Chapter 5526: Death! I
Chapter 5526: Death! I
Somewhere in the cold reaches of an ancient Dimension, a bleeding man stands with his hands on cursed scales, and inside his chest, two old tenants have moved back into a house that evicted them long ago.
Doubt and fear.
And it should be said that even now, even trembling, some corner of that man is questioning. Weighing the gamble, counting the gains, tallying what a reversed curse and a seated Steed would be worth against everything he could lose!
He is not the first to face this homecoming. Every civilization that ever climbed has run the same argument about these two tenants, and the argument begins with corpses. The soldier who doubted his footing for one breath, and the bridge took him. The mother who feared the dark road and so took the long one, and arrived too late. Doubt is the pause where blades find throats. Fear is the counsel of a smaller life! The evidence dies loudly, and so every discipline of power teaches the same first lesson.
Purge them.
Cultivators burn doubt out of their foundations the way farmers burn stubble from a field. Emperors train fear out of their heirs before the heirs can walk. Some go further still, and trade the emotions away entirely, carve them out, hand them to another, and stand afterward in the clean silence where the trembling used to be, and call that silence strength.
And for a while, it is. The purged strike faster. The purged sleep well.
But the doctrine keeps no record of how the purged die, because the ones who could testify are under the water.
Fear is a map with exactly one thing drawn on it: what matters. No being has ever feared the loss of something worthless! A man feels fear at a sickbed because the one in the bed is his whole sky. A queen in chains feels fear of oblivion because she spent three thousand years earning the tomorrow that oblivion would cancel. The fearless do not carry more courage than the fearful. They carry less cargo! Strip a being of everything it loves and watch how brave it becomes, and then ask whether that bravery is worth what was paid for it.
So what is a Human, who is born holding both?
A Human is a brief and burning pattern with no time to armor itself into silence. Humans doubt because their knowledge is partial, and so they check the wall twice, and the wall holds.
Humans fear because everything they hold can be taken, and so they hold it properly, and build anyway, love anyway, cross the dark anyway.
Which brings the matter, at last, to leaders, and to the one distinction on which everything turns.
A good Human leader is not afraid of fear.
For fear denied in the light doubles in the dark, and a leader who cannot admit the tremor in his own hand will demand that no hand around him tremble, and such leaders break their people long before any enemy arrives.
And the fearless cannot lead the fearful. They can only outpace them! A being who feels nothing before the dark can walk into it, certainly, but no bridge exists between his silence and their trembling, and no one follows. It is the leader who feels the fear fully, names it aloud, and steps first regardless who turns terror into a road.
His fear is the proof that the danger is real. His step is the proof that it can be crossed. Fear shared is halved, and fear witnessed being overcome is transformed, and this is the entire mechanism by which frightened peoples have crossed every impossible thing they ever crossed.
Courage was never the absence of fear. Courage is fear, correctly spent.
So when doubt regenerates in a chest that once traded it away, and a heart that forgot the rhythm beats hard against cursed scales, that is not a foundation cracking. That is the foundation completing itself.
Somewhere in the cold, the snow is falling in two colors, and the black half is climbing.
The man with his hands on the scales has his fear, and his doubt, and his greed, and his crown.
Now he must spend them.
Ultimately, the ones who feel everything, and go forward anyway, have always been the strongest things in existence.
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
Inside Hvitrmarr, Noah held the hand of THE Infiniverse, and he was trembling.
Their joined hands were already stained black. The Curse had wasted no time, murky tendrils sunken into their fingers and crawling up their wrists as their feet darkened where they stood upon the inner weavings of the White Steed, and across Noah’s body, gashes tore themselves open one after another! Across THE Infiniverse’s frame too, thin lines split her manifestation as blood sputtered out of both of them gloriously, stellar crimson-blue-gold scattering into the vaulted white-flame dark of a living Steed at war with itself!
But even in such a situation...
Noah’s body began to pulse with light.
Multicolored radiance bloomed out of his body in slow, mounting waves, the light of his Nine Prime Causes, Existence and Paradox and Chaos and Mana, Quintessence and Adversity, Tyranny and Harvest and Apocalypse, each one a different burning shade turning through his weavings! And beneath them all surged the endless blue light of his Infinite Cause, pouring out of his core in tides as their blackened limbs instantly shone bright, the stains burning back inch by inch, and a sea of blue began to expand around the two of them, pushing the gnawing dark to a perimeter!
And within that fought-for clearing...Noah got to learn exactly what he was up against.
His senses spread through her, and the structure of Hvitrmarr unfolded before him.
She was made up of nine Causes. And they were all First Causes!
Nine First Causes, seated by the hands of Those Who Remain at the dawn of this Dimension, turning through her colossal existence like nine ancient suns! But what was horrendous, what made his expression harden even through the blue light, was HOW they were seated. These Causes were not installed within her the way Prime Causes sat within Observable Existences.
These Causes were bound to her Organs. No. They were her Organs!
Cause and flesh fused into single existing things! When he had resuscitated Terminal Observable Existences, he had replaced their dying Prime Causes the way one replaces a foundations of a building. But here, to replace a First Cause...one would have to replace the Organ of a Cursed Steed itself! Break down living anatomy seated by the makers of this Dimension, and grow new anatomy in its place, all while the Curse defended every inch!
His Sight moved through her, and he discerned them, one by one as these causes...were not the normal causes of Observable Existences.
THE First Cause of Fealty, seated as her Heart! The vast drumming organ at her center, a Cause that beat not for herself but for another, the sworn bond of the First Steeds given muscle and rhythm!
THE First Cause of Honor, seated as her Spine! The unbending column running her colossal length, the Cause of carrying every weight upright and breaking before bowing!
THE First Cause of Valor, seated as her Lungs! Twin oceans of white flame drawing the breath before every charge, courage itself made into respiration.
THE First Cause of Obedience, seated as her Ears! Deep coiled chambers that heard the command before it was spoken, attunement to a rider’s will woven into living structure.
THE First Cause of Vigilance, seated as her Eyes! The golden ring-in-ring wonders, the watch that never closes, awareness layered within awareness.
THE First Cause of Endurance, seated as her Bones! The tireless frame that had borne burdens across ages, persistence given architecture.
THE First Cause of Temperance, seated as her Stomach! The furnace that consumed only what duty required and nothing more, restraint as an organ!
THE First Cause of Mercy, seated as her Claws! Strength vast enough to unmake, shaped into instruments that had chosen gentleness for three thousand years!
And THE First Cause of Devotion, seated as her Wings. The great white sails that had only ever flown carrying another before herself, service itself given feathers and flight.
...!
This was what Those Who Remain had built! Not a beast of burden at all, but something sworn and honorable and enduring and devoted, nine virtues seated as nine organs, and then their descendants had cursed the entire order of them and hitched what remained to thrones.
Noah and THE Infiniverse struggled against the pressing dark as he took it all in, and he made his choice in the same breath!
"Ruination. Infiniverse. Confluence."
HUUM!
The fusion slammed through the three of them inside the body of a fourth! His crown unwove into him, THE Infiniverse dissolved into his chest, and THE Quintessential Confluence rose within Hvitrmarr’s inner vaults, grades climbing a rank as his frame, already carved with gashes, blazed crimson-gold through the blue! And through the fused sight, the full scale of the task ahead of him resolved without pity.
Nine Organs. Nine fused First Causes. Every one defended by a Curse that punished hope itself, in a body older than the Scales, on a clock measured in the hoofbeats of eight Steeds and an Jarl.
It was almost impossible. He saw that plainly.
And doubt rose, and fear rose with it, the two regenerated tenants beating hard against his ribs! But Noah Osmont was not made of two emotions. He was Human, and Human was a crowded house! His pride rose beside the fear, the pride of a man who had never once left a wall unclimbed.
His stubbornness rose beside the doubt, the mule-hearted refusal that had carried him up from an F Rank Hunter through every apocalypse existence could schedule! His greed rose, pricing the First-lineage Steed and finding the reward worth any gamble!
His love rose, for the daughter sensing agony-clusters and the mother inside his home and the women who depended on him! And above all of them rose the quality that had crowned him, the responsibility of THE True Human Emperor, the plain and total conviction that if all that was Human was his to gather, then all that was Human was his to protect, and the Human thing before him was dying.
Fear said the wall was high. Every other thing he was said... climb.
He had to try. And he had to succeed!
But how?! How could he resuscitate Causes that were not merely Terminal, but fused into flesh and filled with a Curse that lashed out against every touch?!