Chapter 318. The Weight of Ages
Noah didn't lift a finger to stop Ikaris from fleeing. He had known for several minutes that the Eternal was feigning unconsciousness, lurking in the dark corners of his mind like a wounded predator waiting for a gap in the fence. He let him go.
Now wasn't the time to break the man further. Ikaris needed to simmer in his own failure. Once Noah tracked down Sersi, he would let the couple have their inevitable, melodramatic reunion. He recalled from his fragmented memories of the old films that Sersi had moved on to a new life in London, keeping company with a man who would become the Black Knight. Noah didn't know much about the knight's history—he was a fan of the big screen, not the dusty ink of comic books—but he knew he had to move fast before the pieces of this cosmic puzzle drifted too far apart.
As Ikaris ascended, a subtle shimmer of amber light danced between Noah's fingertips before vanishing into the air. A trace of the Mind Stone's essence had already latched onto the fleeing Eternal's psyche—a leash made of pure thought. If Ikaris chose to remain stubborn, he wouldn't be a martyr; he would be a puppet.
An Eternal 'Superman' as a personal enforcer? Not a bad acquisition, Noah mused.
He watched the sky where the sonic boom had left a trailing scar in the clouds. Ikaris's speed was genuinely terrifying. Within seconds, he had breached the exosphere, his signature vanishing into the cold void of space. In terms of pure velocity, he was a match for the Man of Steel himself, even if his raw power fell short in other categories.
"Why let him go? You had the power to ground him, Noah. I saw it in your eyes," Ajak's voice pulled him back to the frozen reality of the cliffside.
Noah turned his head, his expression unreadable. "I should ask you the same thing, Ajak. Why heal the man who just tried to feed you to the Deviants? Most people would call that a lapse in judgment."
Ajak's eyes turned misty, reflecting the pale, wintry sun. She sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of a thousand lifetimes. "What happened to Ikaris... it is my burden to bear. I failed to guide him. I gave him the truth, but I didn't give him a way to live with it."
She began to pace slowly along the jagged edge of the precipice. For millions of years, her life had been a cycle of divine obedience. Every few millennia, the Celestials would wipe their minds clean, scrubbing away the trauma of the planets they had harvested. They would be "reborn" with false memories, believing their mission to protect life was a sacred, noble calling.
Ajak had been the shepherd through it all. She watched as her family landed on primitive worlds, fought the Deviants, and fostered civilizations—only to lead those civilizations to their ultimate doom. She was used to the friction; she had seen the Eternals drift apart hundreds of years ago after the internal conflicts of humanity bled into their own ranks. On every world, as the Emergence approached, she would find excuses to scatter them, letting them live out their final years in a semblance of peace before the memory wipe took everything.
But Earth was different. She had tried to prepare Ikaris for the succession. She had told him the truth, thinking it would make him a better leader. Instead, it had turned his soul into a battlefield. He had been forced to carry the secret of their cosmic genocide alone, and it had curdled his love for Sersi into a desperate, frantic obsession.
Ajak stopped, her gaze fixed on the horizon as if she could see through the very curve of the earth. Noah watched her, struck by the sheer scale of her existence. This woman had walked among the mammoths; she had watched the first fires be lit in caves and the first skyscrapers touch the clouds.
"Ajak," Noah said, his boots crunching on the permafrost as he stepped out of the shallow crater Ikaris had left behind. "You know why I'm here. We don't need to play the mystery game."
The Matriarch of the Eternals blinked, coming back to the present. "Indeed. When the Ancient One sought me out, she made it clear that you possess a sight that rivals the gods. You knew the fate of this world long before I worked up the courage to change it."
She walked toward the very lip of the cliff, her robes fluttering in the biting wind. "Since our team went their separate ways, I have wandered this Earth. I have lived as a human among humans. I have seen the worst of you—the wars, the lies, the senseless cruelty. But I have also seen the light. I've seen the way you laugh in the face of tragedy, the way you love without logic, the way you build wonders out of nothing but dreams."
She turned back to him, a genuine, fragile smile lighting up her face. "This planet... it changed me. I served Arishem for millions of years without a single doubt. I was a tool, a perfect instrument of his will. Until now."
"The price of a new god is the death of a world," Noah stated flatly. "And you decided it wasn't worth the cost."
"Precisely. I realized that humanity's potential outweighs the birth of a Celestial. I decided to tell my family the truth, to stop the Emergence and save this world."
"And when you told the 'loyal soldier' your plan, he decided he'd rather be a widower than a traitor," Noah finished for her.
Ajak looked down at the dark, churning water of the lake below. The ice was shattered where the Deviants had been cast down, and the broken bodies of their victims bobbed in the slush. "Ikaris is blinded by his devotion to the Judge. He thinks he is saving us by following the path, even if it leads to our destruction."
She looked at Noah with a new intensity. "The Ancient One said you were the world's shield. I see now that she wasn't exaggerating. But tell me, Noah—when the Judge looks down upon us, will you be standing with the humans, or with the gods?"
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