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In the dark beyond the ancient Dimension, where the naked strings of existence ran undressed of matter and law, a gathering stood upon nothing at all.
Jarl Erling was among them, and he was not the largest!
The titanic bronze Descendant with the bone-braided beard and the crimson fissures running molten through his body stood shoulder to shoulder with others of his kind, and there were several, and every one of them wore the same sentence written into their blood. Cursed Descendants of Those Who Remain.
Lords of continental thrones and lone floating mountains, keepers of harnessed Steeds and generations of failed experiments, each of them dying on a schedule no one had ever managed to argue with.
Every single one of them had shining eyes.
They looked out across the darkness together, and the light in those eyes was not the light of power, for they all had power beyond measuring. It was worse than that. It was the light of men who had spent their entire lives counting down and had just been handed a reason to stop counting.
Those who had learned of a cure!
"All I have," Jarl Erling said, "are the brief signatures of existence."
His voice rolled out across the dark, and none of the others interrupted him, because he was the one who had seen it happen and they were the ones who had e running.
"Brief. A handful of moments. The one with Living Causes, the one who can cure the curse, took what was mine out of my Dimension before I could close my hand on it." The molten fissures across his chest pulsed with the effort of saying it.
"But existence remembers what passes through it. And I have the signatures."
He turned his enormous head, and looked at one of them in particular.
"So I will rely on the prowess of Jarl Ingrid," he said, "and the rest of you, to track them down."
And in the air before the gathered Jarls, the images hung.
Noah Osmont, crowned and rendered out of a stolen signature of existence and turning slowly in the dark. And beside him, vast and luminous and impossible, THE Infiniverse. A living Observable Existence with vibrant Causes moving through her, the answer that every Descendant experiment across every age had been reaching for and failing to grasp!
Shining eyes fixed on both images and did not look away.
...!
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Far from that gathering, in another stretch of the frothing black entirely, one rider crossed the deep.
Jarl Skallagrim rode atop a single Cursed Steed.
It should not have been possible. To bring a Cursed Steed out of THE Krazhor-Nul was a thing the Dimension itself resisted, for the Steeds were seated into that place by the sentence that made them, bred to bear burdens within its bounds and bound to it by the same standing curse that was slowly killing them. They did not leave. They had never left!
That was the architecture of the promise, that those who left were abandoned by Salvation!
Skallagrim had paid the cost anyway.
He had e out with seven. Seven remained after he had torn the eighth apart with his own hands in a poisoned garden, seven dying colossi whipped forward into the dark by a keeper whose calm was worse than any rage.
One had made it through.
The rest had not survived the crossing. Their terminal Causes had guttered out somewhere in the dark between, one after another, the curse in them finally collecting what it was owed the moment they stepped past the boundary that had held them for ages, and Skallagrim had ridden on through the dying without once looking back at any of them.
Six Steeds spent as fare! The rot at his fissures had spread for it, and the two years he did not have were fewer now than they had been.
He did not care. One was all he needed!
The surviving Steed labored beneath him, enormous and gray and failing, its chains trailing off into the black, and Jarl Skallagrim leaned forward and set his obsidian hand against the ridge of its neck almost gently.
"Sense her," he said.
The Steed shuddered.
"The sister you had beside you for thousands of years. The one chained in the same harness, dying on the same schedule, bearing the same sentence." His voice stayed level, conversational, the terrible lucidity of it carrying across the frothing dark.
"The sister who abandoned you the moment that she was cured. Who broke her chains and looked at me with those uncursed eyes and went, and did not take you with her. Not you. Not one of you."
The dying Steed made a sound that had no dignity in it.
"Hold to that," Skallagrim said. "Whatever is left in you that can still want something, point it at her."
He straightened on its back, and looked out into the endless dark ahead, at the drifting membranes of Dimensions hanging in the black like islands in an ocean, every one of them a place she might have gone.
"Follow her scent, and we shall have our own cure." The rot glowed dull red along his fissures. "Across Dimensions and time. Find them."
"Find Hvitrmarr!"
...!
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The ninth district of the Cultivation Farms had taken longer than the eight before it.
They had learned. That was the thing about beings who had spent ages perfecting an art of harvest, they were not stupid, they were only fortable, and fort was a thing that could be burned off a lifeform quickly enough if you burned hard enough!
By the seventh district the masters had stopped lounging. By the ninth they had stopped meeting him in the open altogether, and instead they had rigged the whole domain he crossed, sinking their weavings into the pyramids themselves so that when THE Creature came down through the butcher-red sky, the ground rose to fight him alongside its owners.
It had worked, for a while.
Eleven of them. Source True Lifeforms, three of them Cenozoic, and they had fought together properly for the first time since he entered this Dimension, drawing on their Gu, spending their stored burdens like coin, feeding ages of stolen bearing into weavings meant to break a single trespasser apart at the anchors.
Now they were dead, and THE Creature stood in the crater of what had been their stratum, and he was heaving!
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