Chapter 5944: Provenance! I
Chapter 5944: Provenance! I
<THE Primordial Gu of Provenance>
THE Primordial Gu of Provenance felt its hunters die, one after another, in less time than it took a lesser being to draw breath. Nineteen small lights went out inside the great weave of its Narrative, nineteen of the countless Gu that carried its authority across existence, and each of them went dark with its Provenance broken rather than collapsed. It did not grieve them, because it had not sent them to win.
It had sent them as bait. Somewhere in existence there was a thing that had reached into the deep past and pulled a child of calamity back out of an erasure that should have been final, and a thing like that would not be found by searching. It would only be found when it reached out and took something, so the Primordial Gu had sent some of its Ancients to be taken, and now that they had been, it knew exactly where the taker was.
It moved. One of its bodies, among the many it kept scattered through existence, gathered itself out of the dark and went down a Conduit that only the oldest beings could perceive, crossing a vast stretch of existence in a single motion.
It came out of the Conduit above the golden seas of THE Chrysalis, near a distant Maze, and where its body arrived, space could not hold it. The air cracked around it in long white lines, and the cracks wept thin streams of light down onto the golden sea, because existence there had never been asked to carry anything so heavy.
The body it had chosen was the one it liked best, a hand. It was vast beyond the size of any Dimension, an insect’s hand made of hard pale segments and long jointed fingers, and every segment of it was built from a different Provenance, the origin of a Dimension, the origin of a sea, the origin of a Cycle, the origin of countless lives, all of them fitted together into one shape. Along its knuckles and across its palm, eyes opened, thousands of them, cold and patiant and bright with the light of every beginning they had ever judged.
Those eyes looked out across the golden sea, and they found a lone figure floating in front of the Maze. It was a humanoid lifeform in a dark robe, small and plain and holding nothing in its hands, and there was no sign of the nineteen Ancients anywhere around it, not even their bodies, and the Primordial Gu could no longer feel them at all. That did not matter, because they had done what they were sent to do.
The Primordial Gu studied the small figure for a long moment with every one of its eyes. It read the figure’s Provenance quickly and without effort, as it read everything, and it found a beginning there that was true and whole and very young, so young that the Primordial Gu nearly dismissed it. Its voice, when it spoke, did not come from any mouth, but from every segment of the hand at once, cold and even and very old.
"Are you connected to the thing that brought back that calamity?" it asked, and it did not wait for an answer, because it already knew. "The youngest of existence always do the rashest things without understanding much of anything. How...disappointing."
HUUM!
Its Immensity moved, and its Narrative moved with it, THE Hand That Holds Beginnings, a story older than the Long Night that said every lifeform must answer for where it came from. The whole weight of that story gathered in its palm, every origin it had ever judged pressing down at once, and the hand swatted down at the small figure in front of the Maze. It was not even a serious blow, only a swat and nothing more.
The small figure raised its hands to meet it, and the Primordial Gu saw something it had never seen before. As the lifeform raised its hands, the existence around it rose with it, the golden sea and the golden sky and the long dark currents of the Chrysalis all lifting at once to stand behind those small raised palms, and for one instant the Primordial Gu felt its swat meet a resistance that was far too large for the creature in front of it.
Then the blow landed, and the small figure was gone. It flew backward across the golden sea and struck the outer wall of the Maze, and the wall broke, and it kept going, smashing through wall after wall after golden wall, tearing a long raged tunnel through the heart of the Maze of Destiny while golden stone burst outward in every direction!
HUUM!
It was the kind of blow that would have made an Unfathomable Immensity take a fight seriously, and the Primordial Gu watched with satisfaction as the small figure finally stopped somewhere deep in the ruins, riddled with wounds and leaking crimson and gold blood over the broken stone.
And yet...
The Primordial Gu did not move, because something about the last moment had caught in its thoughts. Existence had risen to support that creature, not because the creature had commanded it, and not because the creature had bent it into place.
The Primordial Gu had watched existence since before the Long Night, and it had never once seen it stand behind anything that weak.
It frowned, the eyes along its knuckles narrowing together. How could a power like that sit on such a small and fragile thing? The question annoyed it, because there were very few questions left in existence that the Primordial Gu could not answer at once.
Then it looked down into the broken center of the Maze, and it saw that the ruins were not empty. Where the small figure had fallen, a shape was rising up out of the rubble, long and sinuous and bright, a beautiful face on a long insect neck and tentacles moving slowly in the golden air, and the Primordial Gu knew her at once. It was the First Gu of Destiny, coiled around the place where the small figure had sunk into the stone, and she was more vivid and alive than the Primordial Gu remembered her ever being.
Beneath her, the small figure was sitting up. It had not collapsed, which it should have, and it was looking down at its own body with mild interest, at the broken bones and the torn skin and the crimson and gold blood running out of it everywhere.
Then it lifted its head, and it smiled, a small and painful smile, and spoke in a perfectly ordinary voice. "Everything is connected," it said, "but damn, can it be painful."
...!
The Primordial Gu of Provenance looked down at the bleeding creature in the ruins of the Maze with every one of its thousands of eyes, and for the first time in a very long time, it narrowed all of them at once. It had read this creature’s beginning, and the beginning was true, and young, and small.
So it could not understand, and it did not like not understanding, just what exactly this lifeform was.