Chapter 5945: Provenance! II
Chapter 5945: Provenance! II
Noah sat up in the ruins of the Maze with every bone in his body broken. Blood ran out of him in crimson and gold, pooling on the shattered golden stone, and when he looked down he could see places where his body was simply not the right shape anymore.
Then the prompts came, one after another, steady and calm in the middle of all that noise.
|Your existence has been grievously injured.|
|Every bone has been broken. Your body has been torn in 214 places.|
|Your Dream has been cracked. Your Nightmare state has been shaken.|
|THE Dreaming Human Origin is infinite. It is restoring you.|
|Recovery: rapid.|
...!
He felt it happening even as he read it, his Dreaming Human Origin flowing back into every broken place from somewhere deep and endless inside him, setting bones and closing wounds and filling the cracks in his Dream with fresh blue-gold light. It was fast, faster than it had ever been, but it was not instant, and for an instant he only sat there in his own blood and breathed.
Then he looked up at the vast pale hand hanging over the ruins with its thousands of cold eyes, and something in him understood, very clearly, that nothing he had faced before had been anything like this.
He did not wait. Behind him, without a sound, he began to open another door to THE Fallow of Existence, weaving his unwalked roads into a long dark thread and turning his Infinite Quantum Dream toward the deep beneath every unchosen road.
Grey and obsidian light began to rise behind him in a slow, silent tide, and he let it rise, because he already knew what he was going to do. He would spread the Fallow here, across this whole stretch of the Chrysalis, and he would give himself into it, fully and truly, more than he had ever given before.
|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|
|One of the eldest of all Gu. It has judged the beginnings of more lifeforms than can be counted, and erased every one it found wanting.|
|Narrative: THE Hand That Holds Beginnings.|
|Immensity: Its Body here holds Excedere Unfathomable Immensity. It stands beyond the Unfathomable.|
|Shinjitsu: estimated above 10%. True rate: ?????|
|You cannot win this fight.|
...!
Noah read the last line twice, and then he let it go, because it was true and there was nothing else to do with it. Beside him, rising out of the rubble with her tentacles spread over him, Lygara looked up at the hand as well, and her beautiful face had gone very still.
"Where is the child of calamity," the Primordial Gu asked, its voice coming from every segment of the hand at once, "who was brought back?"
Neither of them answered. The hand hung over the ruins for a long moment while its thousands of eyes moved slowly between Lygara and Noah, and then all of them brightened together and settled on him, and he felt the full weight of its attention press down on him in a way he had never felt anything press before.
"My Provenance tells me that you, the weak human lifeform, have the answer," it said. "So will you make this easy, or hard?"
...!
Noah said nothing, and the Primordial Gu seemed to find that interesting, because its eyes narrowed slightly and its voice grew softer. "You said that everything is connected, did you not?" it asked.
"You know where the child of calamity is, which means you were involved in her return, or you were the one who caused it, which means that you are where this began. A great many things can happen between a beginning and its end, a great many connections, and I can decide right now what the end of this one will be."
Its eyes moved to Lygara and stayed there, and its voice became colder. "I can make the end of it the collapse of this precious Gu of Destiny beside you. Her Narrative and her Immensity will end by my hand, and they will end because of you. How is that for everything being connected, and is that fair? Or you can change all of it, right now, very simply, by telling me where the child of calamity is."
...!
A voice spoke quietly inside Noah’s mind, and it was Lygara’s.
"Do not say anything," she told him, without looking at him. "Not one word, Dreamer, no matter what happens next." Then she uncoiled from around him and rose out of the ruins of her Maze, long and bright and very old, and she went up to meet the hand!
HUUM!
Behind Noah, the door to the Fallow broke open. He did not let it stay a door any more than he had in the Carcosa, and the grey and obsidian light behind him poured out across the Chrysalis, spreading through the golden seas and the broken walls of the Maze and the long dark between them, softening everything it touched into something half-real. He knelt in his own blood on the broken stone and put his hands flat against it, and he gave, as he had learned to, without asking for anything back.
Up in the sky, Lygara reached the hand. She threw out her threads of destiny, thousands of them, gold and silver and every color between, and they wrapped around the hand’s fingers and its jointed segments and its thousands of eyes, binding it in place and bending the path of every movement it tried to make. For a moment it seemed to work, because the hand slowed, and its fingers stopped closing, and the threads sang as they pulled tight.
"Destiny," the Primordial Gu said, almost gently. "You were always the most charming of the Firsts, Lygara, because you truly believe that what happens to a thing is decided by where it is going. But where a thing is going does not matter at all, because everything that has ever happened is decided by where it began."
Its fingers flexed once, and every one of Lygara’s threads snapped at the same instant, and the sound of them breaking rang out across the whole of the Chrysalis.
It struck her with the back of its hand, and she flew across the sky and into the golden sea, and the sea split under her. Noah felt the blow land through the existence he was giving to, felt it shake the Fallow-softened ground under his palms, and he gave more, pushing his Dreams and Nightmares out into the Chrysalis as fast as they would go.
The existence around him was changing, softening, beginning to listen to him just as the Carcosa had, but it was slow, so much slower than the hand.
Lygara rose out of the sea again, and her threads went out again, and the Primordial Gu let them come.
"Provenance decides connections," it told her, as it caught her threads in its palm and pulled them, and her with them, back across the sky toward itself. "It decides what is connected to what, and why, and what each connection is worth, and existence agrees with my Provenance every single time, whatever your threads might say. Do you know why? Because Provenance is what gives existence its meaning, and its beginnings, and everything that existence is, it owes to Provenance."
Noah listened to every word while he gave, and something in him pushed back against it, quietly at first, and then harder. He could feel the existence around him, the real existence, the golden seas and the long currents and the Fallow-touched ground waking under his hands, and none of it seemed to owe anyone anything.
It moved, and it gave, and it took, and it went on, the same as it had in the snowy town and in the Carcosa and in every Gap he had ever planted, and it did not keep accounts.
He gave more, pouring himself into the ground until his hands shook and his half-healed body burned with it, and the Chrysalis around the ruined Maze began to change. Black-gold soil spread across the broken stone, obsidian-gold shoots pushed up out of the cracks, and the golden sea around the ruins went dark and veined with gold, and for a moment, the existence there rose behind Lygara as she fought, slowing the hand by a fraction and turning one of its blows aside.
It was not enough, and Noah knew it was not enough, because the gap between them was so great that even everything around him could only bend it a little.
The Primordial Gu noticed. Its eyes turned briefly toward him, toward the grey and obsidian light behind him and the black-gold soil spreading out from under his hands, and then turned back to Lygara, dismissing him.
"Do you see what he is doing down there?" it asked her, while it held her by the neck in two of its jointed fingers and pressed her Immensity flat against the sky. "He is trying to make existence love him, and existence will not love him back, because existence has no love to give. It only remembers where things began, and then it decides what they deserve."
It closed its fingers a little more, and Lygara’s Narrative cracked. Noah felt it crack, a long thin break running through the oldest destiny in the Chrysalis, and he felt the golden seas shudder with it, and he gave everything he had left into the ground and could not make the hand open. Lygara’s threads went out one more time, weaker now, and wrapped around one of the hand’s fingers, and held there, trembling.
The Primordial Gu turned the whole of its attention back to him at last. It held Lygara in front of itself, badly broken, her beautiful face cut and bleeding, her tentacles hanging lose, her threads trailing from its fingers, and it lowered her a little so that Noah could see her clearly from where he was in the ruins.
"This is how existence works, weak one," it said. "Things begin, and their beginnings decide them, and those with the oldest and truest beginnings decide everyone else. She began in destiny, and you began somewhere small and young that no one will remember, and I began before either of you, and so I am the one who decides how this ends. Your connections and your kindness are worth nothing against that. Tell me where the child of calamity is, and I will put her down and leave, and that will be the end of it. Stay quiet, and she ends here, in front of you, because of you."
Noah stood up. His body was still broken in a dozen places and still bleeding, his robe torn and dark with crimson and gold, and he stood up anyway, slowly, on the black-gold soil he had given into the ruins, with the grey and obsidian light of the Fallow rising behind him in a vast silent wall.
Around him, the whole changed stretch of the Chrysalis seemed to stand up with him, the dark golden-veined sea and the shoots in the broken stone and the long currents bending toward him, and he looked up at the hand that was larger than any Dimension, a small and bloody figure standing in a feild of rubble.
"You say existence owes you," he said, and his voice was quiet, but it carried. "It doesn’t. Existence owes nothing to anybody, not to you, not to me, not to any King on any banner, because it isn’t keeping a ledger. It gives, and it takes, and it moves, and it goes on, and the only thing it ever does with what we do is carry it forward."
He looked at Lygara hanging in the hand’s fingers, and his jaw tightened, but his voice did not change. "You can be cruel in existence. You can flaunt your power at one point in it, and you can break things that are smaller than you because you can, and nothing will stop you today. But everything is still cause and effect, all of it, and nothing that you do here goes away. What you do here, right now, decides whether in the Cycle that comes after this one, the name of THE Primordial Gu of Provenance is still known, or still remembered by anyone at all."
He looked up at the thousands of cold eyes, and his own eyes blazed, one gold and one obsidian, burning out across the ruined Maze. "And I can assure you of one thing," he said. "After this, you will not live past a year."
...!
For a moment, the hand did not move. Its thousands of eyes stayed fixed on the small, bleeding figure standing in the ruins with the Fallow rising behind him and the whole changed Chrysalis leaning at his back, and something passed through them that might have been surprise, and might have been something colder. Then the Primordial Gu of Provenance closed its fingers.
BZZT!
Lygara’s last thread snapped, and her Narrative broke all the way through, and her Immensity went out across the golden sky in one long silent wave of light. The hand opened, and there was nothing left in it, and the Maze of Destiny that she had held together for so long began to crumble quietly into the dark sea around its ruins.
Noah did not look away from any of it, not for an instant, and he did not fall, and he did not make a sound.
He stood there in the ruins with his blood running down onto the black-gold soil, small and broken and burning, the grey wall of the Fallow towering behind him and every current of the changed Chrysalis bent toward him, and he kept his eyes on the hand. Something drifted down out of the sky as he watched, a single thin thread of gold and silver, the last of Lygara’s destiny, and it fell slowly through the snowless golden air and came to rest across his open palm. Noah closed his fingers around it, very gently, and he held on!