Khor continued looking around with mounting confusion, her miniature form trembling slightly as existence itself seemed uncertain about her presence.
When she had proclaimed she shouldn’t exist, the words carried weight that made the Shore’s light flicker.
Noah’s expression grew heavy as he studied her.
She represented far too many things...power that predated power, hunger that could never be satisfied. Her very presence raised questions that might not have safe answers!
His first action was to check the bond he felt with what had emerged from the Seed of Inevitability.
The connection thrummed through his existence like a second heartbeat...unshakable, irreversible, absolute.
Through it, he could feel her confusion, her fragmented memories, her struggle to understand her own existence.
If he wished, he could impose his will through this bond, command her as completely as he commanded his own limbs. And yet...he also felt like he could not truly command her!
Was even an unshakable bond truly unshakable when it came to someone like Khor? Someone who had made impossibility her domain?
She took tentative steps across the plot she had just emerged from, each footfall leaving impressions that seemed deeper than they should be, as if her tiny form carried weight that existence could not truly bear.
"What do you mean you should not exist?" Noah asked, keeping his voice steady despite the implications racing through his mind.
Khor looked up at him, and even in her diminished form, her eyes remained as he remembered...deep as an abyss, containing depths that suggested falling forever might be preferable to reaching the bottom.
Those eyes now struggled to piece together fragments of memory that didn’t quite align.
"Yes, Outsider, I should not exist." Her voice carried certainty despite her confusion. "After all, THE Living Paradox deemed it so. It sought and enacted the cessation of my existence. The unmaking of everything I was, am, or could be."
BOOM!
The words resonated through the Shore with force that made Noah’s entire existence buzz.
"THE Living Paradox?" Noah’s voice sharpened with sudden understanding.
Khor clutched her head suddenly, dropping to her knees on the golden sand as if mentioning this had triggered something.
Her small form shook with the effort of trying to reconcile memories that spanned eons with a present that shouldn’t include her.
"It seems my memory and being are fractured," she said through gritted teeth that were somehow still sharp enough to bite through concepts. "Tell me, Outsider...what age are we in? What time is this?"
She paused, her expression growing more troubled.
"Everything feels... murky. Complicated in ways that existence wasn’t when I knew it. The fundamental forces have multiplied, divided, specialized. It’s like looking at a simple painting that’s been copied and recopied until it’s become a library. What is this?"
Noah’s gaze grew somber as he considered how to explain eons of change to someone who shouldn’t have survived to see them.
"This point in time is eons after the Earliest Folds," he said carefully. "In the current era, nobody has seen Early Creatures. They’ve become myth, legend, cautionary tales. Nobody knows where THE Creature is, or even if it still exists. THE Living Existences are known but not seen, their direct intervention so rare that some doubt they’re real."
She felt the Early Veiled Shore properly for the first time, her awareness expanding to encompass the impossible ecosystem that had developed here.
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse