Chapter 5143: Existence is Conflict! II

Noah’s attention sharpened to a fine point.

"Entire wars have been waged against us by these beings."

Her voice held the weight of recorded history.

"We call them THE Relictus. The Remnants. We named them that because we do not know what they are, only that they remain from some prior era we cannot fully see, holding power that should not exist alongside the rest of us. They are titanic. They are ancient. They wield THE Primordial Source the way you wield a sword, with the casual fluency of a being who has held the weapon for so long that the weapon has become an extension of their body. And they are utterly committed to one purpose. Preventing any advancement toward THE Primordial Source by anyone other than themselves."

Her hands moved as she spoke, though no illusions formed this time.

"So far, THE Relictus is only a name. A category. We have no true biographies of them. We have no histories that explain how they came to be, or whether they were once like us, or whether they have always existed in their current configurations. We have observed them only when they appear, and they appear only when one of us has come too close to the threshold. Each appearance is brief. Each appearance is catastrophic. They strike, they collapse whatever advancement was being attempted, they kill whoever was making the attempt and often kill many others alongside as a warning, and then they vanish back into whatever spaces they occupy between these interventions."

Her voice tightened slightly.

"A single one of them is enough to require thousands of Gilded Ones to engage. Thousands. Drawing on resources that only the Magna Sorora and the great houses can provide. Battle plans developed across decades of preparation, deployed in moments because the Relictus do not announce themselves. Rarely if ever do the thousands win. Rarely do they bring the Relictus down through sheer attrition, through depth of numbers, through the weight of accumulated authority pressed against a single titanic enemy. And often, even when they win, the cost is so high that the victory is functionally indistinguishable from a defeat. Hundreds or thousands of Gilded Ones lost. Generations of cultivation extinguished. Houses brought to the edge of dissolution. Each Relictus we have ever managed to bring down has cost us more than the gain of stopping them was worth."

Her gold eyes met his with grave clarity.

"The highest mortality of Gilded Ones, those of us standing on the shade of Observable, and our allied Gilded Ones in the shade of Unobservable, and Sisters of the Magna Sorora...the highest mortslity across our recorded history stems from THE Relictus. Not from internal conflicts, but from the Remnants. They are the single largest cause of death within our people, and they have been since before our records began. Our archives are full of names of the lost. Sisters who were beloved across their generations, struck down in moments because they had touched something they should not have touched. Royals of grand standing whose entire houses ended with them because the Relictus does not distinguish between the seeker and the seeker’s lineage when the strike is delivered. We carve their names into our walls. We mourn them across the eons. And we keep climbing toward THE Primordial Source anyway, because the alternative is to accept that THE Primordial Source is not for us, and we cannot bring ourselves to accept that."

She paused for a moment, and her voice softened slightly, almost to herself.

"What we know about the Relictus is mostly silhouettes. They appear in different forms in different appearances. Some have come as massive humanoid figures wreathed in light that does not match any known spectrum. Others have come as constellations of moving geometric shapes, no single body to attack, distributed across vast regions of engagement. Some have spoken. Most have not. Those who have spoken have spoken in languages we have never recorded elsewhere. We have never recovered a body. Even when we have brought one down, the body does not remain. It dissolves into the substrate. It returns to wherever it came from. We have studied the residual traces, and the traces tell us almost nothing. Whatever they are, they are not configured along the lines that any of our taxonomies would recognize."

She let her hands settle back into her lap.

"The Magna Sorora set up the system of Custodes specifically because of THE Relictus. Long ago, when one of the early High Sisters fell to a Relictus appearance because she was alone at the moment of attack, the surviving Sorora made a decision. No important Gilded One would ever walk alone again. Every Sister of significant standing, every Royal of significant influence, would have a second existence bonded to them, a second heart beating alongside their own, ready to receive the strike that the Sister could not see coming. The Custodes are not servants. They are THE Second Heart. They are the reason a Sister of THE Magna Sorora survives an encounter that would have killed her instantly without the bond. And the bond is engineered to be foundational precisely because the threats the bond exists to address are foundational."

She looked at him steadily.

"That is what you would be stepping into, if you walked into the Braneworld as my Custos. Not a decorative role and definitely not a subordinate role. A position whose existence is justified by enemies grand enough to cull our highest from time to time, and whose duty is to stand between those enemies and the Sister they have bonded with, regardless of cost."

...!

Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly at the extended dump of exposition from Ubergulden Adelheid.

He wanted to tell her, please, ma’am, I want some more!

Especially when it came to enemies that could kill Gilded Lifeforms.

This interested him tremendously.

But one could not have too much of something, otherwise the taste would sour. So he thought about everything that Ubergulden Adelheid had uttered so far...and he came to a decision!

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