Nine clones drew closer around the opened Descendant, crowns of blood turning slowly, and Noah studied the written line running through Jarl Skallagrim with the interest of a man who had just been handed a language older than every framework he had ever broken!
The plan assembled itself as he looked.
He could not read the script of Those Who Remain. Fine!
He did not need to read it. He needed to REPLACE it! Where the curse’s counter-writing braided through the lineage-line, where the Argent Loom coiled white through the black, he would lay down his Blood Marks as anchors, and then, clause by careful clause, he would swap out the bound lengths of an ancient sentence with material of his own. With his Infinite Sanguine Mana. With his own Osmontian Tongue.
With his words!
But which words? THE MORTAL COIL was a Word of endings and mortality, and it belonged in this work, but it was not enough alone. This was a matter of lineage. Of inheritance. Of a line of descent that had been written for its bearers instead of by them, and against that, he needed something new.
So, hands steady in the opened existence of a Cursed Descendant, Noah began to design the second Word of his Tongue.
’Lineage... and humanity.’
He built it from what he knew to be true. Humans inherited. Blood, faces, tempers, debts.
No human chose the line they were born into, and in that much, humans and Descendants were kin. But there the kinship ended!
Because a human’s inheritance was a beginning, not a verdict. A human took the blood handed down and wrote their own fate with it, and their children would write theirs, and no ancestor’s hand, however old, reached forward to finish anyone’s sentence for them!
A lineage was supposed to be a gift passed forward, not a leash held backward!
The Letters of his Tongue turned around the thought. HUMAN. I AM. And between them, meaning condensed into sound, and sound into a Word, and Noah spoke it silently into his own depths and felt his whole Tongue accept it!
HUUM!
|THE Osmontian Tongue has expanded.|
|A second Word has been designed: THE UNBOUND LINEAGE.|
|Its meaning: a line of descent belongs to those who live it. Every clause of a lineage is written by its own bearer, and no hand behind may finish the sentence of one who breathes. Where this Word settles, inheritance becomes a gift, and ceases to be a verdict.|
|THE MORTAL COIL and THE UNBOUND LINEAGE may be expressed together.|
...!
Noah’s eyes gleamed in the dark, and he went to work!
His blades of blood thinned further, becoming instruments finer than any edge, and through them, he began the infusion. THE MORTAL COIL flowed in first, settling mortality’s honest grammar against a curse that had made mortality a punishment.
Then THE UNBOUND LINEAGE poured after it, wrapping the bound clauses, and behind both came his Blood Marks, laid down one by one along the written line as anchor points, and where curse-writing and Loom-thread coiled together... he began, slowly, to replace them.
And it was like moving mountains with his fingertips!
The first clause resisted him with a heaviness that had nothing to do with mass! He was not lifting a thing, he was contradicting a SENTENCE, prying loose words spoken by one of the oldest hands in existence, and his frame across nine clones strained as though each syllable weighed a Dimension!
His Provenance Essence surged as he commanded all three singularities into the work, stellar blue flooding down his instruments, and all around them, existence itself started to vibrate and shake, the foamy dark trembling in slow waves that spread out from the surgery for light years in every direction!
"While we are here." Noah’s voice stayed level through the strain. "Tell me about Those Who Remain."
"...Now?" THE Cursed Descendant’s eyes were somber as he had to ask!
"Especially now. THE Sleepless Fiend. All of them. If I am gaining their animosity by doing this, I should at least understand who they are."
"Where would I even begin," he murmured. "They are supposedly the idea of beginnings"
"They were ancient when life itself was early. That is the first thing every Progeny is taught, and it is the only thing all of us agree on." His voice found the cadence of something recited across a whole lifetime.
"Before oddities like Vakochev and their Scales. Before the frameworks. When existence was young and thin, they were already old in it. And in that early age...Those Who Remain were known to get together with THE First Lifeforms."
"Get together?"
"Joining. Meeting. Working. Warring. The word changes depending on which Progeny tells the story."
"And between their joining... we arose. The Descendants. And the Primeval Lifeforms both. Though no one living agrees on how."
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