Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5944

Chapter 5944: Provenance! I

<THE Primordial Gu of Provenance>

THE Primordial Gu of Provenance felt its hunters die, one after another, in less time than it took a lesser being to draw breath. Nineteen small lights went out inside the great weave of its Narrative, nineteen of the countless Gu that carried its authority across existence, and each of them went dark with its Provenance broken rather than collapsed. It did not grieve them, because it had not sent them to win.

It had sent them as bait. Somewhere in existence there was a thing that had reached into the deep past and pulled a child of calamity back out of an erasure that should have been final, and a thing like that would not be found by searching. It would only be found when it reached out and took something, so the Primordial Gu had sent some of its Ancients to be taken, and now that they had been, it knew exactly where the taker was.

It moved. One of its bodies, among the many it kept scattered through existence, gathered itself out of the dark and went down a Conduit that only the oldest beings could perceive, crossing a vast stretch of existence in a single motion.

It came out of the Conduit above the golden seas of THE Chrysalis, near a distant Maze, and where its body arrived, space could not hold it. The air cracked around it in long white lines, and the cracks wept thin streams of light down onto the golden sea, because existence there had never been asked to carry anything so heavy.

The body it had chosen was the one it liked best, a hand. It was vast beyond the size of any Dimension, an insect’s hand made of hard pale segments and long jointed fingers, and every segment of it was built from a different Provenance, the origin of a Dimension, the origin of a sea, the origin of a Cycle, the origin of countless lives, all of them fitted together into one shape. Along its knuckles and across its palm, eyes opened, thousands of them, cold and patiant and bright with the light of every beginning they had ever judged.

Those eyes looked out across the golden sea, and they found a lone figure floating in front of the Maze. It was a humanoid lifeform in a dark robe, small and plain and holding nothing in its hands, and there was no sign of the nineteen Ancients anywhere around it, not even their bodies, and the Primordial Gu could no longer feel them at all. That did not matter, because they had done what they were sent to do.

The Primordial Gu studied the small figure for a long moment with every one of its eyes. It read the figure’s Provenance quickly and without effort, as it read everything, and it found a beginning there that was true and whole and very young, so young that the Primordial Gu nearly dismissed it. Its voice, when it spoke, did not come from any mouth, but from every segment of the hand at once, cold and even and very old.

"Are you connected to the thing that brought back that calamity?" it asked, and it did not wait for an answer, because it already knew. "The youngest of existence always do the rashest things without understanding much of anything. How...disappointing."

HUUM!

Its Immensity moved, and its Narrative moved with it, THE Hand That Holds Beginnings, a story older than the Long Night that said every lifeform must answer for where it came from. The whole weight of that story gathered in its palm, every origin it had ever judged pressing down at once, and the hand swatted down at the small figure in front of the Maze. It was not even a serious blow, only a swat and nothing more.

The small figure raised its hands to meet it, and the Primordial Gu saw something it had never seen before. As the lifeform raised its hands, the existence around it rose with it, the golden sea and the golden sky and the long dark currents of the Chrysalis all lifting at once to stand behind those small raised palms, and for one instant the Primordial Gu felt its swat meet a resistance that was far too large for the creature in front of it.