Capítulo 13 La furia del trueno #4

He looked at her for a moment. The chamber around them with its forty preserved people and the resin walls and the wrongness frequency at full saturation.

Her against the wall with her fractured arm and her compromised ribs and her swollen ankle, looking at him with the full direct look. "Can you stand?" he said.

"Find out," she said.

He put his arm under hers, on the left side, away from the fractured right, and he brought her up with the care of someone who knows exactly where the injuries are and is managing their support around them.

She got her feet under her and took a sharp breath when the ankle took weight, suppressed but present and she was standing.

"The third junction," she said. "Is that where?"

"Yes," he said.

"Go," she said. "I have the chamber."

He held her gaze for one moment that was not operational.

"Go," she said again. Softly, this time. The full knowledge of what she was asking him to do, and the asking of it anyway, which was the form of trust that she expressed and that he understood.

He let go of her arm. He went back to the junction.

The command source was not what he expected.

He had held, through the seventy-year intelligence.

Through the Sif briefing, a working image of the thing in the rock.

Something that was large, something that was ancient, something that was the origin genus of the Grimstalker classification.

Something that was darkness in a physical sense, the darkness of the nest environments made into a form.

What was at the junction was quiet. That was the first thing.

The absence of the aggressive display that the command class entities had been running.

The absence of the physical chaos of a creature defending its position.

There was a presence, and the presence was the root note at its maximum intensity, and the presence had a quality that was he found the word after a moment patient.

It had been patient for seventy years. It was patient now.

It occupied a space rather than a physical form in the conventional sense the nature of the pretaxonomic entities.

The ones that predated the classification.

It was not one shape. It was the shape that expressed the wrongness at its generative source.

The thing that wrongness was made from, and at sixty percent of what it needed was not the overwhelming force that the full threshold would have produced.

But significant. Genuinely significant. The most significant divine adjacent entity he had engaged on this Earth in this age.

He faced it.

"Ásgarðr mun falla," it said.

The language was not language in the current sense.

It was the modulation that the preclassification entities used.

The prelinguistic communication that Elara had described hearing in the Port Melbourne tunnel but at this depth, this range, and this age, was coherent.

He heard it as language because he had the capacity to hear it as language. “Asgard will fall.”

"Not today," he said.

Mjolnir's frequency was fully active with the deep resonance of it, the counter frequency to the wrongness that was the hammer's fundamental design.

The reason it had been made. He could feel the relic's presence could feel it.

The divine artifact taken from Iceland in 1953.

The amplifier that had been running the command source's accumulated power through its expansion function.

He could feel the relic the way you feel a thing that belongs to your world and is being held by something outside your world.

The command source read his intention. Of course, it did seventy years of building something that required divine perception to perceive meant it had developed something remarkably close to divine perception itself.

The feedback loop of an entity that has spent its developmental time in proximity to divine power.

It knew what Mjolnir was oriented toward.

It moved. The movement was not the physical movement of an entity displacing through space.

It was the frequency movement of a presence that existed in the incidence as much as in the physical.

The mode of engagement that the preclassification entities used and that required a response at the same level rather than the physical level.

Mjolnir was dual mode it operated at the physical level and at the frequency level simultaneously.

The design advantage that made it the tool it was.

He hit it at the frequency level. He had been careful, because the output at full expression did things to the physical environment that the physical environment on this Earth was not built to accommodate, and he had understood for decades that his operation on Midgard required the constraint of the larger expression. The constraint was now fully removed.

The rock of the deep section registered it.

The resin on the walls registered it. The geological formation above them registered it.

He felt the structural response propagating upward through the rock.

The frequency resonance that rock of this mineral composition produced when hit with Aesir fire at full output.

The command source took it. It took it, and it pushed back, and the pushing back was at the amplified level the relic's sixty percent accumulation channeled through the amplification function and directed at him.

The gathered power of decades of human lifeforce runs through a divine artifact.