Chapter 5545: Extinction II
Chapter 5545: Extinction II
Noah looked up at the thing that had knelt to him, and gave it an order.
"Introduce yourself to me."
HUUM!
The hands moved. The band of small gray palms laced across the titan’s eyes unlaced itself finger from finger, slow and deliberate, and where it parted a gray light began to leak, thin at first and then steady, spilling down the ruined gardens like water finding its level.
Behind him, Ryaenara made no sound. When Noah caught her face at the edge of his vision the humor had gone out of it, and under the stillness sat something he would have called fear on anyone else. At the foot of the obelisk, Anaximander had stopped working. Theron Adranos stood beside him, and both men had gone gray in the face.
The light reached Noah, and everything stopped.
Existence caught and held around him, the way it did when he stretched an instant thin to think inside it, except he had not done this. His vision folded and reopened somewhere that was not the gardens of THE Ymnaros. The light of the sky here came from a source he could not find, and the air carried the weight of a place a long way back, counted in years he had no number for!
He stood in a dark sky. Beside him, filling half of what he could see, hung the visage of the extinct lifeform, no longer kneeling and no longer small against anything, present the way a mountain is present.
It spoke, and the voice came up through him rather than into him.
"Consider a flame," Damodred said. "You would say it is a thing. It has a name, it has a shape, you could point to it. And yet a flame is not a thing at all. It is an event. It is something that is happening, burning itself forward moment to moment, and the instant it stops happening there is no flame left over to bury. There is only the dark where it was."
The great head turned, unhurried.
"I am Damodred. And once, I was happening. I was grand, if you like the word, though grandeur is only a flame that has learned to admire itself. We were known as the Laestrygonians. And there came a day when Those Who Remain decided that our particular fire was one that existence could do without."
...!
Below them, an ancient domain unfolded.
It came up out of the dark in pieces, the way a drowned country surfaces, and Noah understood he was being shown a corpse dressed in the memory of when it had been a home. Cities and whole Dimensions at once, climbing across a black plain in tiers built to outlast the ground beneath them, towers of dark seamed stone that had been grown rather than cut, each rooted downward into the plain by structures that ran out of sight.
Roads worn to a shine by feet no longer present ran between them. Rivers carried the same gray light the titan bled. And over all of it hung a sky crowded with more cities, hung upside down from nothing, their lights answering the lights below.
"Watch them, my first and new Master" Damodred said, gentle as a man pointing out a bird. "And ask yourself what a people is. It is a pattern that has decided to keep itself. That is all. A shape that insists, against everything, on continuing to be that shape."
The people moved through the memory in their millions, built like Damodred, huge and gray and scarred even in their prime, a race that seemed to have come into existence already looking like the survivors of something. And they were strong.
Each of them held Causes at the core of their existence, and the Causes were wrong in a precise and terrible way, wounded and then hardened, the same 36 that sat inside Damodred now.
The memory showed what that meant when it was tested.
A Primeval Lifeform came down on one of the hanging Dimensions, apex because earliest, its weavings sitting beneath every framework these people climbed. And the Laestrygonians met it in their thousands and took it apart, their calcified Causes refusing to yield to a thing that expected all younger things to yield as a matter of course.
"The oldest things in existence assume the young will bow," Damodred said. "It is a reasonable assumption. It is almost always correct. We were the place the assumption went to die."
Whatever came for them, they came out on top. They prospered. Their Dimensions climbed and hung and shone, and for an age no power in existence could make them kneel.
Then the memory changed its light, and Noah knew, before it showed him, that he was about to watch it end.
Armies of Descendants veiled in shifting many-colored light descended.
They came in numbers the memory did not trouble to count, filling the crowded sky between the upside-down Dimensions, and at their head moved something the Laestrygonians had no name for beyond the one it was given. The memory could render it only as an absence, a place in the sky where the light declined to go, and out of that place a voice reached down across the whole domain.
|Your lifeform is vile, and not conducive to existence. Perish.|
HUUM!
"That was the first time we heard that voice, and the last. You will notice," Damodred said, and here for the first time the calm thinned, not into rage but into something more precise beneath it, "that it did not threaten us. A threat is a kind of respect. A threat admits you are real enough to be argued with. It simply announced."
Noah watched the extinction the way Damodred needed him to watch it, without looking away.
The calcified Causes that had thrown down Primevals held, at first. The Dimensions that had stood longer than their own ground held. And then, one by one, they stopped holding, because the thing in the sky was not fighting them. It was overruling them. It unmade the sentence of their existence with the flat authority of a lineage that believed existence was theirs.
The hanging Dimensions came down into the standing ones. The gray light in the rivers went dark. The millions who had never once knelt were made to stop, ended and struck out of the record of what was permitted to be.
"Death..." Damodred said over the ruin, softly, "almost no one who fears it understands it, because fear is a poor teacher. Death is not the enemy of life. Death is the shape life makes at its edge, the way the shore is the shape the sea makes where it stops. To live is to be the kind of thing that ends. We knew this. We had made our peace with the shore." The voice cooled by a single degree.
"What was done to us was not death. Death would have been ours. This was a hand reaching in from outside the whole arrangement to declare that our particular wave was not allowed to have broken in the first place. That is not an ending as much as it is an erasure of the beginning. And that, I have never made peace with."
The memory slowed.
It showed a last work, carried out in the dark while the domain came down around it. The Laestrygonians reaching into their own dying Causes and laying something inside them, a marking, a seed, the memory of themselves written into the one part of existence that might outlast everything.
"We laid our Existential Genetic Markers into our Causes," Damodred said. "Think of a message placed not in a bottle but in the tide itself. We could not choose when it would wash up, or where, or into whose hands. We could only trust that existence is fond of repeating its rare accidents, and that one day, somewhere far ahead, Causes strange enough would meet and mingle in just the way ours once had, and stir what we had left sleeping."
The uncovered gray eyes found Noah at last.
"You, The Master, have grasped the markers of our Causes. What you did to the Steed sent that old shape back through existence, like a note struck once, long ago, sounding again. I am the first to wake to it."
The dark sky held around them, and the ruined domain hung below, and the titan told him what it wanted!
"I place myself at your service. And I ask one thing in return. It need not be soon. I know the weight of what I ask."
"The dissolution of the one who put out the flame of my people. THE Sleepless Fiend, and every Progeny it fathered. Root and line. This...is what I seek."
BOOM!
Noah stood in the memory of a murdered people, and the extinct thing beside him waited on his answer.
"Does The Master believe... such a thing is possible? Can it be done?"
...!