Chapter 5739: Hieroglyph Runestones I
Chapter 5739: Hieroglyph Runestones I
<Epigraph- An Unknown Age, Discovery of Hieroglyph Runestones>
Two beings stood in a dead place at the bottom of a dead Dimension, and the two Hieroglyph Runestones waited in the dark ahead of them.
The first was a cube. A vast one, obsidian shading to grey, each face wider than an Observable Existence, and across every face ran carvings in a tongue so old that the marks did not sit still under the eye; rearranging themselves whenever a mind tried to hold them.
The second was a sphere, greater than the cube, perfectly round and perfectly cold, and its surface too was written over end to end, spiraling script that wound around it without beginning and without end.
Serala stood beside Vakochev and looked at the two shapes for a long time.
She was beautiful. Dark hair, a sharp and patient face, eyes that missed nothing. She had walked beside the maker of the Scales through more dead places than either of them could count, and she had never yet asked him a foolish question.
"What are they?" she said at last.
Vakochev smiled.
He raised one hand, and from the whole of his body endless seas of THE Primordial Source surged out, dense and dark and old, pouring across the dead ground and rising up the two shapes to wrap them, and where the Source touched, the ancient carvings woke and began to glow, cube and sphere lighting the dead Dimension with the cold light of the first things.
"They are Hieroglyph Runestones," he said.
He walked a slow circle around the cube as he spoke, the Source trailing off him.
"Existence has a memory. Everything that has ever happened is written somewhere, in the weavings, in the Records, in the agreement of things about what they are. But the Records can be edited. The weavings can be torn and re-sewn. What is written in the ordinary bones of existence can be rewritten by anyone strong enough to hold the pen, and there are beings strong enough to hold the pen, and they are not kind, and they do not love the truth. So the memory of existence is not safe. It has never been safe."
He set his palm flat against a glowing face of the cube, and the crawling script slowed under his hand as if it recognized him.
"These are the exceptions. These are the memories of existence made into a thing that cannot be edited. They were carved before the frameworks were laid, in a tongue that predates agreement itself, out of a substance that does not answer to any authority born after it. You cannot rewrite what is on a Hieroglyph Runestone. You cannot lie to one. You cannot make one forget. An Immense One could pour the whole of its existence against this cube and it would not change a single mark, because the cube is older than the Immense One, and older than the thing that makes an Immense One what it is. They are...the one honest thing left in a dishonest existence."
BOOM!
Serala came to stand beside the cube, and she reached out and stopped, her fingers a breath from the glowing stone.
"You can read them? It all seems like gibberish to me." she said.
"I have read this one." He touched the cube. "The sphere I have not been able to read at all. Trueness is the key...among other things."
"And what does it say?" Serala asked.
Vakochev was quiet for a moment, and the glow of the two Runestones lit his face.
When he spoke his voice had changed, gone lower and more careful.
"It tells the beginning," he said. "The real one. Not the story the Immense Ones tell about themselves. The first."
He looked up at the cube.
"There was a Dimension. The Runestone names it, though I will not say the name aloud in a dead place, because names have a way of reaching the things they belong to. Lets call it... THE Sundered Dimension, because that is what it became. In the earliest age of existence, before there was a first among lifeforms, before anyone had ever exceeded anything, a being went into that Dimension alone."
The Source coiled tighter around the cube, and the glow deepened.
"It was trying to become something existence had no shape for. There was no ladder then. No Scales, no Weave, no path up, because no one had ever gone up. The being had to make the climbing and do the climbing at the same time. And in THE Sundered Dimension, where reality was already thin, it found that it could take the weight of existence itself and bring it down onto its own foundation as a catalyst for growth. It was THE First Adversity... and it was carried out by existence itself. It has always Existence..."
"It became the first Immense One?" Serala said quietly.
"Eventually yes, it became the first Immense One." Vakochev nodded. "It did not become an Immense One by growing strong. Strength was only the road. What actually happened, at the threshold, is that the being touched IT."
The name fell into the dead Dimension, and even the crawling script on the cube seemed to still for a moment.
"IT was there, in THE Sundered Dimension, because that is where the walls were thinnest, and IT is the thing on the other side of every wall. Some actually posed that Atlas forged IT. They do not know the true history. Atlas was not even alive and IT what’s already there."
"But I digress. Back to that lifeform. The being touched IT, and for one instant it held the pen that writes existence, and in that instant it wrote itself into a shape existence had never permitted before. It became the first Immense One. And more than that, it became the only being, before or since, that could truly wield IT. The one and only. Every hand that has reached for IT in all the ages after touched the same thing the first one touched, and not one of them could make it answer."
Serala’s hand finally came to rest against the cube, and the glow ran up her fingers, and she did not flinch.
"The first one could use it," she said slowly. "And no one after. Why?"
"That is the question the cube asks and does not answer." Vakochev’s voice went low.
"Here is what it does say. The first being touched IT, became an Immense One, held the authorship of existence in its own hand, and looked out at the whole vastness of what it had become and what it could now do. It stood at the precipice of the one thing every lifeform that has ever lived secretly wants. Absolute authorship. The pen that writes the weavings Existence. It is untold wonder with no ceiling above it, simply endless possibilities."
He was quiet for a moment!
"And it glanced at that endless possibility once. Only once. And then it reached into its own existence and gouged out its own Trueness and its own origin, and it ended itself."
BOOM!
"It dissipated its own being at the very moment it had won everything there was to win. Whatever it saw when it held the pen, whatever knowledge or power came with the touching, it looked at that and chose to stop existing rather than keep it."
...!
Oh!