Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5692: The First Entry

Noah sat within the scorching golden waters of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring, steam rolling off his stellar body, and grasped THE Obsidian Journal of Masamuk with both hands.

The cover was warm, worn smooth by an eternity of small handling, and it drank the spring’s golden light without returning a single gleam. He held it, and he thought of exactly one thing.

Immense Ones!

He had just been tortured by one. He had hung spread beneath a lidless eye while trillions of needles hunted his loves through his quarks, and he had felt the difference between reading about a terror and being held in its hand!

His knowledge of the architects was a pile of secondhand fragments, warnings, and taunts. That was no longer acceptable. If he was going to survive these beings, and eventually bury them, he wanted to understand much more about them!

’Show me,’ Noah thought into the warm obsidian. ’Immense Ones. Everything you rambled about them.’

HUUM!

The journal answered!

It rose gently from his hands and hung in the steam before him, and its cover swung open, and the pages began to flutter!

Endless white pages turned past his eyes, blank and blank and blank, an eternity of unmarked white flowing like a river of snow, until finally the fluttering slowed, and stopped, and the journal lay open to a single white page.

And on that page, words began to appear!

They surfaced out of the whiteness unhurried, dark strokes of old obsidian ink settling into lines, and Noah’s endlessly blue eyes settled onto the first sentence as the voice of a small melancholic slime rose off the paper and wrapped around his mind!

—

<The First Time I Met An Immense One>

There was a time when I was fascinated by THE Immense Ones. There was a time, and I record it here so I cannot deny it later, when I even looked up to them.

The young look up at whatever is tallest. I was young once, though the stars were younger.

In those days, my Master had just finished his grandest work. He had laid his Scales across the whole of Existence, and the whole of Existence was still ringing from the weight of them settling.

Everything that lived woke up that day inside a structure. Everything that lived could suddenly see the rung it stood upon, and the rung above it, and the long ladder going up into the light.

My Master was tired, and proud.

Then the invitation came.

It did not come as a message. It came as a door standing open in a place where no door had been, and my Master looked at it for a long moment, and said only, "One of the big ones wishes to talk."

I asked to come along. I was fascinated, as I have written. I wanted to see one of THE Immense Ones with my own eyes.

He allowed it. I have wondered since whether he allowed it because he wanted a witness.

We stepped through the door carefully, and what we stepped into was...unique.

The place was not a Dimension. It was not an Observable Existence, and it was not one of the Unobservable ones either.

It was a pocket of Narrative Existence.

There are beings whose Dimensionality runs so deep that they can set aside a portion of it and furnish it. The place we entered did not exist anywhere. It existed only inside the depth of the one who had designed it, the way a story exists only inside its teller.

To walk into it was to be included. We were, for the length of our visit, characters in a place she was quietly telling herself.

We stood in a garden at the end of a day that never finished ending.

There were low hills of dark grass that remembered being walked on. There was a porch of grey wood, and on the porch there was a table, and the table was set for two, with a settling warmth upon the cups as though they had been poured moments ago.

She was waiting on the porch.

I will not record her form, because her form was not the truth of her, and also because I could not hold it. What I could hold was the pressure of her, and the pressure was...immeasurably old, and immeasurably tired.

THE Immense One was...

THE REMINISCING WIDOW.

My Master inclined his head to her. She looked at him for a long time before she spoke.

"You have gone and done it, then," she said. "You have measured and scaled everything."

"I have given everything a structure," my Master replied.

"Yes," she said.

She poured nothing, and offered nothing. I stood at the edge of the porch, and I listened to the conversation.

"I called you here to warn you," THE REMINISCING WIDOW said.

"What you have built may bring you death. Not only you. All you love, and all who love you, down to the smallest thing that has ever smiled at your name. I am telling you this before the others finish deciding how they feel, because once they finish, no telling will matter."

My Master was not a man who frightened. He set his hands upon the table, and he asked.

"Why?"

"You will have to be more specific," she said. "There are so many answers."

"I gave Existence a structure that everyone can follow. Not a decree. A structure. A thing that stands the same for every lifeform that meets it, in every corner, in every era. Before my Scales, the low lived and died without ever knowing where they stood, or whether their striving moved them at all. Power was fog. Standing was rumor. Now every existence that faces adversity can see its own progress with its own eyes. Now the climb is real. All those facing adversity have a chance to elevate themselves, and to know it, and to be known for it."

"Hm." she said.

"I ended the age of begging," my Master said. "You know what standing was before me. Standing was patronage. It was granted, and it was revoked, and it lived in the moods of the mighty. A framework that measures cannot be bribed and cannot be offended. The smallest lifeform in the smallest realm now holds something no architect ever gave it and no architect can take away. A rung."

"Go on," she said.

"And what is measured is protected," my Master finished. "A thing with a recorded standing cannot be quietly erased. It leaves a mark upon the Records of what exists. I have made every life in Existence slightly harder to disappear. Structure...is the only mercy that scales."

I remember that I wanted to cheer!

THE REMINISCING WIDOW looked at him through the dusk for a long, long moment.

"Everything you have said is true, but..." she said.

She lifted her cup, and did not drink from it, and set it down again.

"You have heard, I am sure, what the young kinds whisper about my kind. That we are the ones who failed. The apex things that could not exceed themselves when the great exceeding happened. The bitter ones."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Some of us are exactly that. Some of my kind are precisely as small as the whisper says, and they are the loudest of us, and the cruelest, and they will hate your Scales for the plainest reason in Existence. Your ladder tells them, every day, in every corner of reality, that they stopped climbing."

"When your Scales teach the young to climb, you should ask yourself very carefully what you are teaching them to climb TOWARD."

BOOM!

I did not understand those words then. I am not certain I understand them now.

My Master was silent for a time. Then he said, "The others. What do they see, when they look at my work?"

"Three things," she said. "First, the insult. You have ranked the unrankable, and dignity at our age is a wound that never closes. Second, the threat. Your structure gives adversity a ladder, and hope is heavy. Despair is formless, and formless things cannot organize."

"And third. The precedent. This is the one that will kill you. How dare you? What gave you the right to blanket all of existence under your scales when those so much grander than you have not?"

...!

My Master was silent for a long time.

"Will they attack me? Will they come for the Scales?" my Master said.

"No," said THE REMINISCING WIDOW.

"They will not come for the Scales first. Destroying a maker’s work only proves the work mattered. They will come for everything that loves you. Death is small, maker. Death is singular, and it ends. I know this...too well."

She looked, then, at the second cup on the table, reminiscing!

My Master stood, after a time. He thanked her.

And at the door that was not a door, he stopped, and asked her the question.

"Why warn me at all?"

THE REMINISCING WIDOW sat on her porch, in her endless dusk, with her two cups.

"Because someone once built something grand for my sake, and no one warned him either."

...!

The door closed. The evening went on without us.

My Master walked on in silence, and I moved beside him, and he never spoke of that visit again.

I record all of this now, an old thing writing by the light of everything that has since burned down, and I find I have only one remark to close the entry with.

My Master heard every word she said that evening. He weighed them, I am sure, on scales of his own. And then he went on exactly as he had planned, because he was a maker, and makers believe their works can bear any weight.

I have wondered, across all the eras since, whether he should have taken a bit more heed of that warning.

I wondered then.

I wonder still.