Chapter 5463: Human! III
Chapter 5463: Human! III
Noah stood beneath his four burning Letters, tracking the grand flow of his changed power, and felt something blaze at the far edge of his existence. Emotion and mania, tangled together, burning hot through the bond of a heart he kept inside him. He sighed, and looked across THE Infiniverse toward a distant dark region where a manic woman had retreated to be alone with everything she felt.
He sent another body to her, and kept measuring here.
---
The region she had chosen was one of the dark ones.
Rivers of obsidian Primordial Source flowed thick through an endless realm of shadow, black currents moving slow and heavy through a darkness that had no ceiling and no floor. Light existed here only where the rivers caught it, faint gleams sliding along the obsidian like something breathing under the surface.
Emotive sat on one of the rivers, hugging her knees.
The current carried her slowly through the dark, a small figure folded in on herself, and she looked the way she always looked, like a delicate flower that a strong wind should scatter. The look had always been a lie. Her existence stood among the most changed in all of THE Infiniverse, her foundations soaked in everything that flowed from the being who carried her heart, and across her skin the invisible multicolored auras of his second Letter moved in slow silent waves, armor she had not asked for and could not see. Her Primordial Intent buzzed around her in unstable pulses, THE Amaranthine Sovereign flickering with its holder’s weather.
Noah arrived without sound and sat down beside her on the river.
She did not look up. Her arms tightened around her knees instead, and her face stayed buried against them, because shame was an emotion too, and she was made of emotions.
"I was going to redeem myself," Emotive said into her knees. "That was the plan I built out of everything I had. You gave me your Infinity when I deserved punishment, you let me keep my heart where I put it, you never once asked me to earn any of it back, so I decided I’d earn it anyway. I was going to deliver the Gilded Ones to their knees for you. Not dead. Kneeling. Armies of them. Fourth Scale Gilded Ones by the hundreds, whole Houses bent under my Intent, and at the end I was working out how to bring you the Fifth Scale ones too, Mesozoic Scale Gilded Ones wrapped up and delivered, all of it laid at your feet with a bow on it. My redemption. Proof that the thing you saved was worth saving!"
Her voice buzzed, and the mania bled through it!
"And then this fucker just comes down out of a red sky and takes it all. My harvest, my armies, my whole redemption, swallowed like it was nothing, like I was nothing, and now the Gilded Ones I bent are pills in his stomach and the promise I made you is impossible forever, because the entire Observable Existence it was made about doesn’t exist anymore." Her shoulders shook.
"So what do I do now? How do I redeem myself if I can never deliver? How do I, what am I supposed to, I just, I can’t even..."
"HUMAN."
HUUM!
Noah wrote the words into the dark as he spoke them, his finger trailing cerulean fire, and the fourth Letter blazed to life in front of them both. Silent waves of light rolled off it and washed over Emotive, the Letter of brief patterns holding together against the dark, and her buzzing Intent slowed under it, her manic edges settling.
"At the end of the day, that’s what we all are," Noah said quietly. "All of us, no matter how far the power climbs. Human. We try things. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail, and when we fail... Simply try again." He watched the Letter burn.
"What I count is the intent underneath. You wanted to redeem yourself so badly you rebuilt yourself around the wanting, and then you did everything a being could do. The result got stolen, but nothing about what you did got smaller." He turned his head and looked at her. "So as far as I’m concerned, you delivered. I consider it done. Tell me what you want for your actions."
...!
Emotive’s head came up slowly.
Her eyes were vibrant, and the mania in them had gone soft around the edges, and for a long moment she just looked at him like she was checking whether the words would still be there if she blinked. Then color climbed her face, and she looked away, and her voice came out in a whisper aimed mostly at the river.
"Umm... You and I. Under time dilation, if possible, for as long as possible." Her fingers twisted together. "Could you just... hold me? That’s it. After that I’ll figure out what I’m doing next, I promise, I’ll be terrifying grand and everything. But for now. Just... that."
Noah nodded.
He moved with immensity and wrapped his arms around her, and leaned back onto the river of Primordial Source, and the obsidian current took them both. Their figures drifted through the endless dark together, carried wherever the river went, and Emotive buried her head against his chest and stopped holding anything in.
Her existence buzzed against him with emotions of terrifying profundity, wonder and relief and adoration and hunger and joy all firing at once, and she did not sort them or mute them or manage them. She let every one of them burn at full strength, because that was what she was! In that moment, carried on a black river through the dark, THE Living Emotive was staying unfathomably true to who she was.
And emotions were not small things.
Across the whole span of existence, emotion sat under more history than any framework liked to admit. Wars had started for grief and ended for love. Civilizations rose on hope and rotted on fear. THE Sealed One himself had built an Age of followers by teaching outcasts to weaponize their pain, because he understood what the frameworks did not, that emotion was foundation-grade force. Whole schools of power spent eons trying to govern feelings out of their weavings, and the greatest beings kept discovering that the feelings had been the weavings all along.
So when an existence came along whose entire foundation was emotion, nothing suppressed and nothing borrowed, and that existence spent years soaking in the resources and potential of a being with Boundless Potential, her heart literally seated inside his Osmontian Source Infinity, there was only ever one place the road went.
The prompts bloomed over the dark river!
HUUM!
|THE Primordial Intent of THE Living Emotive is undergoing a transformation.|
...!