Divine System: Land of the Abominations

Chapter 521 521: The Creed of Nothing (3).

They found the first gap in the ridge system on the fourth day.

It was not dramatic — a narrowing in the channel that opened sideways, a natural break in the left ridge wall wide enough for two people to pass through comfortably, leading into a space beyond that was lower and more open, a broad shelf of ground between two ridge formations that created something almost like a valley. The floor was flat and the bonedust here was undisturbed in long stretches, which meant nothing had been through it recently — or nothing that left tracks in the way living things leave tracks.

They made camp on the shelf that night.

Six hundred and twelve candidates, with Veoltor's group of forty-one now folded into the outer edge of the formation — not integrated exactly, not trusted exactly, but present and following the general direction of travel, which was the most anyone had asked. Veoltor himself had said approximately four words since the channel and all four of them had been practical. He was not a stupid man. He had done the arithmetic.

Nero sat apart, as had become his habit, and called up the Oracle.

He had been thinking about the dark depression since the high point that morning, where it had been visible for almost thirty seconds before the fog shifted and swallowed the sightline. It was closer than it had been. Not dramatically closer, not close enough to make out any detail — but measurably closer, in the way you measure things by how much more of them you can see than the day before.

*Tell me about this place,* he said. *Golgotha. The real history of it.*

The Oracle's runes pulsed once, slowly, in the way they pulsed when what followed was long.

{This will require some patience, Heretic. The history of Golgotha is not a short one.}

*I have a full night.*

{Then. In the time before the age that the Church records as history — before the Demon Wars, before the Grigori's fall was spoken of in temples, before the Empire had a name — there existed beings called the Beinloklat.}

He had never heard the word. He turned it over in his mind while the Oracle continued.

{They were not Abominations. They were not gods. They were something that predated both categories, or at minimum preceded the corruption that created the first and the worship that defined the second. Behemoth-class entities — a classification that means, in practical terms, that the scale of their bodies exceeded that of cities. Not buildings. Cities. A single Beinloklat in repose covered ground that would take a fast horse the better part of a day to cross.}

He sat with that for a moment.

*There are no records of them. Nothing in anything I've read.*

{There are no records that survived in forms accessible to you. This does not mean there are no records. It means the passage of time and the deliberate management of information have placed them outside your reach. The Church knows of the Beinloklat. Whether it chooses to teach what it knows is a separate question.}

He thought of Brother Edric, moving through Sacred Doctrine with the practiced efficiency of a man who had long ago mapped the distance between what he said and what he knew, keeping the gap consistent and invisible.

*What happened to them?*

{Twelve Beinloklat died here. The process of their dying is not something that occurred quickly — Behemoth-class entities of their constitution do not die in the way that smaller things die. They diminish. Over spans of time that do not map neatly onto human understanding of duration, they diminished, and eventually the last of what sustained them gave out, and they came to rest in the place that would later be named Golgotha. Their bodies, over further spans of time, became the ground itself. The bonedust is not separate from them. It is them.}

Nero looked at the ground beneath him. The pale powder that had been coating his boots for days. The same pale powder that was in his lungs, in his hair, in the creases of his armor.

*We've been walking on them the whole time.*

{You have been walking inside them. The ridge formations are their bones. The field is their flesh, converted over millennia into dust. The fog contains their residual breath.}

He looked at the fog beyond the shelf's edge. Slow and pale and patient, curling along the ground the way breath curls in cold air.

He had been breathing the residual breath of twelve dead Behemoths. He decided he was going to continue breathing it regardless, because the alternative was not breathing, but he took a moment to acknowledge the strangeness of the fact.

*And the Rót.*

{The Rót that saturates this place is the accumulated Ein Sof of twelve Beinloklat deaths, concentrated over an age. There is more Rót in Golgotha than in any other location in the known world. This is not a figure of speech. The calculations, if such calculations can be made, are genuinely staggering. Every inch of ground here is saturated to a degree that has no precedent elsewhere.}

He looked at the grey flame he had called up without thinking about it, small above his palm, steady and quiet, tilting toward the bonedust the way it always did.

*That's why you're here,* he thought, not to the Oracle but to the flame, and the flame did not respond because it was a flame and not something that responded, but it burned with a consistency that felt, in the loosest sense of the word, like agreement.

{There is more,} the Oracle said. {If the Heretic is willing to continue.}

*Go on.*

{The twelve deaths were significant. What happened after the twelve deaths was considerably more so.}

After all, there had been a lot of stories passing around about just how powerful the candidates this year were...

The Four Pillars were, perhaps , a particularly bright ray of hope in this dark plave.

Four candidates, seeded individually, backed by resources and attention that placed them apart from everyone else. Future captains at minimum. The sort of people the Church had already decided were worth keeping alive before the trials even began.

Everyone knew the names. He had just learned of them by eavesdropping...

Sera Halvane, from the Western garrison. White Prophets candidate, which was strange because the White Prophets were not a combat order. That they had seeded her through the physical Gauntlet said more about her than any description could. Nobody Nero had spoken to had actually seen her fight, and the accounts he had collected disagreed with each other so thoroughly they might as well have been describing different people.

Damos Rel, from Bridgehorn, Ironherd. Three separate people, none of whom knew the others had said it, described him as built like a hedge of reinforced Blacksteel.

Then the Valen brothers. Cressian and Aurel, two of the three House Valen candidates, the third presumably there in case the first two didn't make it. Seeded together.

All four had reached the bone ridge fields. Where exactly, nobody knew.

Nero thought about them the same way he thought about the dark hole in the ground... At a distance, not things to think about today.