Chapter 5286: Through Adversity I

His gaze was hardened in the way of a being who was feeling more than he was showing.

Noah was not...overly expressive even at a time like this.

Alexander looked at the Enneagram in Noah’s hand and then back at Noah.

"Existence is not a story," he said. "We are not destined beings promised greatness. Existence is brutal. Existence is unfair. Existence does not care."

He steadied himself against a pulse of silver-gold that moved through his torso and pushed back with what Infinity remained accessible to him.

"One has to know when to take a step back. I am taking one now."

He met Noah’s eyes.

"Take care of my people, please. I don’t know if the chance still exists for me. This infection feels far too grand. But I am still fighting it. If you have the capability, I will even rely on you for this. I still have my last shred of stubbornness. I still...want to try."

Something moved through his expression that was not hope and was not despair.

It was his own brilliance that refused to fade even now!

"After all, existence is also filled with adversity."

He looked at Noah.

"And one has to persevere."

BOOM!

Noah looked at him and felt the full weight of what Alexander didn’t know, which was that he had already done the thing he was asking for permission to try.

He had survived an Ealdor-class Existential Acedia Ordnance. He had held the infection back long enough to protect the Enneagram. He had maintained enough cognizance to make the decision he had just made while actively converting.

Fourth Scale existences would have gone down to this same infection without the combination of gifted Infinity and foundational stubbornness Alexander had brought to fighting it!

He had already persevered!

He had already done more than enough!

Noah held the Enneagram and looked at Alexander and said nothing for a moment.

Then he moved.

He sat beside Alexander.

He lowered himself onto the fragment of shattered Shelter, and the silver-gold luminescence of the Acedia Infection pressing outward from Alexander’s body found the Osmontian Absolute Infinity around him and...could do nothing.

He looked at the man beside him.

"You are feeling the way you are because you have decided that needing help is the same as failing," he said. "It isn’t."

He held Alexander’s gaze with flat certainty. "You went outside. You sought your own fortune. You used what you were given and pushed past everything Beowulf put you through and every setback existence put in your path, and you kept moving. That is not the profile of a being who failed. That is the profile of a being who tried."

A silver-gold pulse moved through Alexander’s shoulder and he pushed against it automatically, the Infinity blazing in response.

"Pride has one genuine failure," Noah continued, "and it isn’t needing help. The failure is looking at where you are right now, beaten down and infected and sitting in the ruins of a Shelter, and deciding that because you couldn’t make it on your own outside, the whole attempt was a failure. That is the pride that destroys things. Not the act of extending your hand." He let that land. "You... have not failed."

Alexander’s expression moved.

"Failure is part of the process. I have failed more times than I can count. Every existence that has ever become something worth becoming has a catalog of failures behind it, and the ones who kept going are not the ones who never needed to be picked up. They are the ones who, when they were beaten down, had something... to reach for."

Noah looked at the devastated landscape of the lower Observable Existence around them, the silver-gold Stilling coating everything the eye could find.

"The connections you have are part of your power. Not a replacement for your power. Part of it. Having someone to help you up when you are down can sometimes be everything. Sometimes all one needs is a helping hand."

He stood.

He turned to Alexander and held out his hand.

Alexander looked at it for a moment with heavy crimson eyes as his existence seemed to be crying out! Then he reached up and took it.

HUUM!

Osmontian Absolute Infinity erupted from Noah’s hand and wrapped around Alexander in a bubble of surging multicolored light, the nine Prime Cause expressions running through the bubble’s surface in their compound resonance, the light pressing against the silver-gold Acedia Infection and addressing it the way his own Infinity addressed it.

Alexander’s form blazed within the bubble as it sealed around him completely.

Then he was gone.

Noah had already sent the command to THE Infiniverse before the bubble fully closed, the instruction moving through their connection. THE Infiniverse had sectioned off an isolated domain outside her main body the moment the command arrived, a contained space separate from her primary substrate where the infection could be studied without risk of spread, where Alexander could continue fighting it with the Osmontian Absolute Infinity bubble providing external reinforcement while Noah determined whether the Causal Stilling’s infection mechanism had a cure available to him.

He didn’t know yet whether it did.

He intended to find out.

He turned to assess the rest of the lower Observable Existence, cataloguing the positions of the beings he needed to check on, the surviving unconverted existences whose locations his perception could still reach through the Stilling’s interference, the priority order of who needed to be found first.

He had already started moving when existence fluctuated at a point near him that had been empty a moment before.

He stopped.

He turned.

Sir William Arthur stood in the Stilled space of the lower Observable Existence, his presence settling into the coordinates with the easy authority of a being for whom arrival was simply a thing that happened.

His obsidian stellar suit was unblemished. His white shirt was crisp. His tie sat without adjustment against the shirt’s surface. The obsidian sheath at his side showed no evidence of having been drawn recently, its surface carrying the same composed readiness it had carried when Noah first saw him.

He looked at Noah.

"When lifeforms obtain immense power, paired with overinflated egos and the emotions that power tends to produce in beings who weren’t prepared for it, they arrive at a rather predictable conclusion." His voice carried its measured precision into the Stilled space without effort.

"They conclude that existence is theirs for the taking. That they may do whatever they wish, to whomever they wish, at whatever scale seems appropriate to their current mood." He looked at the silver-gold Stilling coating every coordinate around them.

"The result, as you can observe, is something like this."

He adjusted his jacket.

"THE Gilded Ones represent one particular expression of this tendency. A significant one, I’ll grant you, with their engineering and their civilizational infrastructure and their rather impressive capacity for manufacturing beings at considerable Scale." He looked at Noah directly.

"But they are one expression among many. There are others operating with equally unchecked convictions that existence owes them something, that the fact of their power constitutes a mandate for its use, that the beings living within existence are variables to be managed rather than lives to be considered."

He paused.

"Against such beings, existence cannot be passive. Nothing changes if those living within it simply endure what is done to them and wait for it to stop. We live. We move. We act so that events of this nature can be interrupted rather than completed."

His eyes held Noah’s.

"You are unique in having attracted the attention of THE Gilded Ones across time itself. That category of targeting is not extended to beings without significant standing, and your demonstrated access to at least the first letter of THE Primordial Tongue places you within a tier of consideration."

He straightened.

"You qualify as a potential entrant to become A Sword of Existence. A designation given to beings who, possessing both the power and the will to act, choose to move against the category of threat that treats existence as a resource rather than a home."

He let the silence sit for a moment. "As with everything worth having, it is a choice. I will not make it for you, and I would think less of the offer if I could."

He looked at the Stilled landscape around them, at the silver-gold luminescence that had replaced the Observable Existence’s prior vitality.

"Existence will always remain bright," he said. "Its brightness will only ever dwindle when capable beings, beings with power and potential and the demonstrated willingness to use both, choose to do nothing. The beings who built these Ordnances are counting on the assumption that the cost of response will exceed the willingness of those capable of responding."

He looked back at Noah.

"Do you wish to grasp such an opportunity?"

...!

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