Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5410

Chapter 5410: The Two Pantheons

<Epigraph: The Two Pantheons>

There was a time, not long after Vakochev laid down his Scales of Existence, when the laying was still new enough that beings could remember when it had not been there. This story comes from that seam between the ages.

In those days there was a Primeval Lifeform called THE Verdant Antecedent, old past the reckoning of the new Scales, who took on students the way an ancient tree takes on the vines that climb it, without much comment and without much mercy. Two of these students are the ones the story remembers.

The first was named Sallowe. The second was named Bryndel.

When Vakochev’s Scales were laid, Sallowe rejoiced, because Sallowe had always wanted a road. He had spent his early years climbing in the dark, never sure of the next step, and now here was a path with the steps drawn on it and labeled, a sequence a being could follow and know they were progressing. He threw himself onto Vakochev’s road. He formed his Akashic Civilizational Intent in the proper order, and he refined it, and when the time came to build his Existential Pantheon and cross into the Mesozoic Scale, he followed the framework exactly, and the framework rewarded him for it. His Pantheon rose quickly. He became a Mesozoic Scale being while Bryndel was still laboring, and he was distinguished for it, named among the new powers of the age, pointed to as proof that the Scales worked.

Bryndel did not take the road.

Bryndel had listened to THE Verdant Antecedent longer, or perhaps only differently, and he had come away believing that a Pantheon built from another being’s blueprint would always, in some deep place, belong to that other being. So he refused Vakochev’s sequence. He set out to forge his own Existential Pantheon, from nothing, with no steps laid for him and no labels and no one ahead to tell him whether he was progressing or merely lost. He stumbled. He failed. He built foundations and tore them down because they were not truly his, and built them again, and the years stretched on, and his rival Sallowe rose to distinction and grandeur while Bryndel was still in the dark with his hands in the dirt of his own unmade existence.

The elders say the building took him an age. They do not say it to be precise. They say it to make the listener feel how long it was, how much of it was failure, how easy it would have been at any moment to give up and take the road that had worked so well for his rival.

But Bryndel finished. One day, after all of it, his Existential Pantheon rose, and it was unlike any other, because no other had ever been built the way he built it. He called it THE Mossgreen Reliquary, and it was a thing of living verdure and patient stone, every chamber grown rather than placed, every record of his existence rooted into it like something planted long ago and only now come to its full height. He had become the equivalent of a Mesozoic Scale being at last, on his own path, by his own forging.

Sallowe heard of it, and came to him.

"So you finished," Sallowe said. "It took you an age, and I have been distinguished for most of it, but you finished. Let us settle the old question, then. Spar with me! Pantheon against Pantheon. Let us see, after all these years, which of us is truly the stronger, the one who walked the road or the one who refused it."

And Bryndel, grandly, said no.

"I will not spar with him," Bryndel said. "His strength is not the measure I care about. I will challenge you, Teacher. I want to know what my Pantheon is worth against a thing truly grand, and a rival who walked the same easy road I refused is not that thing. Only you are."

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