the hide, so that each Steed moved through the silk wrapped in its own dawn!
No two were alike.
The leading Steed was a colossal white stag, its antlers branching upward into forks that held whole Observable Existences turning in their tines.
Beside it walked a thing with six legs and a serpent’s body, scaled in gold, its Causes lighting the scales from underneath so that it looked struck through with sunrise.
Behind them a quadruped of black stone with rivers of molten Cause running down its flanks. A winged one, feathered in silver, wings folded because there was no wind here to need them.
A low heavy beast with a shell of overlapping plates, each plate a continent. A hound with three heads and one heartbeat. A horse, plainly a horse, and somehow the most frightening of them all for it, since only a being of terrible confidence chooses to ride the ordinary shape!
And behind the nine, dragged by ropes, came the catch.
Three Common Dream Gu.
Moon-sized, translucent, bloated with murky golden dream-weather, their many eyes rolling in every direction and their soft plates heaving! They had been bound in obsidian rope, thick as rivers, and the rope burned with Causes, and where it touched the Gu the dream-stuff inside them went dark and still.
The Gu did not struggle. Something in the rope had convinced them not to as the faint power of an Immense One could be felt coursing through the ropes.
The hunt had gone well.
At the head of the wedge, on the white stag whose antlers held Observable Existences, the leader sat with the reins gathered in one hand!
She was the largest of them. Fierce-faced, titanic, her crimson eyes burning steady in a face carved of old bronze, and her armor was not armor but the plain bare weight of a body that had never needed any. The Causes of her Steed lit her from below. The silk parted ahead of her before she reached it.
She looked back once at the three bound Gu, and her mouth curved.
Then she grasped the reins.
"Father enjoys his dreams more than usual."
Her voice went out through the nebulas and did not come back!
"So we have to find at least ten Dream Weavings Gu. If we can obtain more..." The crimson eyes turned forward. "Then it is only greater glory for us."
The white stag lowered its head.
"Come on!"
The nine drove forward into the deep silk, wedge tight, Steeds blazing, dragging three bound dreams behind them toward a Father who had not once in the whole of recorded existence been described as sleeping!
The Descendants of THE Sleepless Fiend. his First Borns, were hunting in the Chrysalis!
---
<THE Vasiliou Elseworld>
Existence...was always unpredictable.
Noah knew this. He made many plans because of unpredictability. But still, he never knew everything.
It was only human to not know everything!
At this time.
While one of his bodies held an important journey in THE Chrysalis, one of Noah’s other bodies felt a tremendous change in the golden spring inside a certain mountain.
He was holding onto Thalia when...
The spring went cold before anything arrived.
It was a heavy cold, and Noah felt it first in the stolen thing inside him, THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign, which had sat quiet in his depths since the day he took it.
Thalia’s hand closed on his arm as they stopped their Dual Cultivation session.
"Something is coming!" she said with alarm as robes covered her body!
At this time, when it seemed ever so peaceful and without absolutely any issues...
Above the Vasiliou Elseworld, the violet sky tore.
The whole bioluminescent dome of it simply stopped being a sky and became a face, or the pressure of one, enormous and looking down, and the moss-stone arcs on their localized gravities began to drift out of true as the gravities themselves lost their nerve!
|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR has arrived. You can honor him by many different names, but today, he is a Collector that was not paid.|
|He perceives what was taken from him. It is still being drawn upon. It is being drawn upon now, in a spring, by a thing that did not ask. He can smell his prize filled with the seed of another as he is furious.|
|He is more than fucking displeased.|
An Immense One who did not get what he was promised!
Noah had known this being may send forces or even come himself, but he didn’t expect it so soon!
And he...had gone under the assumption that truly, the influence of an Immense One would be diminished in an Elsedimension! And yet here was one bypassing whatever rulings...and having his power crash into the inhabitants of an Elsedimension. How?
At this time.
The Elseworld answered!
Every lotus in the crystalline lakes below sealed at once, island-sized petals closing over the basins in domes of blue-gold. Light ran up the continent-trunked trees.
And from the golden tower at the heart of Vasileia, Provenance Lifeforms rose into the air, the twelve Elders of the lineage at their head, ancient and radiant, the beings Noah had seen ringed around Aurelius before.
He knew their faces.
They rose to defend their lineage, twelve Ages of standing gathered in the torn violet air!
And at their head, Aurelius Vasiliou.
He came up out of the city with his hands still behind his back, and THE Provenance of THE Unfallen Vanguard unfolded around him for the twelfth time in his existence, and the unfolding was a truth stated aloud to the whole Elseworld: that to injure his home, they would have to get through him, that what stands here will still be standing after!
He rose to the level of the enormous face, and he did not flinch from it, and he spoke!
"You did not get what was promised," Aurelius said, and his voice went out steady across the Elseworld.
"My lineage does not hide from a debt. So name it. What price is owed, and what price can be paid? Speak it, and let us settle this as existences that have both stood a long time, and not as a fire and the thing it burns. We have weavings and karma with other Immense Ones as we can always work-"
HUUM!
The face in the sky interrupted him.
|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR hears the patriarch’s offer.|
|He finds it quaint and says...you dumb fucking buffoon.|
|Today,| he said, and the pressure gathered as he said it, |I will not collect so much as I will kill. I don’t give a damn what you are allied with.|
The pressure came down as Aurelius was shocked and horrified!
What!
This was not how things should play out! An Immense One shouldn’t act so openly and brazenly like this!
What...
BOOM!
It did not strike Aurelius. It struck the lineage around him, and an Elder with the long white braid... simply became less. Her light thinned. Her outline lost its edges. And then the air where she had been held nothing at all!
Rivers of undeniable power of an Immense One continued to come down in spans of instants!
|Some beings should know their place,| the Collector said, |You have lived a long while beside your betters and mistaken proximity for peerage. A candle set near a strand of the Weave is still a candle. It only learns this at the end.|
|Do Provenance Lifeforms no longer fear Immense Ones? Did you all think we are so passive and laid back, only sending messages? Is that why you fucked me over? Did you all forget you sit below us? You aren’t even some ancient clan as I cannot fathom what gave you the balls, you fucking buffoons. |
HUUM!
Another Provenance Lifeform, a broad quiet Elder, threw himself across the space before Aurelius, arms wide, and took the descending power of THE Immense One and did not make a sound, and went out like a flicker of light, his Provenance extinguished!
|The dignity of some existences cannot be crossed,| the Collector went on, unhurried, as a second Elder guttered and a third roared, the entire Vasiliou Elseworld thrown into panic!
|Mine was crossed by a thief, and I have come to teach the whole of the house that sheltered the drawing of it that some lines, once crossed, do not admit of payment. Only of correction.|
Aurelius’s Vanguard held, barely as he was ashen while looking at the destruction!
This truly was not what he had envisioned!
He had thought wrong! Oh, so wrong!