Chapter 5556: Path I

<THE Ymnaros>

Far from THE Hallowed Verdance, past another obelisk in another valley, the same water lay under the same underlight, and everything else about the place was wrong.

The obelisk itself still shone its blue-gold. It had gone on shining while the men and women who guarded it were killed at its foot, and it was shining now over what had been left there afterward.

They had been laid out!

Two dozen Superpowered Lifeforms in white and blue, arranged in even rows on the pale sand inside the doorway, hands at their sides, faces turned up.

Nobody had done it out of respect. You could see that in the spacing, which was too regular, the spacing of inventory rather than of mourning. Someone had wanted them countable.

Inside the Well itself, more of them drifted.

The bodies had been put into the water. They turned slowly in the underlight among the Blooms, white and blue among blue and pale gold, sinking and rising on the currents, and the Panaceas went on opening and closing around them in their patient shared rhythm as though nothing at all had changed in the garden.

And all around that shore, in rows, stood the Infinite.

Dozens upon dozens of True Infinite Lifeforms holding the whole basin in a ring, their Infinity compounding quietly off them and pressing the mist flat, and among them the tall silent shapes of the Cenozoic in numbers that no single Observable Existence should ever have had to look at in one place!

They had been at this for some time.

One of the Cenozoic went in as the light shifted. It walked to the edge with the deliberateness of a thing that had already been refused once and had reasoned its way to a different approach, and it entered the water.

The Well threw it out.

The surface rippled in a hard concentric shove and the thing came off it and landed among the rows of the dead, scattering two of them out of their neat alignment, and it rose without expression and walked back to its place in the ring.

Another went. Another shove. Another rejection.

A third tried it slowly, wading, testing whether patience read differently to the water than force did. The Well waited until it was up to the knee and then declined it as flatly as it had declined the others!

A fourth arrived carrying one of the corpses, on the theory, presumably, that the water might read the passenger rather than the carrier. The Well rejected them both, and the body came back with it, and the thing dropped it on the sand and did not look down!

So it went. Dozens of them, ancient, Cenozoic, holding between them enough power to unmake an Observable Existence outright, taking turns at a lake and being turned away by it one after another without so much as a fight to lose.

Far above all of that, well clear of the water, four figures hung in the black-shot air.

Three of them did not fit on any ladder.

Every other existence in the valley could be placed, weighed, and slotted somewhere on a Scale, and these three simply could not, in the same way that Jarl Skallagrim could not!

The first was made of hanging chain. Or wore it, or had been wound in it so long ago that the difference had stopped mattering, a titan-shape of black links draped in coils from shoulder to ankle, and where the links crossed there were faces worn into the metal by pressure alone, and none of the faces were finished.

The second had no surface anywhere on it. It was a titan of running dark liquid held in the shape of a body by nothing anyone could see, and the liquid moved constantly downward and never emptied, and at the places where eyes belonged there were only two points where the falling was faster.

The third stood in stone armor grown over with a pale calcified crust, and it was the only one of the three that had bothered with a face, and the face was serene, and it had been serene for a very long time.

And at their center, smaller than any of them, floated a man in a crimson robe.

He was the reason the other three arranged themselves the way they did.

He looked ancient in the manner of things that predate their own memory of themselves, and he also looked wild, hair loose and moving in no wind, and beneath both of those he looked mad in a way that was not theatrical at all!

There was no raving in him. There was only the sense, immediate and unpleasant, of a mind that had gone somewhere a long time ago and had never seen a reason to come back, and had been extremely capable the whole time.

He watched the Cenozoic being bounced off the water below, and he seemed to find it neither amusing nor frustrating.

The one in chains spoke, and it spoke with the careful respect of something enormous addressing something it considered its better.

"The Dimensionlapse has given us the opening we waited ages for, Master." Its voice came out of the worn faces in the metal rather than from anywhere on its body.

"Their walls are meaningless now, their Halls route nothing, and we can arrive anywhere inside THE Ymnaros we please. After so long being kept at the door, we are inside the house."

The crimson-robed man said nothing.

"But we have taken multiple valleys," the chained titan continued, "and we cannot take the water in any of them. The Panaceas are almost impossible for us to grasp ourselves. If they are the object, then the practical route is the one we have been avoiding, which is to take the Superpowered Lifeforms alive in numbers, and keep them, and make them harvest for us."

The liquid one poured downward and said nothing. The calcified one remained serene.

"Which is what I do not understand" The faces in the chain shifted. "This Dimension is not the richest. It is not the best defended, nor the best positioned, and its people are strange and small and have nothing that other places do not have more of. Why here, master? Of all the Dimensions in existence, why are we in this one?"

...!

And before any answer came, the valley answered for him.

At the center of the Well, the great pillar began to shine.

The colossal leafless trunk that rose out of the water and continued past sight lit along its whole immeasurable length, the currents in its bark running downward, and around it the illusory collar of gold that had hung there in silence for the entire recorded history of a people blazed resplendent with black-gold light!

Every Infinite Lifeform in the ring turned to look.

The one in chains fell silent. The dark liquid stopped falling for perhaps half a heartbeat and then resumed. And the crimson-robed man, who had not reacted to anything at all since he arrived in this valley, frowned.

It was the first expression he had worn.

"That," he said, "is why we are here."

He did not take his eyes off the collar.

"Across existence there are objects that do not belong to any age that can be dated. Remnant Existential Treasures. Older than the Primeval Ones, older than the frameworks the Primevals sit beneath, and most of the ones anybody has ever managed to trace lead back to Those Who Remain themselves."

WAA!

"They are not artifacts. Artifacts were made by somebody who wanted something. These are remnants. They were... left."

The three around him waited.

"This little necklace," the crimson-robed man said, "hanging in a fishpond, in a valley, in a Dimension full of costumed farmers who give off no authority. A great many patient beings have suspected for a very long time that it is one of them. I came to confirm it, and to take it, and I expected to spend an age doing so."

Then his voice changed, and the madness in him came up out of the calm without raising its volume at all.

"So why."

"...!"

"Why the fuck is the legend of these ungrateful costume-wearing fuckers activating now? This age. This month. This afternoon, while I am standing in the water they die for?" His hair moved in its absent wind.

"For ages they dreamed about it. Generations of them died in rows in front of these stones waiting for that thing to twitch, and it never twitched, not for their best, not for their most loved, not for any of the poor hopeful bastards who were certain. And I arrive to claim it, and something appears and trips the pathway toward it within a breath of my getting here."

He laughed once. It was a short, entirely humorless sound!

"Is existence trying to fuck with me? Haha. Unbelievable."

The frown smoothed away!

"Fine. Come on. I will burn this place down to make certain I have hold of it before whatever tripped that pathway walks to the end of it." He turned in the air, robe moving, already deciding logistics.

"Ground the blood of a few million of these Superpowered Lifeforms into the water. That should be enough to force the matter, and if it is not, we will find out with the next few million. There are enough of them, and they do not run."

He looked back once at the shining collar, and the madness in him settled into something patient.

"Alright, you all. Let’s move."

...!

And the three titans that fit on no ladder inclined themselves, and followed, and there was not a moment of hesitation in any of them, nor any question about whether the order was reasonable.

Of course they followed.

They had been following for a very long time, and they would go on following, because they were THE Followers of THE Sealed One.

Who else would they follow?

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