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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5732: That Uncrossable Line!
Chapter 5732: That Uncrossable Line!
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<A Record Lost In Shattered Scales>An unknown number of years ago, they brought Vakochev to a grandmother half-dead.
The grandmother had no name that mattered to the grand powers and no Provenance worth their notice, only a small warm house at the quiet edge of a dying Observable Existence and a very long memory.
She had known the maker of the Scales since before he was grand, back when he was only a stubborn boy in a tribe near a mountain- when she called him Tokoloshe.
And so when they laid the ruined thing that had been Vakochev across her table and left, leaking Causes and Dimensionality from a hundred wounds that should each have killed him, she was not surprised.
She put water on to boil. She had mended him before. She would likely mend him again, if he was foolish enough to keep living the way he lived.
He had gone against The Vheldrani. A Provenance Lineage older than most laws, a bloodline so deep and so terrible it had pushed two of its own children up past the threshold and out into the Dimensional Skies.
Two Immense Ones grown from a single tree, and the tree still standing, still proud, still certain that a thing which had birthed two of the Immense was a thing that answered to no one.
Vakochev had walked up to that tree and put his fist through it anyway.
For his trouble he had most of his existence hanging out of him, and he lay on her table while she worked and did not complain.
He had learned long ago that she had no patience for the complaints of people who had chosen their own wounds.
"Why," she said, when the bleeding had slowed.
She seemed...tired, like someone who has asked a beloved fool the same question across an Age. "Two of that Lineage sit in a place we cannot see. You knew it before you went. You knew what backed them. And you went anyway. So...why?"
He was quiet for a while. She thought he had passed out.
Then he replied.
"There is a practice in their lesser holdings. In the small Observable Existences they own but do not bother to rule, where the lives are short and the Causes are thin. When one of the Vheldrani children nears the threshold, when it is close to becoming what its parents already are, it needs to be fed. Not food but...Foundation. So they go down into one of those small holdings, and they take the newborns. The very newest. The ones a day into breathing, before a life has had time to become a life, because a Cause that has not yet been spent is the purest thing there is to eat."
The grandmother’s hands did not stop moving over his wounds, but they slowed.
"They harvest them," Vakochev said. "They empty a whole Observable Existence of its first breaths and they render them down into a broth of unspent beginnings, and they feed it to a child of their bloodline so that child can climb a little faster. The parents who wake to find every cradle in their world gone cold on the same morning are told nothing, because you do not explain rules to peasants. I saw the cradles. I counted them until I could not count anymore, and then I went and found the tree that ate them."
"And that is your business how?" she said, though her voice had changed. "You did not know those infants. You never could have. They are gone now, every last one, regardless of anything you did."
"They are," he agreed.
"Then you nearly died for nothing. For strangers. For ash. Against a Lineage that could unmake you between two breaths and felt nothing while doing it, because they are so far above you that your dying is nothing to them." She wrung the cloth out ths was bloody red in color.
"The Vheldrani do not believe your right and wrong apply to them. By every measure that exists, they are correct. A being that high is not judged by the rules of the low. Nothing judges them. There is no one left up there to do it."
"I know," Vakochev said.
"Then why?"
And he turned his head on her table, and he looked at the old woman who had mended him more times than either of them could count.
"Because a rule that only binds the weak is not a rule," he said. "It is a leash. They tell the low that right and wrong are real, and they build their whole order on the low believing it, and then they step over the line themselves whenever it suits them. They want the leash on everyone below and no collar on themselves. And the moment I decide their height excuses them, I have agreed with them. I have said the line is real for me and not for them. I have put on the collar and handed them the leash myself."
He breathed heavily!
He was quiet a moment, and when he went on.
"They think it ends when the cradles go cold. They took the first breaths, they fed the broth to their child, and they walked away certain the thing was closed. The small ones are ash, and ash forgets, so the account is settled."
His ruined hand closed slowly on the edge of her table.
"It does not end. Those parents will say the names of their children when this holding has rotted down to dust. They will say them when the star that lit their world has gone dark and cold. And when the last light anywhere in existence gutters out, when there is no one left in all of creation to hear it, some small ruined thing will still be floating alone in the black, saying a name into the dark that took everything, and the Vheldrani will have forgotten an Age ago that a name was ever theirs to take."
"That is what they actually did, Grandmother. Not a killing. A killing ends. They opened a wound with no bottom, one that keeps being inflicted long after everyone who inflicted it has gone home to eat. And they will never feel the weight of it, because the whole of their order is built so that the ones on top never have to."
He breathed gloriously!
"They are not above right and wrong. Nobody is. They are just tall enough that no one has told them no. So I told them no. That is all I did. I told two of the Immense no, out loud, with my fist, and they will remember for the rest of their long lives that a thing beneath them said it."
WAA!
The grandmother said nothing for a long moment.
Then she went and took the water off the boil, because it was ready, and she made him tea he was in no condition to drink!
"You will die of this someday," she said.
"I know," said THE Maker of the Scales.
"Good," she said as she smiled with quintessential pride. "If ever it happens, just know that I...am endlessly proud of you. And as always...Persevere. In the face of the impossible, Persevere. In the face of the unthinkable, Persevere!"
...!
