Chapter 5464: To A Grand Future! I
Chapter 5464: To A Grand Future! I
Emotive’s calm body buzzed as more prompts came!
|Her existence has attained the absolute peak of her emotions, every feeling expressed at full strength with total honesty, no gap anywhere between what she is and what she permits herself to be. Your Osmontian Source Infinity and your Egoic Intent, flowing through the heart she keeps inside you, are acting as catalysts for a change that would not otherwise be possible at her standing.|
|Through ridiculous means, an Egoic Intent is rising within THE Living Emotive. Identity built on emotion itself, seamless and lived. She is becoming True.|
...!
Noah watched the prompts pass over him and held her tighter, and worked through the mechanism while he did. Three parts had combined here. Her honesty supplied the Trueness, total by construction. His fused authority supplied the catalyst her standing lacked. And the heart she had seated inside him days ago supplied the channel between the two. Remove any one of the three, and no Egoic Intent rose today!
She had built the channel long before either of them knew what it was for, which was, he noted, how the important things usually got built.
Her body buzzed against his chest, the transformation moving through her in slow warm waves, and Emotive felt it happening and did not open her eyes. She smiled instead, content down to her foundations, and buried her face deeper against him as if she meant to meld into his chest entirely, becoming True in the arms of the reason she could.
Existence was short. And a human should not be indecisive with the people who loved him, should not ration himself out in scraps while the ages ran. He held her on the black river and thought that he would live by that better than he had. Make the ones around him stronger, and happier, slowly, as much as he could, for as long as the pattern held.
---
Elsewhere in THE Infiniverse, a library waited.
It filled a stellar realm all its own, rows and rows of shelves running toward horizons in every direction, and the shelves held light. Shining scrolls stacked beside grimoires bound in slow-burning gold, books whose spines glowed with the colors of the knowledge inside them, aisle after aisle of gathered record stretching through a space that smelled of old paper. Reading lights drifted between the rows like patient fireflies.
It stretched out endlessly, for it was one of THE Annals of THE Infiniverse!
At the center of it, around a long table of dark stone, the figures had gathered.
THE Primordial Paradox stood at one end, titanic even at rest, with THE Living Paradox beside him, his expression complex as he looked toward Noah and constantly sighed. Alexander sat with his hands folded, still carrying his terrible stillness. THE Great Usurper occupied his borrowed body in silence, and Thalassarch Nereon’s presence coiled through the upper dark of the library, too vast for chairs, attending all the same. And beside Noah stood Eon, Ubergulden Adelheid herself, brought here from THE Source Lands, her golden eyes moving across the gathered monsters of a dead Observable Existence.
Only THE Creature was missing, still out in the dark chasing his second appendage.
They looked at one another across the stone table, the survivors and the leaders and the woman who had lost her whole people.
A heavy discussion was about to begin!
The library held them all in its patient light, and Noah looked across the faces at the stone table. Scattered, they were targets. Bound into one force under him, they were one target, which was worse, because THE Sealed One specialized in single points of failure. The correct structure was the one nobody’s instincts liked: separate roads, chosen freely, each fitted to what the walker was. So he opened with the only honest framing there was.
"All of you are unique lifeforms in your own right," he said. "I’ve given you the information on THE Sealed One. What he is, what he’s done, what he means. Across existence, he’s a kind of Adversity that may propel you to heights you’d never reach otherwise, if you survive him. Or you could be collapsed. Those are the honest stakes." He let his gaze move along the table.
"I can’t promise anyone here anything, except that I’ll do what I do while staying true to my Intent and my identity."
THE Sealed One was that dangerous. Nobody at the table needed the point repeated.
Noah felt it would be a shame if any of those gathered here died. But some of them standing here at all was already strange, and his gaze settled on the strangest.
Erwin.
The architect of THE Loom and THE Fallout looked like a beggar these days, his Schrodinger based form wrapped in worn gray, and there was history between them measured in deaths across years and Folds. He had been an enemy. He had fought THE Creature across an age, and the cost of that conflict had never been fully counted. For him to stand in Noah’s library, at Noah’s table, was a unique thing, and Erwin seemed to know it, because he smiled first.
"Existence is vast out there," Erwin said. "With you and THE Sealed One being a piece of it. A piece, mind you. Boundless information exists past both of you, and I want to see it. I want to see the Gilded Ones across their Observable Existences. The Infinite Lifeforms in their Carcosa. The Source Lifeforms in their deep lands. All of it, read firsthand." His paradox-light flickered, amused.
"And if THE Sealed One wants to find me and kill me while I’m doing it, he can try. As for us, we have history and animosity, and we don’t have to work together. You do your thing. I’ll do mine. In the future, we might stand on the same plane, or in entirely different places. Both are fine outcomes."
...!
His words were paradoxically true, which was the only kind of true Erwin dealt in, and Noah nodded calmly and priced the road as offered. A wandering Paradox answering to no one was uncontrollable, and uncontrollable was...maybe good?
He looked toward the being beside Erwin. THE Primordial Paradox he actually considered a friend.
The titanic old teacher smiled.
"I’ll see if I can continue guiding my student, since we’re somewhat intertwined right now," THE Primordial Paradox said. "And with your Infinity coursing through me, you and I are intertwined as well. So let me know whenever you do the exciting things. I find I’ve developed a taste for watching you do them."
The two Paradoxes had chosen their road, and Noah nodded and turned to THE Great Usurper.
The borrowed body grinned, and one hand came around and smacked Alexander across the back hard enough to rock THE Peacemaker in his chair.
"I’ll take some of myself and this one through the Gilded Observable Existences and THE Infinite Carcosa," THE Great Usurper said. "Spreading Unity as we go. If we can grow our own grand Intents and Pantheons along the way, even better. I already hold a Mesozoic Scale Ealdor under my Unity, so I can scale up rapidly, and there’s a second purpose underneath the first." His voice settled into something colder.
"I saw how deeply THE Sealed One was entrenched in the structure of the Gilded here. Vessels in their Houses, rot in their foundations, plans running for Ages. If he was that entrenched in THE Braneworld, he’s entrenched everywhere else the Gilded hold ground. I will uncover it all and let you know as Unity is...silent."
...!