Read Novel Full Chapter 5695: It Is Never So Easy!
Chapter 5695: It Is Never So Easy!
Power was not going to save him today!
Noah stood in a frozen spring with an Immense One’s declaration hanging over everything, and he understood there was no way.
His Provenance blazed, his Teloi burned through his quarks, his Mantle coiled with narrative weight enough to rewrite a battlefield, and none of it mattered against something like this.
Her Dimensionality was too unfathomable.
So he did the only other thing he knew how to do!
He thought.
Not ordinary thinking, but thinking elevated by his very Provenance of THE Human Dreamer, as his eyes stayed fixed on the barely-perceivable face of THE REMINISCING WIDOW....
Noah pulled THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer deep into himself and turned it fully inward.
The Human Dreamer was a Lens. And right now it turned on everything he had read!
Everything in his existence became dreamlike as he envisioned himself thinking at speeds as if time had stopped, and his existence analyzing and having epiphanies every instant as he dreamed of information and solutions.
His entire existence became surrounded by a dreamy light as his eyes even seemed heavy as if he would soon fall asleep, and yet his eyes were...ridiculously bright!
He began to think.
What did he KNOW about her?
The journal entry! He had read every word of it while she was still ink on a page. She had sat on a porch in an endless dusk at a table set for two, with one chair ever sat in and a second cup kept almost warm.
She had warned Vakochev because of something that had happened to HER, because someone had built something grand for her sake and nobody had warned him either, and she had been attending evenings alone ever since!
She was a WIDOW!
Which meant she had not always been one!
Which meant there was someone, once, who had sat in the second chair and drunk from the second cup, and she had watched that someone be ended, and the second cup had been almost warm ever since because she could not bring herself to stop filling it!
But there was more! She had warned Vakochev! She had called him to her porch and laid out the full anatomy of his ruin, piece by careful piece, and then she had let him walk away.
She had not stopped him! She had not ended him on the spot the way she now threatened to end Noah, for all that the result of his not-stopping was exactly the catastrophe she had predicted.
Why?
Why warn someone if you believe the warning cannot matter? Why give a choice to something you believe will choose wrong?
His Provenance ran faster, linking, linking, linking!
And Noah felt the understanding arrive like a dreamy knowledge of brilliance as his eyes cut upward to the barely-perceivable face of the Immense One above him and his mouth opened.
"What about you?"
"THE REMINISCING WIDOW." He held her barely-perceivable gaze without flinching. "Who made you a Widow? Did you simply stop? Your love that they killed... would he have wanted you to stop?"
BOOM!
Existence buzzed!
The golden warmth of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring vanished beneath an instant blanket of frost and cold as temperature dropped across the whole region of the Elsedimension.
She looked at him!
For a long, long moment she simply looked at him.
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW speaks: careful now.|
|There are things you can speak of. And things that will bring your ruin far quicker.|
"..."
Noah did not move back.
He held his ground in that frozen spring with Thalia motionless beside him and his entire existence at a full stop.
"You did not stop," he said!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW is still.|
"The second cup in that memory," Noah said. "You still fill it. After everything. After every era that has passed since the one who sat there last. You still go out onto that porch, in that endless dusk you carry with you everywhere, and you set the table for two, and you keep the second cup almost warm. That is not someone who stopped."
Frost crystals ticked softly against frozen water in the silence that followed!
THE REMINISCING WIDOW did not respond immediately, as the gold of her eyes, heavy-lidded and ancient and full of a sorrow she had long since made peace with, pulsed!
She spoke unfathomably slowly.
|He...was not like the ones who came before or after him.|
And for the first time in the conversation something in the Widow’s bearing shifted.
|He made immensity itself. Everything he designed, everything he shaped and carved and made real, he made it so it could exist without him. So it could outlast him. So others could find their way inside it long after his hands were gone.|
Her gaze found something beyond the spring, beyond the Elsedimension, something that only existed inside the depths of her!
|He believed that existence deserved better architecture. He spent... a very long time on it.|
"And he was ended for it," Noah said.
|Yes.|
"By beings like you."
The cold deepened for one instant and then settled again, and her voice remained exactly level.
|By those of us who looked at what his foundations were pointing at, and made the same calculation I made when I looked at Vakochev’s Scales. That the direction of the pointing would bring tremendous death to countless lifeforms before any destination was reached...Yes.|
Noah’s eyes pulsed as he felt like he was a opening a door, and he needed to spread it much wider.
He had to spread it wide!
"You warned Vakochev, but you did not end him there. You gave him the choice."
|I gave him the information. The choice was always his.|
"Why? Why give a choice to something you believe will choose wrong? If the outcome is catastrophe either way, why warn? Why call him to the porch at all?"
The golden halos pulsed! The Widow was quiet for a moment that stretched!
|Because I am not in the business of stealing choices from beings who have the capacity to make them. Even wrong ones.|
Her eyes held steady on him.
|Even from beings who will make exactly the wrong one.|
"That sounds," Noah said quietly, "like someone who is not entirely certain the choice is wrong."
HUUM!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW does not answer.|
"Vakochev could not stop," Noah said, and his voice was very gentle now.
"Not because he was reckless. Not because he was careless of the cost. But because of who he was. He was the kind of being who looked at the way things were and could not rest inside the wrongness of them."
He looked up at her. "Is a river wrong to flow downhill? Is it a flaw in the river’s nature that it carves the canyon?"
|Rivers carve canyons.|
She said it casually.
|And the canyon floor becomes a grave for everything that falls in.|
"Yes," Noah said. "And the river also carries everything forward. And makes things grow. And finds the sea."
He looked up at her barely-perceivable face, at the sorrow arriving in fragments.
"The one who built something grand for your sake... he was that kind of river too, wasn’t he? He could not look at the way things were built and simply accept it. He had to try to build something better. Not for himself. For others. He could not stop that drive any more than Vakochev could. Any more than I can."
The frost on the spring’s surface crackled softly!
"..."
"And he was ended for it," Noah said, "by those who thought that stopping him was a kindness to the many. The same calculation you are making about me, right now."
He held her gaze.
"Does that mean they were right? Does it mean that if someone had simply convinced him to stop, to go to his farm and enjoy his ages and trouble no one, that existense would have been better?"
"Or does it mean that existence lost something it did not know it needed, and the only monument to that loss is a second cup on a table in an endless dusk that you can never bring yourself to stop filling?"
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW is very still.|
The cold was absolute. The frost was absolute. The silence was absolute!
And then, slowly, the gold of the heavy-lidded eyes that had been looking at him from above the height of the spring lowered, just slightly, just one degree, as a thought arrived in them that had not been invited!
And for just a moment, one frost-cracked moment that stretched wider than it should have, something moved across the barely-perceivable face.
It was doubt!
And then it was gone, and her composure returned, and she looked at him, and she blinked once, and when her eyes opened again they held a different quality, something sharpening beneath the heaviness, a mind arriving at a conclusion that had nothing to do with him!
|Ah.|
It was barely a word! It was the sound a vastly experienced intelligence makes when it catches itself being played.
|Ah, I see. That little slime gave you these records purposefully. So that I could meet you like I met them ages ago.|
The gold eyes were steady on him now, and something in their depths was almost, almost amused.
|That little slime... was trying to manipulate an Immense One? To use my name, and what happened to me, to what end? Instead of warn, now support another one of the monsters of existence?|
The frost held its silence around them!
And then from the Widow above the journal above the frozen spring, in a voice that had not changed its composure by a single degree, came the one thing Noah had not expected to hear from an Immense One who had just declared his erasure!
A sound that was almost, almost a laugh!
|Haha.|
Her golden halos turned.
|Is it so easy?|
...!