Chapter 5317: Resuscitation! I
Noah descended into the storm.
The terminal infinity raged around him in obsidian gray currents that would have ended weak Ordovician Paleozoic Scale beings on contact, the unstable First Cause warring against itself across the space, definition and Undefinition tearing at each other in fronts that shifted faster than most perception could track.
THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian held it all away from him, the obsidian gold layer over his existence treating the storm as a condition to move through rather than a threat to survive.
He came near the little girl.
She turned in the storm she was holding back, and as he approached, her voice reached out to him. Small. Tender. Carrying beneath it the constant strain of someone speaking through pain that never stopped.
"You shouldn’t be here...Sir." Her eyes found him, wide and young and exhausted in a way that no child’s eyes should ever have been.
"Staying in a place like this too long, it can hurt your existence. Even strong ones. Please. You should go away. Go somewhere that doesn’t hurt."
She was warning him. Through everything she carried, with the endings of an entire Observable Existence channeling through her every moment, the first thing she did when a stranger approached was try to protect him.
Noah looked at her closely.
"I’m okay," he said. His voice was calm. "This doesn’t hurt me. You don’t have to worry about that."
She studied him with the careful attention of a child who had learned that hope was dangerous to hold.
"Tell me about yourself," Noah said. "About the Causes. About the endings. I want to understand."
She was quiet for a moment, turning slowly in the storm.
"The endings are everything," she said finally.
"When something ends, it doesn’t just stop. It feels itself stopping. Everything that was going to happen and now won’t, all of it presses together at once, and that pressing is what an ending feels like. I hold all of them. Every ending that wants to happen here, I hold it, so it doesn’t." She looked at her own small hands.
"I thought it would be like holding a door closed as it isnt. It’s like being the door. Everything that pushes against it pushes against me."
"How have you carried it this whole time?" Noah asked. "The endings of an entire Observable Existence. For so long."
Her face crumpled, just slightly, the expression of a child asked a question that reached the center of something.
"At first I didn’t know I could let go," she said quietly. "So I just held on. And then I learned I could let go, but by then I knew what would happen if I did. Everyone would end. All of them. The people in the dying Realms and folds and the people I never met and everyone." She turned in the storm.
"So I kept holding on. Every day it hurt more, but every day the reason to hold on was still there. The people were still there. They didn’t know about me. They never knew. But they...were still there, so I kept holding the door." Her voice grew smaller.
"I held it for them. Even though they don’t know I exist. Even though no one ever came to say hi or play with me. I held it because they were alive and I could keep them alive, and that seemed like a good enough reason to keep hurting."
BOOM!
The words hung in the storm.
"Do you want it to stop?" Noah asked.
Her eyes filled. The tears didn’t fall the way ordinary tears fell, dispersing into the terminal infinity around her, but they formed, and her small face contorted with the effort of someone trying to be honest about something they had been ashamed to admit.
"I held on because I knew others would die if I didn’t," she said, the words coming out broken. "And I would do it again. I would. But it hurts. It hurts so, so much. All the time. It never stops, not for one moment, not ever, and I’m so tired, and I don’t know how to keep being brave about it anymore. I...am so tired, Sir."
She looked at him with everything a child’s face could hold. "Please, Sir. Do something. Please. I don’t want everyone to die. But I can’t. I can’t keep doing this. Please, please do something!"
Noah looked at her calmly.
Inside, he was shaking with a rage he showed nothing of.
A little girl. They had let a little girl do this for eons!
The Swords of Existence, with all their power and all their Ways and all their service to THE Source, had looked at this child holding an entire Observable Existence together through her own continuous agony, and the best any of them had managed was to assign someone to choose between killing her and leaving her to suffer?
The full breadth of their wisdom had produced two options, and both options were obscene, and not one of them had thought to ask whether the list of options was actually complete!
Fucking incompetent. Every one of them!
Powerful and ancient and serving the highest standard in existence, and not one of them had been able to look at a suffering child and think harder.
He kept all of it off his face.
"There are always better choices in existence," he said. "People who tell you there are only two options have usually just stopped looking. The list is never as short as they say."
He reached out toward her.
"Do you want to be free?"
She looked at his extended hand. And slowly, without fear, with the trust of a child who had decided that this stranger was different from the nothing that had come before him, she reached back and put her small hand in his.
"Yes," she whispered. "Please."
Noah held her hand.
Through the contact, he reached toward THE Mortis Cause, and through her, he felt the structure of what she was. An Infinite Lifeform, regal and terrifying in foundational architecture even at her young held state, her existence a thing of genuine magnificence that had been bent entirely toward the work of holding endings at bay.
He sensed the boundless endings within her, the terminal infinity she channeled, the full weight of THE Mortis Cause running through a child’s existence.
He commanded THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian to flow into her.
The obsidian gold moved through the contact point, wrapping around her foundations, taking up portions of the load she carried so that for the first time in eons, she was not holding all of it alone.
He waved his other hand through the storm, and invisible strings of THE Mortis Cause formed under his perception, the threads of the failing Cause becoming graspable, and he gathered them, more and more, until it looked as though he held endless strings of endings in his hand!
Holding them, he followed them inward, and connected to the failing First Cause that THE Mortis Cause was the last anchor of.
His internal voice was flat and certain.
He would choose another option. He would spark a change in a dying First Cause!
