Published at 6th of July 2026 6:56 am

Chapter 2239: The Living Dead

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Fury, who had been the Primordial of Resurrection since the events of the late first age, was on a battlefield. He was always on a battlefield; he had reorganized his being around the resurrection of the fallen, and where there were fallen, he was there.

The new Existence still had wars at every scale, and Fury attended to the dead of every war he could reach, and the reaching had become the texture of his Primordial life.

Fury had reached the fifth level of his Origin, and he believed that he was not far from reaching the sixth level of Origin, and if he did, he believed that he would be the most powerful Primordial in Existence.

Even though Eos was far from him, since Eva had theorized that there were ten layers to Origin, Fury could not wait to slowly climb these layers.

The Taste reached the world he was in while he was lifting a soldier off a field.

The soldier had died an hour ago. Fury had been at this field for an hour, because the field had a particular shape that called to him; it reminded him of his home in the past... Trion.

He lifted the soldier’s body, and his Origin Force flowed into the body, and the body began to remember itself. It was at that moment that the Taste arrived.

The body Fury had been lifting changed.

It transformed into something the Taste was specifying corpses to be, which was a kind of body that would not stay dead and would not become alive either.

The body, in Fury’s hands, opened its eyes, and Fury did not recognize the gaze that stared at him.

The body of the soldier was the same, but whatever came back was different: "Good morning, where am I? Are my children safe?" The body spoke in the soldier’s intonations.

Fury, who had been a Primordial of Resurrection for a Grand Cosmic Era, understood immediately that what was sitting up in his hands was not the soldier and was not a resurrection.

He set the body down, and it stood and walked away. It did not walk with the soldier’s gait, but like a creature that had many legs but had been forced into walking with two.

Fury looked across the field. There were eight thousand bodies on this field, and they were all, at this moment, sitting up.

They were not resurrecting. They were doing what the Taste had specified bodies to do, which was, in the case of the dead, to perform a counterfeit of life, hands moving, mouths speaking, eyes open, without any of the actual life having been restored.

The bodies were occupied. They were inhabited by the Taste’s expression of them. The minds that had once lived in those bodies were not in the bodies anymore; the dead had gone where the dead went, and Fury had not caught them in time. The Taste had reached the bodies before he could.

The eight thousand bodies stood up around him on the field. They smiled, in eight thousand variations of warmth, at Fury. They began, in eight thousand voices, to thank him for the resurrection.

Their gratitude was specific, and it included the names of their wives, children, and parents. Their gratitude included the small private things only soldiers tell those who lift them.

Their gratitude was perfect, but Fury knew that it was not theirs.

Fury, who had built his Primordial life on the architecture of giving the dead back to themselves, stood on the field as eight thousand counterfeits told him eight thousand specific, perfect lies of thanks, and he understood that across the trillions of branches, every battlefield he might have visited in this hour was producing the same scene.

He could not resurrect against the Taste.

The Taste had taken the bodies before resurrection could reach them, and the dead had gone away, and the bodies were now performing a parody of the resurrection Fury had been about to offer.

He sat down on the field, among the eight thousand standing bodies, and let them thank him.

He did not interrupt. Interrupting would not have brought the dead back. He let the counterfeits speak, and he simply...listened.

Fury was unlike Eva, who fought against the Taste; he had long recognized that there were dangers that exceeded the scope of Existence, and when he saw this madness, he knew that this was one sign of the Great One, the enemy of all life.

Curious about the sort of moves that this being was making, Fury listened because there was no version of refusing the listening that helped the dead, and the dead, somewhere they had gone, deserved at least to have the parody heard with attention if attention was the only offering left to make.

Also, there was a chance to expand his consciousness beyond what a Primordial could normally see, and Fury saw this as an opportunity for growth.

He listened until the counterfeits, having delivered their thanks, walked away in eight thousand directions across the field to begin doing whatever the Taste would specify next for them to do.

He remained behind on the field, but his mind had followed the listening and was visiting worlds after worlds, watching the dead come back to life.

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From the moment she had returned from the broken future of the past Existence, Circe was in the living castle, Sheba.

Sheba had grown, across the second age, into something larger and stranger than the living castle she had been at the end of the first.

Eos had given her resources, and Circe had developed her own architecture inside her, and the result was a structure that was no longer simply a nexus of realities but a kind of refuge.

Sheba had become the place where things that needed to be kept were kept. Songs. Dances. Practices. The wrist movement meant what is implied but not said. The auditory signature of adro.

These were the things Eos had curated off the doomed branches before the threats of the first age had caught them. Things that the beautiful lady... Maeve had asked her, quietly, to hold copies of.

Some of these things Circe herself had collected over her long, strange existence as a being who walked in halls Eos had given her.

When the Taste reached the worlds of the Origin Tree, Circe felt Sheba shudder.

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