Chapter 5459: Know Thy Enemy!
<THE Infinite Carcosa>
Deep in THE Infinite Carcosa, past regions most Infinite Lifeforms would never see in their long existences, THE Kaerhold Extraction Deep ran the way it had run for many years.
It sat inside a hollowed mountain range, violet-black rock threaded with veins of raw crimson Infinity, and it made no sound that traveled. That was the first thing captives noticed when the chains dropped them on its platforms. The Deep swallowed noise the way it swallowed everything else, and the silence pressed on the workers harder than any whip would have.
They mined in that silence. Source Lifeforms who had once commanded regions. Infinite Lifeforms taken from the heartland of their own territory. Gilded Ones vanished from Observable Existences that would never trace them.
Crimson-blue chaos chains bound every foot, thousands upon thousands of them, Fourth Scale and Third Scale beings coaxing volatile ore out of the walls with authority wrapped in their strongest genuine emotion, because the ore detonated for anything less, and the Wardens had stopped counting the ones it unmade.
The ore went into carts, and the carts and prisoners went along a single road, and the road ran to the temple.
The temple stood at the heart of the Deep, built from the same violet-black stone, its doors tall enough to admit a Warden and always open. Every day the procession shuffled toward it in chains and laid its offerings on the steps, concentrated Existential Biomass by the ton, and every day the offerings sank into the stone and were gone by morning. None of the workers knew what received them. None of them could have spoken of it if they had known as they were all bound by directives.
The whole operation ran on silence enforced at the level of existence itself, here as everywhere else the collector worked.
Deep beneath the temple, in a chamber no chained foot had ever entered, the vessel sat and fed.
It had been a grand Infinite Lifeform once, a Mesozoic being with a name and a Pantheon and a history, and all three belonged to something else now. The vessel sat cross-legged at the center of a slow spiral of descending ore, Existential Biomass streaming down through the stone and into its frame in steady rivers, and its flesh had gone translucent in places from the sheer density of what it held. It had been sitting here for a long time. It would sit here a while longer. Patience was the whole of the method.
THE Sealed One opened the vessel’s eyes and spoke to the empty chamber, because after enough ages, a being learned that the self was the only conversation partner who ever kept up.
"He’ll have counted it as a loss," the vessel said, and the voice came out warm and unhurried, filling the silence the Deep otherwise ate. "The devouring. His little birthplace, his little resurrection, ground down and swallowed in front of him. I fed him adversity by taking from him, and I knew it when I did it. Even absence is a kind of adversity to a thing built like that." The vessel turned one hand over, examining it.
"But it had to be done. Some purchases are worth the price. More knowledge had to be gained, and there is no deeper knowledge of a being than the taste of what he built."
The ore streamed down. The vessel drank it without pausing.
"And oh, my future vessel is grand," THE Sealed One murmured. "Grander than I let myself hope. I have eaten Observable Existences beyond counting, and I have never tasted anything like his..."
Because the two pills had not merely been power. An Observable Existence carried its history in its foundations, and a foundation seated by a specific hand carried that hand’s shape pressed into every truth of it. Chernobyl had held nine Prime Causes that belonged to no framework THE Sealed One had ever catalogued, and he had catalogued them all. And THE Braneworld had held the traces of the Cause itself, and the Lower Observable Existence beneath it had held slivers of memory soaked into its dying stones.
He had digested all of it slowly, the way he digested everything, and now he knew. He spoke to nobody other than himself!
"Quintessential, are you?" THE Sealed One said softly, and something like delight moved through the borrowed voice. "That’s the word at the center of you. I pulled it out of your Causes the way one pulls a signature off a document. THE Prime Cause of Quintessence, seated into a dying Observable Existence’s foundation, the irreducible essence of things. Is that the core of the identity that built your Intent? It must be. It explains the shape of everything else." The vessel shook its head slowly, appreciative.
"Not many could truly claim to be Quintessential, even back then. Even in my Age, when beings were made of sterner material than this one produces, the ones who knew what they were all the way down could be counted on one hand. And here you are...here you are!"
The chamber hummed with descending ore, and THE Sealed One went on, laying out what he had learned the way a scholar lays out findings.
"Nine Prime Causes of your own. Existence, Paradox, Adversity, Tyranny, Harvest, Apocalypse, Chaos, Mana, Quintessence. I read them all out of the corpse of your resurrected Observable Existence... Beings spend Ages hoping to touch the common Causes. You authored your own set, and you did it while sitting at a Scale so low it barely registers? Hah! You haven’t even reached Vakochev’s Sixth Scale or Seventh, and you are already grasping things that belong elsewhere?"
A low laugh rolled through the chamber.
"How unique are you, exactly?"
HUUM!
The vessel’s translucent hands folded together.
"And the memories," THE Sealed One said, quieter now, savoring this part the way he had savored the pills themselves. "The Lower Observable Existence carried memories in its dying stones. Slivers, only. But slivers are enough. There’s a warmth threaded through your history that doesn’t match the tyrant, and it all points one direction, away, elsewhere, to somewhere I haven’t found. So you have a true home hidden away somewhere. A real one..." The warmth in the voice curdled into something patient and terrible.
"That would be the key to getting through to you. Not the strongest door. The dearest one. It always is."
The ore streamed down, and the vessel grew fractionally denser, and far above, the chained procession shuffled its daily offerings onto the temple steps without knowing what they fed.
"It was worth it," THE Sealed One said to the dark. "Every plan this cost me, every asset burned...worth it! Because I know about you now, Osmont. I know your Causes, your word, your warmth, your direction. And knowing one’s enemy is half the battle already won."
The vessel’s eyes closed again, settling back into the long feed, and the last of it came out almost fondly, an old proverb turned over by the oldest thing still using it.
"Know thy enemy. Hmm. Know thy enemy!"
The Deep kept its silence, and the temple kept its secret, and the ore came down in rivers, and beneath it all, something horrendously patient grew!
