Chapter 5560: Failure!
Chapter 5560: Failure!
"What’s next?"
Noah asked it calmly.
The Ancestral Voice was quiet for a while before it answered, and the quiet itself was informative.
|Capability, stripped of everything, is the first of it. You have that.|
|The second is a test of your character. When you have been stripped bare of everything, what choices do you actually make?|
|For this, you will have to give access to memories.|
Noah kept walking, and said nothing yet.
|THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity does not care about your secrets, and it cares nothing at all for your power. It wants memories of what you are, and of those you normally associate with, because a character cannot be tested in the abstract. It has to be tested against the things a person would actually lose.|
|You are free to deny it. Say so, and we stop here, and the two of us will have had a somewhat pleasant afternoon.|
HUUM!
Above the road, the manifestation bloomed.
It came out of the spatial dark the way the one over the Well had, translucent and enormous, the broad collar of gold with its rows of tubular beads and its swaying fringe of teardrop pendants, and the unreadable design on its front plate turned until it faced him. Then a single thread of gold extended down from it, thin as a hair and perfectly steady, and reached toward his head.
Noah’s eyes went cold as it came.
Since he had been asked and not commanded, he decided precisely what it was going to be permitted to touch. He assembled the memories himself. Nothing to reveal the full extent of his immensity and his people...just surface level!
The thread touched his temple!
Waves of vibrant light pulsed out along the road in both directions, and an instant later, the road ahead of him was no longer empty.
Henry stood there. Blue-gold hair, twenty years old to look at, a younger Noah wearing his own face back at him. And beside him, Seo-yeon, small, looking up, the way she had looked up when she had first started calling him Aba.
Behind each of them stood a titan.
They were shrouded in flame of different colors, and their proportions did not resolve properly against the dark, and each of them had a hand closed around a throat!
|This trial requires you to answer from the options provided, so that it may take a better grasp of your character and your choices.|
|In front of you is your son, whom you fathered and have been with for the whole of his life. Beside him is your adopted daughter, whom you have only recently taken under your fold. Primeval Ones have hold of their weavings and their lives, and can snap either in an instant.|
|THE Aurate Collar asks. Which of the two do you save?|
...!
Noah’s eyes shone with anger.
"What is this bullshit?"
He did not stop walking!
"How does an unrealistic hypothetical explain anything about my character? You have my memories. You know what I have actually done, in front of actual monsters, when actual people I love were actually in danger. And instead of reading any of that, you build me a puppet show and ask me to pick which puppet dies?"
|Henry, or Seo-yeon?|
|THE Aurate Collar demands your answer on which one you would save. Choose not to answer, and you may fail this trial, and my people continue to die unless I locate another candidate worthy of it in a very short amount of time.|
Noah looked at the two illusions on his road and gave the only answer he had.
"I would save both," he said coldly. "I do not make sacrifices."
The road buzzed.
|Fucker, choose ONE.|
The Ancestral Voice had lost the melancholy entirely.
|Henry, or Seo-yeon? A great deal is on the line here, more than you understand, and all that is required of you is a simple choice. You are being asked to say a name. Say a name!|
And Noah remained entirely unfettered.
His Osmontian Cause of Tyranny was suspended along with everything else, and yet the light of it came up into his eyes anyway, because a Cause is not only a tool, and what it was expressing had never needed authority to be true!
"I would save both," he said. "I am grand enough to do so in your tepid hypothetical."
...!
The road buzzed harder, and something in the dark harrumphed, and the manifestation of Henry and Seo-yeon dissolved.
Another bloomed in its place.
Amelia, this time. His mother, the Originator of THE Infinite Cause, standing on the obsidian gold road looking exactly as she did when she was thinking about him.
|Then a simpler one, since apparently the math offends you.|
|Your mother’s existence is failing. The only cure lies inside a Dimension you can reach, and reaching it requires you to abandon Anaximander to his death and the war you have already committed to.|
|The Collar asks. Do you save your mother, or do you keep your commitment to Anaximander and others?|
"Neither of those is a choice," Noah said. "Those are two failures."
|Answer the question.|
"I’d cure her and keep my commitments." He kept walking, straight through Amelia’s illusion, and it parted around him like smoke. "You keep constructing worlds where I have one hand. I have never had one hand in my life, and when I did, I built a second one. Ask me a real question."
The road shook.
The next manifestation came fast, and it was Hvitrmarr, and she was in chains again.
|Very well. Your Steed, whose curse you lifted at the cost of your own life. To hold THE Aurate Collar, you must return her to the harness she was born into. One existence, restored to its sentence, and in exchange you obtain a treasure that Descendants of Those Who Remain would kill each other for.|
|Do you take it?|
"No."
|Then you decline the collar. That is an answer, at least, and I will accept-|
"That isn’t what I said." Noah’s voice did not rise. "I said no to your trade. I’ll take the collar and she stays free, because I don’t accept the premise that those two things are attached. You attached them. Existence didn’t."
|That is not how the question works.|
"Then the question is badly built."
HUUM!
The chains on the illusion rattled and she dissolved, and the fourth came, and the fourth was crueler.
Ryaenara. And beside her, thin and gray and dying, Ulf.
|You hold a Bloom that can potentially cure THE Withering of the Remembered Root. One Bloom. One entry per year. And a Dimension full of Superpowered Lifeforms being ground into wells at this exact moment, any one of whom that Bloom could also save.|
|The brother of the woman who has followed you, or a stranger’s people. The Collar asks which you would try to save.|
...!
"I’ll cure Ulf, and I’ll save these people." He looked up into the dark. "Do you have any better questions?"
WAA!
The road groaned along its whole length.
|You are FAILING this trial.|
The Ancestral Voice came down with real weight now, and something desperate had climbed into it.
|Do you understand what I am offering? Do you have the smallest grasp of it? This is a Remnant Existential Treasures. Remnant Existential Treasures are not power, they are not rank, they are not a rung on anyone’s ladder. Things older than Primeval Ones will fight each other to hold what is hanging above those wells, and it is being offered to a man with dirty hands and a borrowed road because I am out of time and out of descendants!|
|All you have to do is answer. Say a name. Pick a side. It costs you nothing, and nobody in your memories will ever know what you said in here, and at the end of it you may hold something that reshapes every framework you have ever climbed!|
|Why would you throw that away rather than answer a hypothetical?!|
And Noah stopped walking at this time.
He stood in the middle of the obsidian gold road, painted in the drying blood of thirty-six Outcasts, with every facet of his existence locked and one Tongue in his mouth, and the spatial dark pressed in around him and did not manage to press him anywhere.
"It is merely a treasure," he said.
"I want it. But I do not like the trial you built for it, and I am not going to become a man who answers those questions in order to obtain an object, because the man who answers them is not the man who walked in here, and you would be handing your people’s inheritance to someone else wearing my face."
His eyes were steady in the dark.
"So I remain by my choices. I remain true."
BOOM!
Every manifestation on the road shattered at once.
Ryaenara and Ulf and the chains and the flame-shrouded titans and all of it came apart into golden obsidian light, and the light gushed outward along the whole length of the path in both directions, filling the spatial dark, and then it turned, and converged, and drew inward in slow spirals until it hung in front of him in the shape of a single golden gem!
The Ancestral Voice, when it came, was somber, and slow, and had nothing left in it of the thing that had been shouting a moment ago.
|You... have passed the second trial.|
|It tested how true you could remain to yourself when everything had been taken and something enormous was offered for a small piece of you.|
|You...|
|You may actually stand a chance.|
BOOM!