Chapter 5793: There Will Only Be Me!

<THE Sealed One>

The feast had been going on for three days, and THE Sealed One had enjoyed almost none of it.

It was held in the great hall of the Aurum Crest, the highest palace of an Observable Existence that the Superbius Gilded had ruled for eleven thousand years. The hall was gold. Everything in it was gold, the floor and the pillars and the long tables and the vaulted ceiling far overhead, where a painted sun made of real, burning light hung eternally at noon.

The Superbius liked it that way. Pride was the root of their power, and nothing fed pride quite like a room that shone back at you from every surface.

There were hundreds of them at the tables. Tall and beautiful and gilded to the fingertips, their skins shining faintly with the Ego that made them what they were, their voices loud and warm and very pleased with themselfs. They told stories of old conquests and laughed at the stories they had heard a thousand times, and toasted each other’s victories, and argued, fiercely and happily, about whose great-great-grandfather had been the grander tyrant, and then they toasted that too.

And every few minutes, one of them would rise, and lift a golden cup, and turn toward the head of the table.

"To our great honor!"

"To THE Sealed One!"

The whole hall would roar it back, cups raised, faces bright, and THE Sealed One would incline his head and lift his own cup, and smile.

He was very good at smiling!

He sat at the head of the long table in a high-backed chair of gold that the Superbius had made for him specially, tall and pale and composed, his long hair pale gold shading into white, his long dark coat immaculate against all that shining metal.

On either side of him lounged a Luxuria. One was dark-haired and laughing, draped half across the arm of his chair, feeding him grapes she had dipped in honey. The other sat curled at his feet with her head resting against his knee, humming some old song of her people, content in the simple, uncomplicated way of a being whose whole existence was built around wanting and being wanted.

They were happy. All of them!

He watched them being happy, and he tried.

He had always tried. Across more Ages than he could count, THE Sealed One had sought out connection as other beings sought out food.

Thats why he mixed in with useless Gilded Ones like he was today. He had mixed with Descendants and Provenance Lifeforms at certain points. Just to...feel.

He had sat at feasts like this one in a thousand Observable Existences. He had lived for centuries among the Gilded in particular, because the Gilded felt so loudly. The Superbius and their bottomless pride. The Luxuria and their hungers. The Ira and their glorious, burning rage. They lived so openly and simply inside their own emotions, and he had always thought that if he stood close enough to feelings that strong, some of it might catch in him, as a spark catches in dry grass.

It never had.

He had tried Descendants. Walked among the sons and daughters of Those Who Remain, with their borrowed grandeur and their sentences in their blood. He had tried Provenance Lifeforms, proud self-made things who should, of anyone, have understood what it was to stand alone at the top of something. And every time, in every hall, at every table, it was the same.

He felt like an outsider!

No guest still learning the customs, either. An outsider as a man is an outsider at an anthill.

He could sit among them, and talk with them, and let them feed him grapes and toast his name, fuck them and make love to them, and underneath all of it he could feel, as clearly as he felt his own heartbeat, that he was above them.

All of them. Every being in every hall he had ever sat in. And a being who stands above everything cannot touch anything. He can only look down.

The Luxuria at his side pressed another honeyed grape to his lips, laughing.

The hall roared his name again.

THE Sealed One set down his cup.

"This... isn’t it," he said quietly.

The dark-haired Luxuria paused, a grape halfway to his mouth. "My lord?"

"This isn’t it." He looked out across the golden hall, at the hundreds of shining, laughing faces. "I don’t feel a thing."

HUUM!

He snapped his fingers!

The sound was very small. It was the only sound in the hall for a moment, because every voice in it had stopped at once. Then every Gilded Lifeform in the Aurum Crest burst!

Hundreds of them, all at the same instant. The Superbius at the long tables, mid-toast, cups still raised. The Luxuria at his side with the grape in her fingers, and the one at his feet with her song half-sung.

Every one of them came apart into a puddle of crimson gold blood that splashed across the golden floor and the golden tables and the golden walls, until the whole shining hall was painted red and gold and dripping!

There was no scream. There had been no time for one!

THE Sealed One sat very still in his gold chair in the middle of it as for ever a brief moment...he almost felt something. Almost!

Then he opened his mouth!

The blood came to him. It rose off the floor and the tables and the walls in long slow ribbons, crimson gold and shining with the last of all that pride and hunger, and flowed across the air and into his mouth, and he drank it. All of it!

Every drop of Ego and every scrap of feeling that had lived in hundreds of Gilded Lifeforms a moment ago, and he took it into himself without hurry, like a man finishing a cup of water he is not particularly thirsty for.

When it was done, the hall was only gold again, and very empty, and quiet.

His expression had not changed at all through any of it. There was no pleasure on his face. No triumph. Only a tired, faraway apathy, and under the apathy, if anyone had been left alive to see it, something very much like sadness.

He sighed.

"You’ve been watching from up there this whole time," THE Sealed One said to the painted sun. "What is it?"

...!

The painted sun opened!

It split down the middle like an eyelid, and behind it there was no sun at all, only an eye. Vast and dark and old, burning with a sleepless, patient attention that did not blink, and never had, and never would!

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND regards you from above.|

|"You are truly a hateful thing."|

|"And yet all of them believe you hold the best chance of opening the door. So they support you."|

THE Sealed One laughed softly, and leaned back in his golden chair.

"But you were always the one who found me," he said. "Ages ago, when I was only bright and very young and very stupid about it. You came down to look, and you never quite left." He spread his pale hands. "So. Any news?"

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND answers coldly.|

|"You will be given what you want."|

|"You missed the one called the Assimilation Factor. That was careless of you."|

|"But every other identified Anomaly, every Undefined Lifeform we have found, will be given to you to devour. Your list is long."|

...!

And in the empty golden air of the hall, names began to rise!

They wrote themselves in lines of pale fire, one after another, drifting up toward the vaulted ceiling like sparks from a bonfire that would not stop burning.

THE REMNANT SEER.

THE LAST OF HOUSE VESPER.

THE ORCHARD THAT WALKS.

THE INFINITY EATER.

THE CONTINUUM PARADOX.

THE WRITER OF MYTHOS.

ANAXIMANDER.

THE CREATURE...

On and on they climbed, dozens of them, a long burning column of every strange and singular existence that had drawn the notice of Those Who Remain in this cold Age. And at the very top of the list, larger than the rest, brighter than the rest, burning above them all:

NOAH OSMONT.

...!

THE Sealed One rose from his chair and walked out into the empty hall! He lay down in the middle of it, on his back, among the bones.

There were a great many bones. The Gilded had left them behind when their blood came to him, white and scattered across the golden floor, and he lay in them as another being might lie in a field of grass, and looked up at the burning names.

"Do you know," he said, "how unlikely it is that any of them will ever become anything?"

His voice drifted up toward the painted eye, calm and conversational and completely without mercy.

"I have watched anomalies for a very long time. Existence throws them up by the thousand, these strange little one-of-a-kind things, and everyone gets very excited, and then they die. They die in wars. They die in winters. They die of their own cleverness. The chance that any single one of them becomes something that matters is so small it barely deserves the word."

He lifted one pale hand toward the column of fire and let his fingers trail across the names. "So why leave it to chance? Why let them squander it? I can take every one of them into myself. Their lives. Their existences. Everything strange and singular about them, all of it put to use as fuel for something far greater than any of them would ever have become on their own."

He smiled up at the name at the very top.

"They should be grateful, really. It is the only way most of them will ever mean anything at all."

The names burned on above him. THE Sealed One lay in the bones and the gold and looked at them for a long, long time.

"They keep saying three," he said softly. "THE Augury of the Long Night. Three at the turning. It is the one scrap of it any of them could scry through the fog, and they will not stop repeating it. I am tired of the number."

His gold eyes narrowed.

"There will not be three. There will only be one. There will only...be me."

BOOM!

The empty hall shook! The golden pillars trembled on their bases, and the bones across the floor rattled and jumped, and the burning names above flared so bright that for a moment the whole Aurum Crest was lit with pale fire from end to end!

Above him, the vast dark eye of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND watched without blinking.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND recites words he has only recently come to hold.|

|"And at the turning, count three.|

|One shall look upon all that is, and grieve.|

|One shall take up every weight, and not set it down.|

|One shall no longer remain, and yet remain.|

|By their three hands the cloth is torn, or the cloth is woven anew,|

|and no living soul may say which"|

THE Sealed One went very still among the bones!

Three is a number, and one is a number. For all their scrying, the Immense Ones had only ever held a scrap of THE Augury of the Long Night, a count of three glimpsed through the winter’s fog.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND observes.|

|"You say there will only be one. The Augury does not disagree with you. It simply declines to promise."|

The eye pulsed, once, slow.

|"Come to the Legacy. A great variety of Gu have been captured for your consumption."|

|"They are all feeding you. Fattening you up. Pouring everything they have into the hope that you are the one who opens the door."|

|"If you do not deliver what they want, boy, oh boy."|

...!

THE Sealed One laughed!

He rose from the floor among the bones, slowly, unhurried, and the last scattered droplets of crimson gold blood on the golden floor lifted and flowed into him as he stood. He straightened his dark coat, and looked up at the eye of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND, and at the burning list of everything he meant to eat, and at the one name that shone above all the others.

"Epochs have passed," THE Sealed One said.

"The same things will rise, and the same things will fall, and the same small bright things will think they are special right up until someone takes them."

His gold eyes shone in the empty hall.

"In every epoch that has passed, and in every epoch still to come, only one will remain supreme. And it...will be me."

...!