Read Novel Full Chapter 5693: What Has Always Been
Chapter 5693: What Has Always Been
Noah sat in the scorching golden waters of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring, the closed journal resting warm against his palm.
He reflected on everything Masamuk had recorded.
Vakochev had heard the warning. The maker of the Scales had sat on that porch, listened to an architect lay out the exact shape of his ruin, thanked her sincerely, and walked on exactly as planned. And why not?
He was the grandest maker of his era! His people were shapers and splitters of Chaos, titans who had stood since before authority had a name!
Not one of them, Noah suspected, had truly believed they would face losses. Not one of them had imagined that the existences of those they LOVED could simply be... rewritten.
Unwritten. Carved out like rooms being emptied while the house still stood.
They had prepared for war. No one prepares for erasure!
And the thought turned, as heavy thoughts always did, toward himself.
What if such a thing happened to him?
What if, in the worst scenario, he was made to forget his mother? Made to forget the woman who had stared down a preschool teacher with nothing but night shifts and love in her hands?
What if Henry was carved out of him, his son reduced to a warm gap and an outline on the floor? His women? His daughter? THE Infiniverse, who held his people inside her own body?
Or the other direction, which was somehow worse. What if THEY were made to forget HIM? What if he walked into his own Realm and his mother looked at him with the polite, careful eyes one gives a complete stranger?
"..."
It was a horrid thought, and Noah did not look away from it, because looking away from horrid thoughts was how Vakochev’s people had died!
And the biggest thing...
Even Vakochev may never have held this as something that could happen to HIM.
The strongest being of an entire era had likely carried the same quiet certainty Noah caught himself carrying every single day.
The certainty that regardless of what happened, he would be okay. That the story bent toward him. He was THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist, after all! Existence itself had handed him the author’s seat!
But if even Vakochev... if even such a being could be defeated, dismembered, buried under chains, and made into a smug jailer’s favorite joke...
Then even Noah Osmont, THE Human Dreamer, was not immune.
"..."
Warm arms found him while he sat in that thought.
Thalia had appeared in the spring without ceremony through that golden doorway, her stellar essence folding through the steam, and she saw his gaze before he could compose it.
She came down through the golden waters and grabbed his head and placed it gently against her chest, her fingers sliding into his hair, her heartbeat steady against his cheek.
"You have worried eyes again," Thalia said softly. "How did the talk with my Father go? It made you this melancholic?"
Noah let himself rest there for a moment, in the small warm feeling of her, and her bountiful chest.
"He is an interesting guy. I do have to do a lot of things to prove I can even hold you."
He felt her huff a quiet laugh above him.
"But we have to get going to these... Atlas Elseworlds. Atlas was profound enough to make Immense Ones worry and target him, and we need to understand why. We need to-"
...!
Noah stopped speaking!
His senses blared, every alarm in his two hundred Decillion quarks firing at once, and none of them were pointed at any threat he could find.
What they were pointed at was her. The figure of Thalia Vasiliou, four columns of ninety-nine, the Queenling of the Vasiliou, was trembling and freezing against him!
He took his head out of her chest and looked up, and her face...!
Her eyes showed anger, and beneath the anger, a flash of something he had never once seen in her, not in the pool, not before the Ruling, not before her own mother.
Fear!
And she was not looking at him. She was looking beside him!
Toward the journal!
Noah turned, and his existence went cold, because unseen to his senses, unfelt by a single one of his blaring instincts, THE Obsidian Journal of Masamuk had opened by itself.
It lay upon the warm stone at the spring’s edge, open to the exact page he had just read, the entry of the porch and the dusk and the two cups.
And on that white page, in the middle of the old obsidian ink...
An eye had bloomed!
It was drawn and it was real at once, a single heavy-lidded eye of deep gold rendered upon the paper, and it was not decoration! Its gaze had weight, and its weight was pointed directly at him and Thalia, and words unfurled across the Dimension in the style he knew far, far too well!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW asks: why will none of you simply leave things be?|
|She asks: why will none of you ever listen?|
BOOM!
Noah MOVED!
His Provenance flared to its absolute totality as every part of his quarks roared awake, nine Teloi igniting through every particle, his Infinite Sanguine Mana surging up through the golden waters in a rising crimson tide!
He grabbed onto Thalia, pulling her against him, and the full weight of THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer gathered behind his eyes as every ounce of power in the Meta-Fictional Protagonist Mantle coiled to erupt, to author, to override, to dream!
BOOM!
But...
Everything froze.
Everything.
The rising tide of Sanguine Mana hung motionless in the air, a sculpture of crimson gold. The steam stopped rolling.
The falls of essence on the Elsemountain above stood still in their descent. The Baryogenesis humming through his quarks paused between one particle and the next, and his Mantle, his Provenance, his Tongue, every authority he had ever generated or stolen or dreamed, sat inside him fully loaded and utterly unable to fire, like a scream held behind a hand!
And from the page, the eye became two.
And then a figure began to rise!
She came up out of the paper the way ink would rise if ink decided to stand, unhurried, vertical, impossible, the white page giving her up in slow flowing folds!
She rose to her full height above the open journal, and the steam of the sacred spring bent politely away from her, and Noah, frozen, beheld THE REMINISCING WIDOW!
She wore the loose draped grace of a highborn woman of some impossibly old court, pale cloth gathered at one shoulder and falling in long unhurried folds, her arms bare, her bearing neither armored nor adorned.
Her figure carried the same heavy settling pressure he read of, feminine and grand and immeasurably tired in a way that had made peace with its tiredness.
And her face!
Her face was astonishingly beautiful, and it could barely be perceived.
It slid off his gaze like light off deep water, arriving only in fragments, the line of a cheek, the suggestion of sorrow, beauty of a magnitude that perception itself refused to hold in full!
And around that half-veiled face floated two halos of golden metal, thin and perfect and slowly turning. One ringed her head at the height of her eyes, framing two heavy-lidded depths of gold. The second floated lower, ringing the height of her mouth, and when she spoke, her words did not come from her lips.
They came from everywhere, in the style of her kind, pressed into the Dimension itself for the two of them to read!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW speaks, and she speaks sternly.|
|Existential Narrative is the most critical thing that THE Immense Ones hold. It is our marrow. It is our estate. I warned Masamuk, ages ago, not to even peer into us.|
|If you share our records, if you read of me in a journal, my words and what I said ages ago... my Narrative can sense this. The telling reaches back to its owner. You then give me access.|
|I warned him. I warned his Master on my own porch, with my own evening. He did not listen. His Master did not listen. And now an old entry is read beside a sacred spring, and here I am, because none of you ever, ever listen.|
The two golden halos turned slowly, and her half-perceived gaze settled upon the frozen pair in the water, and the dusk of her deepened until the golden spring itself seemed to dim toward evening.
|So she asks, and she is tired of asking: if warnings are not enough, just what do I need to do for you all to leave things alone?|
|There is no scenario of change.|
|There is no scenario of victory.|
|There is only what is... and what has always been.|
BOOM!
The words settled over the spring like a lid over a coffin!
Noah’s eyes swirled with endless seas of blue! His Infinite Sanguine Mana RAGED against the stillness, a boundless ocean throwing itself at the inside of a single frozen moment, his quarks howling, his Teloi blazing, his Mantle straining to author a single syllable of override, and none of it moved!
Not a finger. Not a thought made real. He, who had torn an architect’s executioner in half, who had walked through an ancient boundary as though it were a dream, who had endured the torture of a lidless eye and come out heavier!
He looked at the manifestation of an Immense One standing on the page of a journal, risen out of ink and an old evening, and he could not move!
Thalia was frozen against his chest. The spring was frozen around them. The golden skeletons slept below, and above them all stood a widow in her endless dusk, patient and stern and immeasurably sad.
Catastrophe had arrived far, far too soon!