Chapter 78 - I Have No Name But I Must Scream (Patreon)

Ok! Final altered POV, I promise. This one was difficult as fuck, it was hard writing something with no name and with such limited sense of self beneath the self it wears as its "job". Still, I hope that the implications leak through, for it and for its family. It seems that something is afoot that is hidden even from the Empire's eyes...

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In the halls of Paleblossom City’s imperial palace, there is a wing where no mortal has ever tread.

In that wing, there is a hallway where no one without Imperial authority has ever walked. It has many doors, only some of which lead to rooms. Each requires their own key, their own set of steps, their own pre-ordained selection of pieces one needs to set into place before they open.

Only one leads to the room that matters.

There is someone in this room. They are not known, and they are not seen, but they are in a way that leaves their imprint on the room. Sometimes, this someone is the person who speaks when someone important enough comes to the palace. Most times, they are here.

They are not alone in this room.

In this room before this person who is not known and is not seen but sometimes speaks, there is a pearl. The pearl is invisible, not from magic or powers untold, but because it is so clear one can see right through it. The pearl, like all its kind, took one hundred and fifty years to make. It began as snow-white sand from a beach that only exists every third month, on a night with all three moons, and it costs an average of six cultivators a year their lives to collect it. Once enough is harvested, the sand is fed to a beast, a great sea-thing, whose life is lost to chains, its past and its future bound and wrapped by runes and Truths until it has only ever been a paradox, existing in the eternal moment of the now and nowhen else. One hundred and fifty years later, a pearl was formed.

Then, like so many other pearls in so many other palaces, it was placed in a room, which was placed in a building, which was built around it from the ground up. And then, and only then, when the palace is built, the chamber inviolate, the pearl so pristine its clarity is like glass, is the person who is not a person brought to the hallway of many doors to find the one that leads to the room that matters.

The room is pitch black, so it is all the easier to see the light as it flickers in the depths of the pearl.

The room shivers. Ever so slightly, its very walls flutter, like lace caught in a breeze.

There is no name for the color in the pearl now. A single mote, like a fractalized snowflake, lies now slightly left and below its heart, and the person that is not known is Known by the thing that looks through it.

An exchange occurs. It would do no good to attempt to describe its contents, for there are no words which can be spoken on the subject, bar that it was strange, so fast as to be instantaneous, and ended with some form of conclusion. The language used is not one that can be spoken, for it has no somatic components, and does not use light or smell or touch as its medium. It was developed by those who were born equipped already with senses beyond the mortal, and who desired a means of communicating complex thoughts quickly across vast distances, with little chance of being intercepted or interpreted. In this, its developers were very successful.

The pearl begins to glow a second time now, and this time it is not a mote that alights within it.

A glow, around the size of a human fist, manifests in the exact center of the pearl. It, like the pearl itself, is a perfect sphere, mathematically without flaw, and as it glows, the room around the person who is not a person slowly shifts.

It is not so vulgar an effect as to require damage or to wrestle against the ‘laws’ of physics. The attention of something that is to a Nascent Soul cultivator what a Nascent Cultivator is to an ant is turned to the room, and the room simply ceases to be what it was.

The pearl is sitting on a curved, natural rock formation. Above it is an empty sky, bereft of stars, bereft of the coiling, writhing body of the sun and the sharp geometry of its sibling, bereft of even the moons and their orbits. All there is, in all directions, is beautiful blue stone, soft, downy vines (or perhaps tendrils, or snakes), and a distant sea on the horizon, its waves a gorgeous shade of rich, wine purple, its waves strangely falling into triangular and pyramidal shapes as it crashes against a far-off shore..

This world, too, is silent, as the unnamed color looks down at the silent shadow of a person before it.

Again, they speak. In this, some small mercy is granted to those that might seek comprehension, for they do not use the impossible language from before. Whatever was privately shared in the small flicker before this radiance keeps its own secrets, for now. They still do not use words, but their concerns are somewhat more mundane.

The radiance without name asks the not-person on the matter of its palace. It asks over their safety, and the safety of the people they command. It asks about the recent kerfuffle, about the mining of a newfound deposit of cold sunstone. It speaks on a beast tide, and how interesting it is to see so many of them so willingly leaving their dens and hidden places. They both speak of a touch of a candle-flame that moved south, and of a minor death in one of their lesser peons, and of a new development along the western front.

Eventually, their conversation ends, though not on a quiet note. For a moment the radiance fluctuates, and there is a note in it. A warning.

The impossible world shivers, the waves crashing with new ferocity, the mossy vines shivering in a new wind that makes them sound like rustling, scampering claws.

There is something coming.

The not-person asks for clarification.

The radiance has none to offer. It dances about the subject: the Cold Sun and its hidden Watcher have been more active in the last few years. The fifth ring has been a bit more ornery than average. Perhaps there have been more conflicts between the sects, squabbling over resources and relevance.

None are that which it warns of, though. Something is coming.

The not-person asks if the Diviners have not spoken on the matter, if clarity has not been achieved through their eyes, all-seeing in the patterns of what is.

No, the radiance replies. The Diviners all agree, and all lay silent. Something shall arrive soon, and its nature is as unknown as the moment where it shall land.

The not-person asks no more, and acquiesces. To want for any more information would be to want beyond what it needs to perform as demanded, and that it cannot risk. The radiance, in turn, offers a simple thought, one translatable to a single sentence.

“As the Emperor wills, so it shall be.”

“As the Emperor wills it, so it shall be,” responds the not-person.

The radiance fades, from a fist to a droplet and to nothing at all, and just as they had always been in that other place, so too have they never left the inviolate room.

The not-person rises from their seat, the impossibly clear pearl now inert and invisible in the dark, and turns away from the room.

As the door opens, the not-person picks back up their layers. They retrieve their identity, piecemeal as it is, on the journey through the hallway and its many doors, taking bits and pieces hidden throughout it back into themselves. A chain of thought they hid away, a memory they wanted to keep secret, a tic to their face and mannerisms that would not have served it. Halfway down the hallway, the not-person is no more, the vague outline of ideas orbiting it worn like a cloak over a void. It wraps the null self it is valued for in the shell it was given when it was placed here, in this palace, in this city. To wear such a surface-level imitation of its greater Family would only be an insult to the radiance and that which peers through it, a taint in that most sacred of communions.

By the end of the hall, the Imperial Scion is itself again, no matter how shallowly. The self it was born with, kept pure and ungrown until it is chosen by its greater Family, sits separate from all that could change it inside an idea-suit through which their patriarch's authority can rule.

No person has ever seen it as it is, just as it has never seen a person like itself. It, like all the others, are not people, just as a seed is not a plant, not when held apart from the soil.

The Imperial Scion of Paleblossom city, identical as so many of their siblings are save for the scraps it hides within its shell, seats itself on its throne and sends a summons to the sects it rules over.

Something is coming.

Slowly, as they wait, they bring the memory they hid closer. The thought behind it is small, barely visible as part of their noosphere, something that would be overlooked by all but the most dangerous of Diviners. It remembers, in scraps, the last time it had a sect master in its chambers. The way that, with a few words, it cowed one of the proud, one of the egotistical, one of the named, with nothing but its will and its power.

The chain of thought it had removed from its would-be purity connects seamlessly.

It liked being above the sect leader. It likes the looks they give it when they’re afraid, when they look at it and see something that can hurt them rather than a nameless nothing. It matters when they’re afraid, when it is wearing a face and can make choices, even if they’re in another’s name.

It is a placeholder thing to better puppeteer the world for a parent that has kept it without name and without self. And sometimes, it gets to scare people into line.

Something is coming, and deep within itself, within all that power that has no face save the face it is gifted by that which owns it, the not-person wonders. If something can so worry its family, be so relevant that they speak of it through the radiance…

Well. It is not a person, so it doesn’t have wants or ideas, not in the traditional sense. It would be useless as a non-reactive nothing, so it can still think, can still act, just not for itself. But who knows?

Something is coming. something hidden from the Empire and its greatest Diviners. And doesn’t that throw so many interesting things into question?