Chapter 736: Pure! II |
It is told, in the way old things are told and retold, that there was once an Infinite Lifeform called Vorruun the Hollow, who carried within him a hunger that no quantity of Infinity could fill.
He was named the Hollow not because he lacked power but because power poured into him and found no bottom to settle against. He had touched Infinity and not gone mad in the ordinary way that many Infinite Lifeforms went mad, with the glazed eyes and the shouted claims of supremacy.
His madness was quieter and therefore worse. He had concluded that the emptiness inside him was a thing Existence owed him the means to fill, and he had decided what those means were.
Young Source Lifeforms.
The newly emerged ones, the ones whose Pure Primordial Essence still ran undiluted within them, untouched by the long accumulations that came later.
Vorruun had learned that this essence held profound effects for the base and fortification of any existence, that it strengthened the foundation of whatever consumed it regardless of that consumer’s stage or power.
A weak thing that ate it grew sturdier. A strong thing that ate it grew sturdier still. There was no ceiling on the benefit and no floor beneath which it stopped working.
So he hunted them.
He grew patient in his hunting, and patience made him terrible. He learned where and which Observable Existences young Source Lifeforms emerged and he waited at those places, and when they came into existence still soft with newness he took them before they understood what existence even was.
By the time the Relictus and the grown Source Lifeforms turned to hunt him in their turn, Vorruun the Hollow had become something that should never have been allowed to accumulate.
They fought him for many weeks.
In those weeks, three Observable Existences had their First Causes fractured , the foundational events from which entire weavings of existence had emerged splitting under forces that should never have been brought to bear in inhabited space.
Countless Decillions of lifeforms across those three realities died not because anyone wished them dead but because they happened to live in the places where Vorruun and his hunters chose to settle their accounts.
The hunters were not wrong to hunt him. Vorruun had to be stopped. Every essence he consumed made the eventual stopping more expensive, and so the longer he was permitted to continue, the worse the final reckoning would become. This is true and many do not dispute it.
But some asks the harder question anyway.
Vorruun’s hunger destroyed the young Source Lifeforms he ate. The hunt that answered his hunger destroyed three Observable Existences in the catching of him. The thing that began as one mad creature filling one hollow place ended as the unmaking of Observable Existences that had nothing to do with him and had never heard his name.
Destruction had begotten destruction, the way it always does, each act of unmaking justifying the larger unmaking that came to answer it, until the original hunger was a footnote against the wreckage assembled in the name of ending it.
Those who tell this legend end it the same way every time.
They say that Vorruun the Hollow was, in the end, only the first cause of a destruction that grew far past him, and that the lesson is not that he was evil, though he was, but that destruction is the one appetite that always recruits more of itself to satisfy it. The mad creature and the righteous hunters wrote the same word across existence between them.
And the three fractured Observable Existences could not tell, from beneath their ruin, which of the two had been the villain.
---
In that Obsidian Sea where Achilles was just deposited.
There was the one who stood to test those who made it into the obsidian sea, and its name was Morrigaur!
It was massive, a crow whose wingspan stretched across stretches of the dark water that had no name and no measure, its feathers black in a way that made the obsidian seas beneath it look almost pale by comparison.
It nested within the raging waves themselves, riding swells that would have ground lesser beings to nothing, and it had watched every candidate who passed THE Trial of the Immovable Stone arrive in this place to face whatever it chose to put them through.
It looked at Achilles now, and its crimson eyes were full of shock.
The first cause of the shock was simple math!
This entity had passed THE Trial of the Immovable Stone in a span of time so short that Morrigaur had genuinely not finished preparing for his arrival. Candidates took ages to cross that maze!
The Fledgling Source Lifeforms wore them down, knocked them off the stone, sent them back to the start again and again until they either learned or gave up. This one had walked through it like the bulls were a courtesy laid out for his convenience!
The second cause of the shock was worse, and it was the reason the Crow had not yet shown itself fully.
Why did this entity’s existence feel like it was emanating the same aura as a young Source Lifeform?
That made no sense. Source Lifeforms had their own pathways into the structure. They became Swords of Existence or Attendants through routes that did not pass through this trial at all, because beings carrying THE Primordial Source in their foundations did not need to prove they could survive proximity to it. They simply were it. This candidate had come through the standard entry, through the maze, through the path reserved for those who were not Source Lifeforms.
And yet his existence carried that aura now. The clean foundational quality of pure beginnings. The same thing Morrigaur sensed in newly emerged Source Lifeforms before the long accumulations of their lives diluted it.
"..."
The Crow’s crimson eyes moved across Achilles where he stood with his eyes closed, settling into whatever changes were working through him, and it remained where it was.
Morrigaur, the Crow of Sundered Tides, who had tested candidates in the obsidian seas for longer than most civilizations had existed, found itself doing something it had never once done in all that time.
It hesitated to show itself.
Because if it descended to administer its trial the way it had administered every trial before this one, and if this monster decided that a massive crow full of its own foundational power looked like one more thing worth consuming, Morrigaur was no longer entirely certain which of them would walk away from the encounter!
So it watched from the waves as it may just...give this one the Rite of Passage and not even bother with them!