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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5592: All Of Us Are Slaves!
Chapter 5592: All Of Us Are Slaves!
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<THE Creature>The deepest domain of THE Ghor-VazHAL no longer had a floor.
The lakes of blood had been thrown out of their beds. The tower-arteries lay snapped and draining across miles of churned meat and shattered stone, and the vaulted dark above had been torn open in long strips through which the veins of the deeper structure hung loose and dripping, and through all of it drifted the debris of a battle between two things that did not know how to stop!
On one side of the ruin, THE Creature breathed heavily.
He was carrying unfathomably heavy wounds. His obsidian frame had been opened from shoulder to hip, his body nearly split in half along a diagonal of ruin, held together by weavings of white-gold and black that knitted with terrible slowness, and one arm hung wrong, and his breath came in long dragging pulls, each one a payment he counted out and made!
And on the other end of the ruin lay the Primeval One.
The colossus was torn apart. Whole colonies of Gu Lifeforms had been ripped out of its titan flesh and lay scattered and dead in drifts around it, and its vast stomach had been opened to the dark, its contents spilling out in a slow tide, and from that tide, the remnants of its remaining weavings of existence rose constantly into the air, thread after glimmering thread, the substance of an ancient life leaking out with nowhere left to be kept.
It was dying. It knew it was dying. And so, in the way of old things, it talked!
"Why." The voice came out of the ruined titan wet and heavy. "Of all the vileness in existence... why did you come here, to kill me? There are things out there that unmake whole Dimensions for the taste of it. There are things that wear bodies the way you wear wounds. There are sentences walking around with bloodlines, little bearer, and hungers older than me. So much wrong. So much vile. And you spent your time... on me."
THE Creature looked at it across the ruin, and did not move yet!
"You were simply the weight in front of me," he said.
The Primeval One laughed wetly at that, and more of its weavings tore loose with the laughing.
"Do you even know what I built here? The Farms fed things you have never stood close enough to smell. I raised crops of lifeforms across whole Ages, kept them fat, kept them breeding, and the harvest was never even mi..." It stopped itself, slow and deliberate, and its murky obsidian eyes glinted. "Ah, it doesn’t even matter. But I built immensity!"
THE Creature’s voice stayed flat. "I know what you built. I walked through it for an hour. Vein-tunnels full of vileness"
"I built what I needed to LIVE!" The titan’s ruined bulk heaved. "You do not know what was done to me! What I was before, what was taken, what I crawled up from! When everything is taken from a thing, the thing takes! That is the oldest law there is!"
And here, THE Creature rose slightly on his ruined frame, and his voice came down with a tyrannical weight that made the leaking threads of the dying Primeval shiver in the air!
"Regardless of what happened to you... you did not have to resort to draining the lives of countless others. Existence is vast. It is so vast, and it is filled with so many means, so many roads, so many ways for a wronged thing to rise. And out of all of them, it only means one thing that you chose this one. You took the easy route." His breath dragged, and he continued through it.
"Your kind of existence, the ones who only ever seek the easy ways out... you get nowhere. You sit in your farms and your temples and your hoards, fat and ancient and NOWHERE. Do what is harder! Chase adversity. Bear what others set down. And maybe... maybe you might just stand at the peak of existence, as a Great Ruler."
For a moment, the ruin was quiet.
And then the Primeval One laughed!
It was a real laugh, rolling and wet and delighted, blood and weavings spilling out of it together as its existence continued to fade, and it laughed until the laughing tore something further inside it, and it kept laughing anyway!
"Haha! Is THAT what you are chasing? A Great Ruler? BAHAHA! You dumb motherfucker!" Its murky eyes fixed on him, bright with dying mirth.
"You will never get anywhere unless you are suckling at the feet of Those Who Remain, or others like them! There is no peak, there is only a longer table, and every seat at it is bought! You will never be a ruler... as much as you will be a slave. In existence... all of us are slaves..."
THE Creature rose.
His nearly split body drew itself up out of the ruin, wounds still open, one arm still wrong, and he did not answer the dying thing with words!
THE Pantheon of All Existence unfurled!
It had no shape, and it needed none, because it simply became the surroundings! The torn domain, the snapped arteries, the drifts of dead Gu, the vaulted broken dark, all of it turned in a single breath into HIM, and the Primeval One’s fading eyes widened as it understood, far too late, that it was no longer lying in a battlefield.
It was lying inside its bearer.
And the surroundings constricted.
The whole domain drew inward in one slow, total motion, existence folding shut around the torn colossus from every direction at once, and THE Creature devoured the Primeval One completely, flesh and Gu and stomach-tide and every last leaking thread of its ancient weavings, drawing all of it down into the depths of what he was until the laughter thinned, and thinned, and was gone, and nothing of the farmer of THE Ghor-Vazhal remained anywhere in existence at all!
Silence settled over a domain that was, once more, only a domain.
And in the center of it stood THE Creature.
He stood grandly amid the ruin he had made and survived, split-bodied and unbowed, obsidian frame threaded with slow-knitting white-gold, his presense filling the vaulted dark from wall to broken wall, and he let it fill, unhurried, the tally of one thousand complete behind him and the weight of a Primeval One settling into his depths!
Then he turned his head slightly, toward the place where he carried what he carried.
"Give me my damn rewards."
...!
And the statue smiled brutally.
He felt it before he saw it, the wide slow satisfaction spreading across a blank stone face, and then, for the first time in all the time he had borne it, the statue MOVED for him!
The seated colossus raised its worn gray hands, and placed them upon its own chest.
And invisible rivers of white authority began to flow!
They came down out of nowhere that any sense could name, silent and vast, pouring into the stone figure from every direction at once, gathering in its chest beneath its layered hands, and then they turned, and began flowing with immensity into the body of THE Creature, white beyond white, old beyond old, flooding into his split frame and his ruined arm and the depths where a Primeval One was still settling...!
The white rivers poured gloriously.
They poured through the hands of the statue and into the split body of THE Creature in endless silent volumes, an authority he had not even known existed before this moment, and it was remaking the weavings of what he was! His torn frame drank it and knitted at a pace his own weavings had never managed. His Intent was being fortified in an unfathomable manner, its claim reinforced along every thread as though each thread were being rewoven with a second, whiter strand beneath it!
And his Pantheon, the shapeless entirety of him that became its surroundings, grew heavier and steadier and MORE, the way ground grows more when bedrock is poured beneath it!
What was this authority? Where had it flowed from, all this time, that Existence itself had never once felt it pass?
He asked nothing aloud. He drank, and endured, and counted.
And the statue spoke.
|I knew you could overcome even this adversity.|
A pause, wide and pleased.
|Do you want to listen to a story, O Creature?|
THE Creature remained silent.
He knew this thing by now. It had not asked a question. It had announced an intention, dressed politely, and whether he answered or not, the statue would continue talking. This thing loved talking.
He felt the statue smile devilishly across its blank stone face, its worn hands still layered on its chest, still gathering the brilliant white rivers and channeling them down into his body, and it began to talk.
|An unknown number of Ages ago, there was a lifeform.|
|It had a unique origin, and nothing in it was given, for it arose in the manner of the earliest things. It walked among the young kinds of existence, and it did a strange thing with its endless span. It carried for them.|
|Wherever it walked, it took up what was crushing others. The grief of the bereaved. The ruin of the broken. The adversity that falls on the small without ever asking their leave. It took these things up onto itself, and bore them, and the lands around its walking grew stable, and calm, and kind, and civilizations rose in the shadow of its bearing the way grass rises in the shadow of a mountain. The young kinds had a thousand names for it, and every name meant the same thing. The one who stood between.|
The rivers poured on. THE Creature listened.
|Now. In that same span of Ages, there were also the speakers.|
|You know them. Those Who Remain. They did not carry, and they did not walk. They spoke, and their sentances settled over existence like weather, arranging what would be, binding what would serve, and existence bent itself around their words because that was the order of things, and order held.|
|And there came a day when one of the speakers prepared a great sentence. They had a fascination of Mounts, you see. Durable ones. Bred ones. A young kind would be taken, and Causes would be seated into their living by the speakers’ own hands, and that kind would carry burdens across existence forever because it would be spoken so.|
...!
THE Creature’s eyes opened slightly in the flowing white.
Bearers? Causes? It was talking about the Steeds in THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension?
|And the lifeform who carried, who had never once in all its span opposed anything, walked to the place of one of Those Who Remain, and stood between, one last time. It said the Mounts should choose their burdens, as all bearers must, or the bearing would rot into suffering. It said this plainly, and without armies, believing, in the way of things that are good, that being right would be enough.|
Who...was the lifeform? What was it called. What happened at the place of speaking?
THE Creature felt the invitation hang in the white-flooded dark to ask, and he refused it as he felt the stone face’s smile deepen.
|It did not win.|
|Those Who Remain do not move, O Creature. You know this. They did not move then, either. And that lifeform died all the same, and the manner of its death is not part of tonight’s story. The sentence was spoken. The Mount was seated, and bred, and burdened, and you have met what their line became. And the lands that had grown calm in the lifeform’s shadow fell back into the weather of the speakers’ words, and the lifeform’s thousand names were forgotten by everyone who had shouted them. And that lifeform who had helped so many...was forgotten by even those it helped.|
|I tell you this because...Just because one wants to do good does not mean one will win. Existence does not favor good, and it does not favor evil. Existence favors stability. Those who spread misery and pain and instability across it may find adversity stacking against them, higher and harder than against others, this is true, and it is why the farmer you just devoured spent his last Age dying in a hole. But one who stands against the order of things, however good the standing... creates instability too. And existence weighed the one who stood between, and the speakers who held the order, and it chose the order. It may choose so again.|
The hands pressed deeper into the stone chest, and the rivers of white surged.
|You have won now. Your tally is paid, and your reward flows, and a Primeval One sits in your depths. But...your next weight will not be a single vile Primeval Lifeform, half-dead in a farm of its own filth. It will be an entire group of them. Very much alive and not already dying. Fat with Ages and fond of the order exactly as it stands.|
|So. Will you continue to try and balance the scales?|
The white rivers rose through THE Creature as the question settled, flooding up through his knitted chest, up through his fortified Intent, up into his skull, and when he lifted his gaze to the dark, his eyes had begun to fill with swirling rivers of white, the unknown authority turning slowly through them in currents that did not belong to any framework he had ever been offered!
And his answer came out cold.
"Whether one or many does not matter. What needs to fall before me... will fall before me."
...!
He was confident.
Existence... had to be confident!
