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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5594: Salvation! II
Chapter 5594: Salvation! II
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How deeply should he worry about Those Who Remain?Noah turned the question over once. To fear was human.
He had learned that lesson again! Fear was a map that he simply needed to navigate as on the other side of fear...was boundless glory!
He was afraid, correctly. And he would still move! That had always been the immensity of being human, feeling everything, and going forward anyway!
And beneath the fear sat something warmer and greedier, because a Descendant of Those Who Remain stood at speaking distance offering open access to his own existence, and Noah was so, so curious about what such a being held within!
The foamy dark had gone very quiet. Nine clones hung in a loose ring around the throne-saddle, and the last Steed stood trembling beneath its Jarl with its head lowered, and the silence stretched until it had a weight of its own.
Then Noah spoke.
"I can cure you."
The Jarl’s eyes pulsed audibly in the dark as this...was all it wanted! It wanted to be cured! It wanted to live...no matter what.
"But I’ll need access to your existence," Noah continued. "All of it. Opened to me, unresisting. Nothing between my work...and what you are."
Skallagrim stared at him across the dark for a long moment.
"Do you know what it is," he said quietly, "to spend a thousand years planning the possibility of a single cure?"
"...." Noah gazed out wordlessly.
"I built that plan the way other beings build empires. I watched Hvitrmarr. I waited on her. I whipped eight of my own steeds to death crossing the dark after the trail of it." His hands opened slowly on the chains.
"And now I sit at the end of everything, at the end of my life, waiting for that cure. I cannot really say no, can I? But I can watch and observe as if there is any trickery...I have no qualms taking both of us down. You may not know, but I...am immense."
HUUM!
"Do what needs to be done." Skallagrim leaned back on his throne-saddle and spread his arms wide, chest bared to the dark, in the oldest gesture there was.
The gesture said...come!
The heaviness of that moment settled over the foamy black! A Cursed Descendant, terror of the Krazhor-Nul, a being wearing a VERITAS of nineteen, sitting open-handed and undefended before the thing he had once hunted, and the ring of clones tightened around him, slow and wide, crowns of blood turning!
Below the throne, the last Steed shifted, and its small voice came up through the chains.
"J-Jarl... are we truly doing this...?The Great Father asked for information. We cannot go against...!"
"Quiet, little steed." There was almost gentleness in it. "We are already done doing everything else as this...will be a salvation I grasp myself. Father has watched us die for Eons. Sometimes, you need to move yourself. "
Noah raised a hand, and his blood answered.
Drops rose around the clones in their dozens, and then they changed! Each drop drew itself long and thin, crimson gold flowing into edges, stellar blue running down each spine, and where a rain of detonations had once hung above a Woe Culture, there now hung a surgeon’s array of slender crimson blades!
"Don’t move," Noah said. "However deep I go. A tremble in the wrong place becomes a grave...."
The Jarl closed his eyes and said nothing as Noah felt the grand aura of immensity of being this close to a Cursed Descendant!
If he was not burning with Provenance Essence...he may have felt suffocation of royalty and majesty!
But as he was now...he only felt a...lower kind of regality as his regality far exceeded a Descendant.
The blades descended, and began to cut a Cursed Descendant open.
They worked in silence, parting rotted skin and fissured frame in exact lines, folding the Jarl’s chest open to the dark the way Noah had once folded his own, and Skallagrim endured it awake and unflinching, rotten breath dragging through his teeth, and the dark pressed in around the work, and the Steed below did not dare to breathe!
And as Noah’s senses poured into the opened existence, the Jarl surprisingly talked, because dying men at the edge of salvation cannot sit inside a silence that long.
"While you work... let a dying man ask something."
"Ask what?"
"Who... are you? Really." His voice came out low and labored. "I’ve turned you over in my mind since the Krazhor-Nul. I turned you over harder after you almost vanished out of every sense I own, and even here, I could barely perceive you..."
"Does it matter who I am?"
"It matters." The shining eyes cracked open. "Look at where your hands are, Cure-Giver. You are inside a Descendant of THE Sleepless Fiend, unmaking a working of one of Those Who Remain, while their attention gathers on your name. Nothing weak would do that. Nothing without history behind it would even dream to. So what are you? A Descendant of some other line, raised wild where no one could collar you? Something older?"
A pause, and quieter: "What stands behind you... that your hands do not shake while you defile the sentance of one of Those Who Remain?"
Noah did not look up from the work. "Nothing stands behind me."
"I am human, and I stand behind everything that is mine." His blades turned, and cut deeper!
"..."
The Jarl was silent for a long moment after that, opened to the dark, bleeding into the black.
"A human," he repeated at last, softly, and there was no mockery in it at all. "Existence has a vile sense of humor."
WAA!
And what Noah found inside Jarl Skallagrim was unlike anything he had ever opened!
There were... no Causes. He had half-expected the architecture of the Steeds, organs seated with ancient suns, and there was none of it! Where Hvitrmarr’s structure had been anatomy, the inner existence of a Descendant was WRITING!
Through the whole of the Jarl, through frame and weavings and depths, there ran a single unbroken line of script, dense and dark and terribly old, written in an authority Noah could not read, and it did not begin at Skallagrim’s birth!
It ran backward out of him, out of his existence entirely, threading away into distances Noah’s senses could not follow, through father and father and father, one continuous written thing stretching all the way back to the hand that had designed the line and mixed them with many other things!
A sentence with a bloodline. Ulf had mentiomed something close to this!
And here it was, literal, a lineage that was one long sentence written across generations, and Jarl Skallagrim was simply its current clause!
’So this is what a Descendant is...’
And wound through that clause, black and gnawing, was the curse.
It did not sit anywhere. It had no seat to sit in! It was written INTO the line itself, a counter-writing braided through the lineage-script along its whole visible length, annotation upon annotation of ending, and Noah traced the remaining unwritten span of Skallagrim’s clause and felt his expression harden, because the span was short. Months. This being had a matter of months to live!
Months, on such a terrifyingly powerful existence, a VERITAS of nineteen with its conclusion already drafted!
And then Noah saw the third thing, and his eyes narrowed in the dark.
Coiling WITH the curse, braided through the black counter-writing along every length of it, ran rivers of white.
THE Argent Loom!
Thin threads of that stellar white authority, the same rivers that flowed through his Realm and his Dimension and the whole higher weave of nature, wound intimately through the curse of a Descendant, white through black through the written line, and question after question stacked up behind Noah’s eyes!
Why was the Loom braided into a curse of Those Who Remain? Did the speakers work the loomlight when they wrote their sentances? Had the curse captured the rivers, or had the rivers been the ink all along?
The Woe Culture utilized the Argent Loom. And now it coiled inside the oldest curse he had ever opened.
Hvitrmarr had carried her curse in her Causes, and her Causes in her organs, and he had cured her by replacing anatomy. But Skallagrim had no Causes. There was no seat to empty, no organ to regrow, no anchor to starve! The curse was applied directly to who he was. To the written line. To his lineage!
So for Noah to cure him... he would have to reach into the sentence of THE Sleepless Fiend itself, and mess with, and alter, the lineage of a Descendant, fully!
