Chapter 5799: No Immensity! I
Chapter 5799: No Immensity! I
The Plain of Accord was gone!
In its place, in a single heartbeat, stood a forest older than any forest had a right to be. Trees the size of mountains tore up out of the snow, trunks thick as rivers, canopies lost somewhere up among the floating thrones, and they did not stand still.
They grew, and died, and grew again. Every leaf that budded on them held the weight of a Dimension blooming into being, and every leaf that fell was that Dimension collapsing, thousands upon thousands of them erupting and dying and erupting again in every branch, so that the whole forest roared with the sound of realities being judged!
On the edge of the Plain, Ling clapped, eyes shining.
On the golden clouds, Progeny and Provenance Lifeforms leaned forward as one, and no one said a word.
And in the middle of it all, Noah stood and took the forest on his body.
It came down on him from every side. Roots thicker than towers wrapped his legs and crushed. Branches swung like the arms of titens. Leaves fell on him like a rain of breaking Dimensions!
His body glistened through it. His crystalline skin had taken on the sheen of ancient jade, dense and deep and faintly luminous, and beneath it infinite dreams and Provenance moved in slow blue-gold currents. It held. Even so, Minerva’s Provenance was so heavy that fine cracks kept spreading across it, one after another, light leaking out of each thin line!
But he held on.
Against a being at nine hundred and ninety-nine in everything, crashing down on him with the weight of an entire Dimensional forest, he held on!
Every second had been a day of compression for him, and every one of those days was packed into him now, and it was grand. His foundation did not so much as tremble.
Oh!
But what more could he do?!
He let the lid come off.
Not all at once. One layer at a time, carefully, as a man opens a door into a room he has never entered. Stellar golden clouds billowed out of him first, soft and bright, rolling out through the roots and the trunks into the forest around him.
The dreams went first.
Wherever the golden clouds drifted, the forest slowed. Its frantic growing and dying turned lazy and strange. Trees that had been erupting toward the sky began instead to bloom into shapes no tree could ever have learned, towers and faces and curling stairways of bark that led nowhere.
Leaves drifted down slowly, turning over and over as they fell. Time itself, near him, began to dream, and Minerva’s growth-speed stumbled in it!
Noah then let the Physical side of his Root press outward, all the dense weight of those packed quarks, the cold of the Long Night crushed down into every one of them. His body simply became heavier than her forest could move. The great roots around his legs wrapped tighter, and heaved, and lifted nothing. He was not holding them back. They simply could not find the strength to move him!
Then the Conceptual side.
He looked at the forest around him and dreamed, plainly and completely, that it was a forest in a dream.
And existence half-agreed!
Around him, the trunks went hazy at their edges. The roaring of breaking Dimensions softened into something far away and muffled, the sound of a storm heard from inside a warm house. Half the forest was still real. Half of it was a dream Noah was having about a forest, and that half began, very gently, to sleep.
This was it. This was what he had seen from the inside, in the purple sky of the Chrysalis!
Minerva wrote growth onto existence. That was her Root, an Empyros’s power, judging and growing and rewriting whatever her eyes fell on. And Noah was heavier than the writing, the Fiend’s answer, a thing so dense that no sentence could lift it. But he also wrote back, dreaming his own sentence over hers.
He was both. The writer and the page!
Her judgment landed on him, and he stood.
His dream landed on her forest, and it slept!
He took a step forward.
Then another!
He walked through her forest toward her, step by step, across the dreaming Plain, and everything she threw at him either broke on his weight or fell asleep in his dream. Across from him, Minerva’s eyes flickered coldly in his sight.
Above the Plain, the thrones broke.
|THE DIMENSIONAL DEVOURER, POONA, is standing on her throne and cheering.|
|THE DISSECTING SCHOLAR’s spectacles have fogged. His quill is racing.|
|THE ASHEN CANTOR’s embers have stopped.|
|THE VERDANT REGARD’s gaze has gone cold and fierce. It is fixed on her daughter.|
|A voice from a hazy throne: "...His power is lower. So why is she not dominating?"|
|Another answers: "One of them walks the path of a Fiend, but still..."|
...!
Minerva felt it.
Noah watched her realize it. She had come onto this plain to dominate, to show the whole Legacy that no chosen one existed, that existence was not bound to three beings whispered about in the snow. And she was not dominating!
In front of every throne and every cloud, she was being pushed back across the Plain of Accord by the very being she had meant to disprove.
Her pride was cracking, and her argument with it.
She stopped. She drew one long, calm breath, and lifted her head toward the sky. Toward the ring of floating thrones, and every Immense One seated on them.
Then she looked back down at Noah, and spoke to him alone.
"To live true to yourself," Minerva said into his mind, "means you keep walking even when the ground gives out beneath your feet. It means you believe in what you are doing even when the whole of existence looks at you, spits in the dirt, and calls you a fool. Even when existence itself stops believing in you."
Her green eyes held his, steady.
"But where is the line? How far can someone push before stubbornness just becomes madness? How true can anyone actually live? When the sky says no, and the cold says no, and every turning of the road says no, and no, and no again, how much can you believe before your own ribs crack under the weight?"
She did not look away.
"I don’t know where that edge is. Maybe you only find out when you fall off it. But I know what sits inside my own chest. I believe in my own skin. I believe in what I can build with my own hands. And right now, I don’t believe in this existence. I don’t believe its rules, and I don’t believe its winter."
The dreaming forest drifted around them, slow.
"So if existence wants to tell me no, let it. I will pit my belief against existence itself. And we will see which one breaks first."
...!
Minerva stopped attacking.
Her forest died all at once. Every mountain-trunk, every root, every leaf of breaking Dimension, gone in an instant, crumbling into green dust that the snow buried in moments. The Plain of Accord lay bare and white again, and silent.
In the silence, she whispered aloud.
"Then I’ll become Immense right here, and prove it with that."
...!
What?
Motherfucker, what?!
HUUM!
She called everything.
Every sliver of Immensity she had ever been given, she drew into herself at once. Everything she had inherited from her mother. Everything she had grown on her own. Every Favor ever granted to her by any throne. It all came pouring in from wherever it had been kept, green-gold light streaming across the snow toward her, and her Root blazed!
The Plain of Accord shook to its foundations!
On the golden clouds, Progeny and Provenance Lifeforms cried out and gripped the edges as they rocked. Above them, the thrones leaned in, all of them at once.
|THE VERDANT REGARD half rises from her throne of living leaf.|
|"Minerva. Stop."|
"Not here, child!" Moriarty’s voice cracked across the plain, sharp for the first time since Noah had known him. "Not in this cold!"
Noah went still.
THE First Gu of Time had said it, in the purple sky of the Chrysalis. Those who grasp Immensity in this cold may have a chance. Only a chance, and nothing guaranteed. And Minerva was actually trying it, here and now, in front of everyone?!
At this time.
The snow answered her.
It thickened. It spiraled. Out of the grey sky above the thrones, it began to pour toward her from every direction at once, a vast white vortex drawing down onto a single figure in a green robe at the center of the Plain. The Long Night had turned its attention onto a Root trying to become Immense beneath it.
And for one heartbeat, she almost did it!
A crown of green-gold light rose over her hed, far grander than the crooked one of leaves she wore. Her figure grew, climbing upward, vast and radiant, until she stood taller than the floating clouds. Behind her, a shape formed in the air, tall and narrow and edged in light!
And on her chest, the Root of Immensity that had always been hidden from Noah’s sight blazed into view, and it was changing. Its fibers were thickening, branching, reaching upward into a trunk. It was becoming a tree!
An Immensity was blooming, right there on the Plain of Accord!
Awe lit every face on every cloud. Even the thrones went still.
But...
The light of an opening door shut.
Her eyes filled with belief and immensity became ashen!
No door opened and let her through. It simply closed, soundlessly, in her face.
Her Root cracked.
Then it severed!
BOOM!
The sound of it carried across the whole Legacy, from the Firmament Mountain to the farthest peak, the sound of a great tree breaking in half. Green light poured out of her like blood, spilling down her robe and into the snow, and Minerva screamed!
"OOOOOH!"
Her eyes rolled back, showing white.
Then they turned pale!
And she spoke, but it was not her voice.
It was layered. Ancient. Calm, and terrible, a great many voices speaking together through a single throat, and every word fell on the silent Plain like a stone.
|No door shall open, because no new Immensity shall rise to open it. In the endless winter, no new Immensity shall arise!|
...!
Absolute silence.
Every Immense One on every throne went still. Several of the hazy thrones flickered violently, their shapes jolting in and out of sight!
On his throne of instruments, Moriarty’s quill snapped in his grip. Poona was not smiling anymore.
And at the edge of the Plain, Ling had stopped swinging her legs.
Noah stared at the girl in the center of the Plain with the winter in her eyes.
No door shall open? THE First Gu of Time had said the opposite, not long ago. Doors are opening, she had said. The Caretaker had said a door shut long ago was beginning to be unshut. Even the Augury, the one prophecy everyone seemed to be whispering, ended by promising that the True would walk out the far side of the Night.
And this voice said no. No door. No new Immensity. Not ever.
So who was speaking?
He did not know!
The pale light drained out of Minerva’s eyes.
She collapsed into the snow.
Above, THE Verdant Regard rose from her throne.
For the first time, an Immense One left its seat. A vast green presence sank down out of the sky, soft as spring, shrinking as it came, until it was only a figure made of gentle green light kneeling in the snow at the center of the Plain. She gathered her daughter’s limp body against her and held her.
She looked down at Minerva with grief. Pure and plain! And under the grief, something unfathomable rose!
Then she lifted her head, and looked at Noah.
Her gaze was cold.
She said nothing. Not one word. And then she was gone, and her daughter with her.
The center of the Plain of Accord lay empty.
In the snow where Minerva had fallen, an illusory Root lay smoking, green and severed, broken clean in two. As Noah watched, frost began to creep across it from the broken end.
Slowly, it was freezing.