Chapter 5744: Change The Narrative! IV
Chapter 5744: Change The Narrative! IV
Lucy.
Noah watched the small rough being pick her way onward, and understood that he was looking at her, this hunched unhurried thing walking through a forest of growing Dimensions, and the voice of the stone rolled on!
|The earliest existences looked into the heart of a Dimension, into its very center, and their reckoning told them a strange thing: that the center held zero volume, and infinite density. A point of nothing, containing everything.|
|And the wisest among them did not take this to mean that an actual, physical infinity existed there. No. They took it to mean something humbler and far more honest.|
|It meant their understanding had reached its edge. It meant that what lay beyond the center was a thing their minds could not yet envision, could not yet shape, could not yet hold.|
|So they gave that edge a name. They called it... Infinity.|
The forest breathed around the walking figure, worlds ripening on every bough!
|No lifeform has ever truly known Infinity. No lifeform has ever grasped it, or seen it, or proven it even exists.|
|Every musing on Infinity that has ever been spoken, in every age, by every mighty thing, became only this: their own definition of what Infinity could be, as far as they themselves were able to understand it and grasp it.|
|Infinity was never a thing. It was a word. A word each existence filled with the shape of its own not-knowing.|
Noah’s frozen existence turned that over! He had branded his identity onto infinity before! He had wielded it as though it were a thing, a substance, an authority with edges he could hold! And the stone was telling him, gently and enormously, that no one had ever held it at all, that they had only ever held their own understanding of a thing they could not understand!
Below, Lucy stopped walking.
She came to the bank of a river, and the river ran bright and quick, and it was filled with fish! Small, silver, countless, they schooled in the shallows, and the moment Lucy knelt down beside the water, every fish in that river turned its face up toward her and gathered, crowding to the bank, waiting, as though they had done this a thousand times and loved every one.
Lucy smiled at them.
She reached up to the nearest tree and plucked a single Dimension from a low branch, a swirling jewel of a world heavy with a million Causes, and she held it in her thick rough hands, and white light began to wrap around it, spilling from her fingers, wrapping the plucked world in a growing radiance!
And then...
Thousands of genuine Dimensions bloomed from her hands!
Noah watched, and his existence could scarcely hold what it saw, because from that single plucked world, cradled in the hands of a simple caveman thing, Dimensions poured forth without end! Not illusions, not images, but real and genuine Dimensions, thousands of them, then tens of thousands, blooming out of her palms in an endless radiant stream, each one whole, each one ture, each one heavy with its own Causes and its own laws.
She smiled wider, and she directed the endless stream down toward the water.
And the fish ATE them!
The silver fish rose up and took the blooming Dimensions into their mouths as if they were nothing more than crumbs of bread scattered on a pond, swallowing whole Domains, feeding happily, jostling for more.
And Lucy laughed a soundless laugh and kept producing them, minute after minute, Dimension after Dimension after Dimension, what looked to Noah like millions of genuine domains spilling endlessly from the hands of a small rough being for no greater reason than to feed the fish in a river!
An infinite production! Effortless! Joyful! Casual as scattering feed!
Noah’s mind reeled at the sheer, quiet impossibility of it, this being who did not strain, did not calculate, did not grasp at anythng, simply opened her hands and let the infinite pour out as though it were the most natural thing in all of existence.
At last the fish were full, and they scattered back into the bright water, sated and happy, and Lucy let the stream die in her palms and wiped her rough hands on her knees and rose!
She smiled once more at the river, and then she turned, and she walked on through the forest of growing domains, unhurried as ever, as though she had done nothing at all!
And the Runestone spoke its last.
|Infinity will never be a thing you see. It will never be a thing you grasp, or hold, or conquer. It is, and it always was, only a word, a definition given to a thing one does not understand.|
|But here is the key the stone offers you, the only key it has.|
|Attain a good definition. Your own. Unique to you. A clear and sufficient understanding of the very thing you cannot understand. Do not borrow another’s edge, or understanding of Infinity, for another’s edge of impossibility is only the shape of another’s not-knowing.|
|Reach a clear and sufficient definition of your own, and you will be able to read the true idea of Infinity written within this Runestone.|
|And when you read it, a path will light up before you.|
|Where that path leads... is unknown even to the stone.|
HUUM!
The forest began to fade!
The domains on the boughs grew murky, the endless green dimming, the bright river washing out to grey, the whole Primordial garden dissolving at its edges as the vision released its hold upon him and Noah’s consciousness began, slowly, to rise back toward the blue-gold clouds and the frozen war and the writer he had left behind!
And as everything faded, as the forest thinned to almost nothing...
In the very corner of his fading sight, Noah could have sworn he saw it!
The record of the visage of Lucy, the small rough caveman being who scattered infinite Dimensions to feed the fish, stopped walking. She turned her head. And across the whole impossible distance of an age that had ended before Noah was ever born, that ancient thing looked up, directly at him, directly at the watcher the vision was never supposed to notice...
And she smiled at him!
Fiendishly!
...!