Chapter 5828: Order! I
Chapter 5828: Order! I
The silence on the Plain of Accord lasted until Moriarty’s Immensity pulsed.
His voice carried to every one of them. They were to return to their mountains. The Immense Ones of the Legacy would hold a council, and what came next would be decided there.
The crowd broke apart at once, and Achilles lifted a hand to Noah across the snow before leading Rose away. Overhead, the thrones began to fill!
Poona looked at him before the eyes of other Immense Ones as she said...
"I have to thank someone for my return! No worries, I will keep him safe."
Her golden brilliance flared and wrapped around her and Noah as they both disappeared, seemingly to Poona’s Existential Immense Domain.
But that was not the case!
—
THE Existential Dreaming Origin Domain had kept growing since the evolution. New ridges, new valleys, Gigaparsecs of golden blue brilliance.
On a hill above the river, Ruination’s and THE Infiniverse’s cocoons still glowed, still closed.
Noah gazed at Poona on the grass.
She had shrunk into a little golden slime, round and bubbly, flecked with every color. She wobbled a few times to find her balance, then bowed so deeply her eye nearly touched the ground, and thanked him for resuscitating her dream.
She had saved him a few days ago, she pointed out, and now he had saved her, and held her Immensity in his hands besides. As his senior, no less!
"Now I feel like a baby Immense One again, wow!" she added, mostly to herself.
Noah let her bounce for a moment.
Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her and started asking questions!
He had plenty. A whole Legacy of Immense Ones had just fought a small war, and he understood almost nothing about what they actually were. Poona was the first of them who looked happy to explain.
First, he asked her how Immense Ones differed from one another.
According to Poona, they differed in almost every way that mattered. Immensity took the shape of whatever a being had been carrying when it went through the door.
Next, he asked her how to measure them. His gold eyes could look down into an Immense One, but past a certain point, they simply found no bottom.
Poona told him the Immense had a word for that: Profundity. How far down a being’s Immensity went, rather than how high it had climbed, and how much it had carried through the Ages to get there. She explained it in her own cheerful, rambling way as...she loved talking a bit too much.
As she talked, Noah’s eyes worked. He laid her words over everything he had seen in the Thinker’s cavern, every Immense One he had read, every bottom he had failed to find.
And his existence answered with prompts that simplified her convoluted explanations!
|Profundity of Immensity.|
|The measure of what an Immense One has carried, and how far down its Immensity reaches.|
|Newly Risen. Immensity freshly established. Shallow, loud, and still learning its own shape. A Newly Risen One can be read to the bottom by a keen enough eye.|
|Known to you: Ling, THE Dancer in the Boundless Dream. Poona, reborn.|
|Established. Immensity that has carried Ages. Its bottom can be glimpsed, but lies far below. Most who sit on thrones are Established.|
|Known to you: THE Gilt Heir. THE Hound of Thresholds. Many of the Legacy’s thrones.|
|Ancient. Immensity that has carried more Ages than most lifeforms can imagine. Its bottom cannot be seen. Its presence alone changes existence nearby.|
|Known to you: Sir Moriarty. THE Sleepless Fiend. THE Thinker at the End of Existence. THE Verdant Regard. THE Rusted Matriarch.|
|Unfathomable. Immensity whose Profundity cannot be measured, even by the Ancient.|
|Known to you: none.|
|Beyond. ?????|
...!
Noah read the list twice.
The Thinker, who had held four Immense Ones at bay without standing up, was Ancient. The Fiend, whose single finger had nearly stolen his dream, was Ancient.
And above them sat a whole tier he had yet to meet.
Unfathomable. Then Beyond, with nothing written under it at all!
|Your own Profundity: ?????|
|Others perceive in you the Immensity of a weak Newly Risen One.|
To the Immense, he looked like a fresh, weak Immense One standing where a days-old Root should have been. Wrong, but useful. He would let them keep thinking it!
Then he asked Poona about THE Legacy’s Son.
Here she went serious, briefly.
According to her, the title was a spiritual pillar for the whole Legacy: the successor to everything Lucy had left behind. Lucy had named no one. She had left directions, sealed for Ages, about when one should be named. And whoever became THE Legacy’s Son gained access to an Immense Domain that nobody had ever entered, left by Lucy specifically for them. Even Moriarty had yet to set foot inside.
Then she squinted up at him.
"Do I have to call you Master now, since you hold my Dream Immensity?" Poona asked. She thought about it for exactly one heartbeat. "Well, I don’t care! Master, then."
Since his power showed itself at the level of a weak Immense One when he was supposed to have only just formed his Root, she went on, most of the Legacy’s Immense would likely accept him.
"We will see!" she finished, and smiled brilliantly.
Noah looked at her truly.
Her Dream Immensity was shallow, a single warm layer of lamplight with only the beginnings of Profundity beneath its floor. Under it ran the faint memory of everything she had once been, Ages of old quiet Immensity, burned away and remembered. Bright threads ran from the bottom of her into his Tree.
|Poona.|
|THE Dreaming Hearth.|
|Dream Immensity. Kin.|
|Profundity: Newly Risen. It remembers being Ancient.|
...!
THE Dreaming Hearth. It suited her!
Noah stood up and looked out over his Domain as he sensed his own existence.
The gain were Sap from 14% to 38%. Two new Authorities, the Held Breath and the Unclosing Hand. One Immense grasp rebuffed outright, one held at bay. Poona revived as Kin. A proposed title.
The negatives of it all were Judgment Debt up to 3. The Fiend’s full attention. The Verdant Regard’s hatred.
And the most importantly...without the Thinker, Moriarty, and Poona, he would have been captured today. Plainly and simply captured.
He disliked that intensely!
Being saved was a fine thing when it came. Planning on it was another matter. So the answer was simple. Grow until nobody needed to protect him.
He was a dreamer, a sovereign, and a human. The sovereign in him would take this Legacy’s Son title grandly, walk into Lucy’s sealed Domain, and see exactly what she had left behind. If it could be learned, he would learn it. If it could be eaten, he would eat it.
But titles alone would leave his Tree hungry.
What had carried him to his first evolution? A dead Immense One’s corpse and an Ergosphere full of Roots. So where would he find more things like that?
The answer came at once!
THE Undersnow!
Dead Immense Ones. Kept First Lifeforms. Beings at Immensity, in abundance. A Floor already cleared, and a rift north of it standing open and unguarded, leading down into THE Evergrave. Down there were the Caretaker in her chains, the secrets of the Long Night, and things old enough to remember the First Sundering.
And, quite possibly, a great deal to eat!
He turned his gold eyes toward the far edge of his Domain, toward the cold waiting beyond it.
"Existence is vast," Noah said, "and full of terrors..."
It truly was as to prepare, he had to properly understand himself!
So he sat down cross-legged on a hill in THE Existential Dreaming Origin Domain, with Poona bouncing on the grass beside him, and turned his gold eyes inward.
The first question was simple. Could his own Tree count what existence had given up on?
He dreamed that it could, and his existence began to buzz!
|Existence counts what it can write. Its count of you broke at nine hundred and ninety-nine.|
|Your Tree measures you differently: by how far your Dream can reach, and how much of that reach it can command.|
|These are the Orders of the Dream.|
...!
Noah leaned forward.
|Order I. Your Dream reaches across many Dimensions and facets of existence at once, and commands the power within them.|
|Order II. Your Dream can reach across the whole domain of a Legacy and Dream without other’s knowledge: countless Dimensions, and every space between them. All of Order I becomes a single grain within it.|
|Order III. Your Dream gains the capability to reach across an entire stratum of existence, Undefined Gaps, the whole of THE Infinite Carcosa, or the whole of THE Source Lands.|
|Order IV. Your Dream reaches across every stratum existence can perceive, layered together as one.|
|Order V. Your Dream reaches beneath existence: THE Undersnow, THE Evergrave, and the layers of cold beneath the cold further underneath.|
|Order VI. Your Dream reaches across every cycle of existence, back past THE First Sundering.|
|Order VII. Your Dream reaches outside existence.|
|Order ?????|
|Within each Order, the measure after the point is how fully you command it. At I.0, an attribute has only just entered the first Order. At I.9, it presses against the second. Every tenth is a true step in what you can do.|
...!