Chapter 5748: You Freed Me!
Chapter 5748: You Freed Me!
Vakochev floated upon the sundered weavings of the Dimensional Provenance Train, and the space around him was no longer space.
The cleaving of the Train had unmade the very definition of the region, and where reality had been there was now only undefinition, a churning obsidian foam that filled everything, existence itself boilng where the seam had parted! And within that foam the Remnant hung, wrapped in his obsidian flames, a silhouette of dark fire standing at the center of a wound in creation, unhurried, unbothered, waiting!
And at the edge of the breach, The Immense Ones gathered!
They came, and they were not entirely perceivable, because beings such as these did not fit inside the sight of anything lesser! At one moment they were massive eyes hanging in the dark, and the next they were gone entirely, present only as pressure, as weight, as a wrongness in the boiling foam.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND stepped forward, his form an undulating silhouette of brilliance that would not rest, flanked by the gathered gazes of THE OVERSEEING ONE, THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, THE GLOATING JAILER, THE CACKLING BUTCHER, and THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR!
A chilling silence gripped the void!
And into that silence, Vakochev spoke!
His voice did not rumble with theatrical rage. It did not roar or thunder or shake the foam. It carried instead the cold, measured cadence of a man presenting a failure to the ones responsible for it.
The obsidian flames turned slowly around him!
"Across uncounted epochs, you who Remain have extinguished decillions of living beings. Whole Observable Existences and Dimensions, pulverized to nothing. Whole civilizations, ancient and striving and full of small warm lives, harvested down to the bone for a portion of their weavings, their entire histories reduced to a resource and then to silt."
His voice never rose. "And you wrote every one of those deaths into your weavings as meaningless. Unworthy of a second thought. Dust swept from a floor. Decillions upon decillions, and not one of them was ever weighed as anything at all."
He looked from one indistinct gaze to the next.
"And yet. If a single one of you were to bleed. If one Immense One, one, were to die here today, every one of you would shake with hysterical horror! You would call it an impossible crime! You would name it an atrocity against the whole of Existence and hunt the cause of it across every age until the end of things."
The foam boiled around the Remnant.
"So tell me, by what weaving is this measured? By what law is the life of a mortal who owns no borrowed authority weighed as lesser than one of you? Show me the reckoning. Show me the line in existence that says a striving thing with no crown is worth decillions-to-one against a thing like you."
His dead quiet eyes swept them. "You cannot. Because it does not exist. Existence itself does not recognize your hierarchy. Only your violence does. You did not discover that you were worth more. You decided it, and then you killed everything that might have argued."
...!
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND answered him.
The Fiend spoke with terrifying scale, with an absolute and sterile condescension that made the foam itself seem to cringe, and there was no anger in it at all.
|A mountain does not hold council with the gravel beneath its base.|
|The lung does not ask permission of the air it consumes.|
|You speak of a reckoning, little ghost, as though the weak and the mighty were entries in the same book. They are not. Those without authority, or with less of it, are not a lesser party to a negotiation. They are scenery. Backdrop. The texture against which the real story unfolds.|
Existence writhed!
|You misunderstand what an Immense One is, and you always did, which is why you died the first time. An Immense One does not merely live within the architecture of existence. An Immense One IS the architecture. And you would have us weigh the scaffold against the dust swept out the door as though they were equals?|
The Fiend’s threads gathered into something almost like a face, and it looked upon Vakochev with a contempt colder than the void!
|That is the delusion of a peasant who discovered how to strike a spark, and in the striking, believed he had invented the sun.|
Vakochev looked at the Fiend with dead quiet eyes!
He did not flinch, and he did not argue the point, because he had not come to win a debate! He had come to correct a record!
"You slaughtered many of my weavings," Vakochev said, and now his voice changed, went lower and more terrible, though it still carried no rage.
"You broke all of it because you told yourselves a story about it and you believed the story."
The obsidian flames flared!
"You believed that if you stripped away everything I loved, you would break my will. That grief would bring me to my knees. That a being with nothing left to protect would beg, or bend, or surrender the road I walked." His dead eyes did not blink. "You thought my loves were the handles by which you could steer me."
He spread his fire-wrapped arms slowly!
"But you did not break me. You freed me. You...freed me."
HUUM!
Vakochev delivered a vow.
"So here is what I will do today," he said, quiet as the grave he had risen from. "I am going to look upon an Immense One with the exact same gaze you have cast upon the weak since the beginning of things. The careless gaze. The indifferent one. The gaze that does not even bother to weigh what it is destroying."
He looked at the Fiend, and at the gathered gazes, and for the first time something moved behind his dead eyes, and it was not hatred, and it was not grief!
It was indifference!
"I am going to treat your existence," Vakochev said, "as common cattle."
The debate ended, and it ended with the total collapse of local dimensional existenceas...Vakochev MOVED!
Oh, he moved.
His speed exceeded all perception, exceeded Seam-tier sight and Hem-tier sight and everything beneath, and he did not traverse the space between himself and the Fiend, because traversal was for lesser things! He simply forced the coordinate to arrive beneath his boots, willed the destination to become where he already was, and the distance ceased to be relevant.
The clash of Dimensionality detonated across the severed Train.
And the gathered Immense Ones unleashed their combined authority all at once, and as they did, the faint weavings of their eyes vanished from all perception entirely.
Their actions and their power left the realm of the perceivable completely, a war fought at an altitude no lesser existence could witness, the foam itself screaming as titans beyond sight collided within it!
Below, survival became a lottery.
The shockwaves alone, the mere residual ripples of the clash far above, shattered existence for vast spans! Lesser Descendants on the nearby Cabins were flattened into paste before they could draw a single breath, whole ranks of them unmade by a war they could not even see, dying to the backwash of a battle happening somewhere beyond their comprehension.
Down below, amid the shattering, the figure of Calliope appeared!
She rose from the wreckage of her own bleeding body, and she wiped the blood from her face with the back of an ink-stained hand, and she looked up at the churning foam where titans warred beyond sight, and she smiled with pure, radiant fascination.
"Now this," she breathed, her eyes shining. "This is a grand story. Okay!"
And around her, seas of Existential Narrative began to wrap, layer upon layer, a cocoon of authored protection descending over the Writer of Mythos, as THE MATRIARCH OF INK moved at last to shield her Descendant from the storm she had unleashed.
At the rim of it all, Noah tried to see!
He tried to observe the core exchange, the true clash between Vakochev and the Immense Ones, and he could not, because the density of the colliding authorities was blinding, a wall of pure destruction that his sight could not pierce.
And so he reached for the thing he had just made his own.
Infinity!
He thought of it, his own definition, his dream with no far wall, and he conjured a grand and impossible vision within his mind, a dream of a gaze that could stretch forever, an eye that could open onto a vista with no horizon and no edge, a seeing that simply did not stop.
He infused his Provenance with that definition, poured his infinite dreaming into the single act of looking, because he wanted, more than almost anything, to see what a risen Fallen Hero did to the ones who killed him!
He wanted to see!
But even an infinite gaze caught only fragments.
The clash was beyond the threshold where any mind, even his, could assemble the data into a picture.
He caught disjointed, terrifying pieces, flashes torn out of a chaos too vast to hold! An arm tearing clean through a curtain of Dimensionality! The sound of a jaw breaking, somewhere, alongside a roar that had no source he could find! The silhouette of the obsidian coffin, drifting serene and empty through storms of pure and endless Source.
Fragments, only fragments, consequences without their causes, the aftermath of blows he could not perceive being struck.
Then a stray ripple of the Overseeing One’s Dimensionality clipped his masked eye!
The pressure was catastrophic, a mere edge of a mere ripple of one Immense One’s power, and it was enough! Noah’s dreaming form VAPORIZED in a fraction of a nanosecond, unmade before he could even register the touch!
|Presence destroyed. THE INFINITE DREAM remains active. Reconstitution initiated.|
Noah reformed instantly at the perimeter.
And he did not release a single thread of offensive intent! He refused, absolutely, to draw attention, to flare with power, to do anything at all but hang there and watch, a quiet masked eye at the rim of an apocalypse.
Within three seconds a second shockwave, this one from the Fiend’s Dimensionality, tore him apart again.
Noah reconstituted a second time!
And then a third, his eye blooming back into being again and again at the edge of the storm, persisting, immovable, a silent witness who could be destroyed a thosand times and would simply keep returning, watching, saying nothing, doing nothing, refusing to be anything but present.
High in the chaos, two gazes noticed him!
|THE CACKLING BUTCHER observes the masked presence at the rim, destroyed and reformed thrice over.|
|"Ha! Look at this little thing. Blown to nothing and back again, and again. What a stubborn, useless Immensity it has."|
|THE GLOATING JAILER regards him with mild, dismissive interest.|
|"Some eccentric from a backwater domain, come to gawk. No weapon drawn. No Immensity raised. No intent to strike. He is nothing. Leave him to flicker."|
They saw no weapons and no flaring Immensity and no attempt to strike, and so they dismissed him entirely, an eccentric and weak peer from some forgotten corner of existence who happened to possess an irritating immortality technique and not a scrap of combative relevance.
And Noah, dying and returning, dying and returning, let them believe exactly that.
Because he was not here to fight!
He was here to SEE!
...!