Chapter 739: The Strand I
The moment Achilles accepted the mission, the prompts bloomed before him and the mark on his hand shone brilliantly.
|Mission Accepted: The Dying Shores.|
|Designated investigation site: THE Strand of Broken Scales, outer fringes of THE Source Lands.|
|Objective: Determine the cause behind the disappearance and death of Common Source Lifeforms in larger numbers than natural processes account for.|
|Temporary passage to THE Source Lands has been granted for the duration of this mission.|
Morrigaur’s crimson eyes brightened as the mark flared, and the crow laughed with the satisfaction of someone watching a new acquaintance choose the interesting option.
"Missions to that place are some of the more dangerous ones," it said. "But it is a fantastical place to go, even on a temporary pass. You should feel exactly where you need to go to begin. You are an Attendant now, but nobody looks down on the title. Unlike the Swords of Existence, those in our positions are looked at as having more freedom and more versatility. A Sword will only accept the missions made for them. We have the freedom to do whatever we want."
It settled its wings, the crimson eyes carrying a practical warmth.
"Forming connections is always good in existence. If you ever need me again, we have established a thread of karma in the eyes of the Source. You can pull on it at any time to reach out to me. If you need anything, just let me know."
After it said this, waves of obsidian brilliance wrapped around the massive crow, and it disappeared.
Achilles looked at the space where Morrigaur had been for a moment, then turned his attention to his hand. The marker pulsed there, information flowing into him alongside its light, and he felt the guidance the crow had described, a distinct sense of direction settling into his awareness like a navigation system that needed no consulting because it simply told him where he was meant to be.
He wrapped his authority around his body. Silent waves of Assimilation closed over him, and he disappeared to go where the mission directed.
He teleported and arrived in a region that held an oppressive air of power.
Far ahead stood another massive obsidian wall, though this one was different from the mission wall in Bangor. Its surface held pulsing liquid waves of obsidian brilliance, moving and flowing in a way that his foundations recognized immediately. This was a form of THE Primordial Source itself, the foundational authority running through the wall the way blood runs through a living thing.
Around the wall stood massive shapes he first took for statues.
They were not statues. They were titanic Source Lifeforms, their power so far beyond his ability to measure that his perception simply returned the fact of their immensity without any figure attached to it. He could not gauge where they sat! Maybe Fourth Scale, but unlike any Fourth Scale he had met!
They glanced at him only briefly.
He had permission. The mark on his hand declared it, and that was enough. He was supposed to be here, and so the titanic guardians of this threshold returned their attention to whatever occupied beings of their scale, dismissing him not out of contempt but out of the simple recognition that he belonged where he stood.
He gazed ahead and read what his perception offered him.
|THE Primordial Advent Wall. A wall capable of granting passage to specific locations within THE Source Lands.|
...!
This was the gateway he had to cross to enter a place that, from the memories of every Gilded One he had devoured, ranked among the most coveted destinations in all of existence!
He went forward and phased into the wall.
It felt like tunneling through existence itself. His body stretched in every direction at once, drawn thin through a passage that had no regard for the ordinary integrity of a form, and a dense flow of power and immensity covered him from all sides as he moved through it. The Primordial Source pressed against him the whole way, that same boundary he had felt before, though the seam the Pure Primordial Essence had opened let him pass through rather than being rejected outright.
He pushed through the final stretch, and it felt like breaking past some amniotic membrane, a last resistance giving way all at once, and then...
BOOM!
He smashed down like a meteor onto a beach.
He picked himself up and looked around. Obsidian sand stretched in every direction, dark and fine and glittering faintly where the light caught it. Far ahead, massive ancient obsidian trees rose burning with immensity, their presence pressing against his awareness from across the distance.
The light reached the ground in slow-moving columns, and that was the first strange thing about the place, because it came from no single direction. High in the canopy, in the skies above the distant forest, flowers had bloomed like suns, broad and golden, and their light fell through layer after layer of ancient growth until it pooled across the ground in shifting patches of brightness and deep shade. The whole pattern drifted as the flowers above swayed, so that nothing stayed lit for long and nothing stayed dark.
The trees were massive. Their trunks rose wider than entire settlements, their roots gripping deep into substrate that competed for the same earth across distances that took real effort to cross. The oldest among them carried a faint glow running through their bark, the residue of eons spent drinking Primordial Source energy up out of the ground, and the light within them pulsed in slow time with the flowers far above.
The air carried its own weight! It was dense with purity and power, thick enough that a single breath felt heavier and fuller than it should have, and through it ran a constant low pressure that pushed against the Source of anything that tried to drift upward. The higher one’s awareness rose toward the canopy, the more that pressure made itself known, the place communicating without words that the heights belonged to stronger things and that the ground was where most beings were meant to remain.
It was genuinely beautiful. Golden and vast and ancient!
He...wanted to Assimilate everything here!
|You have arrived at THE Strand of Broken Scales.|
|Objective: Investigate the cause behind the disappearance and death of large numbers of Common Source Lifeforms in this region.|
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