novelraw Chapter 688: Archean! III
Chapter 688: Archean! III
The flood had settled, and Achilles did not trust how quiet everything was.
Below him, the seas of Tian had become something that did not belong to any memory he had of them.
The gold was still there, folded under everything like a promise that refused to die, but it had been married to white. White-gold. Neither one nor the other.
He watched it for a long time.
Pillars of liquid stood upright across the sea’s surface, tall as mountains. Archean currents coiled around their bases in lazy spirals, and every so often one of the pillars would pulse, softly, from root to tip, as if remembering how to breathe.
This was not Tian, not anymore!
It was the Tian that had Persevered.
Behind him, Rose and THE Watcher floated in the hush. Rose had been changed by the flood the way everyone who survived had been changed, her fire running deeper, her green burning closer to something molten, her Chaos Claim steadier than it had any right to be after what they had just walked through.
THE Watcher’s singularity had dimmed from its sacrifices, but Archean light had threaded itself through the platinum now, and the golden lotus petals rotated with a cleaner rhythm than before.
They had all risen. His own rising simply did not fit in the same room as theirs!
He turned his head, just enough to see Rose in the corner of his vision.
"Things will change," he said.
The words went out across the sea and did not come back.
"Tremendously. Faster than anything in this Observable Existence has ever been asked to change."
Rose didn’t speak.
"Sometime from now, we’ll look back at this moment..." He tilted his chin toward a horizon that was still settling. "And we’ll call it the start. The start of the most arduous time Observable Existence has ever endured."
"Or it’s something else." His voice dropped a register, and the Archean rivers orbiting him moved with it. "I will do...everything I can to make it something else."
...!
Whatever was coming, whatever Mansa Zulu had set in motion, whatever sat behind Mansa Zulu and whatever sat behind that, he would bend it. He would negotiate with it, or outrun it, or outgrow it, or eat it, whichever of those worked!
For now, though, he would watch. He would be patient the way a predator was patient, the way a thing that knew it had time was patient. He was not moving yet. He was not stepping into the Second Scale yet, even though the doorway stood open inside his chest. Every one of those moves could wait.
Because of the mark of Vilicus!
It was a leash, yes. But it was also a roof. Whatever came hunting through this cracked sky, whatever reached for him or reached for what he loved, there was a calculus it would have to do first. It would have to decide whether it was willing to cross a Gilded One. Whether it was willing to spit in the face of Mansa Zulu, who had branded him personally!
So the mark was a chain and a shield at the same time, and Achilles was old enough in his vengeance to know that the best thing to do with a tool like that was to learn what hand had forged it. Learn what Mansa Zulu stood for. Learn what the Unobservable wanted from a failed Observable Existence it now claimed had "always been ours to begin with."
Learn the shape of the experiment he had been made the steward of, before whoever was running the experiment came back to check the results.
He would watch. He would learn. He would grow in silence, and...
BOOM...CRACK!
At such a time...the sky broke.
It cracked like a mirror that had just remembered it was a mirror. One instant the heavens above the First Sea held their changed, settling light. The next instant a line ran through them, silver and thin and absolute, and from that line a thousand other lines spread in every direction, spiderwebbing outward with the slow inevitability of a decision already made somewhere else!
HUUM!
Achilles’s head snapped up. Rose was already rising. THE Watcher’s petals stopped rotating.
The shards of the broken skies did not fall!
That was what wrong about it. Mirror-sky broke, and the pieces did not come down. They tilted upward, peeling away from their frame, hinging open the way the lid of a box hinges open, and through the space where the sky had been there was...
Nothing.
There was an obsidian darkness so deep and so wide that his Architect’s Perception refused to read the bottom of it!
He frowned.
There were waves of power moving in that darkness!
And then, from the ragged edges of the broken sky, something began to build.
Obsidian-gold.
A span of it extended out from the breach, narrow at first, a single arc of material that was not material, and then it thickened, and then it locked, and then a second span joined it, and a third, and the thing assembling itself in front of him took shape with the patience of something that had been drawn a very long time ago and was only now remembering its own blueprint.
A bridge.
It reached from the broken mirror of the Tian sky out into the obsidian dark, and its far end did not terminate anywhere Achilles could see. It simply continued, and continued, and at some point the bridge passed through a threshold his perception could not follow, and beyond that threshold there was presumably something the bridge was for. Something that would only become visible to a being willing to walk across.
His heart beat heavily!
The mark on his forehead lit.
Information poured into him!
|A bridge between Observable Existences has been forged through the Unobservable.|
|Designation: THE Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns.|
|Function: The Obsidian Span is the sole sanctioned passage between Observable Existences through the Unobservable Sea. Entities who attempt to traverse the Unobservable by any means outside the Span will be dissolved by its currents, regardless of Scale attained.|
|Even those who have attained THE Second Scale of Existence will crumble within the Unobservable Sea if they stray from the Span. Infinity within the Unobservable is not the Infinity of the Observable. Anchors forged under Observable law will not hold.|
|Passage Protocol: The Span accepts only those permitted by THE Great Mansa Zulu or those bearing His mark.|
|Vilicus Notice: As THE Vilicus of this Observable Existence, you are granted standing passage upon the Span at any time of your choosing. Other travelers passing in either direction will be logged for your awareness.|
|The first convoy approaches.|
Achilles’s eye shone!
Far out along the Obsidian Span, where the bridge passed into the part of the Unobservable his Perception couldn’t crack, something was moving. He couldn’t see it. He could feel it the way he had felt the currents. Large. Measured. Walking with the unhurried confidence of things that had been invited.
They were coming.
The Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns hummed in the broken sky, and something on the far side of the Unobservable took its first step toward their Observable Existence!