Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 4983

Chapter 4983: THE Beholder I

In the vast spaces between what was and what would become, THE Beholder drifted.

He was old. Not old in the way that Primordial Architects were old, those beings who had existed since THE First Cause produced differentiation and undifferentiation in its aftermath. Not old in the way that THE Creature was old, that defector from classifications who had witnessed THE Infinite Unfurling and everything that came after.

THE Beholder was old in ways that made such comparisons laughable, in ways that made the entire history of Observable Existence seem like a brief afternoon following an endless morning that most had forgotten ever occurred.

Many believed that there was THE First Cause, and then differentiation and undifferentiation bloomed to cause the emergence of Primordial Architects and countless other life forms. This was the accepted history. This was what beings taught their disciples and recorded in their archives and treated as the beginning of everything meaningful.

The only record that might have the correct information was The Primordial Archive in that small place.

But truly, there was a period of billions upon billions of years where during THE First Cause, there was nothing.

THE Beholder knew this because he had been there.

He had gained cognizance in that age of absolute emptiness, when potential existed but expression did not, when possibility waited but manifestation had not yet learned how to occur. He had observed and watched and done nothing across spans of time so vast that they made the current age seem like the blink of an eye, like the flutter of a heartbeat, like a single grain of sand falling through an hourglass that had been running since before hourglasses were conceived.

The entirety of the history of Observable Existence, everything that beings considered meaningful and important and worth recording, was actually that period of nothing in terms of duration. Everything that came after, during the age of differentiation and undifferentiation until now, was simply a fraction of the history of existence. A footnote. An afterthought. The brief flash of complexity following eons of simplicity so profound that most minds could not comprehend it.

In the grand scheme of existence, even Primordial Architects and Undivided Ones could be considered accidents.

Happy accidents, perhaps. Interesting accidents, certainly. But accidents nonetheless, random emergences from the interplay of differentiation and undifferentiation that had not existed for most of existence’s duration.

They thought themselves ancient. They thought themselves fundamental. They thought their conflicts and their civilizations and their pursuits of power actually mattered in the Existential sense.

THE Beholder found this perspective amusing in the way that a being who had witnessed true emptiness found most things amusing.

He was what later classifications might call a Singular Cognizance, though no classification system had ever properly categorized his kind because so few of them existed and even fewer interacted with the complex life that came after.

Where Primordial Architects had emerged with vast authorities and tremendous presence, where Absolutes had developed civilizations and pursued advancement, where even the simplest differentiated beings possessed multiple aspects of existence working in concert, THE Beholder possessed only one thing.

Awareness.

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