Chapter 5497: White! I
Chapter 5497: White! I
Across THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension of Existence...there were countless lifeforms with deep and glorious histories.
Each one had their own journeys and their own deaths as this Dimension was unique due to the fact that extremely powerful lifeforms...died regularly with short lifespans.
Can you imagine a Mesozoic Scale Lifeform with a Pantheon...having a Lifespan of a thoudand years? A hundred years? It was heavy!
The lifeform in focus at this moment was one of profound patience.
Her name, in the tongue the Cursed Descendants used for their property, was Hvitrmarr. The White Steed!
She was a winged reptile of pure white scales as her massive form put even the floating mountains of this Dimension to shame, each scale a plate of layered pearl-light that shimmered with faint rivers of silver when she breathed! Her horns swept back from her skull in twin spirals of translucent ivory as between them, a mane of soft white flame drifted weightlessly, never once dimming in all her centuries of chains. Her eyes were her most majestic feature, vast pools of liquid gold with pupils shaped as slow-turning rings, one ring nested within another within another, ancient patterns that no other Steed in this Dimension carried.
And around her throat, her wings, and all four of her titanic limbs... were chains.
Chains of screaming crimson metal, forged from the unraveled weavings and bones of dead Steeds as they burned eternally against her white scales! She was one of nine. Nine chained Steeds of Those Who Remain, harnessed in formation before a colossal drifting throne, and upon that throne sat their master.
Jarl Skallagrim.
If Jarl Erling drowned his final years in pleasure, then Jarl Skallagrim had drowned his in madness! The Cursed Descendant’s titanic body had begun to rot at its fissures as his death crept within its final two years, and his mind had rotted faster than his flesh. He no longer experimented in search of a cure. He no longer believed in cures! He simply rode, endlessly, across the dark geography of THE Krazhor-Nul upon a throne pulled by nine dying titans-of-burden, and he whipped them with lashes of cursed lightning for sport, and he laughed at nothing, and he screamed at dead stars.
It was...a sad scene really.
CRACK!
The lash fell across the Steed beside her, a mountainous elk-thing whose antlers had been snapped off for insolence a century ago, and Hvitrmarr did not flinch as her brother-in-chains shuddered and pulled harder.
She never flinched. She pulled, and she waited, and she watched.
What nobody knew, not the mad Jarl upon his throne, not the eight dying Steeds beside her, not even the ancient instruments the Cursed Descendants used to catalog their property was that...
Hvitrmarr could have left at any time!
The chains that burned against her scales were terrifying works, forged to bind the Causes of Cursed Steeds and drink their strength, and they had broken every creature that ever wore them. But her Cause was not like her siblings’ Causes. Where theirs were terminal weavings collapsing toward silence, hers was terminal weavings collapsing slowly, stubbornly, at a fraction of the speed, held together by something layered deep beneath her white scales that no cursed eye had ever managed to read.
For her lineage was a secret older than the Jarls themselves.
She stemmed, in an unbroken line, from one of the First Steeds! Not the failed broods that came after, not the diluted generations the farmhand Progeny had bred and rebred in their desperate experiments, but the original engineered lineage, the first Lifeforms that Those Who Remain had cultivated as Lifeforms with living Causes with their own hands and their own design! Her ancestor had carried one of THEM across the gaps between Dimensions. Her ancestor’s Cause had been seated personally, by fingers that predated the very idea of power and of Scales! And though the great curse had fallen upon all Steeds alike when the Progeny transgressed, the architecture of the First lineage was simply built truer, and it failed slower, and it remembered more.
She remembered things she had never lived. That was the inheritance of the First lineage! Deep in her Cause, like carvings at the bottom of a lake, there were memories that did not belong to her. The feel of a rider whose weight was the weight of everything. Roads between Dimensions that no Anchor could find. And a promise, worn smooth by generations of transmission until only its shape remained: the First Causes were seated by living hands, and what living hands seat, living hands can seat again.
So why had she stayed?
Why had a being who could shatter her chains spent three thousand years pulling a madman’s throne?
Because... escape was not salvation. She had watched free Steeds across the ages, the unclaimed ones dying alone in the far territories, and their freedom changed nothing. Their Causes still collapsed. Their minds still frayed into the savagery of the curse. Freedom was merely dying in a larger cage. And so she had made the coldest calculation any chained thing ever made: if all roads ended in the same death, then the road that cost the least was the one where she conserved everything. Her strength. Her secret. Her slow-failing Cause. She pulled the throne, and she endured the lash, and she spent nothing, because the deepest memory in her lineage whispered that something was worth waiting for, even if three thousand years of waiting had never once shown her what.
Until now.
It came to her mid-stride, between one pull of the chains and the next.
Far away, farther than even her golden eyes could see, across countless gigaparsecs of storming dark... something touched her Cause. Not an attack. Not a probe. A resonance! Her terminal weavings, the slow-dying threads she had guarded for millennia, trembled all at once as if they had heard a sound they recognized, and through the deep place where her ancestor’s memories lay carved, a single feeling rose that she had never felt in her entire long life.
The feel of a living Cause.
Her golden ring-pupils contracted.
It was faint. It was distant. It was moving!
And it was exactly the shape of the promise worn smooth at the bottom of her lineage.
Salvation. Or...well, the most dangerous lie her curse had ever told her!
The allure of it flooded her ancient frame as her white flames drifted faster between her horns, and for the first time in three millennia, Hvitrmarr found herself standing before an actual decision.
To move was to spend everything. The moment she shattered these chains, three thousand years of conservation ended. Jarl Skallagrim, mad as he was, remained a Cursed Descendant of terrifying power, and his rage at losing the crown jewel of his harness would be bottomless. The other Jarls would learn within days that the White Steed had broken free, and many of the dying titan in this Dimension would mobilize, because a Steed that could break crimson chains was a Steed whose lineage was worth dissecting for the sake of the curse. To learn anything more that they could.
They were truly that desperate.
She would be hunted.
And the resonance might be nothing. A newcomer’s trinket. A dying echo. A trap!
But...
CRACK!
The lash fell again, across her own white scales this time, as above her the mad Jarl howled laughter at his own dissolving thoughts, and Hvitrmarr pulled the throne forward through the storm as her golden eyes stared into the far darkness where the resonance pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed like the heartbeat of everything her bloodline had ever waited for.
Three thousand years of patience.
Less than a handful of years before her own weavings finished collapsing, First lineage or not.
And salvation, real or false, moving through her Dimension right now, growing fainter with every pull of the chains.
Her decision settled into her ancient frame.
The next time the lash rose...
The White Steed would move!
...!