Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5406

Chapter 5406: THE Hall of Swords I

The borrowed hands worked the fishing line, and THE Sealed One mused, cruel and ominous and unhurried.

"The trouble with unique lifeforms," it murmured, to the crimson sea, to no one, "is that they are fed by exactly the thing you would use to kill a lesser one. You strike an ordinary being unprepared, and it dies, and that is the end of it. You strike a being like Osmont unprepared, and you have not attacked him. You have nourished him. Every adversity such anomaly survives makes him grander. His whole foundation is built to convert resistance into growth." The borrowed mouth curved.

"He cannot be fed adversity. So I will not feed him any. At least, not anymore..."

The line drifted in the red.

"When I move against that anomaly," THE Sealed One continued, soft and certain, "it will not be a contest. It will not be a glorious clash that he can survive and grow from and add to his record. I have had enough of beings underestimating things and dying for the underestimation. I will not be one of them. When I move, it will be with complete surety. Which means preparation. Which means more information, more pieces of myself gathered, more of his weaknesses mapped, more of his allies understood, until there is no version of the encounter where he walks away grander. The time to act is never when victory is merely likely. For a thing like him, likely is not enough, because likely is just another adversity for him to overcome. The time to act is when victory is already decided before the first move is made. When the only thing left to do is collect what was always going to be mine." It almost laughed.

"He is eating my hand. Let him. A hand is information too. Let him learn exactly as much about me as I am learning about him, and let us see which of us uses what we learn better. I have been doing this since before his Age had a name."

HUUM!

Behind him, infinity stirred, and a woman appeared.

She was a Mesozoic Scale Infinite Lifeform herself, burning with deep infinity, beautiful and grand, and she drifted up behind the vessel and wrapped her arms around him from behind, holding him close, her cheek against the back of his shoulder.

"My love," she said, and her voice was warm, full of an affection that had clearly been built across a long time. "The Council is yours to address, whenever you are ready. They are waiting on you. They always wait on you."

She tightened her arms around him, fond, easy, the embrace of a being who believed completely in the one she held. "But there is no hurry. Fish a while longer, if it pleases you. The crimson always settles you."

Her eyes were full of warmth as she said it.

And she had no idea. No idea at all that the lover she held was not there anymore, that the being whose robes she had shared and whose Council she helped him lead and whose existence she had braided with her own had been hollowed out and replaced an unknown time ago, that she was pressing her cheek against a coat with something ancient and patient wearing it. She held her love, and her love was a grave, and she did not know, because THE Sealed One wore him perfectly, the way it wore everything perfectly!

THE Sealed One turned in her arms.

It turned the vessel toward the woman who loved a dead man, and it looked at her with the borrowed eyes, and it took her lips the way the man she remembered would have. Her infinity flared in answer, trusting and glad. The borrowed hands rose and unclasped her robes, and infinity surged out across the whole of the region, deep and concealing, rising to blanket the endless crimson sea so that what came next belonged to no observer.

And amidst the endless adversity of existence, the patient cruelty and the long gathering and the war that had not yet begun, THE Sealed One continued, in its own monstrous way, to do the one thing it had always done.

It continued to live, completely and without apology, by its identity.

---

<THE Source Lands>

"No mention of THE Sealed One has risen for eons," it said. "Not a whisper. The name was buried with the rest, and the burying was supposed to be the end of it. And now it surfaces, spoken aloud by a freshly sworn Sword in the open air of THE Hallowed Demesne, as though it were any other piece of information." A pause, heavy with what it did not say.

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