There is an old record, copied and recopied across more generations than its copiers could na, and it begins with two won who should have been enemies and were not.
One was an Infinite Lifeform. One was a Source Lifeform. By the laws of how things are and have always been, they were born to fight each other, the way the tide is born to oppose the shore, and they would likely have lived their whole long existences proving the laws correct, except that they t for the first ti on the sa day they each t a Prival One, and a Prival One does not care which of its prey hates the other.
The record does not say much about THE Prival One. Records never says much about Prival Ones.
It says only that the thing was foreign, that it was old in a way that made the two won feel young despite the ages each of them already carried, and that neither Infinity alone nor THE Primordial Source alone was enough to survive it.
They survived because they stopped, in the middle of dying, and did the one thing their kinds never did. They fought back to back. The Infinite Lifeform held the thing with Infinity. The Source Lifeform held it with THE Primordial Source.
And between the two authorities, used at once against a single enemy, they found just enough to live, and THE Prival One, which had not expected the prey to cooperate, withdrew rather than spend more of itself than the al was worth.
When it was gone, the two won looked at each other, and neither of them could quite rember why they were supposed to want the other dead.
So they beca allies. And because they were both, beneath everything else, the kind of beings who could not leave a question alone, they beca sothing rarer than allies. They beca students of each other.
The Source Lifeform taught THE Primordial Source, and THE Primordial Tongue that shapes it. The Infinite Lifeform taught Infinity, and THE First Tongue that emulated it.
And across the years they made discoveries that their kinds had spent eternities too busy fighting to ever make, and the record preserves their words.
"Your Infinity...does not destroy ," the Source Lifeform said, in the early years, with the wonder of a being reporting sothing that should not be true.
"I took it into myself expecting madness. Every Infinite Lifeform I ever watched was a being holding back a flood, spending half their strength on not drowning. I waited to drown. I did not." She held up a hand wreathed in a thing her kind was never ant to hold.
"THE Primordial Source in resists it. As long as my reserves are deep enough, as long as the Source within is potent, the madness finds nothing to take hold of. The Source is a foundation, and a foundation does not go mad. It simply is. And Infinity, set upon sothing that simply is, becos a tool instead of a tide."
"And your Source does nothing to my mind at all," the Infinite Lifeform answered, in her turn.
"I expected it to weigh on . To pull at my Infinity, to contest it. It does the opposite. THE Primordial Source amplifies what I already am. My Infinity reaches further, holds firr, expresses grander, with the Source feeding it from beneath. Infinite Lifeforms may not need amplified Egos if they have this..." She laughed, the laugh of a being who had found a gift where she expected a burden.
This was the first of their great findings.
An Infinite Lifeform who holds THE Primordial Source is not endangered by it. They are amplified, their Infinity made stronger and more stable on the Source’s foundation.
And a Source Lifeform who takes up Infinity is not driven mad by it, so long as the reserves of their Source stay potent, because the Source is a foundation and madness has nothing in a foundation to grip.
They studied further.
They learned that Infinity is not a substance but a permission, the authority by which a thing is allowed to be without limit, and that this is why it tends to drown its holder, because a permission with no foundation beneath it permits everything, including the dissolution of the one who holds it.
They learned that THE Primordial Source is the opposite, not a permission but a foundation, finite, countable, a bedrock that does not permit but simply is, which is why it grants its holders resistance against the tide, and also why it can be exhausted in a way Infinity never can.
They learned that a being who holds only Infinity is all sky and no ground, and a being who holds only THE Primordial Source is all ground and no sky, and that each had spent their existence calling their own half the whole of things.
And they learned the one thing that finally stopped them.
They could not fuse the two. They tried. Across years, across decades, across every thod either of them could devise, they tried to take Infinity and THE Primordial Source and make them into a single thing.
They never managed it. In the body of the Source Lifeform, the two authorities sat side by side and worked together and never beca each other. In the body of the Infinite Lifeform, the sa. They could be held together. They could be used together. They would not lt together.
Always, always, the two remained separate within the existence that held them, two waters in one vessel that refused to beco one water no matter how the vessel was shaken.
For a thousand years they studied, and at the end of the thousand years, they felt a calling.
It is theorized that a calling reached them, that it promised answers, that it spoke to the exact question they had spent a thousand years failing to answer, how the two authorities might be made one. And they followed it. Of course, they followed it!
They had given a thousand years to the question. What were two such beings, who could not leave a question alone, ever going to do but follow a thing that promised the answer?
The calling led them to a vast and empty Observable Existence, a place of destruction, where seas of raging Infinity and THE Primordial Source moved across the ruin in enormous tides. And the tides did not clash.
Everywhere else in existence, Infinity and THE Primordial Source t and warred. Here they moved together, in beautiful sequence, in perfect control, the two authorities braided through one another with a fluency that the two won had spent a thousand years failing to achieve for even a mont, and here it filled an entire dead existence, as easy as breathing.
And at the center of it, they saw the answer to their question.
It was a lifeform, and it was eating the corpse of a Prival One. Not a Prival One like the thing they had survived a thousand years before. A larger thing. An older thing.
A thing whose corpse alone radiated more than the both of them had beco across all their study, and this lifeform was feeding on it, unhurried, its existence burning with Infinity and THE Primordial Source fused into a single seamless authority.
It looked up from its al, and it saw them, and it smiled.
The record preserves what it said. The record preserves it because the two won preserved it, in the last entry either of them ever made, set down in the mont before, sent out and away from that place by so final instinct so that the study would survive even if they did not.
"I’ll get to you all in just a second," it said.
...!
After that, the two who had studied were never heard of again. No domain recorded their return. No chronicle marks their ending. They simply close, there, on a smile and a sentence, in a dead existence full of fused authority and a thing eating sothing that should have been unkillable.
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