Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5545

Chapter 5545: Extinction II

Noah looked up at the thing that had knelt to him, and gave it an order.

"Introduce yourself to me."

HUUM!

The hands moved. The band of small gray palms laced across the titan’s eyes unlaced itself finger from finger, slow and deliberate, and where it parted a gray light began to leak, thin at first and then steady, spilling down the ruined gardens like water finding its level.

Behind him, Ryaenara made no sound. When Noah caught her face at the edge of his vision the humor had gone out of it, and under the stillness sat something he would have called fear on anyone else. At the foot of the obelisk, Anaximander had stopped working. Theron Adranos stood beside him, and both men had gone gray in the face.

The light reached Noah, and everything stopped.

Existence caught and held around him, the way it did when he stretched an instant thin to think inside it, except he had not done this. His vision folded and reopened somewhere that was not the gardens of THE Ymnaros. The light of the sky here came from a source he could not find, and the air carried the weight of a place a long way back, counted in years he had no number for!

He stood in a dark sky. Beside him, filling half of what he could see, hung the visage of the extinct lifeform, no longer kneeling and no longer small against anything, present the way a mountain is present.

It spoke, and the voice came up through him rather than into him.

"Consider a flame," Damodred said. "You would say it is a thing. It has a name, it has a shape, you could point to it. And yet a flame is not a thing at all. It is an event. It is something that is happening, burning itself forward moment to moment, and the instant it stops happening there is no flame left over to bury. There is only the dark where it was."

The great head turned, unhurried.

"I am Damodred. And once, I was happening. I was grand, if you like the word, though grandeur is only a flame that has learned to admire itself. We were known as the Laestrygonians. And there came a day when Those Who Remain decided that our particular fire was one that existence could do without."

...!

Below them, an ancient domain unfolded.

It came up out of the dark in pieces, the way a drowned country surfaces, and Noah understood he was being shown a corpse dressed in the memory of when it had been a home. Cities and whole Dimensions at once, climbing across a black plain in tiers built to outlast the ground beneath them, towers of dark seamed stone that had been grown rather than cut, each rooted downward into the plain by structures that ran out of sight.

Roads worn to a shine by feet no longer present ran between them. Rivers carried the same gray light the titan bled. And over all of it hung a sky crowded with more cities, hung upside down from nothing, their lights answering the lights below.

"Watch them, my first and new Master" Damodred said, gentle as a man pointing out a bird. "And ask yourself what a people is. It is a pattern that has decided to keep itself. That is all. A shape that insists, against everything, on continuing to be that shape."

The people moved through the memory in their millions, built like Damodred, huge and gray and scarred even in their prime, a race that seemed to have come into existence already looking like the survivors of something. And they were strong.

Each of them held Causes at the core of their existence, and the Causes were wrong in a precise and terrible way, wounded and then hardened, the same 36 that sat inside Damodred now.

The memory showed what that meant when it was tested.

A Primeval Lifeform came down on one of the hanging Dimensions, apex because earliest, its weavings sitting beneath every framework these people climbed. And the Laestrygonians met it in their thousands and took it apart, their calcified Causes refusing to yield to a thing that expected all younger things to yield as a matter of course.

"The oldest things in existence assume the young will bow," Damodred said. "It is a reasonable assumption. It is almost always correct. We were the place the assumption went to die."

Whatever came for them, they came out on top. They prospered. Their Dimensions climbed and hung and shone, and for an age no power in existence could make them kneel.

|Your lifeform is vile, and not conducive to existence. Perish.|

HUUM!

"That was the first time we heard that voice, and the last. You will notice," Damodred said, and here for the first time the calm thinned, not into rage but into something more precise beneath it, "that it did not threaten us. A threat is a kind of respect. A threat admits you are real enough to be argued with. It simply announced."

"Death..." Damodred said over the ruin, softly, "almost no one who fears it understands it, because fear is a poor teacher. Death is not the enemy of life. Death is the shape life makes at its edge, the way the shore is the shape the sea makes where it stops. To live is to be the kind of thing that ends. We knew this. We had made our peace with the shore." The voice cooled by a single degree.

"What was done to us was not death. Death would have been ours. This was a hand reaching in from outside the whole arrangement to declare that our particular wave was not allowed to have broken in the first place. That is not an ending as much as it is an erasure of the beginning. And that, I have never made peace with."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify