Chapter 5320: Terrifying! II

<On Impossibilities>

There is a story the old ones tell about the impossible.

In an age that has no number anyone still remembers, there was an Observable Existence crowded with Infinite Lifeforms. This was not unusual for that domain. Its First Cause favored Infinity the way some domains favor war or knowledge, and so the beings who climbed highest within it were beings who had grasped Infinity, and they were many, and they were proud, and they spent their long existences refining their understanding of the infinite.

Among them was one who looked at Infinity and found it insufficient.

His name was Hast, and the others thought him a fool. He had grasped Infinity as they had grasped it. He stood among the highest as they stood among the highest. And yet where they looked at the infinite and saw the summit, Hast looked at the infinite and saw a foothill, and when he said as much, the others laughed, because everyone knew that Infinity was the ceiling of that Observable Existence and to seek beyond it was to seek something that did not exist for beings like them.

THE Primordial Source was for Source Lifeforms. It was in their nature, present at their emergence, the thing that made them what they were. An Infinite Lifeform reaching for THE Source was like a fish reaching for fire. The categories did not permit it. This was known. This was settled. This was impossible!

Hast asked a question that the others had never thought to ask.

He asked who had decided.

Not rhetorically. He genuinely wished to know. Which authority had ruled that an Infinite Lifeform could not grasp THE Source? Which law of existence had been consulted? He searched for the ruling and found none.

He found only the agreement of many beings that it could not be done, and the agreement of many beings, he reasoned, was not the same as a law.

It was merely a habit that had been held long enough to feel like one.

So while the others continued refining their Infinity in the comfort of the known, Hast left.

He left his Observable Existence and went into the spaces between, seeking THE Source with an immensity and a grandeur that the categories said he had no right to, and he was not stopped, because there was no one standing at the boundary of the impossible to stop him.

There never had been. The boundary had been built entirely out of the certainty of beings who had never tested it.

He suffered for it. The path he walked had no map because no one of his kind had walked it, and a path without a map is paid for in ways that mapped paths are not.

But he walked it. And he kept walking it. And in the fullness of an age that has no number, Hast the Infinite Lifeform, who was not supposed to be able to do any of this, drew close enough to THE Source that Vakochev himself took notice of him, and recognized him, and carved his name upon THE Scales among those that are carved there.

He was asked, once, how he had done the impossible.

He said he had not. He said he had merely made a choice and then made an action, and then made the choice again, and the action again, across an age, and that at no point had any of it felt impossible to him.

It had felt only like effort. The impossibility, he said, had lived entirely in the minds of the ones who watched, who saw a being doing what could not be done and called it impossible because the alternative was to admit that the limit they had spent their existences respecting had never been real.

The impossible is not a property of the deed. It is a property of the observer. It lives in the gap between what a being believes can be done and what is simply done in front of them, and the being who stops asking whether others call a thing impossible, and asks instead only whether it can be made through choice and action and the willingness to pay, will find that the wall they were warned of was never a wall.

It was a habit.

And habits, unlike walls, fall the moment someone declines to keep them.

---

In THE Undefined Gaps surrounding Chernobyl, a being had been watching for a very long time.

Maharanis Vikar was an Ealdor Gilded One, which meant he had existed long enough and climbed high enough that most beings in THE Braneworld would have considered the assignment beneath him.

Watching a dying Observable Existence that everyone already knew served as a base for Source Lifeforms was not the work of an Ealdor. It was the work of someone who had displeased the wrong superior, or someone whose House valued thoroughness over the comfort of its senior members, and the Maharanis House valued thoroughness above nearly everything.

This was the thing THE Gilded Ones did better than anyone. They had risen across the eons at a rate that beings of other lineages found genuinely difficult to comprehend, climbing from a position of relative insignificance to one where they fought Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms directly, and the foundation beneath that climb was not their engineering or their pride or their Causes.

It was information. They watched. They recorded. They knew things, and they had learned across eons that knowing things was worth more than almost any amount of raw power, because raw power without knowledge spent itself on the wrong targets while knowledge could direct even modest power toward decisive ends.

So Maharanis Vikar watched a dying Observable Existence, and had watched it for years, and found the work boring.

Until it stopped being boring!

He saw the change through the Gaps of Undefinition first as a wrongness in the light of death he had grown accustomed to. Chernobyl had carried the dim guttering luminescence of a domain in terminal decay for the entire duration of his posting, and that light was the constant he had calibrated his attention around.

Now it was fading. Not deepening toward final collapse, which would have been expected and unremarkable. Fading in the other direction. The death-light receding as something brighter pushed up beneath it, the failing First Cause of Chernobyl coming back, and coming back grander than it had any right to.

Vikar went still!

Then the Primordial Source erupted.

Heavy power surged across Chernobyl in the next moment, the unmistakable density of Source Lifeforms moving with urgency, and a veil descended over the entire Observable Existence as the Source Lifeforms stationed there moved to hide what was happening. Vikar watched them work, watched the lockdown spread across THE Undefined Gaps surrounding Chernobyl, watched beings of considerable power scramble to ensure that no record of the event escaped.

He began to pant!

It was a response of a being who had spent years on boring work and had just witnessed something that recategorized everything!

A dying Observable Existence had come back to life!

He let the magnitude of that settle. An Observable Existence whose First Cause had been destroyed, whose death had been certain, whose decay he had personally observed across years, was being brought back.

He did not know how. But the how mattered less, in this first moment, than the simple fact that it could be done at all, because the vastness of existence held many Terminal Observable Existences.

Domains whose Causes had failed, whose foundations had collapsed, who were sliding toward endings that everyone had assumed were irreversible. If they were not irreversible. If a dying domain could be resuscitated....

What did that mean for the Source Lifeforms who apparently held this power?

And what would it mean if THE Gilded Ones held it instead?

Vikar’s pride, the silent reigning Superbius pride of an Ealdor of the Maharanis House, considered the possibilities with the cold appetite of a being whose entire lineage had been built on turning information into advantage.

But he was careful. He noticed the detail that mattered most.

The Source Lifeforms were surprised. They were hiding it now, moving with urgency to contain it, and beings of their tier did not move with urgency to contain things they had planned.

This was not a routine demonstration of a known capability. The surprise on display, even from Source Lifeforms, told him that whatever had happened in Chernobyl was not something even they had expected!

An anomaly. A unique event. Something that had occurred outside anyone’s plan, including the plans of the powerful beings now scrambling to bury it.

Which meant the question was not simply how the Source Lifeforms did it.

The question was what had caused it, because it might not have been the Source Lifeforms at all.

Vikar did not know the answer. But he knew that the Maharanis House needed to know the question existed, and his existence extended across more than this single location.

Countless distances away, another part of him stirred, and he sent the alert moving toward the Maharanis House!

He was recording that it had happened and letting it be known!

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