Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5450: Choices and Consequences II

There was no Braneworld. There was no Lower Observable Existence. There was the raw dark between existences, scattered with blue and obsidian bubbles full of survivors, and before them the vessel of Borys floated beneath his folding flower, and in his fingers he held pills.

Small. Grey. Unremarkable. An Observable Existence and every trillion-fold realm within them, condensed into spheres that caught no light, and in their translucent shells, if one looked closely, tiny trapped faces could be seen, frozen in everlasting microscopic agony.

Noah looked at him with savage, brutal eyes. THE Creature’s burning gaze held murder older than words. Neither of them moved, because both of them understood, with perfect clarity, that moving accomplished nothing here, and THE Sealed One rolled the pills gently across Borys’s palm and spoke as though discussing the weather.

"This is just a taste," he said. "An appetizer, really. First, I will come for the Observable Existences. Plural, yes. You have collected a few, haven’t you, resuscitated them, seated your pretty Causes in them like garden beds." The aloof eyes found Noah’s. "Chernobyl is one I have knowledge of. That one will be gone in, oh, the next nanosecond or so? Give or take. I do like to be punctual."

HUUM!

"And I want you to understand something today, Osmont, really understand it, down in the foundation of you." The vessel drifted closer, intimate now. "You do not have a sense of control. You have never had one. You had a winning streak for far too long, and you mistook it for control, and today the streak ends. Notice that I did not attack your Emotive. Your...what are the other ones stupid fucking names, Alexander? Usurper...? I did not kill a single one of them. That was also a choice." He smiled.

"But they are next. All of them are next, in whatever order amuses me. So hold them tight. Hold them very tight, and count them every morning, and I want you to do something you have never once done in your entire existence. I want you to fear."

The flower’s petals stirred overhead, contented, digesting.

"I can refine Observable Existences rather rapidly, as you have now seen with your own eyes. Lifeforms are so much easier. So understand the shape of what comes next. I will not touch you, Osmont. Not one hair. I will simply corrupt everything around you, unmake everything beneath you, devour everything that shelters you, until existence itself wants absolutely nothing to do with you. Until you feel cursed. Until everything you touch dies, and every home you hold, dies, and everyone who loves you learns what loving you costs. And one day, when you have run out of homes, you will come to me to make it stop. You will come to me." The voice dropped to something almost tender. "And I will only say one thing to you then. Welcome home. Haha. Welcome home!"

BOOM!

As he spoke, cracks spread across Borys’s body, fine golden fractures running through the vessel like a cup asked to hold a sea, the flesh failing under power it was never built to express. THE Sealed One paid it no mind at all. He lifted the small grey pills, the whole of THE Braneworld and the Lower Observable Existence and every Age of history within them, and tossed them into the vessel’s mouth, and chewed, slowly, listening.

"Choices," he said, through the sound of two Observable Existences dissolving against his tongue, "and consequences. Be ready, my future vessel. I have not given up on you. I never give up on what is mine, and I always, always get what I want."

The flower folded. The crimson light drank itself away. And the vessel of Borys was gone, leaving the Undefined Gaps dark and silent around a scattering of glowing bubbles, the survivors of an Observable Existence that no longer existed anywhere except in memory and in two swallowed pills.

Noah floated in the dark. THE Primordial Paradox and all others were grim!

He had saved everyone he could reach. He had held them all. And the ground beneath every single one of them, the Observable Existence that had made him and his mother and his son and other monsters, the home, was simply gone, and all his power and all his Foundations and all his grand, terrifying, compounding strength... had been worth exactly nothing.

For the first time in a very long time, Noah Osmont looked at his own two hands and found them empty.

A heavy, suffocating silence descended in the Undefined Gaps!

The Undefined Gaps had never been anything but dark, and yet tonight the dark felt different, because tonight it had an audience.

The bubbles floated scattered across the raw black between existences, spheres of lava-blue and burning obsidian holding the last living pieces of an Observable Existence that no longer existed. No stars hung here. No realms turned in the distance. There was only the cold pressureless nothing of the space between spaces, and the soft glow of the survivors drifting through it like lanterns cut loose from a drowned festival.

Nobody spoke.

Inside one blue sphere, THE Living Emotive had been screaming for a while now, rage pouring out of her, her fists hammering against the inside of Noah’s protection, her Primordial Intent thrashing like a mad thing against an enemy already gone. She had promised her fixation a kneeling Observable Existence!

She had subjugated half of Nova Athens, gathered her harvest, dreamed of laying it at his feet, and all of it, the harvest and the city and the Lands beneath it, sat now in the stomach of a thing wearing a dead man’s body.

In another sphere, Alexander did not move at all.

THE Peacemaker floated utterly still, his rebuilt frame motionless, his eyes fixed on the empty dark where THE Braneworld had been. He had dropped Ordnances on Citadel after Citadel in the name of the quintillions the Gilded had hollowed, and now the graves of those quintillions were gone too, the Lower Observable Existence eaten alongside its tormentor, victims and villains refined into the same grey pills. Whatever moved behind his still face, it had no shape yet. Some losses had to be carried a long way before they could even be looked at!

And today’s loss was heavy as even with this loss, the worst thing was...the helplessness to stop it!