Chapter 5810: Brutality! I
Chapter 5810: Brutality! I
He wanted to test a few things of his newly elevated power, so he tested them.
He started with the frost. Snow was still drifting down through the edge of the golden dome, and he reached for one flake and asked the cold inside it to turn. It did. The flake stopped in the air, spun once, and drifted back up along its own path, against the fall of every other flake around it. He tried a second, and a third. They all answered.
Next, THE Unwritten Page.
He reached for it as he would reach for a thought at the edge of sleep, and something came. A title, faint and unfinished, hanging in his mind with nothing written under it. He could not read all of it. Enough of it was legible to know it pointed downward, deeper into the Basal Floor, toward the direction the Glacial Record had shown him. More information wss slowly coming from this as it seemed to be running in thr background for now.
Last, the Lent Clause.
He told Ling what he wanted to try something.
"Big Boy, you have already tried many things today. What more are you planning on doing?"
He spoke I Dream of Healing Infinitely onto her.
WUU!
It settled into her like a coat laid over her shoulders. She looked at her hands, then bit the pad of her own thumb until it bled. The cut closed before the first drop could fall.
"Oh," she said. Her eyes had gone very bright, and she kept looking at her thumb as though it had told her a secret.
Results, then. The frost turned. The Page gave him a direction and was still working right now to give him results. And the Clause held on someone else.
He focused on something else.
The memory of the Caretaker being led away in chains was not the only thing the crow had carried.
Ruination spent a long while going through the rest of it! The devoured weavings of the crow had settled into Noah when its body turned to dream, and she read them as she read everything now, thread by thread, perfectly, keeping all of it.
Most of what she found was hunger. Ages of it, flat and endless, the long patrol of a thing that circled the same frozen islands and ate whatever came through the barrier. A good part of the rest was cold, simply cold, the texture of the Long Night soaking through a mind until there was nothing else in it.
But under the hunger and the cold, there were shapes. Routes. Places the crow had been told never to go. Places it had been told to guard. And other things, much larger than it, that it had been afraid of its whole existence!
Ruination passed it to him piece by piece, and Noah listened with his eyes closed.
It was not enough! It was a map drawn by something that had only ever walked one corridor.
So he reached for THE Unwritten Page to finish its work!
He pressed on it, and fed it everything Ruination had pulled from the crow, every route and every forbidden place, and let the Page make the shape of what lay ahead.
The title sharpened. And under it, for the first time, a page began to write itself!
|THE Unwritten Page turns.|
|THE Undersnow is not a single place. It is a descent.|
|THE Basal Floor is its uppermost layer. Here prowl the Guards: Empowered Hollow Night Lifeforms, each one bound to a stretch of frozen dark, each one carrying a Lesser Kryos within it. They do not live here. They keep watch here.|
|Beneath THE Basal Floor lies the second layer.|
|THE Evergrave of THE Unthawed Ages.|
...!
The name settled into him grandly.
|THE Evergrave is not a floor. It is an expanse. It holds skies, seas, frozen Dimensionalities, and lands that stretch farther than any Guard has ever wandered.|
|Its inhabitants are not Hollow as they are Night Lifeforms in truth: whole, aware, and old beyond counting. They remember, and speak, and keep customs no living thing has kept for a very long time.|
|They were not born there.|
|Every one of them unjustly died. Across the ages, and across the cycles of existence that came before this one, reaching back to before THE First Sundering. And when they died, the Night did not let them go. It kept them and has maintained their existences ever since.|
|Many of them are First Lifeforms.|
|Within THE Evergrave, lifeforms approaching Immensity, and lifeforms seated at it, are abundant.|
|Extreme caution is recommended.|
...!
Noah opened his eyes!
First Lifeforms. Provenance Lifeforms from the very beginning! Dead, all of them. Dead for longer than the Legacies had existed. And kept. Held in the cold by the Night, their existences maintained, age after age after age, and The Long Night that was abundant here...now permeated across existence.
Why?!
Why would a winter keep its dead? For what? And who had the Caretaker been, to walk among them and come above the Undersnow to give him missions, and who was the faceless thing that had chained her and led her down toward them?
He did not have the answer. He had a direction, and a name, and a warning, and a great deal more to think about than he had had an hour ago.
And he had one more thing!
Because the Page had not stopped at the Evergrave. At the very bottom of it, there was another line, shorter than the rest, and it was not about the layers below. It was about right now. About the golden bubble of dream he had raised over the place where the crow had died, and what was waiting on the other side of its walls.
He read it twice!
Then he let out a slow breath and looked at Ling.
She was still sitting on her drift of dream-cloud, watching him, but the dazed look had gone out of her face. She had seen his eyes open.
"Hey," Noah said. "We’re going to be pressed a bit, and made to suffer. But even you shouldn’t die with my Osmontian Tongue on you. Hang in there, okay?"
He said it simply. Then he picked the tenth Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin out of the air beside him and threw it to her.
She caught it!
Her eyes went wide!
It was the last one. She held it in her palm and stared at him as if he had tossed her his own heart. Then her existence drew it in. Greedily, all at once, the blue-gold star sinking into her palm and vanishing, and her whole body lit up from the inside. The Root that was her entire existence drank it and blazed, and she shone, her skin glowing gold-violet, her loose hair lifting, the air around her humming with a power that had not been there a heartbeat ago!
He had meant it as preparation.
Then he waved his hand.
The clouds of dream fell!
The golden haze that had held them came down all at once, sinking away into nothing, and the frozen dark of the Basal Floor rushed back in around them. Cold, first. Then the torn Dimensions drifting in their thousands, and the snow, no longer melting, falling straight onto their faces.
And the things that had been waiting in ambush that he had forseen!
There were nine of them!
They had gathered around the dream while it stood, silent, patient, ringed in a wide circle across the floating islands and the empty dark, and every one of them was as large as the crow had been. Some were larger. All of them were Empowered Hollow Night Lifeforms, and every one of them was looking at him.
A wolf with three heads, each one a different age of the same animal, pup and prime and grey-muzzled elder, frost dripping from all three jaws.
A whale that swam through the empty air, vast and slow, its ribs showing white through its frozen hide, whole drowned Dimensions trapped in the ice of its belly.
A spider with legs of clear glass, each leg taller than a mountain, and in the web it had strung between two torn Dimensions hung frozen bodies, hundreds of them, turning slowly in the cold.
A headless titan in armor of black ice, sitting astride a horse made entirely of snow.
An elk whose antlers were a chandelier of frozen light, every branch hung with small pale flames that did not melt anything.
A scorpion of blue ice as long as a mountian range, its tail curled high, its stinger dripping something colder than frost.
An owl with a hundred faces where its one face should have been, all of them human, all of them with their eyes closed.
A hydra of icicles, nine necks swaying, every head blind.
And at the center of the ring, rising up out of the dark before them, the ninth.
A Naga!
Its lower body was a serpent’s coil so long its tail vanishd somewhere among the distant islands, scaled in white and pale blue, and its upper body was a creature with the shape of a woman and none of the warmth of one. It had six arms, long and thin and jointed wrong, each hand holding a blade of rime. Its hood flared wide behind its head, and the inside of that hood was lined with frozen eyes. Its face was beautiful and fiendish and utterly cold, and it smiled at him with far too many teeth.
Noah’s panel-sight flickered across all nine, and every reading came back at the crow’s level or higher!
Okay! They saved him the time to go looking!
The Naga lowered its head toward him!
|You do not belong here.|
|But you do not listen, so...|
|Let this place where you have killed also be your grave.|
...!
---
<THE Verdant Regard>
It was always spring in the Existential Immense Domain of THE Verdant Regard.
It had been spring there since before some Legacies were founded. Endless meadows rolled away under a pale green sky, thick with flowers that bloomed and fell and bloomed again without ever wilting. Rivers of clear sap ran between them. Trees older than most Dimensions leaned ovver those rivers, their leaves whispering softly, and everything in the whole vast domain grew toward its center, toward her, as flowers turn toward the sun.
The snow had found its way in anyway!
It fell on the meadows in thin grey flakes, and wherever it landed, the flowers did not wilt. They simply stopped. Frozen mid-bloom, petals half open, waiting for a warmth that did not come.
At the center of it all, THE Verdant Regard sat on a bed of moss with her daughter in her arms.
Minerva had not woken! Her body lay limp against her mother’s chest, pale and still, the crooked crown of leaves long gone from her head. Beside them, on the moss, lay the illusory green Root that had been severed on the Plain of Accord. It was frozen now, all the way through! The frost had crept up from its broken end until there was no green left in it at all.
THE Verdant Regard looked at it, and did not move.
Something buzzed at this time.
A faint vibration at the edge of her domain, polite, asking for entry. She knew the shape of it before she even turned her attention toward it, and had known that shape for a very long time.
She let it in.
The air of the domain split open like an eyelid, and he stepped through!
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND did not come as an eye this time. He came as a figure, tall and dark and hazy at the edges, his face barely perceptible, and his presence pressed down on the spring meadows until the frozen flowers bowed. He walked toward her through the snow without hurry.
"THE Keepers of Existence have confirmed it again," he said. His voice was low and warm and very reasonable. "And again. Riven is one of the keys. Perhaps the major key. Even with the winter growing colder, everything remains on track for him."
He stopped a few paces from her.
"We know none of those already Immense will find the door to THE Great Becoming. It has to be an Immensity that rises after the Long Night. And this newest change, Roots no longer able to mature into Immensity at all, only confirms that we are heading in the right direction. I came to ask you to place your cards on the right lifeform. With Riven, things are confirmed. We can all support him. And we can all gain our access."
The snow fell between them.
"The first Root formed after the Long Night, Osmont, may be a key as well. Even if he is not, he is an anomaly enough that Riven feels he needs to devour what Osmont holds, to ensure his own success." His voice softened.
"So I came to ask. Let us work together, as we used to. Allow us to take Osmont. I am sure there are others, even in THE Legacy of THE Acharya, who have their doubts. Let us get past this together."
He came around behind her!
He stood at her back, and his hand came up, slow and tender, and his fingers traced the side of her neck. Lightly. Almost lovingly. Then his hand slid down her arm, and found hers, and his fingers wove through her own.
She was looking at her daughter’s face.
"I am sorry for our daughter," THE SLEEPLESS FIEND said quietly.
...!
Our daughter!
"Through her, I sensed he was involved as well. Yes?"
His thumb moved slowly across the back of her hand. "Existence wraps tightly around anomalies. Even if he is not a key, he is certainly an important weaving. Can I count on you again?"
THE Verdant Regard said nothing!
"If you say yes, I will contact the others and make things ready. Moriarty and a few more will stay loyal to Lucy’s teachings. They will not move."
His fingers tightened, very slightly, around hers. "So it may be a small war, to get Osmont. Or it may be a simple extraction, if we plan well enough."
...!
THE Verdant Regard looked down at the frozen Root on the moss.
She looked at it for a long time. Her eyes were heavy, full of grief so old and so deep! The snow settled on the frozen Root, and on her daughter’s still face, and on her own green hair.
Then her eyes sharpened!
She raised her head. Not toward the Fiend. Past him, past the edge of her domain, past the Legacy’s thousand mountains and the blizzard howling between them, toward a place most beings could not have seen at all. A lone dark mountain, wrapped in a trembling coat of hazy Immensity, burning steady against the storm!
Her gaze held there, sharp as a blade.
And her fingers closed tighter around the hand of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.