Chapter 5818: Glory! II
Chapter 5818: Glory! II
Far away, in the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, inside a cavern of purple torches on a lone dark mountain, a sliver of Noah still sat cross-legged on a mat. He had sent the a part of himself and all of Ling down into THE Undersnow.
And now that part felt the sky come down.
Auras of Immensity pressed on the mountain from above. Several of them, heavy and foreign and moving, bearing down through the blizzard toward the Thinker’s coat of burning light. The purple torches along the cavern walls leaned sideways in their brackets as though a great wind were blowing through the stone! The cavern floor hummed.
Noah looked across at the only other being in the cavern.
THE THINKER AT THE END OF EXISTENCE sat on his prayer mat, vast and kneeling, the frost-packed gash still leaking faint threads of Immensity down his back. His great beads clicked, one by one. His pale, pupil-less eyes lifted toward the cavern ceiling and moved slowly around it, as though he could see straight through the stone to the sky beyond.
|"Adversity is always grand, and always relentless."|
His voice was calm and deep and faintly interested, the voice of a scholar noting that it had begun to rain.
|"Waves of Immensity are crashing into THE Legacy of THE Acharya. It is rare for Legacies to attack one another. But in times like these, anything is possible."|
The beads clicked. |"I have had a long time to think. And I believe I can guess what their target is, from where most of the attacking force has gathered now."|
Noah’s gaze sharpened.
"And where would that be?"
The Thinker smiled. The fierce line of his mouth widened, very slightly, beneath the weeping eyes.
|"Why, here, of course. Toward this mountain."| A slow rumble of breath. |"Which leads me to believe that their target, among other things, is you."|
The torches guttered. Somewhere far above, something heavy settled against the Thinker’s coat of Immensity, and the whole mountain shivered.
|"Have you made progress in THE Undersnow? Or in yourself?"| The Thinker tilted his great head. |"I ask because I would rather you did not worry about this end too much."|
"I made some progress," Noah said. "And I will make more."
He looked up at the humming ceiling. "But why should I not worry?"
|"THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity is extremely old."|
The Thinker’s voice held no hurry at all. |"We may have poisonous snakes among us. That is the only way anyone could have gotten in. But we are still grand. Lucy built this, after all. And Lucy is grand."|
His beads went still.
|"We have some time, for now. Let us see how things unfold."|
...!
Noah lifted his head.
He could feel existence trembling. Beyond the stone of the mountain, beyond the Thinker’s burning coat, beyond the blizzard, something enormous was happening to the whole Legacy at once. What truly was going on out there?
He sent his perception up through the mountain to look.
—
The sky over THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity was broken.
Cracks ran across it from horizon to horizon, jagged and white, and through them the blizzard poured in thicker than ever. Snow buried the Elsedimension Mountains to their shoulders. The purple-gold rivers on the Legacy’s floor ran fast and dark, churning, and the Existential Conduits rising from them hummed at a pitch that set one’s teeth on edge.
And through that broken sky moved the invaders!
To his perception they looked like suns. Brilliant golden spheres, dozens of them, each one an Immensity foreign to this place, sliding through the storm in slow, deliberate lines. Some circled the mountains of the Protectors, pinning them. Some hung over the Firmament Mountain, where the Plain of Accord lay buried under snow. And the greatest number of them, a slow gathering tide of gold, were drifting toward a single lone mountain wrapped in a coat of hazy purple Immensity.
Toward the Thinker. Toward him!
Crimson gold snow fell wherever they passed.
Then the sky went dark!
It happened all at once. Across the whole broken width of the Legacy’s sky, from every horizon, a shape bloomed out of the cracks, so vast that for a moment it read as the sky itself. Obsidian, veined with gold, spreading and spreading until it covered everything above the snow.
It was a visage!
An illusory face the size of the Legacy itself, hanging over all of it. Its great head was the head of an octopus, a vast swollen mantle of obsidian skin shot through with rivers of burning gold, rising up into the broken sky past sight. Below it, where a chin should have been, hung a beard of tentacles, thousands of them, each one longer than a mountain range, coiling and uncoiling slowly in the storm.
Its skin was ridged and scaled in places, ancient, crusted with growths like coral that had been gathering since before the first Legacy was raised. Behind its head, half-seen, dark shapes that might have been vast vestigial wings stirred in the dark between the cracks.
And its eyes!
Two of them, each larger than the Firmament Mountain, burning crimson. They were enraged. They looked down at the Legacy, and at every golden sphere moving through it, with a fury so old and so total that the blizzard itself faltered under their gaze.
Somewhere in all that vastness, very small against the obsidian brow, something glinted. A pair of round lenses, perched on nothing, catching the light.
The tentacles spread!
They fell from the visage’s face and unfurled across the entire Legacy, thousands of them reaching down through the snow, curling around mountains, draping across rivers, laying themselves over every Conduit and every peak from one horizon to the other. Where they touched, the air went still.
And every golden sphere in the Legacy stopped.
All of them, from the ones circling the Protectors’ mountains to the ones over the Firmament to the great gathering tide drifting toward the Thinker’s mountain. Every foreign Immensity froze in place amid the boundless snow, pinned where it hung, as the tentacles settled over the Legacy like a net over a pond.
The visage spoke!
|This is the motherfucking Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.|
|You all seem to forget that, so let me remind you.|
|There are levels to this shit.|
|THERE! ARE! LEVELS!|
BOOM!
Obsidian gold brilliance raged down out of the broken sky!
It poured from the visage and from every tentacle at once, black and gold and blinding, flooding the whole Legacy from its highest peak to the bottom of its rivers. Snow burned away in the light of it. The cracks in the sky filled with it. And behind it, rising out of the obsidian and the gold, came Immensity.
Unfathomable Immensity!
Noah felt it land on the Legacy, and on the frozen golden spheres, and on the mountain where he sat, and on him. It was the weight of a being who had stood at the top of existence for longer than most of existence had existed. It was the weight of a scholar who had been poisoned in his own study, and was done being polite about it.
In the purple-lit cavern, THE Thinker at the End of Existence looked up at the trembling ceiling, and his fierce almost-smile widened.
|"Ah,"| he said mildly. |"There he is."|