Chapter 5851: Noetic!
Chapter 5851: Noetic!
The Choir-Mother was still coming apart inside him, one rewritten sentence at a time, when Ul’moreth spoke again.
|"THE First Tongue was also yours. Take it,"| the old teacher said quietly. |"A teacher who hoards what he knows is only a miser with a classroom."|
And he opened himself!
Golden-blue script poured off his dimmed hand and into Noah, a slow, steady stream of it. Everything this time, more than any lesson. Every Logos Ul’moreth had spoken in his Ages of dreaming. Every sentence, every paragraph, every grammar he had learned in that endless hall of light. How words joined. How sentences broke. How a whole Immensity could be read like a page, if one knew where to look.
He gave it freely. And Noah’s Dreaming Human Origin took it in.
THE Dreaming Grammar drank it first. The new Word, still raw, still settling, reached for everything Ul’moreth gave and grew around it. Then his Tree, then his Dream, then something deeper than all of them, at the very bottom of him, where his Infinity sat.
His Infinity stirred!
Noah went still.
He knew that feeling. He had felt it only moments ago, when Adynatic Infinity bloomed out of a nanosecond he should not have survived. The sense of something reaching outward from the center of him, grasping for a new name.
It was happening again!
So soon? He had barely learned the shape of the last one.
He let it happen, and watched, with something close to wonder, as his Infinity reached out once more, past the impossible, toward something new to it.
|Your Dreaming Human Origin has taken in THE First Tongue from a teacher at the height of it.|
|What was written, you may now read. What is read, you may now understand.|
|Existence was spoken into being. Everything in it is written. Its nature lies open to those who can read.|
|Your Dream is reading.|
...!
|Information: the difference that remains. Every thing is what it is because it differs from what it is not. Every life, every Cause, every Immensity, every grain of snow is a sentence written in that difference. To know a thing truly is to read the whole of it. To read the whole of it is to hold it.|
|Your Infinity has found another definition.|
|Formed: Noetic Infinity. Understanding without end. To know a thing so wholly that it holds no secret from you.|
|Where your Dream reaches, your Infinity reads. What it reads, it understands. What it understands, it holds.|
|Dialetheic. Adynatic. Noetic. One Infinity, three names.|
...!
The change needed fuel.
He felt it reach for some. A third definition, blooming right on the heels of the second, was more than his existence could carry on its own, and it went looking for something to burn. It found the Choir-Mother.
She was still inside him, what was left of her: her rewritten sentences, her broken arches, her choir still mouthing in silence somewhere at the bottom of him. The transformation took hold of all of it at once, and burned it.
An Established Immense One, burning as fuel!
Noah felt her go. Ages of Penance went up in a single long rush of heat, her grey sentences catching one after another and turning to gold as they burned. Her choir’s silent song went last, a thousand voices going out like candles, and for a moment, at the very end, he thought he heard one of them sing a single clear note, and it sounded like anything but an apology.
Then she was gone, and the heat of her poured through his Tree from root to crown.
His Tree drank it all!
|Digestion complete: THE Choir-Mother, an Established Immense One.|
|She has burned as fuel for the change in you.|
...!
|Attributes, measured anew.|
|VERITAS: Order II.6 to Order II.9.|
|PROVENANCE: Order II.7 to Order II.9.|
|PONDUS: Order II.3 to Order II.9.|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Order II.0 to Order II.9.|
|POTENTIA: Infinite.|
|Every attribute stands at the edge of Order III.|
...!
|Sap risen toward the Second Bough: 98%.|
...!
Ninety-eight.
Noah breathed out slowly. Six percent, from one Established Immense One. And every attribute he had, sitting at the very edge of the next Order, as if all of them had lined up at the same door at once.
Two percent left.
His Dream was still out there.
It had kept going all along. It still lay across the whole record, over the black water and the frozen walls and the falling snow, over every being inside the cavern and beyond it. He had felt it there the whole time, the same way he always had.
But what came back to him now was different!
Before, his Dream had shown him things. Shapes, weights, Profundities, dreams. Now it showed him what they were.
Everything inside his reach came to him sorted. Each being, each object, each drifting flake of snow, gathered up into its own clean box of knowing, every box holding only what belonged to it.
A Lineage head at the edge of the record: its name, its Immensity, the Age it had died in, the purpose it had risen around, the Causes wound through it, every way it might move in the next breath. The Drowned Margrave: the sea it had drowned in, the breath it had missed, the bones of everyone who had sunk with it, each one named. A single grain of grey thread drifting on the water, all that remained of a Regent’s sleeve: the hall it had been woven in, the hand that had worn it, the warmth it had stolen.
Box after box after box. Thousands of them. Milions. Opening around him in the stillness, each one full.
Holding all of it was beyond him. Some boxes stayed shut. Some went down so deep that his reading broke off partway. The Faceless One’s box was almost entirely sealed.
But he only needed the shape of it. And the shape came to him clearer and truer than anything he had ever seen.
Information flowed. Endlessly. Out across every possibility, every branch, every turning of every moment, filling in the picture of the existence around him line by line, until he could see it whole. The nature of it, deeper than the surface of the record or the weight of the Immensities pressing on him. What it was made of. How every piece leaned on every other. Where each thread went when it left his sight.
He looked out at all of it with his pupil-less gold eyes, empty and full at once.
"A man reads a book one word at a time," Noah said softly, almost to himself, "because his eyes are small. Show him the last page while he is reading the first, and his head spins. He needs the seconds to fall in a straight line, like beads on a string. Otherwise, he feels he is drowning."
Around him, the boxes of knowing turned slowly, open.
"To dream information without end is to step off that line entirely. You do not turn the page. You hold the whole library in your palm, every room open, every sentence spoken in the same breath."
The seas of blue-gold cloud stilled around him.
"From where I stand, nothing is waiting to happen. The past, the present, and every turn of tomorrow are only different corners of the same table."
He let out a breath.
"Infinity is just a dream that ran out of walls. When you see everything at once, and see it clearly, existence stops keeping secrets. There are no surprises. There is only the room, completely still."
His gold eyes moved, slowly, across the whole of it.
"I have read the room I am in."
HUUM!
He had.
He had!!!
Every corner of it, every being in it, every way it could turn. He had read and understood the room he was standing in, as a man understands the room he grew up in, without needing to look.
His eyes came to rest on the thing wearing his face.
THE Faceless Immense One stood across the square where it had stood all along, in his body, his night-sky skin, his horns, his halo. Its own box of knowing had been sealed tight. But now, under Noetic Infinity, light began to come off it.
Information. Boundless, faint, leaking out of its figure in thin threads of pale light, as heat comes off stone.
Noah’s Osmontian Tongue rose to meet it!
Golden letters came up out of him on their own. I AM. OSMONT. QUINTESSENTIAL. HUMAN. PROTAGONIST. They lifted off his skin and drifted out across the square in long golden rows, thousands upon thousands of them, until they met the pale threads leaking off the Faceless One. Where his letters touched the information, it lit up. Where it lit up, he could read it.
And the box began, very slowly, to open!
|Reading: THE Faceless Immense One.|
|Its true nature: an Existential Epitropos.|
|An Epitropos is a guardian of particularly unique Cycles of Existence. It is given charge of an infinitely small portion of existence, and set to oversee the flow of the Cycle through it. It tends what it oversees, rather than owning it.|
|There are many Epitropoi. Their number: ?????. Who sets them in their places: ?????.|
|THE Long Night is vast, complex, and unfathomable. Everything is...connected.|
...!
|This one oversees the flow of THE Long Night through this region of existence.|
|This charge was not always its own.|
|Before it, the flow of THE Long Night in this region was overseen by another Existential Epitropos: THE Caretaker of the Long Night.|
|It took her place. Her chains were its doing. Her steward’s door was its bargain.|
...!
|Its distinction: THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|
|Used to be one of the first Provenance Lifeforms 3 Ages before THE First Sundering. He died unjustly and became wrapped in the cycle of THE Long Night.|
|Its Immensity: ?????|
|Its purpose: ?????|
|What it curates: ?????|
|Further information is being read, slowly.|
|It stands above you in Dimensionality. By instinct alone, it shields most of what it is.|
...!
Noah’s eyes opened wider!
His pupil-less gold gaze locked onto THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency, and held.
Across the square, THE Curator lifted one hand, Noah’s own hand, and waved it once.
The instant ended!
Time came back all at once. The snow fell again, a little faster than before, and the black water lapped at Noah’s ankles; the great stillness that had held the whole record let go of it, and everything moved. At the west and south corners of the square, THE Drowned Margrave and THE Warden of the Heart drew back. Slowly, at first. Then further, into the falling snow, their Immensities pulling away from Noah as if from a fire.
THE Curator stood alone across from him.
Noah looked at it.
And for the first time, he let his power out as Immense Ones did!
He felt it go out of him, pressing outward into the whole record. It went out as a voice, rather than a weight, or a blow, or a Dream laid quietly over everything. His words left him and went out across existence itself, carried on his power, ringing through every corner of the cavern and every mind inside it at once.
|THE Dreaming Human Origin gazes upon the masses and truly speaks for the first time.|
|"O Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency."|
The whole record heard it!
|"You made yourself seem so mysterious. So grand. But it turns out you are only a thief. Just a Provenance Lifeform who only managed to achieve this level of power after so many ages. A little guardian, who stole the place of another guardian, so you could oversee the flow of the Long Night in one small region of existence. There should be many more Epitropos overseeing other regions of Existence, yes? More souls swept by THE Long Night. You are just...one of many."|
The snow trembled in the air.
|"Who are you to decide how brutal the cold can be here? Who decided that?"|
His gold eyes held THE Curator’s.
|"Because I think my Dream can encompass yours. And I can be the one to decide."|
He tilted his head, exactly as it had once tilted his.
|THE Dreaming Human Origin looks down upon THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|
|"How do you feel about this?"|
HUUM!
At the edges of the record, the Lineage heads flinched. Fourteen vast shapes in the dark, every one of them recoiling as his voice reached them, as if struck. The cinder giant’s black flame guttered. The mirror-faced duchess turned her face away. Under the frost veil, the Bride lifted her head and stared at him.
THE Drowned Margrave’s hundred dead mouths closed, all at once, for the first time in Ages.
And THE Warden of the Heart, far back in the snow, slowly lowered its armored head.
THE Curator began to laugh!
It started very small, a sound in the back of Noah’s own throat. Then it grew.
Its mouth, his mouth, began to stretch.
The smile widened past where any smile should end. It split the face from ear to ear and kept going, far past the limits of any human jaw, the corners of the mouth curling upward, creasing the cheeks so deeply that they cracked like stone.
And its eyes, Noah’s gold eyes, began to change. The gold drained out of them, and in its place came a cold obsidian-blue light, shining and malevolent, burning out of the face he knew better than any other.
|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency laughs.|
|"Hi! Hi! Hi!"|
The laugh went out across the whole record, carried on its power just as Noah’s words had been, and the snow shook with it.
|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency is delighted.|
|"I’ve been caught!"| it said. |"Wow! You really were something."|
The grin stretched wider.
|"Ah, well. Now it just means I need to wipe out everything!"|
It clapped Noah’s hands together once.
|"Okay!"|