THE Primordial Gu of Provenance felt its hunters die, one after another, in less time than it took a lesser being to draw breath. Nineteen small lights went out inside the great weave of its Narrative, nineteen of the countless Gu that carried its authority across existence, and each of them went dark with its Provenance broken rather than collapsed. It did not grieve them, because it had not sent them to win.
It had sent them as bait. Somewhere in existence there was a thing that had reached into the deep past and pulled a child of calamity back out of an erasure that should have been final, and a thing like that would not be found by searching. It would only be found when it reached out and took something, so the Primordial Gu had sent some of its Ancients to be taken, and now that they had been, it knew exactly where the taker was.
