Bölüm 5552: Analiz! Ben

Bölüm 5552: Analiz! Ben

Deep inside Noah, inside the living Observable Existence he carried and who carried him, a sea of blue-gold Osmontian Source Infinity stretched out past any horizon inside a certain realm.

The whole ocean gave off a low sustained hum, the sound of a thing that had never once needed a source outside itself!

Above it hung floating islands.

Hundreds of them, drifting at their own patient heights. They mimicked the old Spiritual Lands- terraced peaks of pale stone laced with veins of gold, waterfalls of raw Infinity pouring off their undersides and falling forever into the sea below.

Mist of pure Source drifted in the gaps between.

It was beautiful! But Ruination and THE Infiniverse were not here for the beauty.

They had come here to work.

All around the two of them, filling the air above the sea and between the islands for as far as the drifting mist allowed, hung diagrams.

Manifestations of everything they had just learned about Causes.

THE Infiniverse stood upon the surface of her own sea, luminous and severe, hands clasped behind her back, and Ruination hovered near her.

To ensure the Master never has to die again, Ruination said, we have to anticipate everything in all possible futures.

The strings moved.

He died once inside the Steed. He came back only because THE Hepatarch answered, and I will not build a strategy on the assumption that it always will.

So we work backward from every ending we can imagine, and we close them. And right now, Causes seem to be the nexus behind a great many of those endings.

The first bubbles bloomed in the air above the sea, written in threads of pale light.

CAUSES.

They are behind you, Ruination said. Behind every Observable Existence that has ever held together. Behind Steeds, who are made of nothing else. Behind the Master’s own ascent, and behind the eighteen colliding in his chest at this moment.

A second bubble bloomed, and a string ran out to join it.

And behind all of that, one being keeps appearing.

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.

One of Those Who Remain experimented on Steeds to fill them with Causes. Then he cursed them. An entire lineage of living Observable Existences, sentenced to slow collapse.

More bubbles formed!

THOSE WHO REMAIN. DESCENDANTS. CURSED DESCENDANTS.

Strings snapped between them, drawing the shape of a lineage that believed existence belonged to it, and a second lineage beneath it dying on a schedule.

The account we have is that his Progeny touched the Steeds, and so he cursed them and cut his losses. That...doesn’t make much sense.

A string pulled taut between the Fiend and the Steeds, and hung there, vibrating.

Were the Steeds actually already unstable? Was the curse not a punishment at all, but a containment? A sentence laid on an experiment that had gone somewhere he did not want it to go?

She let that hang, and drew the last string.

LAESTRYGONIANS.

Because this is the same being, Ruination said, who moved to bring an entire race to extinction because of their Causes.

The diagram hung complete above the blue-gold sea, bubbles and strings and branching lines, and at the center of every path stood the same thing.

So the question is... Ruination said. Why would something that powerful be so interested in Causes? What is it about them that a being who could unmake a lineage with a sentence would spend ages tinkering with, and then twice destroy whatever came out of the tinkering? Why ruin an entire race over their anchors?

...!

THE Infiniverse studied the diagram in silence.

Then she raised one hand, and pulled.

The bubble marked CAUSES came apart at her gesture, unfolding into its component structures, First and Prime and Blighted and Calcified and the unnamed others, and she reached past all of them into the strand that ran back into herself, into her own foundation, and drew that out beside the rest for comparison.

There is something wrong with the Master’s nine, she said.

Ruination’s strings stilled.

THE Infiniverse set the two side by side in the air, and the difference was immediate even in the diagram.

These are the nine Prime Causes that hold an ordinary Observable Existence together. Cognitio. Bellum. Mortis... The common nine, seated beneath a First Cause, doing the work they were made for. Her hand moved.

And these are the Master’s nine. Existence. Paradox. Chaos. Mana. Quintessence. Adversity. Tyranny. Harvest. Apocalypse.

The two sets hung together, and one of them was simply larger.

They are not the same order of thing, THE Infiniverse said. His are distinctly grander. They resuscitated a dead Observable Existence. They were seated into the Organs of a Steed and joined to her First Causes without collapsing. And now they are colliding against pristine First Causes, striking them, forcing reactions out of them, and holding their own in that collision.

She turned to Ruination.

A Prime Cause cannot do that. A Prime Cause is the living relative beneath the ancestor. It does not stand as an equal to a First Cause and grind against it as a peer. If his nine can do that, then his nine have not been Prime Causes for some time. We have simply kept calling them what they were when he made them.

They evolved past Prime, Ruination said.

They are not the common nine, and they are not First Causes either. He carved them himself, out of his own identity...

She closed her hand, and the label on the diagram changed.

They should not be called his Prime Causes. They are his own unique Causes, bearing his identity. They are his... Osmontian Causes.

HUUM!

The sea churned.

The whole blue-gold ocean rose in a single slow enormous swell beneath their feet, the hum of it deepening, and on the drifting islands above, the crystalline groves rang all at once!

Ruination watched the swell pass.

I will let the Master know, she said.

Now, these Osmontian Causes. How do we use them to pull on the genetic markers of the Laestrygonians the way he pulled Damodred?

...!