Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5471: Elvarna! I

There is a question every prisoner eventually asks, and it is never "how do I escape." It is "does anyone know I am here?"

Existence is vast enough that a being can be stolen from one heartland and buried in another, and the theft will echo nowhere. Chains around the feet are only the second binding. The first is silence, and silence is the older technology. But information wants to move the way water wants to fall. Seal a thousand mouths, and the message finds a hand. Seal the hands, and it finds a friend.

The question, in the end, answers itself. Someone knows. Someone is coming. The only variable is what they have become since you were taken.

---

There were so many things in existence that it was hard to keep track of all the possibilities out there.

Noah stared at the sickly existence before him, a being cursed by something tracing back to Those Who Remain, and then his gaze moved to the paintings drifting around them. The question assembled itself the way his questions always did, plainly. Was the capability Ulf held truly so terrifying that it had to come with a curse to kill him off? Because that was what the arrangement looked like from the outside. A gift and its assassin, issued together, as though something in the deep lineage had decided this particular window should never stay open long.

He wanted a closer look at the being. He wanted to know if what Ulf did could be replicated, studied, learned. THE Mirror That Keeps had recorded stranger things.

His eyes went back to the canvases. Each could hold unique meanings, and some were very straightforward, but one property of them had already caught in his mind. Glimpses of the future were unique when, among the many things Noah was about to do, was going back to the past.

The pictures this being drew were his potential futures. And his potential futures, if Ryaenara’s plan held, would be happening in the past. A painted tomorrow that took place ages ago. Closed Loops, rendered in pigment.

The sickly lifeform was so interesting to him that he almost wanted to get his hands on him then and there, but the protective figure of Ryaenara stood square in the way, and before Noah said anything at all, she turned to her brother sternly.

"No more painting for now. It makes you even sicker." Her tone allowed no appeal. "Give me anything else you’ve painted in the last day. I’ll be gone for a bit while I put my focus on our friend over there. He may be a key. A key and a solution to your curse."

...!

Ulf’s eyes shone at those words.

He looked at Noah, and for a moment the dying painter seemed thoughtful, weighing something only he could see. Then his eyes flashed with decisiveness, and an instant later they glazed over and turned gray, the pupils disappearing entirely, and when he spoke, the voice that came out of his frail chest was deep and ancient and did not belong to him.

"When the pool that has no color calls, the hand must give its own,

For blood of True and Primeval both shall pay the ferry home.

The dimensions lost to time and space wait not for those who plead,

They open only to the one who bleeds the eldest creed.

Twice shall the crown be offered up, and twice shall it be worn,

But only what is set down whole may pass where ash is borne.

The mask that saves a thousand lives must die upon the face,

For quintessence cannot truly bloom while shadows hold its place.

Beware the kneeling of the proud, for kneeling is not loss,

The silhouette unfinished waits where all the futures cross.

What eats, and watches, and remains shall gather in one name,

And that which you cannot reject, you must become, or be became.

Three deaths must the deathless die before the door swings wide,

The felt, the made, the borrowed self, each one must be untied.

Choose true, O brief and burning one, for choices carve the way,

And what was written in the white was written from today."

...!

Noah’s existence was buzzing as he listened to the voice pouring out of the sickly existence, every line landing. And the moment the last word finished, Ulf’s eyes flickered with that gray light one final time, a terrifying aura of ancientness leaking off his frail body and dispersing into the seasons, and he crumpled to the ground.

"Ulf!"

Ryaenara was at him instantly, gathering her brother off the grass, and she said nothing else to Noah at all. She simply waved her hand, one sharp motion, sending him away as if he were a catalyst causing all of these changes and the catalyst needed to go, now, before it caused anything more.

The seasons vanished.

|You have been removed from the True Dimension of Existence. The expulsion was executed by its designer through the Dimensional Rules themselves, and no working of yours was consulted or could have been. You are advised, Master, not to take it personally.|

Noah found himself back inside the temple of the first Dimension, the floating shrines and still stellar lakes of Ryaenara’s outer domain settling around him, the gateway behind him already sealed.

He stood alone among the ancient stones, and his eyes were unfathomably bright.

The words of Ulf, the Cursed One, turned through him line by line, hooks and all, and Noah began methodically to wonder what they could mean.

An entire body settled in beside Ruination and THE Infiniverse, and the three of them went to work on the words of a lifeform whose curse stretched back to Those Who Remain themselves. Every line was recorded, cross-referenced, and turned over. The white pool. The blood of True and Primeval. The three deaths. The mask that must die upon the face. And alongside the prophecy went the paintings, all of them reconstructed from THE Mirror That Keeps and analyzed stroke by stroke, because whether they were true futures, dead possibilities, or the real thing already in motion, Noah intended to confirm for himself rather than take a dying man’s brush on faith.

As he was thinking all of this, another thread of him pulled taut.

"Hmm?"

Another body, the one that had been quietly working the problem of Taylor, finally made its breakthrough.

She had come to him a little while ago wearing a grave expression that did not fit her, and she had said the strangest sentence she had ever handed him.

’I really, really want to tell you something, but I fucking can’t.’

...!

It had not taken long to figure out. Taylor did not censor herself for anyone, which meant the censoring was not hers. The only force that could seal a mouth at the level of existence itself was a Directive imposed by something of extreme power, and the list of beings currently imposing Directives across existence currently had exactly one name on it.

Somehow, THE Sealed One had gotten involved with Taylor. Since Noah did not know to what extent, he had taken her, alongside another of his bodies, straight into the Undefined Gaps, away from everything the involvement could touch.