Chapter 5284: Causal Stilling! II
Chapter 5284: Causal Stilling! II
The many-faced locus that had carried Erwin’s evolving consciousness had gone flat behind the silver glow, the expressions no longer cycling through their configurations but fixed in the flatness of something whose internal process had been removed and replaced with a single imperative.
An Existential Acedia Dredge.
The glorious Living Paradox. THE Information Paradox!
Turned and altered by something that even a Fourth Scale Existence could not stand against!
The obsidian tentacles that had moved with the complex purpose of a being engaged with existence moved now with the simple purpose of something seeking contact and infection.
THE Primordial Paradox looked at what his student had become as even he...was barely keeping his cognizance.
He said nothing, but his eyes showed a sense of sadness...and pity!
---
In THE Wastes, Alexander felt it coming before it arrived.
The Enneagram on his chest blazed with multicolored Infinity, and from that connection something moved outward through Alexander’s foundations with the urgency of a warning.
He looked up at the silver-gold pillars cracking the sky above THE Wastes.
He drew his bow as he roared!
OOOH!
The Infinity from THE Genesis Monarch’s mark poured through the bow and into the arrow he pulled from nothing, the multicolored light of it blazing against the silver-gold of the descending Stilling!
He released with everything he had toward the nearest pillar in a gesture that was... simply the refusal of a being who could not accept without resisting.
The arrow hit.
The pillar’s light swallowed it.
The Causal Stilling reached Alexander and moved through the outer layers of his foundations, and he felt the progressive absence of the thing being taken more disturbing than the taking itself!
He fought it with every technique available to him and with the Infinity still pouring through the Enneagram and he held, barely.
He was crying.
He was crying and fighting and neither the crying nor the fighting had any dignity in them!
Because this was not a dignified moment!
This was the lower Observable Existence in the process of being ended by beings who had made a calculation!
At this time...
The Existential Acedia Dredges were already moving through the Observable Existence.
Whether they were Fold Dwellers to Formless Terrors to Primordial Architect within THE Wyld, they all became Existential Acedia Dredges!
They had been beings of every kind and classification before the Stilling, and now they were uniform in their wrongness, silver-gold light running through bodies that still functioned as bodies, but pursued a single purpose that the silver-gold imperative had replaced every other purpose with.
The lower Observable Existence had been a place where extraordinary beings had done extraordinary things across eons of extraordinary conflict.
In the silence following the Ordnances, it was something else.
---
THE Infiniverse was gone from the lower Observable Existence before the Ordnances finished their detonation.
She had moved the moment Noah’s order reached her through their connection, the Vessel Severance capability carrying her into THE Undefined Gaps with the completeness of a domain that had been built with exactly this kind of departure in mind. The Calabi-Yau folding had been her concealment. THE Undefined Gaps were her escape, the unclassified regions between defined existence providing cover that no Ealdor-class deployment could reach because those deployments had been designed for Observable Existence, and she was no longer there.
She carried everyone inside her. Every being Noah’s people had brought into her domain across the full span of her development, every Early Creature and Living Existence and Fold Dweller and cultivator who had made her their home, all of them present within her substrate as she moved through THE Undefined Gaps. The emergence event had drawn his people back inside for its completion, a timing that had felt like administrative necessity at the time and had become the specific grace of a thing that saved everything it touched without knowing it was doing so.
If they had been outside, they would not have been saved.
---
Noah stood in THE Early Veiled Shore with the nine Prime Cause lights burning through his Osmontian Infinite Physique and said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say that the situation hadn’t already said more completely and with considerably more authority.
Beside his Primus Apeiron body, Taylor stood.
She had been communicating with existence from the moment the Ordnances detonated, the ability that had made her valuable enough to kidnap working now in the direction it had always been designed to work.
Existence was feeding her information about everything it was experiencing simultaneously across the lower Observable Existence.
Her face moved through expressions in rapid succession and settled on fury, the fury of a being receiving detailed information about something catastrophic.
"How could they do this?" The words came out compressed under their own weight. "I know there is no such thing as good or evil but, really? REALLY?!"
She looked at the space around her, at the Early Veiled Shore that no longer touched the lower Observable Existence it had occupied an hour ago. "I lived with Gilded Ones peacefully in my Observable Existence. I didn’t...they shouldn’t...really?!"
Her eyes blazed with the fury of a ruler! Even though she did not belong here, she still felt!
Noah was not expressive.
His rage burned so far inward that nothing of it reached his exterior.
The crystalline blue of his eyes carrief the specific chill of Osmontian Absolute Infinity burning through the Ira Ego hidden inside at full expression.
Nine lights. Nine Prime Causes. The complete fury of a being who had built something grand!
He breathed out.
He shifted into his Humilitas Ego of Infinity.
A void of humility and surrender wrapped around him with the cold completeness of nothingness made substantial, and he took a step and disappeared from THE Early Veiled Shore.
The lower Observable Existence received him.
He arrived where the Primus Apeiron body had stood befofr and felt the effects of the exploded Ealdor-class Existential Acedia Ordnances moving through the surrounding space as a pervasive condition rather than an active attack, the Causal Stilling having already settled into the fabric of the space and become indistinguishable from the space itself.
The silver-gold luminescence of the Acedia sat in the substrate of everything he could perceive, coating the geometry of the region the way frost coated terrain, and it pressed against him from every direction simultaneously.
It found nothing.
|Osmontian Absolute Infinity- active engagement with Ealdor-class Existential Acedia Ordnance effects.|