Chapter 5800: No Immensity! II
Chapter 5800: No Immensity! II
The severed Root lay in the snow where Minerva had fallen, green and broken and faintly smoking, and the frost crept across it from the broken end.
No Progeny stirred on the golden clouds. No Keeper stepped forward. Above, on their ring of floating thrones, the Immense Ones sat as still as the statues on the mountain’s flanks, and not one of them spoke.
Only the snow moved!
And then, very slowly, it began to change!
It thickened first. The steady fall that had covered the Legacy since THE Long Night began grew heavier, and heavier still, flakes crowding the air until the far thrones blurred and the edge of the Plain vanished into white. Thicker than anyone on the mountain had ever seen it. Thicker than anyone in the Legacy had ever seen it!
Then the wind came!
It came out of nowhere. There had been no wind on THE Firmament Mountain in all the time Noah had stood there, only the quiet fall, and now there was a wind that howled! It tore across the Plain in a single screaming gust and the snowfall became a blizzard, whipping sideways, stinging, roaring over the golden clouds and the thrones and away across the Legacy.
Noah felt it spread. Across every Elsedimension Mountain in every direction, the black glass peaks and the green ones and the one that burned sullen red, the blizzard came howling down. It tore acros the purple-gold rivers on the Legacy’s floor and whipped them into white-capped waves. It shook the thousands of domains hanging in the sky like lanterns in a storm!
All around the Plain, the Keepers moved at once. Authority rose off them, and Dimensionality with it, spreading out in shields over the clouds of the beings they served. Verys stood behind Noah with one webbed hand raised, and the blizzard broke through.
Conduit Lifeforms scattered from the pillars in bright, frightened flocks, chiming in alarm, and vanished into the white! The golden clouds rocked on the wind.
And then existence began to speak!
There was no voice. There was no cognizance with a name above it, no speaker at all. The knowledge simply arrived, in Noah and in every being on the Plain at the same instant, as cold arrives in the bones on a winter night. Nobody told it to you. You simply knew it, all at once, and could not stop knowing it.
|THE FIRST FROST HAS FALLEN.|
|No new Immensity shall arise.|
|Any Root that attempts to complete itself shall undergo IMMENSE SEVERING.|
|THE COUNTING HAS BEGUN. Existence now counts every Root. Each Root makes the cold heavier upon every other Root, and upon all others besides.|
...!
Every being on the Plain went still inside the howling storm!
On the golden clouds, Progeny and Provenance Lifeforms went pale. The water-woman’s glowing fish went dark all at once. The stag’s bells stopped ringing. Batiatus, who had not stopped talking since he arrived, sat with his mouth open and nothing coming out of it!
Dravos, still being tended at the edge of the Plain, lifted his broken helm toward the sky. More than one of them pressed a hand flat against their chest, over the place where their Root sat, as if they could hold it still.
Above, the thrones perceived it too! Noah felt them take it in, all of them, the vast presences flickering behind the storm. On the throne of black glass, the embers went out entirely. The hollowed star dimmed. Even the hazes, which no one could see, seemed to draw in on themselves, as though something very large had just felt a draft of coldness.
Noah looked at his hands as he...only he did not feel the cold as terrifying as all others did.
But a weight arrived even for him.
It settled onto his Root without any fuss at all. It was there, a pressure that had not existed a heartbeat ago, sitting on the turning mobius at the center of him like snow gathring on a roof. And as he felt it land, he understood with a cold, clean certainty that it would only ever get heavier.
Noah’s expression grew heavy.
Beside him, on the next cloud, Achilles had gritted his teeth. The frost on his lashes thickened as the blizzard poured past him, and inside him Noah could feel the new Root, barely a day old, flicker under the added weight.
Noah sat very still on his cloud, and thought.
Only days ago, he had sat down with THE Writer of Mythos and begun writing a Narrative together. A small thing, it had seemed. One thread pulled, and then another, until Vakochev had been called forth, and an Immense One had died, and waves of cold had poured out of the corpse, and a Hollow Night Lifeform wearing Lucy’s face had risen out of it.
It had only gotten colder since!
And now this. He had come to a Convocation of Roots meaning only to watch and learn. A Progeny of an Immense One had singled him out, fought him, tried to become Immense to prove him wrong, and failed. And because she failed, here was a harder winter than any before it!
No new Immensity, ever. And a cold that grew heavier with every single Root that dared to exist.
All these fucking things kept happening!
He knew he had not caused them. Not really. The Writer had written; Vakochev had come; Minerva had chosen her own gamble. But every time he moved, the winter seemed to grow teeth.
Did he simply need to not fucking do anything? Sit in his Existential Root Domain and never come out? Because it felt, sitting here in the howling snow, that the more he moved, the more everything around him deteriorated!
And then there was the other thing!
It came to him slowly, as he turned the information over, and he did not like it at all.
The Counting did not only press on Roots. Upon every other Root, and upon all others besides, existence had said. All others. Even the Immense Ones would be heavily affected, then. Even the thrones above him would feel the cold grow heavier with every Root that existed.
Which meant that anyone who wanted the cold to ease on themselves now had a very simple way to do it.
Fewer Roots!
If you were an Immense One, and the winter sat heavier on you for every young Root counted beneath you, then every Root that stopped existing would make your own winter a little lighter. Just a little. Just enough to be worth thinking about.
Noah’s expression grew heavier still!
He lifted his head and looked up through the blizzard at the ring of floating thrones.
The snow was so thick now that he could barely see them. Only shapes. The black glass. The bone. The living leaf, empty now. The hollowed star. The hazes. Great vague presences sitting in the storm above the Plain, looking down at the golden clouds where every being with a Root of Immensity sat pale and still.
And it felt, suddenly, as though he were looking up at countless pairs of eyes.
Chilly eyes. Calm eyes. Eyes that had just been handed a very simple sum, and were looking down at him, and at Achilles, and at every other Root on the mountain, and quietly beginning to count!