Chapter 5875: True! I
Chapter 5875: True! I
Far away, in another region of THE Chrysalis, the rivers ran in every color.
They wound through the shimmering dark in long braided channels, each one a different hue, and each hue a different Provenance. Life ran green. Death ran pale violet. Fire ran gold, Water ran blue, and Time ran a strange purple that seemed to move backward even as it flowed forward. There were rivers of Provenances unknown to most lifeforms, nameless colors, all of them twisting through each other and parting again in a vast, endless space, with the falling silk of the Chrysalis drifting down into their currents.
And in the rivers, Gu swam.
Rare Gu. Thousands of them. Of every Provenance. Glittering beetles of living flame darting through the gold. Pale moths of Death drifting over the violet. Long silver centipedes of Time coiling against the current. Each one a treasure that lifeforms in Legacies would have spent whole lives searching for, and here they swam by the thousands, as common as minnows.
Then a tear opened above.
A Kirtimukha stepped through.
It landed in the rivers with a vast, heavy splash, and the Rare Gu scattered like sparks. It stood knee-deep in the many-colored currents, serene, its eyes closed, and opened its jaws.
And it began to drink the Narrative of Provenance itself.
The rivers bent toward it. Their colors drained into its mouth in long braided streams, green and violet and gold and silver, and with them went their story. The legend of where every Provenance had come from. The weight of every origin.
Slowly, the surroundings began to grey.
And in the next instant, something bloomed!
It came up out of the rivers themselves. Out of every color at once. It unfolded upward from the space like a flower made of every Provenance in existence, and it was a hand.
A humanoid hand. But not human. Its fingers were long and jointed, segmented like an insect’s leg, plated in chitin that shifted color with every movement, green and violet and gold and silver and a thousand shades without names. Fine hairs bristled along its knuckles. Its palm was lined with veins that ran with every Provenance at once. It was larger than a Dimension. It was larger than many.
Up it rose, above the space, and above the Kirtimukha.
Then it came down!
It crashed down upon the Giant with a weight that shook the rivers for light years. Its long insect fingers closed around the Kirtimukha’s body, wrapping it from shoulders to knees, and squeezed.
The Kirtimukha struggled.
It did so emotionlessly. Its serene face stayed blank. Its eyes stayed closed. It strained against the grip with the same blank calm it had shown while drinking, its obsidian arms pushing against the jointed fingers, its jaws still open, still trying to devour the Provenance that held it.
The Hand paid it no mind.
It squeezed harder.
The Kirtimukha’s obsidian body began to crack. Long white fractures raced across its chest, its shoulders, its serene face. Fragments of black stone burst from it and fell spinning into the colored rivers below.
And a voice boomed out across the Chrysalis.
It was many voices: every Provenance at once, speaking together.
|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance is disappointed.|
|"I destroyed this calamity Cycles ago."|
The Hand squeezed. The Kirtimukha cracked.
|"I looked upon it, and found no origin. A thing with such vile beginnings is a thing that should not be. So I unmade it."|
Its tone was calm!
|"And now it has been brought back."|
A long pause, filled with the slow grinding of stone.
|"This is the nature of calamity. It always finds a way back. You may scatter it, and it will gather. You may bury it, and it will dig. You may erase it from every record in existence, and still it will wait, somewhere outside the records, for a crack to crawl back through."|
The Hand’s long fingers flexed.
|"But Provenance is older than calamity. Everything that is, began. Everything that began has an origin. And every origin answers to me. Calamity may return a thousand times."|
Its grip tightened.
|"Provenance will overcome it a thousand and one."|
The Kirtimukha broke!
It collapsed, all at once, its obsidian body crushed inward under a force so far beyond an Ancient Immensity that the rivers for light years around flattened into glass. Black shards sprayed outward. Its serene face split down the middle. Its open jaws were ground into powder. Whatever Narrative it had swallowed spilled out of it in a gasp of colored light and ran back into the rivers it had been taken from.
The Hand opened.
Black dust drifted down into the space and was carried away by the many-colored currents.
The voice spoke once more.
|"Find the Calamity that has risen again. And the thing that brought its weavings back."|
A stillness settled over the delta.
|"Crush them both."|
...!
Above the rivers, the dark began to crack.
Fissures opened across it, one, then another, then many, thin lines of brilliant light splitting the shimmering black. And out of them, Gu emerged.
They were vast. Every one of them shone grander than any Rare Gu, grander than anything swimming in the rivers below, their bodies blazing with color.
There was a great beetle of molten gold with wings like staind glass, a serpent-bodied centipede of silver Time, its hundred legs trailing clocks, a pale moth of Death whose wingspan blotted out a whole region of the sky, and a mantis of green Life, its forelimbs raised as if in prayer. More. Each one unique. Each one radiant.
And from every one of them rolled waves of Immensity.
Ancient Immensity!
Five emerged. Ten. Fifteen. Eighteen. Still more came through the cracks, until the dark above the delta was crowded with them, a swarm of radiant, ancient insects hanging over the rivers of Provenance.
They hovered there for a single breath.
Then, as one, they turned.
And they shot out across THE Chrysalis in every direction, streaks of brilliant color tearing through the falling silk, hunting.
---
<THE Dreaming Human Origin>
The moment THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral spoke of trading for information about THE Dissolved Progenitor, the Ossuary changed.
Noah saw it first in the threads!
The countless millions of destinies hanging above the sea of stars began to pulse, all at once, obsidian and gold, like the strings of a vast instrument plucked by an unseen hand. The light ran along them in slow waves, and the bone spindles at their ends trembeld.
And beside him, he felt THE First Gu of Destiny’s mood shift.
Her vast body stayed coiled and still in her sea. Her beautiful face showed nothing. But the air around her grew heavier, and colder, and every thread in the Ossuary leaned very slightly toward her, as grass leans before a storm.
She opened her mouth to answer.
Lifthrasir raised her hand first!
She did it with a smile, lightly, as someone raises a hand in a classroom. Then she rose from the snow and floated up, past the sea of stars, past the knees and chest of the nearer Kirtimukha, until she reached its broad obsidian shoulder and sat down on it.
She looked very small there. A frail, pale figure in a grey shift, perched on the shoulder of a titan, her limp wings trailing behind her. She settled her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands, and looked out at the crescent of Ancient Immense Ones with bright, interested eyes.
"We can trade for information about THE Dissolved Progenitor," Lifthrasir said pleasantly.
She tilted her haed.
"Though I’m not sure you actually have anything we would need."
...!
We.
She had said it lightly, and she had said it on purpose. She was speaking for THE First Gu of Destiny now!
The Ancient Immense Ones looked from the small Halfling on the Giant’s shoulder to the vast First Gu coiled in her sea, and back again. Lygara said nothing. She let it stand.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND looked between them too.
Then his luminous eyes slid sideways, past Lifthrasir, past Lygara, and settled on Noah. And he smiled, brilliantly.
The horned one led this group. That much was plain from how the others arranged themselves around him. But Noah found his attention fixed on the Fiend anyway, because in the next moment...
|"There are many things in existence worth trading for,"| THE SLEEPLESS FIEND said, his white-hot threads twitching happily. |"Many possibilities."|
His grin widened.
|"We could even take some time to study the lifeform who formed the first Root after THE Long Night emerged, and has since then displayed power of an Immense One...even though it has only been days since the emergence of THE Long Night. How oh how would such a thing be possible? The door to Immensity is supposed to be closed too, you know? And nobody goes from forming a Root to Immensity in a few days, you know?"|
...!