Chapter 5385: True! II

His ambition now, stated plainly to himself, was this dreadful thing fully under his control, spent down beat by beat, every secret in it his.

And a man cannot bring a monster under his control by refusing to ever engage with it. He brings it under control by setting off its traps on his own terms, while he holds every advantage, and overcoming them, and proving to it and to himself that the cage holds even when the prisoner is allowed to act.

He knew there was a trap. He wanted to spring it. He wanted to walk into the thing THE Sealed One had built and walk back out intact, because that was what mastery actually looked like, and because he was done flinching from the contents of his own heart!

So he sent a sliver of his Intent, a sliver of himself, toward the thread of information!

|A generated thread of complex information and record has been released freely by THE Sealed One. The record is unfolding as a memory belonging to THE Sealed One. Caution: the offering is given willingly. Treat all willing gifts from the contained presence as carrying intent beyond the gift.|

HUUM!

Noah focused, and felt a portion of his Intent drawn into the thread, and a scene began to bloom in front of him. He received it calmly, fully prepared, his attention split between the unfolding record and the cage in his chest, watching for the move he knew was coming, ready to answer it the instant it showed itself.

|A memory from a time before Vakochev’s Scales of Existence were laid is now playing before you.|

|Designated: THE Last Quiet After The War.|

|In this memory, THE Sealed One sits upon a mountain of the corpses of True Lifeforms. The war is over. The memory will now begin to play.|

---

The record unfolded, and it did not unfold simply.

The pieces came together in a complex way, fragments of a memory assembling themselves around Noah’s awareness, and he watched all of it coldly with his own identity burning steady at the center of him. He did not merely watch, though.

He moved. He placed himself, his identity, subtly into the weavings of the memory as it assembled, threading the Quintessential truth of who he was into the structure of the record itself, so that he was not a passive eye waiting for THE Sealed One’s trap to spring on its own schedule.

He was a presence inside the memory, ambitious and proactive, ready to act the instant the move revealed itself! He would walk this record like a man who owned the ground.

The pieces locked together, and the prompts named where he stood.

|You have appeared within the record. Location: THE Infinite Carcosa.|

|THE Infinite Carcosa is a span of existence vaster and more complex than THE Source Lands, for the simple reason that Infinity sits at its backbone where Primordial Source sits at the backbone of the Source Lands. Because Infinity does not run out, the Carcosa does not end. It stretches without limit, folding and refolding through itself, and it is where the madness and the superior horror of Infinity unfold without restraint, without the foundation that the Source provides to steady it. It is beautiful and it is deranged and it goes on forever. This record plays out in a single small corner of such a place.|

The first thing that mattered was not what Noah saw. It was what he felt.

Because the record was playing from the inside, from the perspective of THE Sealed One, and so the feelings came with it, flooding into Noah unbidden!

Arrogance, vast and total, the arrogance of a thing that had never once met its equal. Confidence past any measure he had a frame for, conviction so absolute it left no room for the concept of doubt. And under all of it, woven through the grandeur, a sadistic delight and an endless, patient, bottomless hatred, all of it gathered and held beneath a single controlled banner, organized, ruled, the way a tyrant rules a vast estate. The feelings were not chaotic!

That was the horror of them. They were arrogance and hatred and cruelty held in perfect order, the emotional landscape of a being that had made even its madness obey.

Noah received it and kept his own identity burning clean against it, refusing to let the borrowed feelings become his, and he looked at the environment.

Mountains of corpses stretched out around him. Titanic beings, their bodies and existences torn open, and from the wounds in them leaked Causes and Intents and a great many things Noah could not yet fathom, the inner workings of beings so far beyond him that their spilled remains were studies he could not read.

The aura of even a single one of these corpses exceeded anything he had felt in the whole of his life. They felt grand, and terrifying, and impossibly distant, the kind of distant that meant they belonged to a tier of existence he had not climbed to and might not for a very long time.

And they were corpses. Every one of them. Struck down. Killed and piled, by the thing whose perspective he wore!

Above the mountains of the dead, the skies were an endless blue sea of Infinity, and the sea was alive. It surged like a living beast, filled with a superior madness, storms and typhoons of raging Infinity churning across the heights without rest, the unsteadied boundlessness of the Carcosa doing exactly what the prompts had warned it did!

Noah felt, looking at it, that a Triassic Scale being, a Fourth Scale existence, would have struggled to survive in this place for even a single second. The air itself was a thing that ended you.

And atop the mountain of corpses sat THE Sealed One.

Not the decrepit cleaved hand. Not the aged stolen face on the corpse in Noah’s heart. This was the thing whole, the thing as it had been, and it had a humanoid form of devilish handsomeness, adorned in a robe of obsidian and crimson, and it sat upon the bodies of the slain with an arrogance that made even the arrogance Noah was feeling from the inside seem like a pale echo of the posture.

It lounged on the dead the way a king lounges on a throne he has never once feared losing.

It was looking at nine beings.

Nine True Lifeforms, bound and held by a terrible crimson brilliance, and the moment Noah saw that brilliance he knew it!

Oh, that crimson brilliance!

He knew it instantly and completely. It was the fusion! Infinity and THE Primordial Source, melded into one seamless authority, the thing Noah’s own Intent had only just begun to draw together inside him. Here it was, whole, mastered, casual, far too grand for anything he could currently produce, wrapped around nine True Lifeforms like a Primordial snake coiled around its prey, holding beings that each felt mightier than anything Noah had ever stood near.

Out of the nine, one looked at THE Sealed One and did not lower her eyes.

She was a woman of immaculate beauty, burning with blue Infinity, bound in the crimson coils like the rest, and she met the gaze of the thing on the throne of corpses with open defiance.

"All of this will never be yours," she said. "You hear me? Never. You will fail! You. Will. Fail!"

HUUM!

Noah felt her power through the words, and it staggered him. Her conviction, her authority, the sheer weight of what she was. Standing before this woman, even Dame Seraphine, a Mesozoic Scale being, a Knighting Sword, would have felt like an infant. Like an ant beneath a boot!

This was a True Lifeform from before the Scales, defiant and unbroken even in her bonds, and her certainty rang out across the mountain of the dead like something that could not possibly be wrong!

And in the next moment, THE Sealed One smiled.

It was a gleeful smile, delighted, the smile of a thing that found her defiance charming the way it had found Noah’s charming, and Noah felt the smile from the inside and felt the casual pleasure behind it, and understood a half-second before it happened exactly what that pleasure meant.

BOOM!

The immaculate beauty of the woman twisted and distorted. The crimson tendrils wrapped around her tightened, reached past her body and into her existence, found her very Source and her identity, the deepest truth of her, and crushed them. Her whole form came apart in an instant, collapsing into a gory ruin of parts, her power and her conviction and her certainty that the thing on the throne would fail all ending together in the time it took to close a hand.

She had said he would fail.

And he had killed her, mid-sentence, without rising from his seat, because that was his answer, and it had been his answer to every True Lifeform piled beneath him!

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