Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5614

Chapter 5614: Mistakes!

<Existential Interlude- Mistakes>

Nobody knows how long ago it was.

The record itself does not claim a time. It only claims that it happened, in the age when Those Who Remain still spoke often, and existence was still young enough to listen closely.

One of Those Who Remain had many Descendants.

His name is not written as the record calls him only the Father, and it calls his youngest Descendant Alvarr, and it says that Alvarr was born restless.

One day, Alvarr came before the Father and said, "Father, I wish to prove myself to you. Give me a quest."

The Father considered him for a long time. Then he said:

"Go out into existence, and bring me back a thing I do not have."

Alvarr bowed, and left that same instant!

This was the first mistake, and it was the mistake of haste.

Alvarr crossed a hundred Dimensions before it occured to him that he had never asked what the thing was. What did his Father lack? What could a being lack, when existence agreed with almost every one of his words? He did not know! He had been so eager to begin that he had run past the beginning entirely, and now an Age had been spent, and all of it was wandering!

He returned to his Father empty handed and ashamed, and he waited to be punished, and he waited a long time as his father was entertaining himself with one of THE First Lifeforms at that time for a whole millennium.

After waiting for his punishment in that millennium...

The Father did not punish him.

"Why would I punish a teacher?" the Father said. "Your mistake has just taught you what nothing else could have. You mistook motion for progress. All the living do this once. Most of them do it forever. Now you will not. Go again."

The second mistake was the mistake of the mirror.

Alvarr went out and gathered treasure. He took the hearts of dead Dimensions and the crowns of drowned kings, rivers of authority and seeds of unborn Observable Existences, everything that made his own chest burn with wanting, and he piled it before his Father in a heap that bent the light.

The Father looked at the heap, and then at his son.

"You have brought me everything YOU desire," he said. "You looked into Existence and saw only your own face in it. This is the mistake of the mirror, and every living thing commits it: to give others what we ourselves want, and call it generosity. Do not be ashamed. Be corrected. To find what another lacks, you must first put down the mirror and listen. Go again."

And so the Descendant went on and commited another mistake!

The third mistake was the mistake of pride.

Alvarr resolved to listen, and so he sought out the oldest and grandest beings in existence, Primeval things and sovereign things and Provenance Lifeforms, and he asked them what a being such as his Father could lack. They gave him grand answers, and every answer was wrong.

At the edge of a small Observable Existence, a farmer who was nothing at all offered him directions, and Alvarr did not stop, because what could nothing at all know?

He wandered another Age. When he finally passed that way again, humbled and worn, he stopped at the same field, and the farmer gave him the same directions, and they were true ones.

When he told his Father, the Father nodded slowly.

"Pride is the worst of the mistakes," he said, "not because it is the largest, but because it is the jailer of all the others. Every mistake can be cured by asking. Pride is the mistake that forbids asking. A being who cannot ask can only repeat. Remember the farmer. Go again."

And he went on!

The fourth mistake was the mistake of the closed hand.

Following the farmer’s directions, Alvarr came upon a wonder: a dying beast of the old dark, and cradled in its fading coils, a thing that existed nowhere else, offered freely to whoever would take it before the beast’s last breath.

And Alvarr hesitated.

Was it a trick? Was it worthy? Was he? He weighed, and he doubted, and he waited to be certain, and while he waited, the beast breathed its last, and the wonder went out with it, and no power in all existence could light it again.

"I made no move at all," he told his Father, bitter. "How can doing nothing be a mistake?"

"Because hesitation is not the absence of a choice," the Father said. "It is a choice wearing the mask of caution. The closed hand believes it is keeping itself safe. It is only keeping itself empty. Some doors open once, my son. You will grieve this one for a long time, and the grieving is also the learning. Go again."

And this fucker went on to commit yet another mistake.

The fifth mistake...was the mistake of the buried wound.

For in his wanderings Alvarr had erred against a companion, a small betrayal, committed in a weak hour, and rather than confess it, he had hidden it, and told himself it was too small to matter.

But a hidden mistake is a planted one!

It grew in the dark. The small betrayal became a distance, and the distance became a silence, and the silence became a parting, and by the time Alvarr understood what he had buried, the companion was gone beyond finding, carrying a wound with no name on it.

He confessed it to his Father last of all, and his voice failed him twice in the telling.

"Now you know the accounting every liar learns too late," the Father said. "A mistake confessed is half repaired. A mistake hidden compounds. Shame promises to protect you from the cost of your errors, and instead it collects interest on them. Bury nothing, my son. The buried does not rot. It grows. Go again."

Finally, lastly, he commited his last mistake.

The sixth mistake was the mistake of the ended story.

Alvarr did not go again.

He sat down at the rim of a dead Dimension, and he counted his failures, one Age of haste, one Age of mirrors, pride, an empty hand, a buried wound and its silense, and he concluded that he was a being MADE of mistakes, and that a being made of mistakes could bring his Father nothing, and that the quest was over because he was over.

He sat there for a long time. Long enough that the dust of the dead Dimension began to know him.

And at last, because there was nothing else left to do, he stood up anyway, and walked home to say the failure aloud rather than let it also become a buried thing.

He came before his Father with his hands open and empty.

"I have failed the quest," Alvarr said. "I searched every reach of existence, and I found nothing you lack. I bring you nothing. Only my mistakes."

There was a long silence!

And then the Father did something the record insists upon, though it strains believing. He leaned forward, and his ancient existence trembled, and he said:

"Say that last part again."

"...I bring you only my mistakes."

"Then the quest is complete," the Father said. "You have brought me the one thing I do not have."

BOOM!

"I am one of Those Who Remain. When I speak, existence is supposed to agree. I have never reached for a thing and missed it. And so I have never once, in all the reaches of my existence... learned anything. A mistake is a teacher that existence sends for free, and no teacher has ever been permitted to reach me!"

And the young make mistakes and become old. The old make mistakes and become wise. The wise make mistakes and become stories, and the stories go on erring in the mouths of everyone who retells them, and this too is how the living remain alive.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify