Chapter 5609: Tesseracts! II
Chapter 5609: Tesseracts! II
The heavens answered as eighteen hundred Tesseracts fell out of the gold at once, streaming down in long blue-white lines toward the cliff, and they did not scatter or crash, they came to him, gathering into a vast slow orbit around his body, hundreds upon hundreds of folded hypercubes turning through the air in nested rings, their light washing the cliff and the river and the orchards in deep cerulean, and the whole realm hummed with the pressure of that much beginning held in one place!
Noah stood in the middle of his own storm of seeds, and turned to his daughter.
"Seo-yeon."
She looked up at him with wide shining eyes, and he reached into the orbit and drew out nine.
They drifted across to her, one after another, settling into a small ring around her, and their light lit her face blue as she stared at them.
"Nine," Noah said. "THE Mirrored Hearth was your first, now design nine more." He crouched to her level, the way he always did. "Whatever you want them to be. Reach for what you are, and let them take their shape from that. And when they are grown, ten Observable Existences will stand under your existence, and anything that ever reaches for you will have to reach through all ten first."
Seo-yeon’s small hands closed around the nearest hypercube with trembling hands!
And she nodded so hard her hair bounced!
Then Noah rose, and looked out over the turning orbit of everything else he held, and began sorting it in his mind.
Henry would receive multiple. Adelaide. Barbatos. Kazuhiko. Khor. Sigrid. Titano and the Emperor Penguin and Erikson and Lich Ra’Zan, Amser Modred, Malphas the butler who had been bowed to by a being that once mistreated him, Emotive, the nine Daughters of THE Dora Shath’yar, Naldine, even the arrogant goat Heidrun who would probably found something insufferable and beautiful!
Every single one of them, given not one seed but several, so that each existence at his table would stand on the backing of the Causes of MULTIPLE Observable Existences!
And after them, the ones whose threads ran thinner but ran all the same would receive something.
Not everyone could be what he was. That was simply true. Provenance was not transferable, and no gift he could make would let another being generate the way he generated!
But that had never been the only road to grandness!
Existence had frameworks, ancient and established and full of ladders, and he had spent his whole climb learning exactly how those ladders worked. Causes. Foundations. Observable Existences. Intents and Scales and Sources. The whole architecture that beings like THE Sleepless Fiend used to make Steeds carry Causes and Descendants carry sentences, the architecture that Vakochev had built a ladder out of and named after himself!
Noah could not make his people First Lifeforms.
But with eighteen hundred Genesis Tesseracts turning around him, he could make them unfathomably grand inside every framework that existence had ever offered, until each one of them stood on so many foundations that reaching them meant unmaking a dozen Observable Existences first!
And every single one of those Observable Existences would be born nested inside THE Infiniverse.
Which meant she would grow too.
His eyes lifted, and he got to work!
---
<THE Sealed One>
Far too many days had passed since a new Sword had stood in THE Hall of Swords.
The Hall did not stand anymore.
Its vaulted ceiling was gone, torn open to the raw dark of a separate Dimension of Existence that no longer had walls to separate it from anything. The ancient stone lay in continents of rubble. Out beyond where the Hall had ended, the fold of reality itself had been decimated for a distance no measure in the Source Lands bothered to keep, whole stretches of the Dimension hanging in unlit ruin, the light that had come from no visible source snuffed out entirely.
And THE Throne of Swords was broken.
The great obsidian structure of countless blades lay split down its center, and hundreds of the swords woven into it were shattered, each broken blade meaning a Source Armament somewhere across existence had just stopped being whole.
Before the ruin of that throne, THE Queen Regnant knelt.
Her hundreds of glistening tentacles were spread flat against the shattered stone, her gaunt elongated arms braced, her writhing head bowed so low that the pale suctioned tendrils around her clattering aperture brushed the ground.
Grey and obsidian flesh wept slime and something darker. The Primordial Source and Infinity running side by side through her existence still ran, still nearly touching union, and both of them guttered.
And she was not willing.
Every wet twitch of her said it. The tendrils along her torso strained upward against the posture, over and over, and were pressed back down. Her claws had gouged trenches into the stone beneath them from the effort of holding still. The kneel had been imposed on her body, and her existence had not agreed to it, and it went on refusing in small useless increments with every breath she did not have!
Behind her, in rows that stretched back through the rubble, the Swords of Existence knelt too. Mesozoic Scale beings and more... all of them down, all of them shroudless, most of them bleeding.
And walking through the ruin of it, unhurried, was a tall pale man in layered dark robes.
THE Sealed One looked around the wreckage with mild interest, and when he spoke, his voice carried easily through a Dimension too broken to echo.
"You know, I do not truly wish to destroy."
He stopped beside a fallen column and rested a hand on it.
"Destruction is expensive. It is loud, it is imprecise, and it leaves nothing behind that can be used." He looked up at the missing ceiling. "I did not want this. This was the cost of a hall that would not open its doors."
"...Then unbend my spine," THE Queen Regnant said, "and we will discuss doors, O Infinite Liar."
Her voice came out of the bowed writhing mass, and even flattened, even wrecked, it was sweet. Calm and sweet, almost gentle!
"There she is." THE Sealed One smiled slightly. "I was hoping the pressure had not taken the voice. Your voice is the finest thing in this hall. Was, I suppose."
"I am making an offer right now." He resumed walking, threading between kneeling rows. "I seek to rule. That is all. Not to end. You, the Swords, the True Lifeforms, the Primeval Ones who graze across THE Source Lands and think their earliness makes them permanent, all of it will soon fall to me. And the falling is not the point. What comes after is the point."
"After?" Her teeth clattered. "You ground an Age of your own children into three pills and ate one where everyone could watch. What exactly do you imagine comes after, for the rest of us?"
He crouched, comfortable amid the rubble and smiled.
"Do you know how many exceptional lifeforms existence produces in an Age? Thousands. Do you know how many of them ever amount to anything, left to their own devices? A handful. The rest bloat, and squabble, and are eventually eaten by something with a better appetite, and every ounce of what they were goes into a mouth that does nothing with it."
His voice stayed perfectly reasonable.
"I took an Age of waste and I concentrated it. Their potential exists TODAY, doing something, instead of having been spent on nothing across ten thousand pointless little conflicts. Nothing was destroyed. Things were merely... reassigned."
"My disciples...my Followers...Do you imagine I felt nothing? I remember all of their names. Every one. I keep them, which is more than existence ever offered them. Existence would have forgotten them entirely. I am the only reason a single one of those disciples still exists in any form at all." He tilted his head. "A farmer does not hate his pigs when the winter comes. But he does remember which ones fed him."
Her tendrils strained upward again, and were pressed down again.
"That is the part none of you ever understand," THE Sealed One continued, rising, brushing dust from his robes. "You think I am hungry. Hunger is what I use, it is not what I am for. Look at what existence IS. Chaos. Dimensions folding into other Dimensions and drowning everything inside them while nobody is even accountable for the folding. Millions of petty sovereignties, each one certain it is the center, all of them grinding against each other forever, and the total sum of all that motion across all those Ages is... nothing. No direction. No decision. No one accountable."
HUUM!
His voice sharpened, and for one moment something almost passionate showed through the collector’s calm. "I do not want to eat existence, Your Little Majesty. I want to FINISH it. I want one hand on it, and one accounting, and an end to the endless committee of the useless mighty. And I am the only being who has been at this long enough to do it. Fuck Those Who Remain as they won’t do it, so I will do it on their behalf."
THE Queen Regnant was silent for a long moment.
"And your followers?" she said at last. "In this finished existence of yours. Do they get names, or do they get shells?"
"They get to be part of something that arrived somewhere." He said it gently.
He walked past her, toward the split obsidian throne, and stopped in front of the broken blades of every Sword in existence.
"I will not rush this. I never rush." His pale hand traced the shattered edge. "There is a being out there, a new thing that you have met before, a genuine anomaly, and he cannot be handled the way anything else is handled. Strike him unprepared and you do not wound him, you feed him. Every adversity he survives makes him grander. So I do not offer him adversity. I offer him nothing at all, and I gather, and I map, and I wait, and when I finally move it will not be a contest he can survive and grow from. It will be a collection." He glanced back over his shoulder.
"Do you see the discipline in that? I have watched a thousand mighty things die of impatience. I intend to die of nothing."
"You may consider yourself a preparation. It is not an insult. Everything is a preparation."
He turned fully then, and looked out over the rows of the kneeling, and the mildness in him thinned into something very old.
"One last thing, and then I will leave you to your rubble and your thinking."
The ruined Dimension held still.
"Lately, I have begun hearing whispers." His borrowed eyes lifted, past the missing ceiling, into the unlit dark. "From myself. From a version of me that is not here, and has not happened yet, speaking backward into the ear of the one who is."
He listened for a moment, and the smile that came over his face was almost reverent. "I do not yet know all of what he says. But I know the shape of it. And whatever is coming..."
HUUM!
"...it seems to be GRAND."