A/N
Hey everyone,
This chapter was very difficult for me to write, I wrote like 3 different drafts for it, but for some reason it was just a struggle to write it the way I envisioned it. I didn't want to post a chapter I wasn't happy with so I spent most of the day just trying again and again. Anyways, I was finally able to write it the way I wanted so here it is, I hope you all enjoy it.
Unfortunately, that does mean I was only able to write 1 chapter today, my brain is fried and needs to rest. Tomo's first chap is the timeskip (I promise!) and then we get to the action!
Chapter 793: The Heir of the Golden Sun Reveals Himself
"With the Golden Sun's blessing," I said, looking him directly in the eyes, "anything is possible."
It was the smart thing to say, not too much and not too little, it sounded like confirmation without actually confirming what I didn't know because I had been in the cultivation world long enough to understand that the best responses to unexpected revelations are the ones that sound inevitable when you say them out loud.
Elder Thorn drew a slow breath and the trembling in his jaw settled as he rebuilt himself piece by piece after having had his entire worldview shatter around him.
"The heir of the Golden Sun," he whispered, "has been born, just as the prophecy promised."
The instinct to ask which prophecy was intense since I needed to know what it was if I was going to successfully navigate whatever came next, but I pressed the instinct down, because if I truly were what I was presenting myself as, a person who carried the Golden Sun's power in my flesh, then I would already know what prophecy he was talking about, and the question would expose me instantly.
Also, I wouldn’t put it pass the elder to invent a prophecy on the spot just to see whether I confirmed it, because someone who had spent centuries surviving in a den of enemies had almost certainly developed the habit of testing people in indirect ways before trusting them with anything that mattered.
So I said nothing, and I held his gaze and let the golden light in my eyes do the speaking for me.
Fortunately, I didn't need to maintain the silence for long, because Beric, was exactly who he always was and asked the question for me.
"What prophecy," he said, and the look in his eyes made it clear what he thought of prophecies.
Elder Thorn didn't look at him, his eyes remained on me, then the elder began to speak.
When golden light was whole and bright,One sun alone filled day with light,Until corruption claimed its core,And shattered peace forevermore.
From one came two, divided, torn,The red sun blazing, rage-filled, worn,The blue sun cold with reaching will,And between them, conflict still.
This wounded world shall never rest,Shall never pass corruption's test,Shall never see its wounds made clean,Until the Golden Sun is seen.
But golden wholeness cannot riseFrom elder hands or ancient eyes,It needs the heir, the one who standsWith red and blue in both their hands.
Who walks between the warring fires,Who holds the sun's opposing spires,Who meets the dark from outer night,And drives it back with threefold light.
And when the battle has been bled,When all the broken world is fed,The heir becomes the final flame,The Golden Sun is born again.
When the last line left his lips, the chamber was silent as we all began to digest what we had just heard.
I already knew that Golden Sun had the power to show the past and the potential shape of a future, so the existence of a prophecy that had accurately described what I was didn't surprise me in principle, the Golden Sun knowing its own heir would come was not a stretch of any logic, the part I had considerably more feelings about was the final verse.
"Azure," I said internally.
"I noticed," Azure said. "You become the final flame. The sacrifice that allows the Golden Sun to reform. But technically speaking, Master, this isn't your body to begin with, and if you were to die in the Two Suns World, your soul would simply return to your body in the Cultivation World, so from a purely practical standpoint the prophecy's conclusion is less alarming than it might appear on the surface."
"That's a remarkably bloodless assessment of someone else dying."
"Tomas would have died in this loop regardless," Azure said, but there was no cruelty in it. "You gave him more life than he would have had."
I knew that was true. I had always known that was true. It didn't make it easier to stand in this room and hear a several-centuries-old prophecy describe that life ending as a necessary conclusion to a story that hadn't been Tomas's to begin with.
I hoped that whatever came after this would give him something that felt like peace.
Beric's voice came before I had finished the thought.
"Prophecies," he spat, "are what cultivators use to avoid taking responsibility for their choices." He glanced at Lady Laelyn briefly, as though checking that she was still standing and undamaged, which she was, then returned his gaze to the middle of the room and said, "Every practitioner in this world is a slave to one sun or another, and now you're telling me there's a third one that gets to decide what happens."
Elder Thorn finally looked at Beric with narrowed eyes.
"If you follow no sun," the elder said, "then what gives your existence direction?"
Beric didn't hesitate for even a fraction of a second.
"The lady," he said. "Serving her is enough for this old soldier."
Elder Thorn's eyes moved back to me, and his expression remained essentially unchanged, but something in the set of it suggested he found Beric's answer small. I understand why that was even though I didn’t agree with it. The elder was a man who had spent centuries thinking in terms of worlds and entities and ancient forces, while Beric was someone whose entire horizon ended at the welfare of a single person.
"Do you trust these two?" he asked me.
I thought about the answer because the answer needed to reflect what the Golden Sun would actually see in these two people if it were looking, and I believed I understood what it would see.
"The Blue Sun's Saint has been purified by the power of the Golden Sun," I said, gesturing slightly toward Lady Laelyn as I spoke, and she held the elder's gaze without flinching, "and she has joined the cause of saving this world." I moved my gaze to Beric and continued, "The Golden Sun blesses the soldier beside her because it knows he will place himself between her and anything that means her harm without being asked, and that is a quality the Golden Sun recognizes even in those who don't seek its light."
Elder Thorn absorbed this, and then he nodded once, and said, "If the Golden Sun trusts them, then I will extend them the same." He then let out a slow breath through his nose and said, "All these centuries, I have fought this in secret, alone, and there was no sign of the heir's arrival, so I did what I could."
I arched an eyebrow, curious now, because I hadn't expected the elder to volunteer this information.
"At first I tried to recreate the conditions myself," Elder Thorn said, "through my own experimentation, but the energies resisted me, as they will always resist someone who carries only one sun's resonance." He paused, and then continued, "Then I met this young lady’s grandmother, and I believed for a time that she might be the heir the prophecy described, that her amber eyes and her instinct for the balance between the suns might be the beginning of what was needed." A flash of sadness flashed through his eyes. "But even she couldn't sustain the Golden Sun's energy without it beginning to consume her from within."
He folded his hands behind his back.
"So I changed the approach," he said. "I arranged for a Skybound elder with an unusual interest in the intersection of the two suns' energies to come into contact with a Lightweaver, hoping that the crossing of those two paths might produce something closer to what I needed."
I knew immediately who he was talking about.
Professor Thara had told me, in the loop where I had been Saint, about Elder Molric, about how he had captured her and brought her to some hidden lab and made her work alongside him as he tried to understand blue sun energy in the context of red sun cultivation. And it turned out that the whole time, behind the scenes, Elder Thorn had been the one who had arranged the encounter, placing two pieces on the board and hoping they would do something useful.
Even though they hadn't produced an heir, they had produced Yggy, which meant Elder Thorn had indirectly created one of the most important relationships in my life, and he had absolutely no idea.
"Those words of the prophecy were all the Golden Sun gave me," Elder Thorn continued, and there was something raw underneath, something that centuries of discipline had covered over but not entirely eliminated. "One moment of contact, one set of verses, and then silence. I thought I had failed it." He looked at me with fanatical relief. "And yet here you are, the heir standing before me."
I ignored the intense look in his eyes and thought about what he had just said. The Golden Sun wasn’t still in contact with the elder, which meant that it couldn’t expose me. I had to admit that was convenient.
"You have done well," I smiled, embracing the role as the heir of the most powerful sun in this world, "and the Golden Sun sees everything you have sacrificed in its service." I held his gaze steadily. "But there is much still to be done if we are going to save this world, and I need to know whether you are willing to sacrifice everything so that the Golden Sun can be born again."
And then I let both eyes change just to add that dramatic effect that a situation like this needed.
Red first in the right eye, the same deep color that my Skybound cultivation carried when I stopped suppressing it entirely, and blue in the left, the quiet luminous tone of the Cerulean Vein running at full extension, and then both colors began to move and swirl and blend together in a slow rotation until they merged into the deep gold that was neither sun and both suns simultaneously.
The elder’s reaction was more surprising than last time.
The Rank 7’s legs gave out from underneath him, and he sank to his knees on the bare stone floor of his sparse quarters and pressed one fist to his chest with his head lowered and his shoulders squared.
"I swear it," he whispered. "I swear it on the centuries I have spent, on the saints I have destroyed to keep this world alive, on everything I have given to the waiting. The Golden Sun has my oath."
To have an elder kneel before what looked like a servant wasn’t a small feat.
Lady Laelyn’s eyes widened, clearly not having expected the stubborn elder to submit so easily.
As for Beric, I noticed a look of respect appear in his eyes.
“I still don’t trust prophecies,” he murmured. “But I trust that man's conviction.”
He looked at me then, and I could tell that he admired that I was able to do all of this without lifting a single finger. But I had to admit, even I didn’t expect it to turn out like this, I had walked into this room expecting the hardest conversation of the loop.
After all, Elder Thorn had been the thing I couldn't predict across every loop, the variable that could end everything, the man who had pressed a character for soul severance against my forehead and walked away while I dissolved.
But I understood what type of person the elder was, Elder Thorn was Kal without the time loop, he was Du Yanze without the Mandelbrot Recursion, he was someone who had decided that the weight of the world was his to carry and had been carrying it for so long that the weight had become his entire identity, and what he had needed, beneath all the centuries of paranoid calculation and brutal pragmatism, was simply someone to hand it to, and that someone had finally arrived.
"When you think about it, it’s sad,” Azure said. “Kal before he understood the truth. Hiron. Elder Thorn. Every one of them believes they are working toward saving this world. Every one of them has organized their entire existence around that belief. And every one of them is causing harm on a scale they can’t see from where they are standing."
"I agree," I replied to Azure internally, looking down at the elder kneeling before me. "I just hope that I'm never someone who thinks he is doing good and is, in fact, doing the opposite. That seems like it would be a very easy mistake to make from the inside."
Azure was quiet for a moment, then said, "I'll tell you if I notice."
I decided to take that as the reassurance it was intended to be.