Chapter 5846: Nano! Second! I
Chapter 5846: Nano! Second! I
Noah breathed in, and the whole cavern slowed!
An instant was stretched across infinity!
It was a small thing to do. A breath. The kind he had taken a million times without thinking, in a school garden and on a frozen plain and in the dirt between bean rows. But the dreams of everyone under him were still pouring into him, uncountable, and when he breathed in, he breathed them in too.
And then he could see them.
His own, and everyone else’s!
They spilled out of everyone in the cavern like light out of cracked lanterns, drifting up into the falling snow, and every one of them was open to him.
His own came first, blue and gold and vast, full of a farm and a family and a table where everyone he loved sat together.
Ruination’s came next, crimson and silver and sharp, a dream of a crown that had once been only a voice in a man’s head and now had hands. She dreamed of keeping up. She dreamed of being needed for something no one else could do.
THE Infiniverse’s was so large it filled half the cavern, a dream made of countless smaller dreams, every realm inside her dreaming at once. Underneath all of it, small and careful, was a single dream of her own: a quiet room, a window, and a question she had only just learned how to ask. What do I want?
Emotive’s burned every color there was. It was loud and wild and furious and laughing, and right at the center of it, holding it all together, was one thing. Him. Her dream was of him, happy.
Noah looked away from that one quickly.
Then he looked at the four Night Lords.
Their dreams were there too!
THE Gaunt Regent dreamed of a throne. A plain wooden chair rather than the bone throne it sat on now, in a quiet hall, the chair its master used to sit in, and in the dream the Regent was sitting in it, and the hall was warm, and someone was bowing to it for once.
THE Choir-Mother dreamed of a voice saying it was enough. That she could stop now. That she was forgiven.
THE Drowned Margrave dreamed of air. Only that. A single breath at the surface of black water, Ages ago, that it had reached for and missed.
THE Warden of the Heart dreamed of an open gate. A gate it had stood before for so long it had forgotten which side it had wanted to be on.
And the thing wearing his face?
Its dream was a seam. A long pale line, sewn shut, with something pressing against the other side of it.
|Within your Dream: the dreams of all present.|
|Read: your own. Ruination. THE Infiniverse. Emotive. THE Gaunt Regent. THE Choir-Mother. THE Drowned Margrave. THE Warden of the Heart.|
|THE Faceless Immense One: ?????|
...!
Noah let out his breath, slowly, and the cavern stayed slow around him.
Around his body, his Dream raged.
It had nowhere to go. Four Established Immensities still pressed down on every side of him, and so the Dream poured out of him and was crushed back, poured out and was crushed back, until it hung around him in seas.
Boundless seas of blue-gold cloud and light, compressed to the thickness of a hand and still churning. Event horizons opened along his arms and shoulders, black and ringed with gold, turned once, and sank back into his skin. Constellations wheeled across his chest faster than stars should wheel. The two rings of his halo burned. The air around him bent, and bent back, and bent again, as though existence were trying and failing to decide what shape it should take near him.
And in the middle of all of it, his gold eyes looked out.
They were pupil-less, and empty: only gold, calm and flat and endless, as bare of feeling as an open sky.
And at the same time, everything. Every feeling of every dreamer pouring into him, the child’s wonder and the farmer’s worry and the ant’s small hunger and the whale’s long patience, all of it there at once, boundless, held behind a gaze that showed none of it.
He looked out at the cavern from very high up.
He could see it as a map sees a country. Four Night Lords at the corners of a square, each one a Profundity whose bottom lay beyond him. Fourteen more at the edges, waiting, three of them so close to Established that their Profundity was already sinking. And across the square, a thing wearing his face, whose dream was a seam closed to him.
He could see time in it too, every moment at once, stacked: the moment the Faceless One closed its fist; the moment it spoke his name; the moment, a breath from now, when it would have learned enough. Existence was reading him, line by line, while he stood still in the snow. Every instant he spent here, it understood him a little better. And when it understood him well enough, there would be a future with no path out of it.
"Four Established," Noah said. His voice was low and even, and it carried no further than his own Dream. "Fourteen waiting. One wearing my face. And existence itself, reading me while I stand here."
He looked down at his hands, wreathed in compressed blue-gold seas.
He saw it then, from that height.
Since he had come down here, he had been measuring himself against them. Newly Risen. Established. Ancient. Which ones he could kill, which ones lay beyond him. He had been standing at the bottom of a ladder and counting the rungs above him, as if the ladder were his to climb.
But the ladder belonged to them.
He had come from somewhere else entirely, through no door of theirs. He was something existence lacked until he made it: a Dreaming Human Origin, a new kind of thing, standing where no kind of thing had stood before. And a new kind of thing had only one question worth asking: what could it dream?
"They say an Established Immense One cannot fall to me yet," Noah said quietly.
He lifted his eyes to the Gaunt Regent, thin and endless at the north corner of the square.
"Perhaps. But what in existence cannot be dreamed?"
He turned inward, to the Tree, to the deepest part of his Dream, and gave it an order.
Dream a future. One where I begin to leave this place. One where at least one of them falls.
He paused, and added the impossible part.
In less than a nanosecond.
|...|
His existence went very quiet, as if it had heard something absurd.
Then it began to dream!
The seas around him surged. The compressed clouds of blue and gold tore loose from his skin and poured outward in every direction, and the event horizons along his arms opened all at once and stayed open, a hundred black eyes ringed with gold, staring out at every possibility there was.
"Infinity," Noah murmured, "is only the impossible, waiting for its next definition."
His gold eyes stayed exactly as they were.
"So let us define it again."
The instant opened up!
His Dream spilled out of him in every direction at once and began to map. Every future, rather than one. Countless branches of what might happen in the next nanosecond, unrolling through the frozen snow like the roots of a tree, and Noah walked down all of them at once.
In most of them, he died!
He watched himself crushed under the Keeping, drained grey; drowned; kneeling under the Choir-Mother’s song until nothing was left of him but an apology; refused, and shattered.
In the rest, the others died first.
And in almost all of those, the first to go was Emotive.
He watched it happen again and again. In branch after branch, she threw herself in front of him. In front of the Keeping, in front of the Drowning, in front of the Warden’s raised hand. She died laughing, screaming, furious and crying all at once, every color going out of her hair.
She always went first!
He looked closer, and understood why.
She felt his emotions more than anyone. More than Ruination, more than THE Infiniverse. She felt everything he felt, louder than he felt it. And in every branch where Ruination or THE Infiniverse was destroyed, even for a little while, even if he could dream them back, he was sad. And feeling him sad was more than she could bear.
So she always made sure she was the one who broke first.
Noah stood very still in the middle of a million futures where she died for him. The seas around him slowed. The event horizons along his arms turned, and turned, and watched her fall in every one of them.
"You would end a thousand times," he said, very softly, "to spare me a single sorrow."
His eyes stayed gold and calm and empty, and behind them, something as vast as everything he carried rose up and settled, and stayed.
"I see every one of them. I will remember every one of them."
He kept looking!
He found it in the last place he expected!
It began with how he looked at the Regent.
Until now he had seen its Immensity as a weight, a Profundity whose bottom lay beyond him. In the stretched instant, with every dreamer’s dream pouring through him, he looked again, and saw what it was made of as he almost couldn’t believe it.
Could it be?
Could it really?!
He saw what could be...a variation of something that made up Existence itself. It was the rope holding up Observable Existences and Dimensions.
Something that he named his own and filled his Quarks with!
He felt what he could only describe as...
Causes!