Chapter 238: Experimentation II
Bringing his Ama to the Cradle of First Flames was a strange thing.
It was the place he had been living, yes. But it was also nothing like the place he had been living. When he and Uncle Adam had arrived at the Purple Stone Tribe summers ago, it had been a small Dross settlement scraping survival from poor soil at the edge of barren Threshold Lands. Now it floated in the sky, miles of transformed paradise lifted above the clouds, World Trees rising a mile into the air and rivers running clean and a stairway of stone descending through the cloud layer to the ground below.
He had changed the place beyond recognition.
But as always, it wasn’t the place that mattered most. It was the people.
And at this moment, the people were gathered around a shimmering blue lake near the heart of the Cradle. Men and women and beasts together, the Beast King Mafube and Masamuk settled in one area with the Noble Simba delegation, Grandmother Essun moving among the tribesmen whose bodies now held Mana, every one of them a Warrior where once they had been Dross who could be swept away in a single bad night.
But the biggest thing happening was Uncle Adam.
The old warrior was on his knees, trembling, looking at the Empress he had believed was long dead. Damian understood what was moving through him without needing to ask. Uncle Adam had served the Vakochev Empire. Like many of the loyal soldiers who had survived its fall, he had spent eight summers carrying a particular weight, the weight of having not been strong enough to do anything when the enemies came, of having lived while the Emperor and Empress did not.
He had protected Damian as penance and as duty both, and now the woman he had failed to save was standing in front of him, whole and grand and alive.
His Ama smiled and lifted him up.
"You did your duty," she said. "You protected my little prince all these years, until he was ready to shine. Without you, I would not be standing here either." She held his shoulders. "So stand proud."
...!
Uncle Adam cried.
He cried the way old soldiers cried!
Before Damian could say anything at all, Grandmother Essun was already moving.
The shrewd old woman had taken in the scene, calculated its requirements, and arrived at her conclusion faster than anyone else present. She began moving through the gathering with a stick in her hand, swatting at people as she passed them, her voice cutting across the lakeside.
"The Ama of the Tokoloshe is here," she announced to the gathering at large. "So get a move on! Let us prepare a feast for them, you fools! Move!"
...!
The old woman set the whole gathering into motion, and Damian smiled at the moment of peace, however short it might turn out to be.
He knew something might still come of the Ancestral Celestials. Xuanwu had fled, but beings like that had long memories and longer pride, and the death of two of their kind over the River was not the sort of thing they would simply forget. But if they sought adversity with him, he was more than content to clear the board. He had cleared it once already today.
For now, his aim was to understand THE Primordial Tongue and THE Primordial Source better, and he intended to do exactly that.
But first he pulled Serala along into the festivities Grandmother Essun had started, and he let his mother settle into the place his people had built, and he let the day be a day.
---
Arguably, that whole day was one of the best he had known across his many summers.
He got to watch his Ama laugh. He got to watch her talk with the tribesmen and the Noble Simbas and Grandmother Essun, got to watch her settle into a place where she was treated as what she was rather than what the demons had reduced her to. A feast was held.
The tribesmen danced the ancestral dances that the Rain of First Flames had stirred loose from their memory, bare feet striking the earth of the floating Cradle in patterns older than the Vakochev Empire. Serala stayed close to him through it, and his Ama caught them together more than once and said nothing, only smiled in the way mothers smiled.
Late into the night, the festivities wound down, and Damian floated above the shimmering blue lake.
The trees around it held luminous leaves, soft light spilling from them into the dark, and the whole region swirled with faint rivers of Mana that the Cradle produced now as a matter of course. It was quiet. His family was resting. The Cradle floated peacefully in the sky above the Lands of Stone.
Around him, the obsidian of THE Primordial Source swirled.
He had been studying it. He had been sensing the ongoing changes in his existence, the steady elevation that continued whether he attended to it or not, the Pure Primordial Essence still integrating, the Source within him refining off the contributions of every lifeform under his Scale. With each passing hour, he found himself understanding the same thing more deeply, which was how far out of his depth he was.
THE Primordial Source was too grand.
He felt like a tiny leaf connected to an unfathomably vast sea. He could be swept away at any second. The connection he carried was a thread to something so much larger than himself that the part of him capable of pride had simply gone quiet in its presence.
And right now, he was trying to get closer to that sea.
He was trying to coax it. He was trying to convince it to let him grasp its waves, to let him hold even a fraction of its immensity long enough to understand a little more of what he carried. He didn’t demand this time, the way he had demanded above the Dominion when his father’s corpse was being defiled. He approached it differently, patiently, reaching toward the vastness and asking it to meet him partway.
He wanted to understand.
He continued, and the minutes passed, and around him the rivers of obsidian raged more and more, building in intensity above the luminous lake until the light of them outshone the leaves of the trees.
BOOM!
He felt the change.
His body was being squeezed, and then his sight, his perception, was being expanded. It expanded rapidly, tremendously, faster than he could track. In moments he could sense everything within the Cradle and hundreds of miles around it, every lifeform, every river, every stone. And it did not stop there. His perception kept reaching outward, across the Lands of Stone and into its skies, across thousands of miles, expanding and expanding without finding an edge.
Words bloomed before him.
|You have become more attuned to THE Primordial Source and unlocked something unique to you- Primordial Perception.|
|Gradually, because your evolving Source and existence remain so weak relative to your connection to THE Primordial Source, what you are able to perceive is expanding to cover vast distances. In a short period of time, a million miles will not be an issue. A single light year will not be an issue.|
|You are the only limitation. Your perception will continue to expand as your existence slowly adapts to your increasing access to THE Primordial Source.|
...!
Damian floated above the luminous lake, his perception still spreading outward across the Lands of Stone and beyond, and he understood, once again, that he had underestimated what he carried.
You are the only limitation.
He sat with that line for a long while in the quiet above the water, his family sleeping below him, the Cradle floating in the dark, his sight reaching toward distances that the Lands of Stone had no names for!
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