Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5590

Chapter 5590: Wrong Place, Wrong Time!

<THE Sealed One>

Deep within THE Infinite Carcosa, a temple rose out of a sea of golden mist.

It was built of white stone in tiers upon tiers, each tier wide enough to hold a city, and across its endless steps and colonnades, True Lifeforms moved about in the plain robes of priests! Hundreds of them!

Beings whose presense would have flattened Observable Existences walked in silent lines carrying censers and sealed urns, tending rows of caged radiances that pulsed behind lattice screens, and every one of them moved with bowed heads, because the master of this temple had been old before their Ages had names.

At the very top of the temple, on a wide platform open to the golden mist, a humanoid Primeval One sat on a plain stone seat.

He wore the shape of a broad old man with skin the color of river clay, hairless, heavy-shouldered, dressed in a single white cloth, and his eyes held the slow patience of something that had watched harvests of entire Ages come and go.

This was one of the old harvesters. One of those who had stood behind the Gilded Lifeforms across the Ages as they reaped First Causes from the young and the dying, gathering the yield into temples exactly of this kind.

And onto the platform before him, without sound or ceremony, a figure appeared.

A tall pale man in layered dark robes, lean and unhurried, looking around calmly at the tiers and the priests and the caged lights with the mild interest of a buyer in a familiar market.

THE Sealed One had arrived.

The Primeval One smiled slowly.

"Now what," he said, "would bring a vile thing like you to my steps?"

"Is that any way to greet an old customer?" The vessel of THE Sealed One clasped its hands behind its back. "I bought from this temple when it had four tiers. I remember when your priests were seven frightened Gilded children."

"And I remember what you paid with." The old man’s smile did not move. "Which is why I ask what brings you, instead of asking you to leave. Speak your business."

The Sealed One drifted a step along the platform, gaze trailing across the caged radiances below.

"I came to make things easy on myself." The pale man turned, and his voice settled into the tone of a man laying goods on a table.

"I have too many avenues where I must place my focus. Too many boards, too many pieces, and recently, a new expense I did not plan for. So I have come to hand you an opportunity, and let your nature do my work. Consider it a gift between old friends."

"You have never given a gift in your existence."

"And you have never refused one. Listen." The vessel raised one finger.

"A Remnant Existential Treasure has surfaced. Not a rumor. Not a fragment. A true Remnant, whole, worn openly. It sits in THE Ymnaros Dimension, in the hands of a lifeform that is just now growing into its power. Young. Unguarded. Unclaimed by any faction you would have to answer to." He smiled thinly.

"I wanted to use you as a sharp sword, harvester, because my hands are full, and because I want this enemy of mine to suffer. Noah Osmont, in THE Ymnaros Dimension... holds a Remnant Existential Treasure."

...!

The words settled over the platform, and below, several priests paused mid-step.

A Remnant Existential Treasure! The kind of prize that emptied temples and started wars between Primeval Ones, offered up freely with a name and an address attached!

The old man looked at the pale vessel for a long moment.

And then the Primeval One smiled wider than he had smiled all Age.

"It is a good plot that you had," he said warmly. "It truly is. It is just a shame... that you came here at the wrong, wrong time."

The moment the words finished, the air above the platform moved.

Unseen white authority descended!

THE Argent Loom, rivers of it, bent down out of the golden mist where no eye had marked them and wrapped around the body of THE Sealed One’s vessel in silent coils, and before the pale man could so much as flinch, someone appeared behind him.

A hand reached past his shoulder.

And a collar closed around his neck!

CLICK!

The change was instsntly and total. The waves of Intent that forever rolled off the vessel of THE Sealed One faded away! His Infinity, silent and compounding beneath every body he had ever worn, went dark! The deep patient weight of the Primordial Source drained out of his frame like water out of an unstoppered basin, and what remained standing on the platform, in layered dark robes, was a body that read to every sense in existence as a normal human with absolutely no authority at all.

The vessel’s hands rose slowly to his own neck.

The collar was a seamless band of pale gray metal, cool and light, without lock or hinge or joint, and across its surface, thread-fine lines of white ran in woven patterns, loomlight hardened into a shape. It did not burn him. It did not bind his limbs. It simply sat there, quiet as a closed door, and on its far side sat everything he had ever been.

He looked down at it with a heavy, heavy gaze.

"Hm. I did not expect to bag one of the vessels of THE Sealed One here."

The voice came from behind him, and he turned.

A woman stood on the platform. She was tall, dressed in simple pale garments without ornament, dark hair bound back plainly, and she was terrifying for one reason above all others: she emanated nothing.

Not a glimmer of authority. Not a thread of Intent, not a breath of any Source, not one single register on any instrument his stripped senses had ever owned. There was only THE Argent Loom, flowing around her in slow white rivers, orbiting her frame the way rivers orbit nothing else in existence, and her pale eyes studied him with unhurried interest.

"This particular body of yours should have low dimensionality," she said, walking a slow circle around him. "It shouldn’t have sensed anything. And it should be cut off entirely from your main ones. No records out. No memories back. You build your vessels carefully, I will grant you that."

She stopped in front of him, and tilted her head. "But we can still torture you, to obtain information. Hmm."

She turned from him, crossed the platform, and did something that struck the stripped vessel harder than the collar had.

She walked to the Primeval One, and stroked the top of his ancient head.

"The age of lifeforms utilizing and abusing authority is coming to an end," the woman said, her hand resting on the Primeval One’s head as she looked out over the temple tiers.

"Intents. Sources. Infinities. Causes. For long enough, existence has bent and bled beneath beings who were handed power by frameworks and used it as they pleased. That ends now. You have simply joined the many of you that we will round up, and shackle, and make incapable of utilizing any ounce of authority... to finally bring stability across existence." She smiled, small and cold.

"Rejoice, oh Sealed One. For you will join many others."

"A new age is coming... a new age is coming, as many wrongs will be corrected."

"You heard his offering, Ohmran." The woman stood at the platform’s edge with the white rivers turning slowly around her.

"A Remnant Existential Treasure. Worn openly, in THE Ymnaros, by a lifeform still growing into its power."

"I heard it, Warden Yrsa." The old clay-skinned Primeval One rose from his stone seat, and standing, he was half again the height of a titan, thick and slow and heavy-footed, the pale gray band glinting at his throat beneath the white cloth.

"A Remnant cannot be left in random hands. So..." She looked up at the towering old one.

"Check this out, Ohmran. Go to THE Ymnaros. Verify the treasure and the holder. Observe. Touch nothing that is not confirmed, and engage nothing that is. You carry my leash and my patience, and only one of them is long."

"As the Warden says."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify