Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5985

Chapter 5985: Choices, and Consequences II

Some say that every choice was made before the one who makes it ever arrived.

A river does not choose its sea, they say, and a stone does not choose where it falls; it only seems to choose, because it cannot see the slope beneath it. Others say the opposite with equal certainty: that a self is the one thing in existence that can begin something, that every choice is a small first cause, and that nothing pushed it but the one who chose.

Between them stand those who say both are true at once, that a choice can be shaped by everything that came before it and still belong entirely to the one who makes it. And at the edges stand the strangest of all, who say that the question itself is a kind of trap, and that the only answer worth giving is to choose, and keep choosing, and become whoever those choices make.

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<Anaximander>

THE Primordial Source lay still again after the flood, an endless obsidian sea with no shore and no horizon, and in the middle of it, where the waves had crashed down onto a small dark-haired scholar, Anaximander was shining.

He stood on the black water with his arms loose at his sides and his head tilted, and the light that came off him was the same deep, old light that had slept beneath the sea since before any of them were born. In truth, it was difficult to say where he ended and the sea began.

His body was still a man’s body, slim and unhurried and a little stooped from a very long habit of leaning over things to look at them closely. But he had no skin. Where skin should have been, there was only the sea’s own dark sheen, smooth and glittering, and beneath it the shape of him showed through: the long cords of muscle in his arms and shoulders as slow currents of deeper black, the curve of his ribs as pale ridges under moving water, and the steady beat of a heart that was no longer quite a heart, pulsing faint gold in the center of his chest.

His obsidian pupils had widened until they held the whole dark of the Primordial Source, and his tousled hair drifted around his head in a current that touched nothing else. If anyone had glanced across that sea without knowing to look for him, they would have seen only more of the sea.

He looked down at his own hands for a long while, turning them over, watching the light move under them, and then he smiled, slowly, the smile of a man who had finally found the last page of a book he had been reading all his life and discovered it was blank.

"I have been thinking about something," Anaximander said, and his voice was soft.

"I have been thinking about every door I ever walked through without opening, and every distance I crossed without crossing it. People always asked me how. They thought there was a method, some art I had learned in a library somewhere. The truth is that I simply decided I could. I wanted to be on the other side of a door, and so I was. I decided that no one could harm my body, and so no one could. I never once asked existence for permission. It never once occurred to me that I needed to."

He turned his hand over again and watched the light ripple through it. "And now I am told I am not a lifeform. I am told I am a small piece of existence that woke up one day and chose a shape. That should change something, I suppose. A lesser scholar would be very upset." He laughed quietly.

"But it changes nothing. It explains nothing, either. Being existence did not make me able to do anything. Deciding did. A piece of existence that never decided anything would only be a stone, or a wind, or a patch of sea. I am not the sea. I was never the sea. I am the one who chose to stand on it."

He lifted his head and looked out across the endless dark.

"I can see it now. Every road I ever walked is still there, behind me and ahead of me at once, and on every one of them I am making the same choice. I am deciding to be myself. That is all I have ever done. I can be a lifeform, or not, but I am still me." His voice came back, close and warm and a little amused. "I am...Anaximander."

The sea answered him. It settled under his feet, everywhere, all at once, quiet and deep, and stayed settled.

Far above him, Vakochev had been watching in silence, his titanic form still and his great head bowed toward the small shining figure at his feet. When he spoke at last, his voice rolled across the obsidian sea in deep, slow waves that the scholar and THE Creature both felt in their chests.

"I have seen a great many things carved out of existence," Vakochev said. "I have watched Legacies cut pieces from it and bleed it for Ichor and seat what they carved inside themselves, and call it power. I know the look of a carved thing. It always carries the wound it came from. You carry no wound, scholar. You seem to be something carved from existence, and yet nothing carved you. Nothing ever cut you loose. You simply stepped out, the way a thought steps out of a mind."

He lowered his great head a little further, studying the scholar with eyes as old as the sea. "I would make the assumption that you are an Essara of Existence, a living one, walking around in a shape it chose for itself. But...you are not. An Essara is a piece. You are not a piece of anything."

The Primordial Source went very quiet around his feet. "It is a Profundity. You are a Profundity, standing up and calling itself by a name."

Anaximander considered that for a moment with his head tilted, turning it over in his mind as he turned over everything anyone ever handed him. Then he turned away from the titan and looked at the one who had stood beside him through the flood without stepping back, and he smiled.

"Whether I am anything more than myself remains to be seen," he said to THE Creature. "But for the longest time, I was never alone. I was always with you, my friend. Through every Dimension and every strange shore, through every door I walked through, you were there on the other side of it."

His voice softened. "So if I am a piece of Existence, then...what are you, whose entire Way, whose Civilization, whose very being...is Existence?"

THE Creature looked back at him patient and silent, as he always was.

"I do not wish to be alone in this, my friend," Anaximander said. "I do not wish to alone be something I do not understand. So...whether this is from me making it be true, or whether it has always been true...I say that you, THE Creature, have always been Existence."

...!

BOOM!

The word struck the Primordial Source, and the sea screamed. It was the first sound it had made, a long, rising howl from every direction at once, and the black water around THE Creature leapt up in jagged towers and fell back and leapt again. Fire came up out of him. It was the many-colored flame he had carried since the Wyld, red and gold and violet and green and colors that had no names, and it poured out of his chest and his arms and his eyes and wrapped around him in a pillar that climbed into the dark higher than Vakochev’s head.