Chapter 5831: No Door Was Sealed! I
Chapter 5831: No Door Was Sealed! I
<THE Sealed One>
All of existence was red, and THE Sealed One stood at the center of it, smiling.
He had always liked this part. The moment before. When the crimson first poured out of him and painted everything it touched, every enemy in reach became, for one breath, a thing that belonged to his color. The obsidian foam of a dead home, the drifting snow, the rivers of ink around the woman on the air. All of it red. All of it, in a small and honest way, already his.
He let them look at it!
Across the undefinition, three figures stood in his light.
THE Creature, vast and dark, white and obsidian flames rising off him, the fractured Root of Existence glowing in the crack across his chest.
Anaximander beside him, a scholar in white robes with no authority at all, his hands clasped behind his back. And Calliope, THE Writer of Mythos, sitting on nothing with one leg crossed over the other, script crawling slowly across her skin.
Three of them. And behind him, five Immense Ones, standing in the foam like suns behind a hill, watching.
He had no need of them.
That was the point.
Calliope moved first!
She uncrossed her legs, lifted one ink-stained hand, and wrote on the air.
The words burned as she made them. Fine, dense lines of script, her own neat hand, unspooling from her fingertip in long black ribbons.
A dreamer would have recognized the shape of what she was doing; he had a Grammar of his own. But hers made stories, where his made Sentences.
"Once," Calliope said lazily, writing as she spoke, "there was a mountain that was told to kneel. And it refused. And the hand that told it to kneel broke on its peak."
The words left the air and became true!
A mountain rose out of the red foam between them, grey and vast and snowcapped, ancient as a myth, and it came down on THE Sealed One like a falling sky!
He lifted one hand, and caught it.
The crimson in his palm opened. It was Infinity, and something older under it, braided together into a single bright substance, and it drank. The mountain met his palm and began to come apart, stone by stone, myth by myth, each piece sliding into the red light of his hand and vanishing. He was eating it, eating her story.
Then he chewed, thoughtfully.
"Good," he said. "A little dry."
Calliope’s dark eyes narrowed, and the script on her skin quickened.
She wrote faster!
A tide came next, a flood from some story about the drowning of the first Dimension, roaring across the foam in a wall of black water full of drowned bells. A spear followed it, written out of a legend about a hunter who threw his weapon at the sun and pinned it to the sky. Then a crowd of shining soldiers out of a war that existed only in her hand, marching in perfect order, every one of them a myth of a hero who did not fall.
THE Sealed One met all of them.
He drank the flood. The spear he caught between two fingers, tasted, and let crumble. The soldiers reached him in their thousands, and he walked through them as through a field of tall grass, his crimson eating each one as it touched him, and with every myth he devoured, he shone a little brighter.
And THE Creature moved!
Instead of attacking, he did something worse. The foam around THE Sealed One stopped being foam. The red light, the drifting snow, the air between them, the very ground beneath the Sealed One’s feet: all of it became THE Creature. His Pantheon of All Existence had no shape. It became the surroundings, and now THE Sealed One stood inside him.
The space closed in!
Existence itself pressed down on THE Sealed One from every side, weight upon weight, the burden of eras pressing inward, and his feet sank. For a moment, the crimson around him flickered.
"Ah," THE Sealed One said softly. "This...is you Existence?"
He pushed outward.
Crimson tore through THE Creature’s Pantheon like light through cloth. The red brilliance poured out of him in every direction at once, Infinity and the old thing beneath it, and wherever it struck, THE Creature’s existence was eaten. Eaten, rather than broken. A chunk of his Pantheon simply ceased to be his and became a little more of THE Sealed One.
THE Creature grunted!
Then THE MAW opened!
It opened in the dark above THE Sealed One, vast and lightless, and it came down to swallow the crimson whole, one devourer meeting another. For an instant, the two appetites ground against each other, the MAW eating crimson, the crimson eating MAW, and the whole undefinition shook with the sound of it.
"Interesting," THE Sealed One murmured, and for the first time, he took a step back.
And a few strides away, Anaximander watched all of it with his hands clasped behind his back, and sweated.
His fight looked nothing like the others’. He had no authority to fight with. Every scrap of power in this place belonged to someone else: THE Creature’s existence, Calliope’s myths, the crimson of the man across from him.
All he had was himself.
THE Sealed One noticed him at last. He looked across the foam at the scholar in white, and something in his face brightened with real curiosity.
"You," he said. "I have seen many anomalies but...what exactly are you?"
WAA!
He flicked his fingers.
A lance of crimson tore across the undefinition toward Anaximander, Infinity and the source braided together, bright enough to unmake clusters of Dimensions.
Anaximander looked at it.
"No," he said. "That won’t reach me."
The lance stopped!
It hung in the air an arm’s length from his chest, crimson and blazing and perfectly still, straining forward with all the power of a fused Infinity behind it, and pressed no farther. Existence had heard the man in white robes speak, and existence agreed with him.
The lance faded.
THE Sealed One’s eyebrows rose.
He sent another. A storm of them this time, hundreds of crimson lances from every direction at once.
"You won’t hit her," Anaximander said, not even looking, and every lance curving toward Calliope bent away. "Or him."
The ones aimed at THE Creature broke apart!
"And you are not as fast as you think you are."
THE Sealed One, who had already crossed half the distance between them in the space of a thought, found himself somehow still standing where he had started.
He stopped!
For a long moment, he simply looked at Anaximander. At the sweat on the scholar’s brow. At the hollow in his chest shaped like a Root, filled with nothing but existence’s agreement.
Then THE Sealed One laughed!
It was a genuine laugh, bright and astonished.
"You," he said, "are the strongest one here."
He turned his whole attention onto the scholar, and his voice softened into something almost affectionate.
"The Creature commands existence. The Writer makes it. But you simply say what is true, and existence nods along. No authority. No Root of your own." He tilted his head. "Do you know how many things I have eaten, trying to understand how something like you happens? And here you are, sweating in the snow."
"It’s quite warm," Anaximander said mildly, "under all this red."
THE Sealed One stood still for a long time after that.
Behind him, the five Immense Ones watched without moving. Across from him, three enemies drew breath: THE Creature with a hole eaten in his Pantheon, Calliope with her script running thin across her skin, Anaximander with sweat on his brow and his hands still clasped behind him.
They had held him. All three together, they had held him.
He found that he was very pleased.
"Do you know what I am?" he asked them, quietly. "Most do not. They call me a thief. A genocidal maniac who ate his own disciples. A devourer. A vessel-wearer. They are not wrong. But they miss the point."
He spread his pale hands.
"Every being in existence is born with a little. A Root, if they are lucky. A Source. A gift from some framework they did not build. And they spend their whole lives guarding that little, and dying with it."
He smiled. "I chose differently. I took many things. And most recently...every Root I ever devoured, I kept. Every Gu. Every Infinity Eater. Every story I have ever tasted. Nothing I have taken has ever been wasted."
The crimson around him dimmed.
And behind him, something began to rise.
Roots.
They bloomed out of the dark at his back one after another, illusory and enormous, each one a diffrent color. A Root of green fire. A Root of grey stone. A Root of gold, a Root of bone, a Root that sang. Dozens. Hundreds. Every Root he had ever devoured, from every Provenance Lifeform and Progeny THE Keepers of Existence had ever fed him, rising behind him in a vast and terrible crown.
Then they began to merge!
They grew into one another, Root into Root, colors bleeding together, stems twisting and fusing, until behind THE Sealed One stood a single towering shape, a crown braided from a few hundred stolen Roots. And from that braid, a weight poured out.
It was beyond him. Beyond anything a being who held a Root should be able to carry.
It was Immensity!
HUUM!