Chapter 4:33 Authority |
The first word alone had nearly floored me, but now I was starting to get a handle on things. My eyes opened slowly, to behold the beauty of the One World, and the Four Realms, and the Void, and the Oshun below me. Four different incarnations of myself were all that were left, four out of the thousands I’d had running about. And the Rival sat beside one, while Morgan sat beside another.
Morgan bared its teeth in a feral snarl.
"Now do you see?" It demanded. “This is what you are meant to become. Heavens of all the other universes.”
"I am genuinely unsure what it is you are trying to make me see, despite you having said that," I admitted, "or what it is you thought this would accomplish other than please me." Because, as surprising as it was, this did in fact please me. My children were growing up, and I needed to go see what they were making. The construction process, even with [Words], was relatively slow, but -
Ding!
[Congratulations! Members of your universe have started using your [Words] to develop their own micro-universes. You have -]
I swiped the message away, to look at later. Not now, Mr. Boxes. I have the family delinquent to deal with at the moment.
"I -" Morgan began, but I held up a hand to stop it.
"No. Morgan, I appreciate what you did for the others, despite you believing it was for another purpose entirely. However, the intent behind it was problematic. I -" I paused, my children calling upon something else and dragging my mind away for but a moment. They were - fuck, they were starting to try and create Authority, weren't they? The problem was, I didn’t know how to create Authority.
My eyes narrowed as my attention focused on the spider wolf.
"Hear me, and listen. You believe my words to be untrue, my actions to be misguided. I am the Heavens. If there is a Will, it is mine. If there is a height, or a low, they are mine as well. The horizon is me, just as the rustling grass is. You wonder why I do not claim to conquer, or why I cut away my connection to various parts of the Realms? I answer you this; doth thou control each cell within your body? Doth thou claim to conquer each finger and toe?" I demanded, my soul struggling against itself as pieces of doubt and anger and frustration clashed, then righting as I exerted myself, allowing my children to lean upon me and Mr. Boxes by proxy in their bid to become more. Everything within me fell into line not because I had overcome it, but simply because there was no room for doubt or fear or anger at the moment. Morgan too a step back, eight eyes growing wide, rolling within its skull wildly even as its teeth bared in a savage grin.
"But you must -"
"I can control each of them, from my toes to my cells, to the individual parts therein." I stated, shoulders squaring as I rose to my feet, taking a single step forward to lay a hand upon Morgan’s head. The mangy wolf flinched as it looked up at me, my hand both present and not, controlling and not. My other incarnations were already moving, forming a triangle around the Four Realms and the Big Four, acting as a locus for power to flow and function. "But not actively. Not forcefully. They react because I do. Each has their function, but not under my constant, micromanaging control. That is the truth," I uttered.
The universe shifted.
It was a quiet thing, a misunderstanding now corrected, that the One World settled into with ease. I felt it. I felt it. Even the Oshun flinched, unconscious though they were, rattled and unable to fully awaken.
Amari Ren, still cradled in the arms of one of my bodies, babbled happily, the Authority in their chest settling and cells drinking in the newly, fully integrated source. Their heterochromatic eyes shone gleefully, one pudgy hand reaching up to slap my face. The incarnation that held them smiled, and teleported them to Inesa, who gladly took the baby without breaking stride, Xing Wu swinging them both up onto his shoulders, while his daughter clung to his leg. I refocused.
Morgan took a single step backward, bowing slightly, my hand still upon their head, between their twitching, rotating ears. Its eight spidery legs folded in on themselves defensively, space and time stuttering.
"You are me. You were me, once, I should say. Now thou art not." I could feel my voice changing, switching between the archaic tongues and back again, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Morgan huffed once, twice, then growled low, then froze in place, all completely kerfuffled by my statement. "Feel the truth, now."
And I paid attention to it no more. Instead, I focused on my other children. The Big Four, who were all hovering around their budding creations.
None of the budding universes were anything of interest yet. What they’d started with, those skeletal structures, had been almost completely obliterated. Now four different yet similar flavors of Primordial Chaos, formed from the false emptiness of the One World's core, filled the area that had once been a construction site. My fingers itched, wanting to teleport them and the Realms outside of the hollow center to the outer Void like I had been when I created the Four Realms, but...no. This needed to happen in safety. Besides, such was a feat that was far beyond my current power.
The One World’s core, despite the work we'd done to help fix it, was still a mess. The framework of the afterlife the Oshun and Keilan had built was still in tatters, left largely by the wayside - functional, but not improving or growing anything in the way the Four Realms' afterlife did. Souls from the One World drifted down through the cracks in the crust, to circle about aimlessly through the barren core. There was starting to be a buildup of souls down here, as births on the surface began to be outpaced by the deaths, even despite the Oshun no longer producing souls in their unconsciousness.
The souls flowed around the Four Realms in tiny streams, avoiding the masses of Primordial Chaos my children were slowly shaping into their new realms. Primordial chaos that came from them, emerging from each and every one of their pores, their cells brimming with their power yet their minds - their minds struggling to understand what they were doing.
I focused on each of them, in turn. Elvira's eyes were glazed as she spread her arms and wings wide, her domain of Divinity fluctuating wildly. My eyes narrowed as I observed her. Divinity should be a domain potentially on-par with my own domain of Balance. Should I...?
No. Keilan was the same - Connection was a broad domain, as equally broad as Balance, yet his domain was fluctuating just the same as Elvira’s. Bits of their divinity flaked off, only to rejoin in another part of their aura, reinforcing the weaker parts of themselves. Just as Reika's was, and just as...
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
I cocked my head to the side as I observed Alexander, the dragon swimming through his primordial chaos like it was a river, leaving wakes and rippling streams behind him. Ah, so that was it. Instead of, like me, cutting pieces of themself off, they were realizing parts of their domains, and rapidly expanding them in real time.
But that still left the Shadow, and the Authority to be made. They were borrowing mine, currently, to do what they were doing, and were struggling with making more of it to fulfill their purposes. I couldn’t just give them mine, and to really create what they wanted and needed to, they needed more Authority. How did I guide them into doing that? Did Mr. Boxes know?
I posed the question to the great being as best I could, but all I got in return was silence. Mr. Boxes wasn't going to help any further - or, at least, not with that. My brow furrowed as I considered it, taking a momentary step back, looking Reika up and down. My other three incarnations continued to hold the formation, hands spread as Mr. Boxes’ power and understanding filtered through them and me. Reika’s hair whipped about her head, the elemental flowers that dotted it gleaming with a multitude of light. If Mr. Boxes wasn't giving me an answer this way, then perhaps it meant I was approaching the problem wrong.
How had Mr. Boxes created me to be an Origin Deity? I still wasn't certain of the criteria for being selected as an Origin Deity; that was beyond me. I knew my children had the potential, but Mr. Boxes' criteria? Far and away not within my realm of understanding. However, I did generally know how the process of creating a universe worked. I was watching it in real time, after all, and had my own experiences to call upon as well as the Oshun’s.
Our memories weren't necessarily suppressed at the start - they were in many ways, but I would bet my left arm that it was more to protect those memories than anything else. Mr. Boxes' absurd power was just too much for us to contain when we were that little. Then, pieces of ourselves that were too weak were carved away, leaving space for Mr. Boxes' power to swoop in and inspire the growth needed to develop into an Origin Deity, not making room for Authority but inspiring its growth.
So the stages were: memory suppression/our minds being overwhelmed by power. Then carving away weakness. Then gifting power. Then instinctual creation of a universe, using seven [words.]
The Big Four had skipped some stages. I was acting as the memory suppression and safety net protecting my kids from Mr. Boxes' raw power, filtering it through my own as I was, so that was already different. Their memories were blurry, but not completely gone like mine had been. Carving away weakness was likely where Authority was created; something about that process had to inspire Authority to be born when combined with the actual act of creation.
Yet...
I drifted over to Reika once again, having drifted away from her while I’d been lost in thought, as she flowed through something like a dance. She pumped out more and more Primordial Chaos, her [Word], her [Home], slowly creating structures. I didn't know what the true end-game structure would look like, but I could see the DNA, the raw material that said this is what it can be.
She was making something connective. Sort of. Connective in the same vein as the Physical Realm, but more present, more than just a buffer between the Heaven and Karmic Realms. She wouldn't have been able create something like that, had she not still had some of her memories; that wasn't instinct, it was who she was. Well, maybe it was instinct. I was guessing, and all I could do, like I always had since the very beginning when I’d been thrust into this situation with no instruction book and no idea how to move forward, was what I thought was right.
And what my heart was telling me was quite simple; I was not Mr. Boxes. I was very much one of his...creations? Beings? Was I even a creation of his? He hadn't created all of reality, he just ruled over it. That was beside the point. I was not Mr. Boxes was the point, as if that hadn’t been obvious, but it felt like a distinction that needed to be made. I may be accepting his guidance, but much like Xing Wu had done to my Dao, I was not following his path and word to the letter.
Besides, I had a thought now, that was stuck in my head and wouldn’t go away. Mr. Boxes had hinted that Shadows, that thing that was created when weakness was cut away, were things that were constantly dealt with throughout the life of a universe, unless a permanent solution was presented. What was the most permanent solution?
Devouring the Shadow. Letting it become part of yourself again. I had done that halfway, taking back a large piece of what had made Morgan the Shadow, but opted not to kill the wolf. The Oshun? They were actively merging with their Rot, and devouring it back even as it had once tried to devour them. Sehuyun? She hadn’t even bothered to be split; instead becoming her own Shadow. Or maybe she had, and then just ate it immediately afterwards. The entire circumstance of a Shadow existing encouraged Origin Deities to devour the Shadow in order to completely remove them from the equation.
Is that what Mr. Boxes had done? The thought struck me like a lightning bolt, my shoulders straightening and domain stilling. It felt, for a moment, like all reality held its breath as I looked at Morgan, peeling away reality to observe it as it slunk back to its Hidden Realm. The Shadow, mangy mutt that it was, would probably gleefully allow me to absorb it back into myself if it meant becoming more of what it wanted. The "Heavens."
But that was not me. That was not what I had done, was it? I had gone halfway, taken back from the Shadow what was still me, and left what had become something else entirely to allow it to become Morgan. How many universes were there where the Origin Deity had come to the same conclusion as I? How many had a Shadow that was manageable if left somewhat to its own devices? The Rot would have been a constant war, and while Morgan was no cakewalk, it wasn't constantly trying to undermine or destroy me either, instead actively looking to help. Even if its version of "help" wasn't always helping.
How many had let their Shadow become something that ran counter to their own personal Dao? Morgan had become a being of Time specifically because I, personally, rejected the ideas behind time travel and other such things, and it wanted to show me that I could be that, and shouldn’t limit myself in such ways.
And who was I to cut pieces of weakness off of others? I looked out over the Four Realms, watching the paths people took and how they grew. I truly did not know how rare or not the actual processes of the Four Realms were; my style of reincarnation, the process of regaining memories, the path to Immortality. How would my universe had been different, had I leaned away from the Xianxia-ness and fought against the mistakes I had made, or tried to undo them?
No, I had done something different. I encouraged people to step forward, to cross the bridge that was life again and again until they became what they wanted; whether that was an Immortal, or a spirit who remained in the Spirit Realm for however long they wished or even nothing at all. I did not remove weaknesses. I encouraged you to look inward and know thyself; to accept it all, and that was how you became truly strong. That was how you became an Immortal in my universe. That had always been how you became more.
Not by removing your weakness to overcome it later, by overcoming it by facing it head-on. Neither was a wrong method. The former was just not how I did things.
"Breathe," I muttered, closing my eyes and letting my soul stretch itself out, to briefly brush against Rieka. "And see the bridge you have before you. Cross it, or hold it; see your foe on the other end, be it thyself or no thing at all. And accept it."
Rieka froze in place. So did Alexander, and Keilan, and Elvira, the primordial chaos pooling around them and stilling entirely. Their souls reached out to briefly brush against mine, the weight of them sending me staggering, golden blood dripping from my nostrils as the full weight of Mr. Boxes' power and their need to take this path crushed my shoulders. My knee fell, hands bracing against nothing to steady myself.
Authority sparked within my children, the scraps I had been lending them acting as tinder for a flame, the Primordial Chaos spurring to faster growth as they faced their inner Shadow.
They would emerge it different. They would find more [Words] this way.
I just had to protect them until they figured it out. No matter how long that took.
My gaze drifted skyward, toward where I knew a certain dragon was hurtling towards us, and at the Oshun, who still slumbered. If they would threaten my children, I would not show mercy.
I knew a certain dragon would be thrilled to hear that.