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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5794: Myths and Legends!
Chapter 5794: Myths and Legends!
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<THE Writer of Mythos>The page was white before her, and then it was not as words appeared.
I will die.
She tore it away. Beneath it lay another page, just as white, and she set her pen to it with great care, meaning to write something else entirely. A river, perhaps. A mountain. A girl walking home in the rain. Anything at all.
And yet...
I will die.
She tore that one away too!
The floor around her desk was deep in pages. Hundreds of them, thousands, drifting in soft white banks against the legs of her chair, and every one of them said the same three words in the same neat hand. Her hand. She had not meant to write a single one of them!
She sat at the heart of an Existential Immense Domain, and it was not hers. It was far too grand to be hers. It was a library that had no walls, only shelves, shelves that climbed up past the reach of any sight and went on climbing, carved from a dark and polished wood that had never grown on any tree.
Every shelf was packed with books, and every book was a life, and every life was written in ink. Rivers of that ink ran slow and black through the air between the shelves, curling and settling, never spilling a drop. The whole place smelled of old paper and of rain on stone. There was no ceiling. Far above, where a ceiling should have been, there was only a vast pale sky of blank parchment, and across it, even here, fell the snow.
This was the personal domain of an Immense One. THE MATRIARCH OF INK!
Her mother.
The Writer of Mythos dipped her pen again. The ink came up black and shining. She held it over a fresh page for a long time, and she thought, very hard, of a river in a green valley in spring.
And yet..
I will die.
...!
She set the pen down. Her hand was shaking!
"Since the snow began to fall," she said quietly, to the shelves, to the ink, to the endless pale sky, "this has been the only Mythos of my existence. The only one. Before, I could write anything. A war and its ending. A kingdom and its fall. My own next breath, if I wished, and my Narrative would agree to it. Now my Narrative has only one thing left to say to me, and it will not stop saying it."
She looked down at the banks of white pages drifting around her ankles.
"It tells me I will die. Not in some far Age, not someday. Soon. And no matter what I write, however I try to write around it, this one line is always what comes out of the pen."
Her voice caught, just slightly. "And it tells me who. It will be existence itself that kills me. Not an enemy, not a curse. Existence."
She laughed, and there was no humor in it. "Isn’t that cruel, Mother? That the Mythos I am most certain of is the one I most want to be wrong?"
The ink in the air went very still!
Then the whole domain seemed to lean toward her, as a room leans toward the one who owns it, and the pale sky above rippled like a page being turned.
|THE MATRIARCH OF INK speaks.|
|"Nothing will collapse you. Nothing will take you from me."|
|"If existence itself comes calling, my ink will write it a different ending. I have written endings for things far older than existence’s patience."|
The rivers of ink curled close around the desk, slow and protective.
|"And you are THE Writer of Mythos, are you not? Then write a different ending. Write a Mythos in which, whatever comes, you do not die."|
|"Your next Mythos is your Root of Immensity. Finish it. Once you have, I will take you to THE Legacy of THE Fraternity. I have a few friends there, at least."|
The Writer of Mythos wiped her eyes with the back of her ink-stained hand.
"Why not THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity?" she asked. "The few weavings of Mythos I have ever caught about Legacies all say it is one of the grandest there is. Lucy founded it. THE Acharya."
|"THE Acharya is not the only grand Lifeform ever to rise in existence and found a Legacy,"| said THE MATRIARCH OF INK. |"She was one of the most powerful, certainly. But the grandest Legacy is not always the most fitting one. There are things in THE Legacy of THE Fraternity you can obtain that will suit you far better than anything in hers."|
The ink settled.
|"But put all of that aside for now. Write your Mythos. Write your Root. I will share my Immensity with you freely."|
|"You were born with a Root of Immensity already in you, and you refused it, because you wanted to earn one of your own. You have earned it. You have labored long enough. Now you need only claim what was always yours."|
|"It is time for you to ascend."|
...!
The Writer of Mythos was quiet for a moment.
Then she smiled. It was a glorious smile, bright and sure and a little fierce, the smile of a girl who has been told by the only voice in existence she has never once doubted that she is allowed to win.
She nodded!
There was no fresh page this time. Instead she pinned up her long dark hair with the pen, then drew it free again, turned it in her fingers, and set its nib against her own wrist, against her own skin, against her own existence!
And she began to write!
The ink flowed out of the pen and into her, bright and black and glittering, and the rivers of her mother’s ink rose up all around her in answer, pouring down through the endless shelves toward the little desk at the heart of the Immense Domain. The pale sky rippled from end to end, and the white pages on the floor lifted in a slow spiral around her chair.
Her pen moved, and a Mythos of her own Root began to take shape across her skin.
But somewhere at the very back of her mind, where the pen could not reach, a single line was still waiting. It had not gone anywhere. It simply sat there, patient and certain, in her own neat hand.
I will die.
—
<THE Creature>
There was nothing where their Observable Existence used to be.
It was not even emptiness, since emptiness was at least a kind of shape. This was undefinition, a vast murky foam of obsidian that went on in every direction, bubbling slowly, with no floor and no sky and no edge, as though existence had been scraped out of this place and nobody had ever bothered to fill it back in.
Once, there had been a home here. A small Observable Existence, the one where he had first opened his eyes, and Osmont was also born here, and Anaximander, and a great many others, all of them sprung from the same unremarkable corner of everything. THE Sealed One had taken it. Now there was only the foam!
THE Creature sat in the middle of it.
The snow fell here too. It fell everywhere now. But here it did something it did nowhere else. It did not settle on him or slide off him. It flowed into him, drifted in through his vast dark shoulders and out through his back, and around him in slow eddies, moving through his body exactly as it moved through the foam, as if there were no difference between the two. As if he were not sitting in this empty place at all, but were simply part of it.
As if he were one with existence!
He was titanic now, even for him as an invisible statue seemed to be fully layered unto him. His figure rose out of the obsidian foam like a mountain range with a man’s shape, wreathed in flames, white and obsidian, burning together and never mixng, the white in the black and the black in the white. And beneath the flames, simmering close against his skin, lay a Provenance that had no color at all. Neither clear nor blank, it was simply the color of existence before anyone had decided what color existence should be.
He raised one enormous hand and looked at it.
"What was established in the future," THE Creature said, "is bleeding into the present."
His voice was flat, unhurried, heavy as always.
"My Provenance of existence in the future is my Provenance of existence now. I brought it here." He turned the hand over, slowly. "But to do so, I crossed many bounds. Did things existence does not do. That...bore a cost."
He lowered his hand to his chest.
There was a crack there! It ran from his collarbone down toward his heart, jagged and faintly glowing, and through it, if anyone had been close enough to look, they would have seen something forming inside him. A Root. A Root of Immensity, and not of any one thing in particular, but of existence itself!
It was beautiful and it was vast and it was fractured, split through along a line that did not close, and every so often it flickered, unsteady, and when it did, the flames around THE Creature flared too high, and something moved across his flat, heavy face that was very nearly anger, or very nearly grief, before it settled again.
He sat with that for a while, in the foam and the snow.
Then, for the sake of stability, he opened his mouth.
"Anaximander," THE Creature said. "Come."
...!
One second later, his oldest friend was standing beside him in the undefinition, with his hands in his sleeves.
He looked exactly as he always had. White scholar’s robes, a little rumpled. Tousled hair. No authority on him at all, none whatsoever, and still the obsidian foam drew back from his feet as though it had remembered a rule it had forgotten. Only his eyes had changed.
They were older than they had been, far older, the eyes of a man who had spent a great deal of time in places where time behaved strangely and come back carrying some of it.
Anaximander smiled at THE Creature.
He did not say anything. He simply stepped closer and laid one hand on the titan’s vast shoulder.
The flames eased! The crack across THE Creature’s chest steadied its flickering glow, and the thing that had been moving across his face grew still.
"Big guy," Anaximander said gently. "Why does it seem that you did something so hasty?"
THE Creature was quiet a moment.
"Existence moves whether the rest of us move or not," he said. "It moved faster than I expected. So I had to catch up."
The white and obsidian flames turned slowly around him. "A Great Ruler cannot hang back while everything moves past him. I did what had to be done. Like existence, I bear what I must."
He looked down at the scholar beside him. "As do you, my friend."
...!
Anaximander said nothing to that. He only kept his hand where it was.
THE Creature regarded him for a long moment, through the drifting snow.
"Existence now, or existence years from now," he said. "It is still existence. Let me help an old friend. Let me bring your weavings from the future into the present."
Anaximander shook his head, still smiling a little.
"I don’t need anything right now," he said. "I’m good with where I’m at."
THE Creature looked at him.
He looked at his oldest friend in the whole of existence, the one who had come every time he was called, the one who had put a hand on his shoulder in a place where nothing else remained, and something in the vast, flat, heavy face shifted in a way it almost never did.
"I do not wish to be alone, Anaximander," THE Creature said.
The snow drifted through him.
"Existence is boundlessly lonely. Far too many things exist in it, and still one can feel desolate among all of them." The flames burned low and steady.
"There is much to be done. It would be grand if we could move as we used to. Together."
...!
Anaximander was quiet for a while.
Then he smiled, lightly and he sighed.
"Okay," he said. "I was thinking of relaxing for a bit, but..."
He tipped his head back and looked up at the snow falling out of the endless obsidian dark. "Those with power and the means to use it have a responsibility not to only relax. Alright. Alright."
HUUM!
With that, existence began to swirl!
The obsidian foam churned. The undefinition around them heaved and rolled, and out of the dark overhead, boundless storms of snow came cascading down, thicker than they had fallen anywhere, pouring over the two figures in the place where their home had been.
Anaximander raised a hand to shield his eyes.
THE Creature did not!
The snow poured down on him, and for the first time since he had sat in this place, it did not flow through him. It settled! It gathered on his vast shoulders, heavier and heavier, the weight of a whole Age’s winter piling up on him in the dark.
Anaximander glanced at it, and reached up as if to brush it off.
"Leave it," THE Creature said.
He rose to his feet, slow and titanic, with the whole weight of the falling winter on his shoulders.
And he did not set it down.
