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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5614: Mistakes!
Chapter 5614: Mistakes!
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<Existential Interlude- Mistakes>Nobody knows how long ago it was.
The record itself does not claim a time. It only claims that it happened, in the age when Those Who Remain still spoke often, and existence was still young enough to listen closely.
One of Those Who Remain had many Descendants.
His name is not written as the record calls him only the Father, and it calls his youngest Descendant Alvarr, and it says that Alvarr was born restless.
One day, Alvarr came before the Father and said, "Father, I wish to prove myself to you. Give me a quest."
The Father considered him for a long time. Then he said:
"Go out into existence, and bring me back a thing I do not have."
Alvarr bowed, and left that same instant!
This was the first mistake, and it was the mistake of haste.
Alvarr crossed a hundred Dimensions before it occured to him that he had never asked what the thing was. What did his Father lack? What could a being lack, when existence agreed with almost every one of his words? He did not know! He had been so eager to begin that he had run past the beginning entirely, and now an Age had been spent, and all of it was wandering!
He returned to his Father empty handed and ashamed, and he waited to be punished, and he waited a long time as his father was entertaining himself with one of THE First Lifeforms at that time for a whole millennium.
After waiting for his punishment in that millennium...
The Father did not punish him.
"Why would I punish a teacher?" the Father said. "Your mistake has just taught you what nothing else could have. You mistook motion for progress. All the living do this once. Most of them do it forever. Now you will not. Go again."
The second mistake was the mistake of the mirror.
Alvarr went out and gathered treasure. He took the hearts of dead Dimensions and the crowns of drowned kings, rivers of authority and seeds of unborn Observable Existences, everything that made his own chest burn with wanting, and he piled it before his Father in a heap that bent the light.
The Father looked at the heap, and then at his son.
"You have brought me everything YOU desire," he said. "You looked into Existence and saw only your own face in it. This is the mistake of the mirror, and every living thing commits it: to give others what we ourselves want, and call it generosity. Do not be ashamed. Be corrected. To find what another lacks, you must first put down the mirror and listen. Go again."
And so the Descendant went on and commited another mistake!
The third mistake was the mistake of pride.
Alvarr resolved to listen, and so he sought out the oldest and grandest beings in existence, Primeval things and sovereign things and Provenance Lifeforms, and he asked them what a being such as his Father could lack. They gave him grand answers, and every answer was wrong.
At the edge of a small Observable Existence, a farmer who was nothing at all offered him directions, and Alvarr did not stop, because what could nothing at all know?
He wandered another Age. When he finally passed that way again, humbled and worn, he stopped at the same field, and the farmer gave him the same directions, and they were true ones.
When he told his Father, the Father nodded slowly.
"Pride is the worst of the mistakes," he said, "not because it is the largest, but because it is the jailer of all the others. Every mistake can be cured by asking. Pride is the mistake that forbids asking. A being who cannot ask can only repeat. Remember the farmer. Go again."
And he went on!
The fourth mistake was the mistake of the closed hand.
Following the farmer’s directions, Alvarr came upon a wonder: a dying beast of the old dark, and cradled in its fading coils, a thing that existed nowhere else, offered freely to whoever would take it before the beast’s last breath.
And Alvarr hesitated.
Was it a trick? Was it worthy? Was he? He weighed, and he doubted, and he waited to be certain, and while he waited, the beast breathed its last, and the wonder went out with it, and no power in all existence could light it again.
"I made no move at all," he told his Father, bitter. "How can doing nothing be a mistake?"
"Because hesitation is not the absence of a choice," the Father said. "It is a choice wearing the mask of caution. The closed hand believes it is keeping itself safe. It is only keeping itself empty. Some doors open once, my son. You will grieve this one for a long time, and the grieving is also the learning. Go again."
And this fucker went on to commit yet another mistake.
The fifth mistake...was the mistake of the buried wound.
For in his wanderings Alvarr had erred against a companion, a small betrayal, committed in a weak hour, and rather than confess it, he had hidden it, and told himself it was too small to matter.
But a hidden mistake is a planted one!
It grew in the dark. The small betrayal became a distance, and the distance became a silence, and the silence became a parting, and by the time Alvarr understood what he had buried, the companion was gone beyond finding, carrying a wound with no name on it.
He confessed it to his Father last of all, and his voice failed him twice in the telling.
"Now you know the accounting every liar learns too late," the Father said. "A mistake confessed is half repaired. A mistake hidden compounds. Shame promises to protect you from the cost of your errors, and instead it collects interest on them. Bury nothing, my son. The buried does not rot. It grows. Go again."
Finally, lastly, he commited his last mistake.
The sixth mistake was the mistake of the ended story.
Alvarr did not go again.
He sat down at the rim of a dead Dimension, and he counted his failures, one Age of haste, one Age of mirrors, pride, an empty hand, a buried wound and its silense, and he concluded that he was a being MADE of mistakes, and that a being made of mistakes could bring his Father nothing, and that the quest was over because he was over.
He sat there for a long time. Long enough that the dust of the dead Dimension began to know him.
And at last, because there was nothing else left to do, he stood up anyway, and walked home to say the failure aloud rather than let it also become a buried thing.
He came before his Father with his hands open and empty.
"I have failed the quest," Alvarr said. "I searched every reach of existence, and I found nothing you lack. I bring you nothing. Only my mistakes."
There was a long silence!
And then the Father did something the record insists upon, though it strains believing. He leaned forward, and his ancient existence trembled, and he said:
"Say that last part again."
"...I bring you only my mistakes."
"Then the quest is complete," the Father said. "You have brought me the one thing I do not have."
BOOM!
Alvarr stared at him, uncomprehending, and the Father spoke on, and the record keeps his words whole:
"I am one of Those Who Remain. When I speak, existence is supposed to agree. I have never reached for a thing and missed it. And so I have never once, in all the reaches of my existence... learned anything. A mistake is a teacher that existence sends for free, and no teacher has ever been permitted to reach me!"
And so it was, the record says, that every evening for an Age, a being whom existence obeyed sat quietly in the dark and was taught by his own child, hungering after the one wealth he could never mint!
The record ends with three sayings.
To err is to be alive. Stones are flawless, and they are stones.
A mistake is only a failure if it is the last one you consult.
And the young make mistakes and become old. The old make mistakes and become wise. The wise make mistakes and become stories, and the stories go on erring in the mouths of everyone who retells them, and this too is how the living remain alive.
But not all of Those Who Remain listened the way this Father listened. Some paint an entirely different picture that would make one question whether Those Who Remain were so grand and wise.
Because some believe Those Who Remain are filled with faults, and no more grander than any other lifeform out there.
That is another story.
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
It was human to make mistakes.
Noah Osmont was human.
So he made a mistake!
It did not look grand when he made it. Mistakes rarely do. His mistake was only this: he pulled all nine of his clones out of THE Ymnaros and into THE Infiniverse, to stand among his people, to place eighteen hundred beginnings into the right hands, to watch his daughter’s face as she held nine seeds of her own. A father’s errand. A ruler’s errand. A few hours of work inside his own home!
And it did not seem like anything at all!
Damodred was out there. Hvitrmarr was out there, a queen who had broken her own chains. Anaximander was out there, and nothing in existence had ever managed to file him. Skallagrim stood guard at the very door with a Steed at his side and all twenty of Attributes in his frame. Four of the mightiest beings Noah had ever gathered, watching a Dimension at peace, and if anything happened, anything at all, he could be there in a short period of time.
Or so he thought!
It arrived in the span of a nanosecond.
Noah was standing in the golden light of his mother’s realm with Tesseracts turning around him in their slow orbit, and between one beat of his Heart and the next, the threads went dark!
Hvitrmarr’s thread, the Blood Duke’s bond of crimson gold running from his existence to hers, snuffed out between one instant and the next! Damodred’s presence, wrapped in his authority, gone! The weavings he had seated across the key figures of an entire Dimension, dozens of them, extinguished instsntly in a single silent moment, and through the one thread that remained, through Skallagrim’s Sovereign bond, strained taut and screaming, sensations poured into him that made his blood turn cold and then ignite!
Shackled!
Inhibited!
IMPRISONED!
His people! His guardians! Beings he had healed and freed and seated with his own hands, silenced across gigaparsecs in less time than a thought takes to finish, and something in him went very still and very quiet, and then everything in him that was not still and not quiet stood up at once!
Fury rolled off his body as the golden fields bent flat around him!
Sanguine light erupted around his body as from different direction, nine crowns of blood tore themselves away, and his hands were already moving, and in the distance, along the cliff above the radiant river...
Thalia Vasiliou frowned.
She was standing beside his mother with a fishing line still in her hand, and her head had turned upward, toward the skies of THE Infiniverse, toward the outside, exactly toward the place where his threads had died, and her narrowed eyes seemed to reach through his home’s endless blue to the wound beyond it!
And her thought arrived in his mind, low and level and grim.
’This force? This early?’
His racing paused on those words!
’Those are particularly troublesome ones, and their backing is unfathomably deep. It would hurt me a great deal to give you any information about them. So you may have to put in a bit of work with these ones yourself. Try any way you can to obtain information about them, and...’
The pause stretched!
’...I am sorry for any pain of your people they and you are about to have.’
...!
She said such heavy words, and Noah did not answer her, because there was nothing to answer with, and because he was already gone!
He set off!
His clone came to a stop in the crossing-dark outside THE Ymnaros, and stood opposite the leader of those who had attacked his Dimension and his people!
She stood with her back to a half-collared Sovereign wrapped in hundreds of white blades. A plain woman in plain garments, dark hair bound back, pale eyes, no authority anywhere on her at all, and at her feet, chained and pinned and headless, lay the corpse of a small Steed that had been free for less than a single day!
And she looked into the cold rage of his manifestation without a flicker, and told him what she wanted.
Him!
His body, delivered to her hands, in exchange for every chained and caged and inhibited existence his mistake had left behind!
It was human to make mistakes.
Noah was human.
And outside THE Ymnaros, in the crossing-dark, the price of his was standing in front of him with pale, patient eyes, waiting to be paid!
