Published at 12th of November 2026 7:39 am

Chapter 5987: Provenance and Endings II

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

THE Primordial Gu of Provenance looked at him in silence. The eyes along the pillars had all opened at once and were all looking at Noah, thousands of them, cold and pale and unblinking, and for a long moment no one in the temple moved.

Then the Gu laughed. It was a great, full, startled laugh that rolled out between the pillars and across the floating gold island and set the nearest leaves trembling on their branches, and it went on for a while.

"I felt the child of calamity was gone again," he said at last, still smiling. "I didn’t think you would be the cause...wow oh wow. Well..."

Noah took note of two things in that. The surprise was real. And the word "again" meant it had felt her second, from wherever it sat. Whatever this being was, it kept constant track of endings, without any effort at all.

The Gu settled his hands back onto his knees, and the laughter left his face, though a little of it stayed in his eyes. "Let me tell you why, then, since you came all this way. You should understand what I am, first. I am Provenance. I feel every beginning in existence, and so I feel every ending too, because an ending is only what happens to a beginning. Most endings are ordinary. A tree falls in its time, a star burns out, a child grows old and dies in a warm bed, and all of that is proper, because each of those beginnings was carried to the place it was going. Those endings feed me. Every beginning that runs its whole course and ends where it should makes Provenance stronger."

So Provenance had an income!

Every beginning that ran its full course paid into the Gu, and every beginning cut short was money it never collected.

He had spent years before the apocalypse reading the books of companies that lived and died on exactly that kind of record, and he knew how such a being would think. It would protect its income first and judge everything else by how it touched the income.

His pale eyes held Noah’s. "But some endings are wrong. Some are catastrophic. They cut a beginning off before it ever became what it was going to become, and every time that happens, existence loses a piece of its meaning, and so do I."

"THE First Gu of Calamity," he went on, quite calmly, "is responsible for more wrong endings than any being I have ever felt. Countless deaths. Countless beginnings cut off at the root, Cycle after Cycle, and not only by her own hand. Everything she touches learns to end things badly. Her children, her servants, her allies, her husband. Her child was one I killed, many Cycles ago, because a daughter of Calamity is a beginning that will only ever end in catastrophe, and I prefer to cut such things short myself, cleanly, before they can do worse. And then you apparently brought her back. And now, it seems, you have killed her again."

He smiled faintly. "Provenance grows stronger when things do not end catastrophically. Calamity, and all those associated with her, THE Dissolved Progenitor and the others, they all must die."

BOOM!

The word struck the temple, and the eyes along every pillar shut at once, and the blue sky outside seemed to darken a shade. Noah stood very still in the middle of it all. He thought of the girl lying in the snow, whose only dream had been to grow old somewhere warm. He thought of Thessaly, rooted to the chest in his own soil with her eyes wet, of Phaedra flying into the dark with her sister’s blood on her face, and of Lygara by the fence post with her hands pressed together until they ached.

He looked at the being on the dais, who had just said all of that calmly and evenly and moved on, and he found that he was not angry. He was listening very closely instead, because the logic was clean, and clean logic was the most dangerous kind.

The Gu had cut a child short to stop catastrophic endings, which was itself a catastrophic ending, and it had not blinked at the contradiction. Either it had already priced that cost in, or it had decided the cost did not count when it was the one paying. Noah wanted to know which.

"And the ones who never chose any of it?" Noah asked. "She did not choose her mother. Did you ask what she wanted, before you ended her?"

"Why would I?" The Gu looked faintly puzzled. "Nothing chooses its beginning. That is the whole of my point. A thing is decided by where it starts, and what it wants along the way only decorates the road." He tilted his head. "You disagree. I felt that, the last time we met. You think where a thing is going matters more than where it began. That is a very young belief, and you hold it very sincerely, and I do not dislike you for it. But consider what you have just told me. You protected her, and you ended her anyway. Where did that come from, if not from where she began?"

Noah did not answer that at once. He ran the events back in order and checked each one. He had given her a dream. She had come to his field under her mother’s banner, and the Gu would say that was her beginning speaking.

But at the very end she had stood at the line with two roads in front of her, one where she walked away and one where she turned her calamity on his farm, and she had chosen the second with her eyes open. He had chosen, too, which road to answer her with. Two choices sat between her beginning and her ending, and neither of them had been made by where she started.

"From where she chose to go," he said at last. "At the very end, she chose. So did I."

"Then we see it differently," the Gu said, with something close to warmth, "and we may go on seeing it differently for a very long time. That is no great matter. Let me tell you something that is."

He leaned forward a little, and the light in the temple seemed to lean with him. "Do you know why IT was shattered? No? Neither does most of existence. I will not tell you whose hand broke it, because I do not know for certain, and I do not say things I do not know."

"But I know this," the Gu went on. "Whoever broke it, Calamity and THE Dissolved Progenitor had their hands in it, one way or another, directly or not. He held IT once. He wished to end everything and begin again, a clean page, every beginning in existence wiped away at once so that he could write his own. Do you understand what that would mean to me? It would be the greatest wrong ending existence has ever known. Every beginning there has ever been, gone in a single stroke."

The Gu’s voice stayed perfectly even. "The Sundering stopped it. It also cost existence more beginnings than I can count. Many such events have happened across history, wars of Kings and Legacies and the turnings of the Long Night, and each of them made Provenance a little less than it was."

The Sundering. Noah was, at that very moment, spread thin across a region of the Chrysalis that carried that event’s name.

The Gu sat back again. "I will be honest with you, since you were honest with me. I do not do this out of the goodness of my heart. I am not certain I have one. I do it for the power of my Provenance, which grows every time a beginning is carried home and shrinks every time one is cut off. Calamity and her house cut off beginnings the way other beings breathe. So I will end them. Even now, while I sit here talking with you, I am planning how to wage that war."

That, Noah found, was the most useful thing it had said.

The eyes along the pillars opened again, one by one, all of them on Noah. "Which brings me to you."

He studied Noah for a long moment, his head tilted again, and Noah let him look. "You are an odd thing. In this place, nothing is hidden from me. Every being in my home shines with its own beginning, and I can read each one down to the root. And yet I look at you and find nothing. No beginning I can read, no weight, no Essara, nothing at all. Do you understand how rare that is? It means you have more than you show. To bypass my perception Exalted Essara, then at the very least, you carry a defensive Exalted Essara with a Power of Existence that blocks perception, and if you carry one, you likely carry others."

...!

Share