Chapter 5555: The Well! II
Chapter 5555: The Well! II
When it came to who should give a test of just how purr they were...Noah turned and looked at a certain Steed!
"You first," Noah said.
Hvitrmarr inclined her horned head and walked to the edge of the pale sand. She simply stepped off, and THE Undivided Well took her.
In truth, the question everyone had come here to ask was answered in that first moment, before anybody had time to be nervous on her behalf.
There was no ripple of refusal, no pause while something unseen considered her. The water opened the way a door opens for a hand that has always had the key.
Compared to the way she moved in the air, she moved through that sea like something coming home. Her white hair fanned out behind her, and the nine First Causes drifting in the weave of her robe brightened as the underlight found them, so that she went down trailing her own small constellation.
Below her, the Blooms turned in their thousands. Radiant flowers of blue and white and pale gold, opening and closing on a slow shared rhythm, and they lit her from beneath as she passed over them. Noah watched from the shore and found he had nothing at all to say about it.
Since she was not the sort to take more than she needed, she chose a bloom about the size of a shield. She closed her hand around its base and drew it free with a care that looked, from above, a great deal more like asking than taking.
Then she rose, and broke the surface without a sound, and came back across the water to the sand. She held THE Vermeil Bloom out to Noah in both hands, and its light shone up into her face.
"For you, Master."
Noah reached for it.
"Hold on."
Ryaenara had already got to her feet, and she said it loudly enough that every head on the shore turned. She was rolling her shoulders, and her eyes were on the sea with the exact expression she wore before a fight she intended to enjoy.
"Before you take that. I want to see... if I’m pure."
"I’ve been alive for too long. I’ve kept my word to people who didn’t deserve it and broken it with people who did, and I have never once pretended to be anything I’m not. If anybody here is exactly what she says she is, it’s me."
She reached the edge and dove, and... the water threw her back!
It happened so quickly that it took a moment to understand!
The surface rippled outward in a hard ring from the point she struck, and it did not part for her, and she came off it in a spray of gold-shot droplets and landed on her back in the sand.
"What?!"
She was furious!
Of course she was up again almost at once. She stared at the water, and then at her own hands, as though they had gone behind her back and done something she had not authorized.
"What?"
She went a second time, faster, and the Well shoved her out again, and she landed skidding through the fine sand. By the third attempt she had stopped being polite about it. Her Intent came off her in a heavy vibrant tide, and she drove herself at the surface like a thrown spear!
Despite all of that, the Well did not fight her. It did not brace, and it did not push back, and it never once answered her power with power of its own. It only declined!
Then nothing happened at all, for a while.
The waterfalls kept falling on the cliffs behind them, and the luminous vines in the silver forests kept breathing their light in and out, and none of it had any opinion.
Ryaenara sat in the pale sand with her Intent still burning around her and nothing anywhere to burn it against, and she looked...lost.
Theron Adranos looked away. There was no judgment anywhere on his worn face!
Noah went and stood beside her as he laughed inside a bit.
"Hang in there. We dont always have to be good at everything.And...So long as you are pure to yourself, I don’t see why it should matter what a lake thinks about it.."
Ryaenara scoffed and stood and dusted off her legs as she voiced out...
"Hmph." She jerked her chin at the water. "Why don’t you try, then? You talk big, but you may not be considered pure yourself, and I would like very much to watch you bounce."
Noah nodded and walked to the edge calmly.
Behind him the shore went quiet in a different way than before, and he could feel all of them at his back.
He asked himself the question honestly, one last time.
Was he pure? He had no idea, but he stepped off the sand anyway!
And....!
The Well opened for him.
There was no resistance at all. No test he could feel, no weighing, no moment where something considered him and came to a decision. The water simply took him in as it had taken Hvitrmarr, warm and clean and closing over his head!
It was quiet down there. An entire Dimension had bled over this water for ages, and the dark stone of the cliffs above was layered with the calcified strata of every ambition that had failed to reach the basin. Only slow light and slow current, and the great patient pillar rising up through all of it toward a sky he could no longer see.
Since the Blooms turned all around him as he went down, he had time to notice that his own eighteen Causes were turning in his chest to a rhythm not quite the same as theirs, and not quite different either. He chose one, and reached out, and closed his hand around its base!
The prompts came then.
|THE Vermeil Bloom. Panacea. Analysis follows.|
|Nature: a self-originated growth. It was not seeded, cultivated, or designed by any hand present in this Dimension.|
|Function, first order: it cures degradation. Terminal Causes, failing anchors, curses seated into a lineage, corruption grown into an existence at the root. What has begun to fail may be made whole. What has been sentenced may have the sentence lifted. May. Nothing is guaranteed.|
|Function, second order: it elevates. In a lifeform that consumes it, the Bloom does not add power. It resolves the existence into a truer version of itself, and grants power as the consequence.|
|Function, third order: in a being that possesses no Cause, the Bloom can potentially precipitate the emergence of one. A Purpose. An anchor where there was none.|
Noah read the third line twice, and then a third time.
Compared to what it had cost him to cure one Steed, that line was almost obscene!
|Ancillary observation, appended by THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard rather than by the Bloom itself.|
|THE Vermeil Bloom is not a whole thing. Its structure reads as a component. Specifically, it reads as an accessory of ?????, in the way a shed scale reads as an accessory of the beast that shed it.|
|Further: the accessory is not inert. It is seeking. Every Bloom in this water, and in every water like it across this Dimension, is oriented. They have been looking for a very long time, and the Regard cannot determine what for.|
|?????|
Noah’s brows rose slowly beneath the water.
An accessory of something that was...seeking.
Theron had said the legend held that the collar came first and every Panacea was its overflow, and he had used the words runoff and residue, and had clearly never expected either of them to be read literally. But if each of these flowers was a piece shed from something larger, and if all of them were pointed outward and hunting, then what exactly were these Panaceas looking for?
The Bloom in his hands...answered him before he finished the thought!
HUUUM!
Black-gold light broke out of it, running along every petal in fine hot lines and then leaping off into the water, and it was nothing like the pale gold of the Well!
The lattice of it spread outward through the turquoise, and the nearest Blooms caught it, and then the ones beyond those, and then the ones beyond those!
BOOM
BOOM!
Ten thousand of them, if there were ten thousand down there. The whole crop of that sea lit in a spreading wave with Noah at the center of it, until the gentle underlight had drowned entirely beneath a black-gold radiance climbing up out of the deep, and every flower in the water had turned toward one man and begun to burn!
Above the surface, the valley went the same color. The waterfalls caught it, and the mist banks caught it, and the luminous vines lost their patient rhythm and blazed, and the drifting islands overhead lit from underneath!
As a result of all that, or perhaps as the reason for it, the great pillar at the center of THE Hallowed Verdance began to vibrate along its whole immeasurable length, and the currents of light in its bark reversed and ran downward toward the water.
And...the collar hanging around it began to shine!
THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity had hung above every well in every valley of this Dimension for the entire recorded history of a people. It had never moved for their greatest, nor their most beloved, nor for any of the ones they had been certain of, and generations had died in rows on the sand in front of the obelisks waiting for it to do anything whatsoever.
Now its rows of golden beads lit black and gold from within, and its teardrop fringe swayed, and the unreadable design on its front plate turned slowly and faced the water!
On the shore, Theron Adranos stood with his mouth open and did not manage to speak!
Ryaenara found her voice first.
"No fucking way." She took a step forward into the shallows, staring at the burning sea and then up at the shining collar above it. "No fucking way, right? Are you serious?"
Nobody answered her, because the two who might have were not looking at her at all. Hvitrmarr stood in the shallows with her own Bloom forgotten in her hands and her gold eyes fixed on the necklacs. Behind her the veil of ancient hands had turned upward!
In the black-gold light of ten thousand seeking flowers, the Steed and the dead thing watched an object older than any Panacea answer a man who had never once been anything but himself!
Pure!