Read Novel Full Chapter 5449: Choices and Consequences I
Chapter 5449: Choices and Consequences I
Noah’s expression turned heavy, and he prepared for anything, every Foundation coiled, THE Loyal Reach a thought away, his people held tight inside his blue. And yet the vessel made no further move. It had taken the Fifth and Fourth Scale Gilded Ones in its opening breath, and now it simply floated in the blood-colored sky.
And it looked at Noah.
"My dear, defiant Osmont," THE Sealed One said, warm as an old friend. "How has existence been treating you? You’ve been moving around a great deal, I’ve noticed. Doing things here, doing things there. Stripping my Gilded, eating my hand, speaking my name in polite company." The borrowed face smiled.
"No matter. None of it matters, truthfully. I am here today for a lesson. A small one, on Choices, and Consequence. You made choices. I made choices. And today, both of us will pay the consequences of them together. Are you ready?"
HUUM!
Noah’s existence buzzed harder, and he said nothing, and gave nothing, reading the vessel with everything he had. Borys emanated power at the full Fifth Scale even as a worn glove, and beneath that power sat something with no floor to it, the pressure of the thing wearing him bleeding through the seams.
"You know," THE Sealed One continued, conversational, drifting slowly closer through the frozen crimson air, "a great many plans of mine were ruined in this Observable Existence.Assets stripped. Wars I had spent Ages arranging, dismantled in an afternoon by you and your collection of strays. And I have learned, across a very long life, that when plans are ruined, one does not rage. One simply cuts one’s losses, and converts the loss into tuition." He spread Borys’s hands amiably.
"But here is where it becomes delicate, Osmont, and I want you to appreciate the delicacy. I have studied you. I know precisely what you are. You are a thing that eats adversity. Every trial makes you grander, every enemy feeds you, every wound closes over into armor. Fighting you is watering you. I will never provide you adversity. Not one drop of it. No duels, no contests, no glorious clashes for your record."
The smile widened, and the temperature of it fell.
"What I will provide," THE Sealed One said, "is the other thing. The idea of consequences. Because every choice has one, and no one has ever once presented you the bill before."
Above and behind the vessel, existence peeled open.
An appendage emerged, and it was not a hand and not a maw. It bloomed. A flower unfolded across the blood-red heavens, gigaparsecs of it, petal after petal of pale grey-blue flesh opening in slow concentric rings, each petal veined with silent weeping light, and at its heart turned a ribbed hollow like the inside of a mortar. It was beautiful in the way THE Queen Regnant’s tale had called the old brutality beautiful, perfect and patient and utterly wrong, an inherent appendage of the first True Lifeform, older than THE Scales, older than the frameworks, surfacing out of an era that existence had spent eons trying to forget.
"I do not wish to give you any adversity," THE Sealed One said softly, beneath his blooming flower. "So I will simply take. Take that which you love. Take that which you protect. Show you, one consequence at a time, what every choice you have ever made actually cost, with the price paid by everything except you." The aloof eyes glittered.
"Now. Do you know why, all those Ages ago, out of everything I did, it was one particular deed that made all of existence fear me? Do you know why I was feared as the one who swallowed and refined Observable Existences?"
...!
HUUM!
The flower descended.
It came down upon THE Braneworld not as an attack but as a harvest, the vast petals closing around the whole of the Observable Existence at a scale that made the gathered monsters into motes, and it began to devour...the foundation. The petals drank at THE First Cause of THE Braneworld itself, and the nine Prime Causes beneath it began to scream, their foundational truths bending and running like heated wax toward the ribbed hollow at the flower’s heart.
|THE First Cause of THE Braneworld Observable Existence is being devoured. The nine Prime Causes are destabilizing catastrophically. This process did not begin today. Analysis of the deterioration indicates the Causes have been quietly converted and undermined for a long span, prepared in advance. What you are witnessing is not the beginning of the devouring. It is the finishing of it.|
Noah bellowed and erupted with everything he had!
OOOOH!
His Osmontian Source Infinity poured out of him in a flood as THE Estuary Eye opened wide, and he seized the failing Prime Causes the way he had seized Chernobyl’s, the way he had seized Thalassarch’s, his Intent and his fused authority plunging into the foundation of the Observable Existence that had birthed him, fighting to hold its truths stable against the drinking flower. Beside him THE Creature roared and unleashed the whole of THE Egoic Intent of Existence, gigaparsecs of obsidian flame diving into the same foundation, the two grandest beings of the young age straining together to hold up the floor of their birth Observable Existence!
A Maw erupted from the chest of THE Creature to eat everything!
And...
And...!
And it was not enough.
The flower was too strong, and worse than strong, it was prepared. Every Cause they stabilized had already been hollowed from within across who knew how long, rotted and converted in the dark while everyone fought Gilded Ones on the surface, and holding it was like holding water in cupped hands. Noah felt THE Prime Causes of THE Braneworld die one by one beneath his grip, felt the Observable Existence that had made him below it begin to liquefy into glowing paste, and there was nothing, nothing, his fused authority and his Intent and his Tongue and all his Foundations could do to stop it.
|THE Braneworld Observable Existence is collapsing into refinement. The Lower Observable Existence, bound beneath it, is being drawn into the same process.|
Nothing was working regarding the Observable Existence!
So Noah made the choice!
He let go of the foundation, and poured everything into the bubbles instead, his lava-blue spheres blazing around Emotive, Alexander, the Usurper, the Paradoxes, Nereon, around the millions of stripped and subjugated survivors Emotive had gathered, around every living thing his Cause could reach, hauling them out through the crimson light as Existence came apart! THE Creature did the same, obsidian flames scooping Calypso and whatever his reach could hold. And around them, with a sound like ten thousand voices flattening into one hum, THE Braneworld Observable Existence and the Lower Observable Existence beneath it, the golden towers and the silver Dredge-tides, all of it, everything, was drawn into the ribbed hollow of the flower and ground down and condensed.
When the light faded, they hung in the Undefined Gaps!