Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5709

Chapter 5709: Sonder I

Noah looked at the devastation, and the devastation looked back through a hundred grieving faces.

Aurelius sat on the moss-stone arc with his wife’s arms around him and his daughter’s forehead against his shoulder, and his blood had dried on all three of them, and his Vanguard was gone in a manner that Noah suspected would not return in a lifetime.

He lifted his head. He found Noah across the wreckage of his own city, and then he gave one heavy nod.

"I did not know you had the pull that you showed," Aurelius said. His voice had lost the steadiness it wore in the sky, and he did not try to put it back. "Thank you. For spending a favor of an Immense One to end this."

Noah said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not sound like taking credit for a rescue that had cost this man half his lineage.

"It was I who made the deal, ages ago, to give my daughter away." Aurelius looked down at Thalia’s radiant hair under his hand. "So I cannot lay this at your feet. Your intrusion took a choice out of my hands. The choice of cowardice, which I could never make myself take, because I was afraid of exactly this, the extermination of everything that carries my name. You forced us to the place I had spent an Age avoiding. A price was paid for it. But I..."

His voice trailed. He looked out at the pale places in the air where his Elders had been.

"But I..."

The words did not finish.

And Noah’s eyes flashed with the brilliant light of infinity, and everything went grey and still.

He had not frozen them. He could not have frozen most of them; a great many of the Provenance Lifeforms in this ruined city were his betters in every number that could be measured.

He had only stretched his own perception toward infinity, so that a single instant opened out and out, an instant with no far wall, and he stood inside it alone with a failure that was not going anywhere.

His eyes pulsed.

He entered the reverie, that unique state where boundless epiphanies bloomed in every direction at once and a thought could be turned over ten thousand times before the next instant arrived.

And his eyes, which existence had learned to read as tyranny, held something else in the grey stillness.

Sadness.

It was only human.

Because in the stretched instant he was thinking of Eon. Of how he had taken her as his woman, and how her home and her people had been destroyed, and how that had become one more weaving in the great wake he dragged behind himself. And now Thalia. He had taken her too, this woman who had crossed time itself to reach him, who had torn her own Provenance to arrive, who had sat in his spring and named every danger ahead of them in careful order.

She had warned him. She had done nothing but warn him and help him and love him, and here was her home, and here were her people, thinning into the air while she knelt in the blood of her father.

He could argue that he had made no promises. It would even be true. He had promised the Vasiliou nothing except an errand and a bargain.

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