Chapter 5567: Ignorance! II
Chapter 5567: Ignorance! II
When the pool that has no color calls, the hand must give its own
For blood of True and Primeval both shall pay the ferry home
The dimension lost to time and space wait not for those who plead
They open only to the one who bleeds the eldest creed
Twice shall the crown be offered up, and twice shall it be worn
But only what is set down whole may pass where ash is borne
The mask that saves a thousand lives must die upon the face
For quintessence cannot truly bloom while shadows hold its place
Beware the kneeling of the proud, for kneeling is not loss
The silhouette unfinished waits where all the futures cross
What eats, and watches, and remains shall gather in one name
And that which you cannot reject, you must become, or be become
---
Noah’s eyes flashed with an incandescent light, his body still shedding gray filth into the sand, and across the distance the hands of Anaximander, moved by another, reached for THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity.
...!
And every piece of it fell into place at once!
I hate what is happening here. The Voice had said that in the middle of the second trial, and dressed it in a crude joke about a beautiful woman being handed to somebody else. It had hated what was happening. It had said so!
Nobody asks what a dying guardian hates about its own rescue.
The dying voice of a Primeval thing that could not let go of something. Its own introduction. Everyone had heard grief in it!
The pathway shall open. Not for you. It had never once said for you!
And Hvitrmarr’s voice, thin and urgent through a bond stretched nearly to breaking, had reached him in the dark between the trials with the one thing she had thought he should know. Anaximander was taken elsewhere. The Voice came for him and took him another direction, and none of us know where.
A being with no external authority!
Noah had walked the last trial with all of it sitting in his mind, unproven and unforgotten. He had cast out everything he owned above a sand that had killed Primevals, with the suspicion filed and waiting, and he had done it anyway, because the door needed opening and he was the one who could open it, and because a man who has just generated his own light from nothing is a very different of a man than the one who entered.
So now he stood in the black sands, bleeding gray, transformed and transforming, and watched a stolen friend’s hand close the last inches toward a Remnant Existential Treasure.
And his eyes showed no surprise at all!
"Why are you in such a hurry," Noah asked, "when your prize is right before you? Can you tell me why?"
...!
Across the sands, the hand stopped inches from the gold.
Anaximander’s body did not turn. The cold ancient light in his eyes stayed fixed on the collar, and the voice that came out of him was almost conversational!
|Because I could not possibly give such a thing to another.|
|Do you understand what this is? What it can do? With this in hand, I could save every Superpowered Lifeform in this Dimension without needing anyone. Without waiting on candidates, without lowering standards, without begging strangers to be worthy. Every descendant I have watched die in rows in front of stones, and I could end all of it myself, at last, after ages of watching.|
|And with this body, it is possible. Anaximander, containing my remnants, and all the others who failed before me. He can hold what none of us could hold alone.|
The glazed eyes tilted slightly, as though appraising the flesh they occupied.
|He is almost like you, you know. He just seems a bit different. I have not yet determined where the difference lives.|
Noah listened in silence.
His transformation had not stopped for any of it. The gray filth still ran from him in thinning rivulets, the hum of the singularity still worked down through his atoms, and he stood in the middle of his own remaking and asked his next question as calmly as the first.
"How did you get into Anaximander, though?"
|Carefully.|
The word came cold.
|A being like him cannot be taken. I did not cheat, whatever you may be preparing to think of me. His body cannot be harmed by others. His identity makes existence conform around it. Every art of possession ever devised breaks against a nature like his, and I knew it, and so I did the only thing that works on the truly unique and the truly powerful.|
|I asked.|
|Consent was critical. He agreed to carry the pieces of every failure across every age, freely, with his eyes open, because he is kind, and kindness is a door that beings like him never think to lock. What entered him, entered invited. What lies atop his consciousness now, he accepted the weight of. I broke no law of his existence.|
|I merely understood which laws he would suspend for a stranger who asked politely.|
Noah nodded to that, calmly, and sighed.
"I would let you continue," he said. "Honestly. I would let you reach out and try to take hold of THE Aurate Collar, and I would stand here and watch you burn for it, because I think you know less about what is hanging on that obelisk than you believe you do, and I can see something on it now that you cannot."
His eyes did not leave the figure at the obelisk.
"But my friend would burn with you. So I have to stop you."
The face of Anaximander turned at last, and it had become distasteful, a frown pulling at features that had never worn one, an expression fitted onto the wrong man.
|I have waited too long for this.|
|I have many depending on me. Every Superpowered Lifeform still breathing in this Dimension is my responsibility, and I will finish what I started, and I will not be lectured by a candidate.|
The glazed eyes narrowed.
|You show a spark. That is all. You have not attained the status of those beings, whatever you may feel blooming in you. A spark is a possibility, not a Provenance. And after I grasp the collar, I will take that spark from you as well, since leaving it loose in existence would be untidy.|
...!
Oh?
Noah almost smiled.
This being thought he had passed the trial because he showed a spark. It had stood witness to the whole of it, and it had read all of that as a glimmer. A possibility. A one-in-a-trillion flicker of what might someday be!
He shook his head slowly, because he had not shown a spark.
He had caused the emergence of his own unique individual essence, generated from himself and nothing else across all of existence. His Provenance!
It hummed in him at this very moment, calm and blinding and entirely his, and the being wearing his friend had watched it happen and could not see it, because a thing with no external authority does not announce itself to instruments built for weighing authority, and the Voice was, in the end, exactly what it had confessed to being. A creature made entirely of successful accumulation, reading the whole of existence through the one lens it had.
But he did not need any of that.
That was the part the Voice had truly failed to account for. Noah watched the possessed hand begin to move again, closing the last inches toward the gold, and he knew with complete certainty that Anaximander’s body would not be able to handle what it was about to touch, and so he did not reach for his Provenance at all.
He said two words.
"Anaximander, Come!"
HUUM!