Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5440: True!

A path toward IT. Toward Those Who Remain.

Noah heard the words, and remained supremely calm, because for all their weight, the woman still had not answered the thing he’d actually asked. He had learned long ago that grand beings loved to answer the question beside your question, and the only cure was repetition.

So he repeated himself.

"Who," he said, "do you follow?"

WAA!

Ryaenara’s smile settled into something calm and almost apologetic.

"I cannot tell you," she said. "And I want you to hear that precisely. Not that I will not. I physically cannot tell you, even if I tried with everything I have. The name is bound into me in a way you don’t yet have the framework to understand, and to speak it aloud would unravel me, thread by thread, until nothing of Ryaenara remained to finish the sentence." She spread her hands lightly. "So I won’t be doing that shit today. But I can tell you other things. Adjacent things. I can tell you about True Lifeforms."

As she said it, the darkness cleared.

Rivers of blue and gold light replaced the black, flowing slow and vast around the temple’s interior, washing the lifelike statues in soft color. And high above them, suspended in the currents of light, a cocoon appeared, huge and pale and gently pulsing.

"When a True Lifeform emerges," Ryaenara began, and her voice took on the cadence of a being reciting something old, "it is a second birth. Not a metaphor. An actual birth, as real as the first one, and in some ways more real, because the first birth only produced a body, and the second one produces a self. The being who existed before the fusion and the being who exists after are not the same person wearing an upgrade. The old one ends. The new one begins."

She gestured upward at the pulsing cocoon.

"To be born, one must belong to a lineage. All births work this way. Nothing is ever born from nothing, not the first time and not the second. But do not hear the word lineage the way small beings hear it, as bloodline, as familial descent, as some ancestor’s name in a ledger." Her vibrant eyes fixed on him.

"It is a lineage of Existence itself. An Existential Lineage. The moment a True Lifeform emerges from their second birth, they begin walking upon one, whether they know it or not, whether they asked for it or not, the way a river begins flowing downhill without being consulted about gravity."

Above them, the cocoon began to unfurl.

It peeled open in slow layers, and within it a humanoid lifeform hung in the light. As they watched, a tail unwound from its base. Then wings spread from its back, vast and slow. A halo kindled above its head. A third arm formed, and then a fourth, and the unfurling did not stop, more limbs and appendages continuing to bloom from the figure one after another, each new formation making the being look less like a person and more like something ancient, grander and stranger and older with every addition, until what hung in the blue-gold light was less a body than an accumulation of ages.

"All True Lifeforms are true to themselves," Ryaenara continued, watching it with him. "That is the entire admission price. Their identity seamless, their Intent built on what they are. But every one of them, without exception, also inherits some form of Existential Lineage the moment they cross over. Because existence is too vast, Osmont, and far too old. Unfathomable things happened at the beginning of it, things even I only know the edges of, and those things left weavings behind. Deep structures. Old channels. And a being who becomes True does not float free of all that history. They plug into it. Which channel they plug into, which Lineage claims them, depends on what they are, but a channel always claims them. It is simply how the second birth works."

Noah listened to all of it carefully.

Then he shook his head.

"I reject that," he said, and his voice came out imperious, the blue of his Intent stirring around him. "All of it. As a True Lifeform, I belong to some Existential Lineage I’ve never heard of? That I carry an Inheritance flowing down from something unfathomably old, whether I consent or not?" His eyes hardened.

"Where is the individuality in that? Where is the trueness? The whole foundation of what I am is that I am me, seamlessly, with nothing borrowed and nothing installed. I climbed from nothing. Nobody handed me a single thing. I am me, without any Inheritance. My Lineage is my own. My Inheritance is my own!"

HUUM!

Ryaenara rolled her eyes.

She actually rolled them and shook her head with exasperation!

"You do not understand," she said. "And you’re being arbitrary about it. Black and white, mine and not-mine, as if those are the only two boxes existence comes in." She drifted closer through the rivers of light.

"No True Lifeform loses one drop of their trueness by belonging to an Inheritance that stretches back to the beginning of existence. It is not an implant. It is not a leash. It is nature. When you formed your Intent, did you lose yourself? When you fused your authorities, did you become less you because Infinity and the Primordial Source existed before you did? Of course not. You claimed them. You expressed yourself through materials older than you, and the expression was still entirely yours."

She gestured at the many-limbed ancient figure above.

"The Lineage is the same. It is you, claiming who you are, as your truest self, from weavings of existence that bloomed at the very beginning of everything. Those weavings were always there. They have been waiting since before waiting had a name. You are not being given something foreign. You are finally tapping into something that was always, in the deepest sense, already yours. When you formed your first new appendage as a True Lifeform, it should have felt like remembering a limb you’d forgotten you had."

HUUM!

Noah’s eyes pulsed.

"Inheritance is not the opposite of individuality," Ryaenara pressed on. "For a True Lifeform, it is the completion of it. The small beings under Vakochev’s Scales build themselves out of what their short lives can gather. A True Lifeform is grander than one short life. When you were born the second time, you became old, older than your years, connected backward through the deep channels to the era when the first weavings were laid. The Lineage does not tell you who to be. It is the ancient half of who you already are, surfacing. Rejecting it is not independence. It is a man rejecting his own spine because he didn’t personally forge it."

She smiled then, and it turned devilish at the edges.

"But words are cheap, and you are the sort who trusts what he sees. So let me show you mine."

And Ryaenara transformed.

HUUUM!

Her slender graceful figure came apart and reformed, unfolding the way the cocoon above had unfolded, and what stood before Noah afterward was a terrifying exotic lifeform. Her fair skin gave way to something pale and deep and faintly luminous, and appendages bloomed from her body one after another, each stranger than the last. A crown of slow-turning rings that were not quite matter orbited her head where hair had been. From her back spread limbs like folded antique wings made of layered translucent membranes, each membrane veined with script too old to read.

Slender feelers of soft light traced down from her shoulders, tasting the air, and along her arms opened rows of small unhurried eyes, gold and calm, that blinked out of rhythm with one another. From her lower back uncoiled a long articulated tail of pale segmented plates, ending in a bloom like a flower made of teeth, and beneath her skin things moved gently that had no names in any framework Vakochev had built, ancient machinery of flesh going about its patient work.

She was horrifying, and she was magnificent, and above all she was old, old in a way the temple and the statues and even the clicking language had only hinted at.

She raised one transformed hand and touched the membranous wings, the orbiting crown, the rows of calm gold eyes, one appendage after another, with unmistakable fondness.

"All of these are mine," Ryaenara said, and her voice now carried harmonics beneath it, deep and layered. "Every one. True to me, grown from my truest self, as individual as anything in existence. And every one of them stretches back to the very beginning of time. They are my Inheritance. I made them all the way back then, in a manner of speaking, in the era when the first weavings bloomed." The flower of teeth at her tail’s end opened slightly, contentedly.

"And I am only reclaiming them now."

...!

WAA!