Chapter 145 Ch 145
The framework pulsed around them, the patterns in the walls blazing bright with something that looked, Mara realized with a cold shock, like recognition. Like the design in the walls had been waiting for exactly this moment, had been spreading through the framework toward exactly this conversation, had been leading exactly here all along.
Isla was looking at her steadily.
"No," Mara said.
"Mother—"
"No," she said again, and her voice did not shake but everything beneath it did. "You are not giving up everything you are. I will not allow it."
"You cannot stop the ancient presence," Isla said, gently, with the devastating gentleness of someone who loves you and is telling you a hard truth. "You cannot stop the design from completing. The only question is who holds the center, and it has to be someone who carries the blueprint, which means it has to be—"
"It has to be me," said a voice from the corner of the room.
Everyone turned.
The transformed Unreal stepped forward from the framework threads where it had been manifesting throughout the meeting, and its presence filled the room with the weight of something that had made a decision it was not going to take back.
"I WAS EVERYTHING REALITY REJECTED," it said. "I WAS WRONGNESS ITSELF, EVERY FORM OF EXISTENCE THAT WAS TOLD IT SHOULD NOT BE. OBLIVION'S DESIGN, A REALITY WHERE NOTHING IS REJECTED, WHERE EVERYTHING IS INCLUDED, WHERE NO FORM OF BEING IS DECLARED IMPOSSIBLE." It looked at Isla with something in its expression that was very close to wonder. "I AM NOT JUST THE BEING THAT BENEFITS MOST FROM THAT DESIGN. I AM THE PROOF THAT IT IS NECESSARY. I AM WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EXISTENCE REJECTS RATHER THAN INCLUDES." It looked at Mara. "TRANSFER THE BLUEPRINT TO ME. LET ME HOLD THE CENTER. I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE UP THAT I WAS USING ANYWAY."
Mara stared at it, and the framework pulsed around all of them, and the patterns in the walls blazed, and somewhere in the deepest reach of the framework the ancient presence turned its full attention toward the center of the room, toward the convergence of everything it had been waiting for, toward the moment that had been delayed since the Primordial shattered Oblivion into pieces so long ago that the number had no meaning.
"If you do this," Mara said to the transformed Unreal, and her voice was rough with something she was not going to call by its name in a room full of people, "you cease to exist as what you are."
"YES," the Unreal said simply. "BUT WHAT I BECOME WILL EXIST AS EVERYTHING THAT SHOULD HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ALLOWED TO EXIST." It held her gaze, steady and certain and utterly at peace. "IS THAT NOT WHAT YOU TAUGHT ME? THAT TRANSFORMATION MEANS BECOMING SOMETHING LARGER THAN WHAT YOU WERE, NOT ERASING WHAT YOU WERE BUT MAKING IT PART OF SOMETHING THAT MATTERS MORE?"
Mara could not find words.
She looked at Isla, who was still on her knees with the blueprint blazing in her eyes, and at Zevran, who was looking at her with the expression that held everything he was and everything he trusted her to do with it, and at the room full of people who had survived impossible things because she had refused to accept impossibility, and at the transformed Unreal standing in the corner having made a choice she had no right to take from it.
She pressed her hands to the floor.
She felt the framework respond, felt the ancient presence lean close, felt Isla's blazing blueprint pulse outward through the fragment echoes toward the center of the room, felt everything converging toward a single point the way everything always converged, the way it had converged every time she stood at the edge of the impossible and found that the edge was not an ending but a beginning of something she did not yet have the words for.
"Together," the transformed Unreal said, and it was not a repetition of any phrase that had come before, it was a statement of what was about to happen, of what this moment required, of what three very different forms of existence were about to become in the space of the next few seconds.
And then something went wrong.
Isla screamed.
Not in pain, not in fear, but in the particular sharp cry of someone whose perception has just been ambushed by something enormous, and the blueprint in her eyes went dark all at once, completely, like a flame snuffed by a hand, and she collapsed fully to the floor, and the framework threads in the walls went dark with her, every pattern the ancient presence had been restoring for two days vanishing simultaneously, and the ancient presence itself pulled back, contracted, withdrew from the populated section so rapidly that the framework shuddered with the sudden absence of it.
In the shocked silence that followed, with Isla unconscious on the floor and Zevran pulling her into his arms and everyone else frozen, a single voice came through the framework threads, clear and cold and speaking from a place so deep in the framework structure that it should have been impossible to reach from the outside.
"The design does not belong to you," the voice said, and it was not a voice Mara had heard before, not one she could place, not one that belonged to anything she had encountered in all the impossible things she had survived. "It never did."
And then it said something that stopped her heart.
"It belongs to the one who destroyed it. And I have been waiting inside this framework since before you built it, Moon Wolf, waiting for the pieces to come back together so I could make certain they never complete." A pause, deliberate and cold. "Hello, Mara. You have been very busy. You should have stayed dead the first time."
The framework around them pulsed once, sharp and wrong, and the lights in the war room went out.