Chapter 5801: Difficult! I
Chapter 5801: Difficult! I
For a long time, the only sound on THE Firmament Mountain was the blizzard.
Then Sir Moriarty rose from his throne of instruments!
There was no slow, pleased rising this time. He simply stood and when he spoke his voice cut through the howling wind as cleanly as a blade through cloth.
"The Convocation is ended."
The Plain went still inside the storm!
"Every one of you will return to their mountain with their Keeper. Now." His spectacles were white with frost. "There will be no Favors granted. There will be no closing rite. Go."
There was no warmth in it at all. None of the dry amusement, none of the scholar’s delight, nothing but precision, each word set down exactly where it was needed and not one word more.
Nobody argued!
Noah looked out across the Plain, at the blizzard tearing sideways over the golden clouds, white and endless and roaring. He could feel it stretching away past the edge of the mountain, past the Legacy, past anything he could perceive.
It was not only here. He was nearly certain of it. Across every Dimension and every Observable Existence, the same storm was likely raging right now.
Above, one after another, the thrones began to empty!
The pressure of the Immense Ones’ gazes lifted from the Plain like a hand taken off a chest. First the black glass. Then the hollowed star, the bone, the living throne in leaf that had already stood empty. The hazes thinned and vanished. Moriarty was gone. Poona lingered a moment longer than the rest, her bright eyes sweeping once across the golden clouds below, and then she was gone too.
The ring of thrones hung empty in the storm, filling slowly with snow!
On the Plain, the Progeny and Provenance Lifeforms began to disperse.
They did it quietly. The water-woman stepped off her cloud with her fish still dark inside her and let her Keeper lead her away. The stag followed his, antlers bowed, bells silent.
Batiatus went without a word. Keepers led their charges to the edge of the mountain one pair after another, onto the glowing Conduits, and away into the white, until the golden clouds stood mostly empty and the Plain of Accord was only snow.
Noah stayed where he was!
He stood at the edge of his cloud and looked at the place where Minerva had fallen. The snow had nearly buried it already.
"Wow," said a voice beside him. "What a crazy thing your actions had a hand in propagating."
...!
Ling was standing in the snow beside his cloud!
He had not seen her come, and he had not felt her come, which was a great deal more unsettling! One moment the snow beside him was empty, and the next she was simply there, looking up at him.
Her round face was somber for once, the smile gone quiet. But her eyes were bright. They were full of something that was not sorrow at all, a sharp, curious light, like someone who knows a great deal more.
Noah did not turn to look at her.
"I did not have a hand in propagating anything," he said.
Ling held out her hand, palm up. Snow gathered on it at once, piling up fast, a small white heap in the middle of her palm.
She was dressed for a summer afternoon, not a blizzard at the end of existence. The same blue silk dress embroidered with gold, cut high at both sides, her thick powerful thighs and strong calves bare to the storm but for the white wrap-bands at her ankles.
No coat, no cloak, no fur. The wind tore at her ribons and whipped her spiraled buns and she did not so much as shiver. She stood in the howling white looking perfectly, entirely at ease.
She smiled!
And her voice arrived in his mind, for him alone.
"Every time you take a step, authority shifts beneath you. Every time you open your mouth, the air changes. You make a choice, and existence answers. Cause and effect. It’s that simple."
She tipped her palm, and the little heap of snow slid off it.
"Some people love to cry about bad luck. They point at their ruined existence and call it an accident. A twist of fate. A coincidence. But nothing in this life is coincidental. Whether you want to admit it or hide behind it, causality is inescapable. Every choice you ever made has an effect."
Her eyes went to the buried green glow in the snow.
"Minerva did what she did of her own will. But you were among the things that came together to make it happen as it happened. Is it bad luck that she had to be the first one to try to become Immense, only to fail? That the new conditions of existence were revealed through her, and the cold got colder?"
She hummed. "Hmm. We just said luck is something people cry about. There’s no fate. There’s no luck. There’s only us. What we are, and what we choose to do, Big Boy."
The snow poured down around them.
"And I’ve made a choice. It’ll have its own causality, same as everything. I’m inviting you to my mountain."
...!
An invitation to her mountain? Now? In the middle of all this?
Noah turned his head, finally, and looked at her!
"Whatever for?" he sent back, for her alone.
Ling blinked at him. Then she smiled brilliantly.
"Why," she said, "to put your head between my thighs and see if I can crack it."
...!
Noah said nothing!
Ling laughed!
"Kidding." She tilted her head, and for a moment the brightness in her eyes went very focused. "I’ve made a choice, and so has the Immense One behind me. Someone a great deal more powerful than Sir Moriarty, and a great deal more mysterious, wants to have a talk with you."
She held out her hand, palm up again, empty this time. "Walk with me?"
Noah looked around!
The Plain of Accord was nearly empty now, a white field under a white sky, the blizzard howling across it and the empty thrones hanging overhead full of snow.
A few golden clouds still held figures. On the nearest one, Achilles had drawn Rose close against his side, one arm around her, frost thick on both of them, his solemn eyes on the storm. Rose’s face was pressed into his shoulder. Neither of them was looking at anything but each other.
Noah looked back at the girl who was a Root, entirely, from her skin to her core.
A mysterious Immense One. More powerful than Moriarty.
He needed time to think anyway. Maybe an Immense One would be illuminating.
He nodded!
Ling grinned. She flicked one foot against the snow, a light, careless little motion, and her hand snaked out and closed around his. Her grip was warm.
She flicked her foot again.
And the two of them were gone!
In the place where they had stood, the snow crashed down harder than before, filling in their footprnts in an instant, as though the blizzard had been waiting for them to leave.
---
Ling’s mountain was unlike any other in the Legacy.
It rose alone out of the blizzard, wrapped from root to hidden peak in a trembling golden-violet haze. That haze was the light of an Immensity, burning steadily and deliberately all the way around, and where the storm struck it, the snow simply stopped. The blizzard screamed and whipped against it and could not get through. Like a massive coat of Immensity wrapped around an entire mountain!
Ling let go of his hand and went ahead up the slope.
Inside the haze there was no snow, and yet the mountain was cold! Its slopes were dull grey-black stone, the air still and heavy. Gnarled trees with bark like old iron lined the way, their branches bent back on themselves, and every one of them was shivering in the windless air, as if they remembered the cold even with it kept out.
Ahead, a cave swelled out of the mountainside like a great stone throat, twisted trees crowding its mouth and pale smoke drifting out of it.
Ling went in without slowing. Noah followed, and at the stone lip, his sight bloomed.
|You are entering the periphery of an Existential Immense Domain.|
|The Immense One who controls it holds absolute authority within it.|
|Although, to be clear, it would hardly matter whether they wished you harm here or anywhere else.|
...!
Noah stopped!
A little way into the misty tunnel, Ling turned her head, the smoke curling around her face. For a moment she did not look like a cheerful girl who had run late up a Conduit. She looked like something that lived in a place like this.
"I don’t bite," she said. "Neither will the owner of this place. Come on."
Noah did not do afraid. And even if he had, curiosity had always won that argument in him. He stepped in!
The tunnel was long and close and warm, its walls damp under his fingertips, so thick with mist he could barely see her blue silk ahead of him. The smell of incense grew stronger with every step.
Then it opened into a cavern!
Its ceiling was lost in the dark and mist filled all of it, grey banks rolling slow across the floor. It felt enormous, and occupied, like a room where someone sits very still in a corner.
Ling stopped at the edge of the mist and stretched, arms high, then bending one leg and the other, her powerful thighs flexing and loosening under the silk.
For a moment she simply stood there with her eyes closed, the mist curling around her ankles, as if listening for something only she could hear. She breathed out.
And then...she danced!
It began slow: one step, her arms sweeping a wide, flowing arc, drawing a circle on the air. Her body turned with it and the arc continued unbroken, circles within circles, every motion flowing into the next with no seam between them. Her face had gone calm and far away. She was a priestess at a rite, and the rite was her.
Then her feet struck the stone!
DUM!
Heel, then ball, a hard stamp that rolled through the cavern like a drum. Another. A rhythm rising, older than words. Her palms struck her own thighs and chest in time, call and answer, skin answering stone. Her hips moved loose and grounded, her body sinking low toward the earth and rising again, arms flung wide.
With every turn, the mist drew back from her in rings!
And as it cleared, flames appeared! Purple torches set in the cavern walls kindled one after another as the mist fell away from them, two, then six, then a great ring of dozens burning deep, steady violet, throwing long trembling shadows across the stone and across the dancing girl at the center of it all.
The rhythm quickened. Her turns tightened, and the violet light caught on her and trailed behind her hands like ribbons of flame. Twelve turnings, Noah counted, each one different, and on the twelfth she spun so fast the purple light wrapped her entirely!
|You are witnessing a NARRATIVE INSCRIPTION RITUAL DANCE: THE Kindled Circle.|
|It is not performed. It is written, with the body, onto the domain.|
|Each turning draws the dancer closer to their own Root of Immensity, attuning existence and Root to one another.|
|Performed to its Truest Essence, the distance between the two closes entirely. The dancer and their Root become one.|
...!
Noah went very still!
Become one with their Root? He looked at the girl spinning in the violet light, at the panel of 1s he had read on the Plain, at the being whose Root did not sit inside her but was her, from her skin to her core.
So that was how! Somewhere, at some point, she had danced this until there was nothing left between her and her Root at all, and whatever she had been before that, she had stopped being it.
The last haze thinned at the far end of the cavern, where the ring of torches met, and lifted. Behind it lay an old, faded prayer mat.
And on it sat an Immense One!
Noah could not quite see it. Its Dimensionality ran so deep that his sight kept sliding off its edges. But he saw enough to know he would never forget it.
It sat, vast as a mountain range drawn down into the shape of a giant. Enormous prayer beads, each the size of a boulder, dark and polished by some unimaginable span of handling, hung around its hands and thick forearms on a cord older than many. Its eyes were open, pale and pupil-less, and slow tears ran from them down a broad, solemn face, hissing faintly where they met the violet fire at its jaw.
And yet the mouth beneath was set in a wide, fierce line, almost a smile, burning with terrible cheerful certainty. Its hair rose from its brow like a mane of fire, and the fire was purple, wreathing its shoulders and beads and knees in slow, deep violet.
It wept, and it smiled, and it burned!
Unmoving and silent, it sat on its prayer mat, and its weight filled the whole mountain!
Ling’s dance wound down to stillness directly in front of Noah. She rose tall, lifted her arms once toward the ceiling, and let out one long breath, the purple light sliding off her like water.
Then she sat cross-legged on a second mat laid before the prayer mat, patted the empty space beside her, and looked back over her shoulder.
"Come."
...!
Noah stood a moment longer, looking at the weeping, smiling, burning thing!
This was what an Immense One felt like. Poona waving from a golden throne, Moriarty adjusting his spectacles over a corpse, those had been Immense Ones choosing to look like something he could stand beside.
This one chose nothing. It simply was, and the air pressed on him so heavily that he had to decide, deliberately, to keep breathing it.
Why would a being like this call him here?
The answer was not his yet. He wanted it!
So he crossed the cavern floor between the purple torches, sat down on the mat beside Ling, and looked up at the Immense One.