Chapter 241: The Guardian
Amenta Lands of Stone.
That was the term the massive spider had used. Not the Lands of Stone, the way every tribe and empire and Sangoma had referred to the world for as long as anyone could remember, but the Amenta Lands of Stone, as though the name everyone knew was only half of a longer name that had been forgotten somewhere along the way.
Damian remembered the legend of Anansi.
Children were told the stories to frighten them, tales of a great spider who watched from places they could not see, who knew every secret and spun every fate. He had heard them himself as a boy, before the empire fell, before any of the rest of it. He had never once considered that the spider in those stories was real, let alone that it was floating on a meteorite above the world, calling itself a Guardian, shooting toward him through the vacuum of space with all of its many eyes shining in delight.
As Anansi approached, Damian gauged it the way he gauged everything now.
|Extremely Strong Null Source Lifeform. A Lifeform that has somewhat succeeded in climbing the ladder of power. Its Source is stable and ordered, as it has begun to wonder about its Way. Manipulation of its Source through Primeval Source Manipulation is possible.|
Zhuque had been a Weak Null Source Lifeform.
Anansi was Extremely Strong.
The distance between those two designations was not small, and Damian understood, looking at it, that this being’s power alone likely eclipsed any single Ancestral Celestial he had perceived among the floating landmasses. It made sense. Anansi’s home was not in the sky above the Lands of Stone. It was here, in the vacuum, above even the Ancestral Celestials, floating in the dark as a Guardian.
Anansi arrived, its great obsidian-purple form filling Damian’s view, and it spoke through mana without any of the caution that its size might have suggested it should carry.
"Haha! You must be so confused!" Its voice traveled across the vacuum that should not have carried sound at all, warm and rapid and delighted. "Well, to put it simply, let me explain, because explaining is one of my favorite things and I have not had anyone new to explain it to in a very, very long time!"
WAA!
"Our Amenta Lands of Stone rarely produces Stellar Lifeforms! Do you understand how rare you are? Beings who can survive out here, who can move across the weavings of this space! Because this is not normal space, oh no, this space is heavy, the weavings here are thick and cruel, and if a being does not have enough power, even an Ancestral Celestial would be crushed flat the moment they rose above the floating lands and tried to swim out into the dark!" Its many eyes gleamed. "But you! You are floating here breathing it in like it is nothing! Like you were born for it!"
OH!
It circled him once, all eight legs gesturing as it talked.
"I have been the Guardian for the last one thousand years! One thousand! Because nobody else rose in all that time, nobody else could survive out here, and someone always has to stay! Before me there were others, a few of them across the long ages, and every single one of them eventually left! They went out into Existence to seek resources, to seek the things that propel a Stellar Lifeform’s power forward! But always, always, a Guardian must remain behind!" Its voice rose with the building enthusiasm of a being reaching the point of its story.
"Because if no Guardian remains, then roaming Stellar Lifeforms from out there in the dark could find our Amenta Lands of Stone undefended, and they could enslave it! Take it! Make it theirs!"
It stopped circling and faced him directly, every eye fixed on him.
"And now you are here! So! Haha!" Its legs spread wide in something like triumph. "Tag! You are now it! I am free! After a thousand years, I am finally free to roam and advance and seek my own path!"
...!
Damian was quiet, taking the words in.
Him. A Guardian?
He looked at Anansi up and down, at the many eyes, at the carapace traced with patterns that looked like written stories, at the open and excited expression of a being that had clearly decided this conversation was going exactly the way it wanted. He turned the proposal over in his mind.
Then he spoke.
"You wish to go out and seek resources to elevate your power further," Damian said. "What if you didn’t need to?"
...!
Anansi’s many eyes narrowed at once.
"Hey, hey, hey!" Its voice dropped into something heavier, suspicious, the voice of a being that had waited a thousand years for this exact moment and was not about to let it slip away on a technicality. "A newcomer is always the Guardian! That is the rule! That has always been the rule! Do not try to back out of it now that you are here! I have been patient for ten centuries and I will not be cheated by a smooth-talking new arrival who thinks he can change the way things have always been done!"
Damian shook his head.
"Stay still," he said, and tapped the air.
HUUM!
He could see the obsidian Source of this being, ordered and stable in a way that Zhuque’s never had been, and he reached for it. The up and down arrows were there, the way they were there above every Source he looked at, but he had moved past needing them. They had been a beginner’s manual, a simple interface for a power that he now understood well enough to handle directly. He found Anansi’s Source, and rather than reducing it, he elevated it. He pressed it upward with the proficiency he had developed across the day, across the Murderous Saint and the Demon Dukes and the Ancestral Celestials, and he poured a portion of what he could do into pushing this being’s existence further along its own road.
Anansi’s body trembled.
Dense Mana converged around the massive spider from every direction, and stellar glows descended from the distant dark, threads of pure power wrapping around its Source as the elevation took hold.
BOOM!
An obsidian aurora of wings erupted behind Anansi’s great spider form, vast and shimmering, and its aura swelled grander than it had ever been across its thousand years. The patterns on its carapace blazed brighter. Its many eyes went wide, every one of them, as it felt what had just happened to it, and it looked at Damian in pure shock.
With a single tap, Damian had pushed it further than it had advanced in the last one thousand years.
OH!
In the very next moment, Anansi folded all eight of its legs beneath its massive body and bowed toward Damian in the vacuum of space.
"Brother Newcomer!" it said, every trace of suspicion gone, replaced entirely by delighted reverence. "What do you need from me? A Guardian? I will stay as one, gladly, for another thousand years if you wish it! What was that power, by the way? How did you do that? Hey, are you really a Stellar Lifeform, because I have never felt anything like what you just did to me, not from any Guardian before me, not from anything I have ever encountered out here in the dark!"
WAA!
The questions came one after another, tumbling out of the spider faster than anyone could have answered them, and Damian let them wash past him as he turned his attention to the surrounding vacuum and the distant, barely discernible stars scattered across the black.
His perception was still spreading outward. It had not stopped since he arrived, still reaching past the Lands of Stone, past the floating landmasses, past Anansi’s meteorite, out toward distances that even now he could not find the edges of.
He sat in the dark of space, weightless and breathing it in, and he nodded to Anansi.
"Tell me all you know," he said. "About the Lands of Stone. About yourself. About the Guardians who came before you."
...!
He wanted to gather some information before he sent this body out into the dark.
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