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This cluster of tubes inserted into his back is for motor function. The vestigial body: limbs superior and anterior. It feeds beneath his left-sided shoulder blade. Fine branching tubes, the distal tips of his fingers. God-hand. Nation-killer.
This group supplements common knowledge. Daily life that he had not ever witnessed as a shadow beneath lightning, not as an empty map of shoals, not as a balladeer in hiemal cages. It snakes up his spine to his cerebellum. Fine. Man. Daylight without thunderstorm. Snowfall without bloodspread. Lifelines in pastel. Four-walled classroom. Mind, maker—
This cluster revels in his victories. The hardfought information and secrets She never would have told him, never would have thought about, never blinked in everwinter stasis. Here the blind eyes of scholars and corruption of shogunates are truths laid out, irrefutable, his truths; backwater whispers and trysts under smoke, coinage, prayer, a hundred thousand promises broken. The world's betrayals. His secrets to hold.
This branch for history, the lives before lives he will turn to his favor. That is, he exploits their ends.
This for speech, pathos weaving itself in his new tongue.
This, for—
This for—
This—
And there are infinitesimal fractaling connections upon him, there are heartbeats within heartbeats the inimitable proof of his ascendency. He has the universe pouring into him, filling him with all truths except one: he needs no manmade, man-seized knowledge capsule for his heart.
The gnosis resonates. It pulls truth through thermionic valves like its own source of gravity, his own sun. His goal and means, batteried, self-perpetual nirvana of being. Everything else circles.
Far too emotional. That was what She said about him. It was without cruelty, because She did not consider these things. Emotion, and hurt emotion, was ephemeral and thus unconducive to eternity. She had built him to carry Her heart and he carried everything.
This, for Her.
The gnosis fits inside his chest like he fits inside the pulse of lightning. Like a dagger forged around the shape of his fist.
As though his brain were released into open air, as though his hands were unbound after centuries. He was destined for this—a power nearly greater than himself. Brighter than any mortal can dream. Kunikuzushi , nation-killer. His steel-stricken vertebrae hum choirs. God-eater.
Man's warped ambition gives him eyes. The truth of skies and star-descendants and planeless seas. See: he will never be free of Her orbit.
The doctor, mind-splitter, man-maker, gives him the means to raze solar systems. His bones glow irradiant. Sea: he drowned before he was ever born.
Air in his mouth stings, oxidized.
She was wrong. His emotion is all-consuming and blueflamed. The truth is that his rage will always be here, sparking outside the stream of time. He will outlive Her. He will outlive eternity itself, will tear it to pieces with his teeth all kilojoule-white, with failed ideals like mortar in his gums. The world offers everything in staticked measures and he takes. He waltzes.
He will show Her cruelty.