Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5987

Chapter 5987: Provenance and Endings II

THE Primordial Gu of Provenance looked at him in silence. The eyes along the pillars had all opened at once and were all looking at Noah, thousands of them, cold and pale and unblinking, and for a long moment no one in the temple moved.

Then the Gu laughed. It was a great, full, startled laugh that rolled out between the pillars and across the floating gold island and set the nearest leaves trembling on their branches, and it went on for a while.

"I felt the child of calamity was gone again," he said at last, still smiling. "I didn’t think you would be the cause...wow oh wow. Well..."

Noah took note of two things in that. The surprise was real. And the word "again" meant it had felt her second, from wherever it sat. Whatever this being was, it kept constant track of endings, without any effort at all.

The Gu settled his hands back onto his knees, and the laughter left his face, though a little of it stayed in his eyes. "Let me tell you why, then, since you came all this way. You should understand what I am, first. I am Provenance. I feel every beginning in existence, and so I feel every ending too, because an ending is only what happens to a beginning. Most endings are ordinary. A tree falls in its time, a star burns out, a child grows old and dies in a warm bed, and all of that is proper, because each of those beginnings was carried to the place it was going. Those endings feed me. Every beginning that runs its whole course and ends where it should makes Provenance stronger."

So Provenance had an income!

Every beginning that ran its full course paid into the Gu, and every beginning cut short was money it never collected.

He had spent years before the apocalypse reading the books of companies that lived and died on exactly that kind of record, and he knew how such a being would think. It would protect its income first and judge everything else by how it touched the income.

His pale eyes held Noah’s. "But some endings are wrong. Some are catastrophic. They cut a beginning off before it ever became what it was going to become, and every time that happens, existence loses a piece of its meaning, and so do I."

"THE First Gu of Calamity," he went on, quite calmly, "is responsible for more wrong endings than any being I have ever felt. Countless deaths. Countless beginnings cut off at the root, Cycle after Cycle, and not only by her own hand. Everything she touches learns to end things badly. Her children, her servants, her allies, her husband. Her child was one I killed, many Cycles ago, because a daughter of Calamity is a beginning that will only ever end in catastrophe, and I prefer to cut such things short myself, cleanly, before they can do worse. And then you apparently brought her back. And now, it seems, you have killed her again."

He smiled faintly. "Provenance grows stronger when things do not end catastrophically. Calamity, and all those associated with her, THE Dissolved Progenitor and the others, they all must die."

BOOM!

The word struck the temple, and the eyes along every pillar shut at once, and the blue sky outside seemed to darken a shade. Noah stood very still in the middle of it all. He thought of the girl lying in the snow, whose only dream had been to grow old somewhere warm. He thought of Thessaly, rooted to the chest in his own soil with her eyes wet, of Phaedra flying into the dark with her sister’s blood on her face, and of Lygara by the fence post with her hands pressed together until they ached.

He looked at the being on the dais, who had just said all of that calmly and evenly and moved on, and he found that he was not angry. He was listening very closely instead, because the logic was clean, and clean logic was the most dangerous kind.

The Gu had cut a child short to stop catastrophic endings, which was itself a catastrophic ending, and it had not blinked at the contradiction. Either it had already priced that cost in, or it had decided the cost did not count when it was the one paying. Noah wanted to know which.

"Why would I?" The Gu looked faintly puzzled. "Nothing chooses its beginning. That is the whole of my point. A thing is decided by where it starts, and what it wants along the way only decorates the road." He tilted his head. "You disagree. I felt that, the last time we met. You think where a thing is going matters more than where it began. That is a very young belief, and you hold it very sincerely, and I do not dislike you for it. But consider what you have just told me. You protected her, and you ended her anyway. Where did that come from, if not from where she began?"