Chapter 5808: Emotion!
Chapter 5808: Emotion!
<THE True Human Emperor>
Noah’s existence was stretched across many places at once, and one of them was a dream.
It was Emotive’s dream!
He had visited a great many dreams since he built the Dream Engine. Adelaide’s snowbound capital. The Emperor Penguin’s army of robots wearing his face. Each one had been a window into what a person wanted most, rendered in whatever shape their heart could hold.
Emotive’s was different.
He arrived floating in a vast, shining expanse that took him a moment to recognize. It was THE Earliest Folds. Or rather, it was Emotive’s memory of them, reimagined and polished and made grander than they had ever truly been, the old strange spaces of his long-lost Observable Existences rebuilt in a dreamer’s hands.
Massive structures of THE Loom rose everywere through it, the great woven works that Emotive and THE Living Paradox had once built together.
They climbed and arched and spiraled away in every direction, towers of woven light, bridges of thread thick as continents.
And everywhere, in every direction, stood statues of Noah!
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Some small enough to hold in two hands, some so vast their heads were lost among the woven towers. Noah seated on a throne. Laughing, head thrown back.
Arms spread wide, painting a Dimension in his blood. Standing over a fallen titan. Every one of them was stellar, grand, carved with such devotion that each seemed to have captured the very best thing about him in a single moment and held it there forever.
He floated before one of them, and stopped.
It was made of pure Luxuria Ego Authority. The whole enormous figure shone with a deep red light, warm and heavy and intoxicating, the raw substance of desire shaped into a man. It was him with crimson hair and golden eyes, wearing a fitted red suit, standing with one hand in his pocket and the faintest knowing smile on his face.
And sitting on its shoulder was Emotive!
She wore a loose red dress that hung loose and careless off her fair figure, her white skin shining brilliantly in the red light of the statue beneath her. Her hair burned. Not with one color, but with many, all of them shifting at once, crimson and violet and electric blue and a green like poison and a gold like sunrise, every shade of every feeling a being could have, tangled together and flickering madly. And her eyes, when they found him, blazed with that same bottomless mania.
She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful!
Then those eyes found him.
And she smashed forward off the statue’s shoulder, crossed the space between them in an instant, and wrapped her whole body around his feet!
She clung there, arms locked around his ankels, cheek pressed to the top of his foot, and let out a long, deep sigh of absolute contentment!
Noah sighed too. He reached down and patted her burning hair.
"You can just hug my body, you know," he said. "Why wrap yourself around my feet?"
She did not let go.
Sometimes her love and her fascination with him felt too extreme. Sometimes it unsettled even him. But this was who she was. This was the woman who had torn her own Heart out and given it to him, to save him from becoming an apathetic, mindless version of himself. He could put up with a great deal of strangeness from someone who had done that.
"I like what I like!" Emotive said into his foot. Then she lifted her face, and her manic eyes blazed up at him. "And I can feel so many emotions coming off your existence right now. So many! How can I be of service to you, my Everything?"
...!
Noah looked into those eyes of boundless mania, and produced a Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin.
It hung in his palm, pale blue and humming.
He reached down with his other hand and took Emotive by the neck, not gently, and lifted her up off his feet until she hung before him, her toes dangling, her burning hair spilling around her face. Her eyes went wide and bright with delight.
He was not being cruel. He knew her. She liked to be handled a little roughly, liked to feel his grip and his certainty, and in her own mad way this was how she knew she was loved. He was only speaking her language.
Then he drove the Kryos into her chest!
She gasped, and her eyes never left his face, absolute mania and absolute trust burning in them together.
Noah went to work. He reached into her existence through the Kryos and began to build a Root, and the moment he looked closely at what was in there, he was alarmed.
He had known her emotions were strong. But..
She had elevated the Seven Deadly Sins and their Virtues to heights he had never imagined. Luxuria and Castitas, Ira and Patientia, Superbius and Humilitas, every one of them and their Egos refined and deepened and stacked atop each other in her existence until they formed a structure so dense and so volatile it hummed like a storm about to break. She had been busy, in her long dream. Terrifyingly busy.
He did not change any of it. He only used what she had already built, guiding the Kryos along the paths she had carved herself, letting her Egos and her emotions shape the Root as it formed. It was hers. He was just helping it find its footing.
Minutes passed.
HUUM!
Emotive floated free of his hand.
She hung in the dreaming air before him, arms loose at her sides, her many-colored hair streaming upward as though caught in a wind that blew from her own chest. Her whole body glowed. Waves of emotion rolled off her, one after another, joy and fury and longing and grief and a madness underneath all of it, each wave carrying the weight of an Ego so heavy it bent the woven light of THE Loom’s towers around her.
|A ROOT OF IMMENSITY has been formed.|
|Bearer: EMOTIVE.|
|THE PASSIONAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN.|
|THE ROOT OF EMOTION.|
|PHYSICAL ROOT OF IMMENSITY.|
|Nature: Emotion made flesh. Every feeling the bearer holds is carried in her body as mass, force, and weight. The more she feels, the heavier and stronger she becomes.|
...!
Physical?
Noah stared at the prompt!
How could a Root of Emotion be Physical and not Conceptual? Emotion was the most abstract thing he could think of. It had no shape, no weight, nothing to put your hand on. Unless it did. Unless a racing heart and shaking hands and a throat gone tight with grief were not the side effects of feeling at all, but the feeling itself. Unless every emotion she had ever had lived in her body first, and she had simply never let it be anywhere else.
His eyes shone!
Before him, Emotive dropped from the air and knelt. Terrifying waves of power and Ego vibrated off her, rippling out through the whole dream, and she bowed her burning head to him.
Anyone watching would have thought he had just wasted two Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins. One on Thalia. One here. Two of the rarest treasures of the Long Night, given away, gone.
But they would have been wrong.
His Foundation, THE Tide That Owes Nothing, sat at the very forefront of his existence now, and it was no longer simply collecting the boons of his actions and filtering them. His Provenance of THE Human Dreamer had wrapped itself around the Tide, tightly, and together they were doing something new.
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has answered your giving.|
|Given: two Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins. Aided: the formation of two Roots of Immensity.|
|Returned, as dreamed: QUINTESSENTIAL EXISTENTIAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN x10.|
|Your Root buzzes with excitement at the thought of consuming them.|
...!
Ten!
Noah felt his Root hum in his chest, eager, hungry, spinning faster at the mere thought of them. Ten Quintessential ECGs, returned for two Kryos given freely. That was the Tide. That was what happened when he gave with open hands and a clear heart.
He could be magnanimous. He could give things away, and get back even grander returns. His women and his family could be spoiled, and things could be made right for all the women he had not exactly ignored, but had never quite given their proper due.
A great many things could be made right. And in doing so, he would keep living his Dream grandly, and keep making tremendous gains, and there was no contradiction in that at all.
He was still thinking it when two small arms came around him from behind.
Emotive had risen from her kneel and come up at his back, and now she wrapped herself around him, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades, her small hands locking tight across his chest.
"I want to end my dream soon," she said softly. "So I can be by your side again."
Her grip tightened.
"I’m connected to your emotions more than anyone. So I’m the most in tune with what you feel, and what you want. And you, my Everything, are voracious."
Her voice dropped. "I can feel the cold you’re fighting against, and taking in. I can feel your fear. Your doubts. I can feel you wondering if you have what it takes against this Long Night, for something that seems so complex, with so many moving pieces."
...!
Noah’s eyes pulsed as her small hands wrapped tighter around his chest!
"But I can feel your Tyranny too," Emotive went on. "Boundless. And your Quintessence, roaring inside you, screaming that even in all this, you will reign supreme. I can feel you more than anyone else can, whether you meant it to be that way or not."
She pressed closer.
"Emotion is one of the strongest things in all of existence. Every lifeform does everything it does because of how it feels. Immense Ones move by emotions, an ant moves by emotion. Your grand dreams, you enact them because of how you feel. You feel grand!"
Her voice trembled with something between devotion and madness. "And I want to make sure existence has no choice but to bend to your will."
Her burning hair spilled over his shoulder.
"This dream you put me in let me hone my emotions and my Egos. I won’t leave it just yet. But even without leaving it, I can still feel you, and I can do many things...even If I am not awake."
She paused as her voice turned low and very hungry. "I’m also unfathomably thirsty. And true to my emotions. I want to spend the next few years in this dream doing some unspeakable things to you."
She pressed her lips to his ear.
"Are you ready, my Master?"
...!
Noah’s eyes pulsed with voraciousness.
So did hers.
And the grand dream went on around them, the statues of him watching from every direction, the woven structures of THE Loom arching overhead, as time in the dream stretched out long and slow and theirs!