Chapter 5817: Glory! I
Chapter 5817: Glory! I
Barbatos’s dream smelled of glorious death.
Noah stepped into it through the Dream Engine and found her where he always did, at the heart of a necropolis that went on forever. Tombs rose in endless terrraces under a violet sky, each one carved with names, and between them walked the dead she had raised. She sat on the steps of the tallest tomb with a book open across her knees and a thread of pale green necromancy spinning lazily between her fingers as it passed through dozens of dead Dimensions.
She looked up, saw him, and smiled.
He spared her the speech and opened his hand.
The corpse of THE Warden Who Does Not Rise came out of his Dream and settled onto the terraces of her necropolis. It filled the sky. Its frozen fur blotted out the violet light, its broken wings of stopped moments hung over whole districts of tombs, its great ringed face lay turned toward her, eyes closed, as though it had simply lain down among her dead to sleep.
Every skeleton in the necropolis stopped walking and looked at it!
Barbatos set down her book.
She asked him what it was. He told her: a Half-Immense guardian, dead, whole, carrying Ages of the Long Night’s cold in every spine of its fur. She asked him what he wanted her to do with it. He told her whatever she liked.
She walked up to it slowly and laid her palm flat against its frozen side.
"Oh," Barbatos said quietly. "Oh, you gorgeous fucking thing!"
She was talking to the corpse as he left her to it.
|Given: the corpse of THE Warden Who Does Not Rise, a Half-Immense Lifeform, to Barbatos.|
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has noted your giving. A gift of this weight, given with thought to one you hold dear, will be answered.|
...!
He moved on!
—
Emotive’s dream was exactly as he had left it: THE Earliest Folds reimagined in a madwoman’s hands, woven towers of THE Loom arching overhead, and statues of him everywhere, each one carved with the devotion of someone who had never once considered being ashamed of it.
She saw him and came flying. He caught her before she could wrap herself around his feet this time.
While she clung to his chest, laughing, he thought about why he had come to her with this.
He had many people with potential. His Son. Seo-yeon. Thalia with her Root of genome alteration. Barbatos, just now, with a Half-Immense corpse to raise. Every one of them could grow into something grand.
But Emotive’s potential was the one that frightened him a little!
Her Root was Emotion, and it was Physical. Every feeling she held, she carried in her body as mass, and force, and weight. The more she felt, the heavier and stronger she became.
That alone would have been enough. It was only the beginning.
Every lifeform in existence did what it did because of how it felt. Pride built empires. Fear toppled them. Love had moved him across more domains than he could count. Emotion was the engine underneath every other engine, and Emotive’s Root was built out of that engine directly.
And emotion was always one’s own. It came from inside, every time! The Long Night froze whatever a being had taken from somewhere else, and it could find nothing in a feeling to freeze. Under the Counting, under the Sealed Door, under a winter that choked every borrowed power in existence, her Root would keep generating, because a heart that feels needs nothing from anyone.
Then there were the Seven Sins and their Virtues. She had refined them in her dream to heights that had alarmed him, stacked and packed and volatile, storm upon storm of Ego. Her Root had simply swallowed all of it and turned it into weight.
And last, the thing only she had. The link. She was tied to his emotions in an unfathomable way. Every feeling that moved through him reached her too. As he grew, she grew. As he climbed, some part of her climbed with him.
A Root that fed on the one thing in existence that could never run dry, fed further by him.
Yes. She was the one!
He set her down in front of him, and let his Dream open.
Behind him, the golden-blue panda rose!
THE Vigil That Wished to Rise gathered out of his Dream, vast and shining, its gold-ringed eyes calm, its whole unbroken wings spread wide over the woven towers. Emotive’s manic eyes went round and bright as she looked up at it. The dream-panda reached into the depths of Noah’s Dream with one great paw, and drew out THE Stillborn Singularity of THE Warden’s Immensity, half-perceivable and flickering, and lowered it gently into Emotive’s open hands.
She held it, and her hair burned in every color at once!
"For me?" she whispered.
"For you."
She stared at it, then at him, and her eyes blazed with a love so total it was very nearly frightening. Instead of asking what it was, she held it against her chest, over her Root, and he watched her existence lean toward it.
|Given: THE Stillborn Singularity of THE Warden’s Immensity, to Emotive.|
|Given this hour: a Half-Immense corpse and a singularity of failed Immensity, to two you hold dear, with thought.|
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has answered.|
HUUM!
At this time, Emotive’s figure also began to shine as an utterly euphoric blast of emotions erupted from her!
And...
|THE Tide has been made euphoric with its brilliance. The quality of your return has further increased.|
...!
The dream around them shuddered!
|Returned, as dreamed:|
|Loot I: the corpse of an Immense One. Whole. Its Immensity settled within it, unscattered.|
|Loot II: an Immense Ergosphere. A sphere of turning Immensity, holding within it Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins. Number: unknown.|
...!
They came out of the Tide into Emotive’s dream, and the dream strained under them at once!
The corpse came first! It hung in the sky above the woven towers, and it was vaster than the Warden had been, vaster than anything Noah had yet seen lying still. A figure like a colossal robed sovereign, its face serene and sealed, its hands crossed over its chest, a crown of pale fire still resting on its brow long after the fire had stopped burning.
Its Immensity had stayed whole through death. It sat inside the body, whole and settled and heavy, and the weight of it pressed down on the dream until the statues of Noah began to crack at their bases!
Oh!
Oh!!!
Then the Ergosphere!
It bloomed beside the corpse, a sphere of Immensity turning around a dark core, and the turning never slowed. Currents of pale gold light swept around it in bnds, faster at its equator, slower at its poles, dragging the dream-air around with them.
Inside, glimpsed through the turning bands, lay shapes. Many shapes. Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins, dozens, hundreds, more, suspended in the dark at the center, and every time Noah tried to count them, the turning carried the count away.
...!
Emotive’s dream began to come apart!
The woven towers of THE Loom groaned and bent. Cracks raced across the sky. The statues of Noah toppled one after another, and the ground of THE Earliest Folds buckled under the weight of two things that had never been made to sit inside someone’s dream!
Noah moved at once!
He wrapped his Dream around the corpse and the Ergosphere together, sealed them in blue-gold, and pulled. The whole enormous weight of both came away out of Emotive’s dream in a single rush and went down, through him, through the Dream Engine, into THE Existential Root Domain, where there was room enough to hold them.
Emotive’s dream steadied. The cracks in the sky closed!
---
In THE Existential Root Domain, one part of Noah stood before a dead Immense One and a turning sphere, and looked.
The corpse lay across the blue-gold hills like a fallen range of mountains, robed and crowned, its hands crossed over its chest. Its Immensity sat inside it whole, and the weight of that pressed a shallow valley into the Domain’s soil around it. Beside it, the Immense Ergosphere turned and turned.
He was about to grasp them when his gaze changed.
Another part of him had felt something!