Chapter 5557: Path II
Chapter 5557: Path II
<THE True Human Emperor>
In truth, Noah did not know what to make of any of it!
He had never believed in destiny. Or rather, he had never believed in a destiny that arrived from outside, handed down by something that had decided things about him in advance. Destiny as a thing to be designed, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely, and he had built a Civilization of it once and hung its threads where he wanted them.
So he was not a chosen one.
Although, of course, there was the grand fact of the fifth Letter.
Because he had written PROTAGONIST into himself, deliberately, and the whole point of that Letter was that adversity fed him and that fate-adjacent things bent when they got too close. Was that what had happened here? Had a legend belonging to a people he had met a little while ago simply mistaken a Letter for a prophecy? Or had it been something else in him, the Osmontian Causes, the Marrow, the eighteen collisions running in his chest, some part of what he was resonating with a thing that had been waiting to resonate for ages?
There were no coincidences, in his experience. There were only mechanisms he had not identified yet!
Not that he was complaining! The question that actually mattered was how difficult the next part would be. The manifestation reacting did not hand anyone the collar. It opened a pathway toward it. And nobody had ever walked that pathway.
He put the Bloom away, and rose out of the water.
The commotion above was heavier than he had left it. Theron Adranos was trembling, openly, in front of everyone!
Anaximander had a wry look on his face when Noah came up onto the sand.
"Brother," the scholar said, "how do you always do these things? I am not complaining, since it may well be the thing that carries us through what is coming. But wow."
Noah shook his head and looked out at the distant trunk.
"I’m as lost as you are," he said calmly. "I might have tripped something by mistake. It’s entirely possible none of this has anything to do with me."
As it turned out, that was the wrong thing to say in that valley.
Because the sky churned then, harder than it had been churning, the black-gold light in the mist thickening overhead, and a voice came out of all of it at once.
|No, it is definitely connected to you.|
...!
"..."
Everyone went quiet.
Ryaenara stopped mid-motion in the shallows. Anaximander’s wry expression emptied out. And Hvitrmarr and Damodred both moved without a word spoken between them, the steed coming up on Noah’s left and the titan settling in behind his right shoulder, close enough that the valley darkened where he stood!
Theron went to his knees in the sand as his face filled with reverence!
"O Ancestral Voice." His own voice cracked on it. "Has the time truly come?!"
The Ancestral Voice.
Noah’s eyes went sharp, and he reached out with everything he had, and found nothing whatsoever. No presence, no weaving, no location, no origin. The voice was not coming from a direction!
|Since we are all pressed for time, I will be brief, and I would prefer not to repeat myself.|
|At this moment, invaders are butchering Superpowered Lifeforms across this Dimension. Laying them out in rows and putting them in the water and grinding them down, for greed, and in some cases for pleasure.|
|If nothing is done, they will have everything regardless. The collar. The wells. The Blooms. All of it, at their leisure, after the last of my descendants is used up. I have watched it get worse while waiting for a candidate who met the standard.|
|So I made a gamble. I lowered the restrictions on who may be considered worthy to grasp THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity.|
...!
|You meet the lowered tier of requirements.|
|Which means it is now a race, and the thing you are racing is time. Obtain it, and there may still be Superpowered Lifeforms left in this Dimension to be saved. Fail to, or dawdle, and there will not be.|
Out at the center of the Well, the pillar answered.
A column of golden-black light bloomed off the trunk and climbed, and where it reached the height of the drifting islands it opened, folding out and inward at once until a doorway of black and gold hung in the sky above the water.
Noah looked up at it with shining eyes.
"Who are you?" he asked.
|Does it matter?|
|I am the dying voice of a Primeval thing that could not let go of something. Ancestral Voice is more than enough for you to be going on with, and it is what they have called me for ages, and I have never bothered to correct them.|
|Now. Time is of the essence, as a madman has begun to butcher Superpowered Lifeforms in numbers even I did not anticipate. So. Will you move? Will you go and see whether those measly credentials of yours can actually obtain THE Aurate Collar?|
|If that dragon standing beside you had been the one chosen, this would have been considerably easier. If that monster wearing severed hands for a blindfold had been chosen, easier still. Alas, they do not meet the requirements|
|Enter. And since you are the one who must attempt it, you enter alone, or the path dissipates.|
...!
Noah shook his head, internally, at the sheer nerve of it!
Insulted, recruited, and put on a clock by something that would not even give a name!
He began to rise out of the sand.
He could not take Hvitrmarr, and he could not take Damodred, and while he thought about that he also thought about the words of how a madman had begun to butcher, and what those words meant about the next hour in a Dimension he had walked into for a look around.
So he turned to the two of them, and spoke calmly.
"You two. Take Anaximander and Ryaenara across to wherever they’re being butchered." He looked at Hvitrmarr, then up at the veil of hands. "Kill the Infinite True Lifeforms. All of them you find. And if you sense anything too powerful, anything that doesn’t measure, pull back. Okay?"
"Understood," Hvitrmarr said.
Since it was only human to help, and since he had said as much out loud before he came through that obelisk, Noah then raised his head toward the churning sky!
"Can you help guide them?" he asked. "To wherever the Superpowered Lifeforms are dying the most. You clearly care what happens to them, and my people can help."
There was, after all, no reason a voice that protective should not be put to work.
And he was thinking about several things at once. Whatever this pathway turned out to be, his forces would not be idle during it, and a Dimension full of invading Infinite Lifeforms was a Dimension full of corpses and loot with Infinity still in them.
|...|
The voice was quiet for a moment.
|I will direct them where they need to be.|
Noah nodded, and took a step, and appeared before the golden black doorway.
Then he looked back.
Hvitrmarr was frowning. He could feel it through the bond more clearly than he could see it on her face, the whole of her objecting leaving him alone.
And Damodred spoke, and his voice rolled up through the valley from somewhere behind his ribs.
’The Master’s existence is surrounded by a grand weaving of his own making, and by a destiny he wrote himself. There is nothing in that doorway that was not already answering to him.’
’I will kill and collapse out here on your behalf. I will protect these little ones. Do not worry.’
"..."
The words sat heavily on the sand, and Hvitrmarr’s frown did not leave, but her shoulders came down.
Noah nodded once to both of them, and stepped through the doorway, and was gone!