Chapter 5740: Hieroglyph Runestones II

Serala had said nothing as the dead Dimension was very still!

But she had thought at that time about what could have possibly made an existence who was so profound and who held such power end everything they held?

"Since then," Vakochev went on, "very few have touched IT, and none have ever made it work. The barrier is not power. It is not strength. Multiple Immense Ones have stood and stared straight at IT and could not activate a single one of its functions, not one, though each of them could unmake a Dimension with a thought. And IT slipped right past them. But...a peasant with no authority at all, a thing of no standing whatsoever, could in principle put a hand on IT and change the entire landscape of existence. The lock has nothing to do with how mighty you are. The first one had almost no strength when it began, and it is still the only one who ever held the pen."

He turned from the cube and looked at her.

"So the question is why. What did that first being see, at the precipice of every glory a lifeform could want, that made it end itself rather than hold on? What was done, all the way back then, to make IT the way IT now is, a thing that answers to no strength and no weakness, that turned the only being who ever wielded it into a suicide, and has refused every hand since? Is IT the answer to something, or the warning against it?"

His voice dropped. "I do not know. The cube brings me to the edge of the knowing and stops. But THE Hieroglyph Runestones are the only things left in existence that might tell the true story of what happened back then. Not this one alone. There are others, scattered, each a page. If I could gather enough of them, I think they would tell me why the first of the Immense unmade itself the very day it became one."

He glanced at the silent sphere.

"But I have found only two in a whole lifetime of looking. And multiple of them, I am certain, are already in the hands of Immense Ones, who guard them not to read them, but to make sure no one else ever does."

The two of them stood in the light of the two stones, the cube read and the sphere still silent, the seas of THE Primordial Source turning slow around them both.

"You are going to look for the rest of them? You may spend spend what is left of your life chasing stones, so that one day you can read why a being unmade itself at the moment of its glory. Is it all...worth it?"

Was it worth it?

Vakochev had been silent for a little while.

"More than worth it. But...I am going to build a ladder first," Vakochev said. "So that when I am gone, the ones below do not have to break themselves finding the road the way I did. I do not want to be the last honest thing in a dishonest existence. I want to make honesty cheap enough that everyone can afford it."

He looked at her. "And yes. After that, I am going to keep chasing the stones, until I know what that first one saw. Because I think it is the most important thing that has ever been forgotten."

Serala was quiet for a long moment.

"They will try and stop you. They will definitely stop us as..." she said. "You may never live to read the last stone. You may be...just like that first Immense One. If you eventually grasp everything that they grasped, what if you do the same thing and choose to..."

She could not finish her words!

WAA!

"Maybe."

"Then why read the stone at all?" she asked, her eyes almost tearing up.

"Why this need to know? I just...I just want to spend all of existence holding on to you. I don’t want to know!"

...!

Vakochev looked at the cube for a long time, and then he looked at the sphere he had never been able to read, the greater of the two, older still, holding a truth he would go to his grave without.

He could not gaze at the woman beside him...as if he knew his conviction would be shaken if he did!

"Because a thing that is true is worth knowing whether or not you can use it," he said. "The Immense Ones believe knowledge is a tool, and a tool is only worth the work it does, and a truth you cannot spend is a truth not worth having. That is why they rewrite the Records. That is why they bury the stones. To them, a fact that cannot be turned into power is garbage, and the past is only a resource to be mined or hidden."

He set his hand against the cube one last time, and the crawling script warmed under his palm.

"But the past is not a resource. It is not a tool. It is the true thing, the thing that happened, whether or not anyone ever benefits from knowing it. And an existence that only values the truths it can spend is an existence that will, in the end, forget it was ever true at all."

"I read the stone because it is true. I may die before I use it. And it was still worth every year it cost me, because for one night, in a dead place, at the bottom of a broken realm, one being ended himself in the face of Everything...but even his record was said aloud. Aloud and recorded on the Hieroglyph Runestones."

He turned from the stone.

"In an existence built on a lie, one true thing said aloud is not nothing. It may be the only thing that isn’t."

The two Runestones glowed a while longer in the dead Dimension, the read and the unread, and then the maker of the Scales let the Source fall away from them, and the ancient light went out!

---

<Current Age>

The Immense Ones were fucking around!

That was the truth stripped of all its grandeur, and Noah turned the thought over from the far edge of the gallery.

Here were beings of terrifying, existence-ending power, gazes that had burned lineages and frozen springs and staged whole tragedies for their own amusement, and they had gathered over this cluster of Dimensions for one reason, which was that not one of them, for all their might, could be certain they were able to hold IT!

They already had power beyond counting. They were hunting for a KEY, a lifeform shaped correctly enough to grasp the one thing their power could not!

And they did not know which shape that was as the clue came with those...holding Hieroglyph Runestones.

But these were terrifying beings, reduced to gamblers who could not read their own dice!

Noah was still turning that over when Calliope’s voice slid back into his Provenance, and she was, as ever, talking a great deal.

|Hmm, it is so hard, you know, to come across another existence who can freely steer narratives when they have not even reached the level of an Immense One. So hard! I feel like I could talk to you for an Age and only get started. And yet look at this predicament around me. It simply does not allow it!|

Her pen never stopped as she spoke, archetypes surging and breaking against the infinite sea below.

|Whatever narrative the Immense Ones have designed here, I do not like its flow. It is not coherent. It does not carry the feeling of a grand myth, of a true epic, and I would know, since building those is the whole of what I am! It reads like something written by old men, by bored things who have forgotten how a story is supposed to move. I want...to change it up.|

...!