Chapter 5862: Hello!
Chapter 5862: Hello!
<Existential Interlude- Before They Are Gone>
There was someone, once, who hoped for a small thing.
Smaller than power. Smaller than a throne, or a crown, or a name that would outlast the stars. Only this: that people might know, while it was happening, that they were living through the good times of their lives.
Because most only learn it afterward.
They live through the good times the same way they live through ordinary days. They eat the meal and taste only that it is warm; they sit at the table and hear only the noise; they hold the small hand in theirs and think about tomorrow. And only later, years later, looking back from somewhere colder, do they understand. That was it. That was the best of it. That was the time they would have given anything to return to.
By then, it is already gone.
So that someone hoped people would take a moment. Just a moment, in the middle of it all, to stop. To look around. To realize where they were standing.
To appreciate it.
To understand it.
To be grateful for it, while it was still in their hands.
It is a very small hope. It asks for nothing more than attention.
And only a rare few manage it.
—
<THE True Human Emperor>
Noah sat on the white throne at the bottom of the Descent of Chains, and for once, he simply rested.
His stellar chest lay bare, constellations drifting slowly across it, the frost along his left shoulder glittering faintly. Golden blankets of dreams lay draped over his lap, soft and warm, rising and faling gently. And beneath them, curled against him with her cheek on his chest, Emotive slept.
She slept soundly. Her breath was slow and even, and her hair spilled across his skin in every color at once, shifting only a little now, drowsy hues of gold and rose.
Noah looked down at her.
He lifted one hand and moved her hair aside, gently, until he could see her face. It was fair and peaceful in sleep, her lashes still, her lips slightly parted. All the brightness she carried when she was awake had gone quiet. She looked very innocent, lying there.
His pupil-less gold eyes burned softly as he looked at her.
He thought about everything.
Far above the Evergrave, past THE Undersnow, his Dream was spreading.
He could feel it as he felt his own breath. Silent, unseen, one golden-blue brick at a time, laying itself over the existence of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity. Mountain after mountain. River after river. Dimension after Dimension inside them.
|THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity: more than half rewoven into your Dream.|
More than half!
Lucy’s Legacy, the place that had taken him in and named him its Son, was now more than half his Dream. Its air. Its earth. The space between its mountains. Every particle of it, quietly replaced, while Moriarty hovered above THE Legacy Son’s Mountain and watched a blizzard and saw only snow.
Noah looked at it all, and his existence shone.
It rose up out of him on its own, in a slow swell, exuberance and power together, his constellations brightening across his bare chest until they lit Emotive’s sleeping face in blue and gold. His Dream vibrated, deep and grand, at Order III, all through him and all through everything he had altered, and he felt the shape of what he had become more clearly than ever before.
A Dreaming Human Origin. Something existence first held the day he made himself.
And at this moment, his perception, already so vast, kept stretching.
His eyes pulsed!
Behind the throne, a bubble bloomed!
It rose out of the dark of the Descent, round and shimmering, a sphere of stellar blue-gold light the size of a house. And inside it, a scene moved.
Then another bubble bloomed beside it! And another. And another. One after another after another, until the whole dark behind him was filled with them, hundreds of glowing spheres of dream, drifting slowly upward through the falling snow.
Every one of them held him!
In one, a young man sat in a cheap jacket on the cold floor of a boss room, staring at a green crystal; in another, the same young man knelt in an apartment with a thin skill book open on his knees; in others, an older man lay crushed beneath a stone in the obsidian sands, a figure stood on the chest of a dead Immense One on a frozen plain, and a man knelt in a garden with a grain of something unbearably heavy on his palm.
And further back, much further, the bubbles grew smaller and dimmer and stranger.
A boy, very young, playing in a dusty yard. A child asleep on his mother’s shoulder. And at the very end of the line, in the faintest bubble of all, a small hospital room with tired light, and a woman’s exhausted face, and a newborn crying in her arms.
Beside the bed, in the corner of that faint little room, stood a figure of dreams watching.
Watching himself be born!
Noah looked at all of it.
He could see himself then, and now, and every moment between, all at the same time. His Infinite Dream was happening now, and happening then, and happening everywhere at once, every moment of his life laid out around him like lanterns hung along a long dark road.
He spoke quietly in a frequency only for himself to hear.
"I see...a boy sitting in a small, quiet room," Noah said, "looking down at his empty hands. He holds no authority. No rank. No power at all."
In a bubble near his shoulder, the boy sat on the edge of a narrow bed and turned his hands over, slowly, palms up, as if hoping something might be written there.
"At the exact same time, I am standing in a sunlit clearing, watching a sphere of red fire leave my palm."
In another bubble, a young man stood in a clearing of tall trees behind his dilapidated apartment with his hand out, and a small, ragged ball of fire left it and struck the bark of an old trunk with a dry crack. Smoke curled up. The young man stared at it with his mouth open.
"It strikes the bark of a tree. To that young F Rank hunter, that single flame is an impossible miracle. It is...the center of his existence."
The young man in the bubble laughed out loud, alone in the clearing, and looked at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.
Noah smiled.
"Further along the plane," he went on softly, "I am striding through burning stellar fields."
A bubble higher up lit with fire and starlight. In it, a figure walked through a field of burning stars, and the stars passed beneath his feet like pebbles in a stream.
"The stars pass beneath my feet like pebbles in a stream. Then entire galaxies blur into faint dust behind me. Universes unfold. Cosmos gather and part as I walk through their foundations."
The figure in the bubble walked on. Galaxies streamed past him like sparks thrown off a grindstone. Universes opened around him and closed behind him.
"I step clean out of my own Frequency of Existence, and leave that boundary behind. Then I step outside my Wheel of Existence entirely. Realities spin in the wake of my passing."
In the bubble, a vast wheel of light turned slowly behind the striding figure, and he stepped out of it as easily as a man steps over a threshold, and realities spun away behind him like leaves in his wake.
"I rise until I am accomplished across the whole of an Observable Existence. Past any Architect. Past any Gilded Lifeform. Until the vault of that sky is destroyed and becomes too small to hold my shoulders. I cross the skies of Source Lands and the Infinite Carcosa..."
In the highest bubble of all, a figure stood beneath a sky so vast it held everything, and the figure rose, and rose, until its shoulders pressed against the very roof of that sky.
"I move across Dimensions, and across time. I stand atop the shoulders of True Lifeforms, and Primeval Ones, and Provenance Lifeforms, and Immense Ones."
His gold eyes moved slowly across all the bubbles at once.
"And every one of them will be surpassed, in time..."
The snow drifted down between the spheres.
"All of those moments are happening right now. They lie side by side on one flat table. I see the boy with empty palms. And I see where I stand today, holding an Infinite Dream, with my sights set on existence itself."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Looking across the distance between them... where I stood then, and where I stand now..."
He breathed out, and his breath fell as snow.
"It simply feels grand. A man feels good when he builds something with his own hands. When he finishes a long road on his own two feet. It feels good. It’s the honest pride of a man looking back at the ground he walked, and knowing every inch of it belongs to him."
His gaze dropped to Emotive, asleep on his chest, and then lifted again, past the bubbles of his past, into the dark ahead of him.
"And right now," Noah said softly, "I can envision my future self."
His Dream gathered.
"Show yourself to me. Show me my own dream."
HUUM!
Ahead of the throne, a bubble began to form!
It was different from the others. Brighter. Vibrant blue and gold, so vivid that the bubbles of his past dimmed around it like candles beside a sunrise. It swelled slowly out of the dark, larger and larger, until it hung before him taller than the throne.
Noah laughed!
It burst out of him on its own, joyful, loud and bright, and Emotive stirred in her sleep, murmured, and settled again against his chest.
This was something he could do now? See his future self? Or was it only the self he dreamed of becoming? Would it know anything? Would it have any cognizance at all? Could he ask it questions? Could he learn something from himself, from his own future?
He leaned forward, eyes burning.
Inside the bubble, a figure took shape!
Humanoid. Blue and gold. Its whole body was aflame, filled from within with a light so intense that its outline blurred and wavered. Its proportions blurred into light, and its face was lost in the glare. It was all radiance, a shape of fire and dream and starlight standing in the heart of the bubble, too bright to hold in the eye.
But he could feel it!
It was him!
Every part of him knew it. His Tree knew it. His Dream knew it. The grain of IT in his chest knew it, and hummed. The figure in the bubble was him, as surely as his own hand was his, only somewhere so far ahead that even his Infinite Dream could barely reach it.
And existence went silent!
Around the throne, the falling snow stopped. Every flake hung frozen in the air. The hum of the dead chains fell quiet. The faint rhythmic voice of the Long Night, always beating underneath everything, went still. Even the flow of the winter through the seat seemed to hold its breath.
Only the bubble moved, slowly turning, blue and gold and blazing.
Noah leaned back on the white throne.
He smiled.
His hand found Emotive’s hair again, and stroked it, slowly, once. She slept on, warm and peaceful beneath the golden blankets of his dreams.
"I look upon a version of myself in the future," Noah said quietly, "at this present moment. And I say..."
He looked into the blazing figure in the bubble.
"Hello."
HUUM!
Inside the bubble, the radiant figure moved.
It was barely discernible. A shape of blue-gold fire, its face lost in its own light. But Noah saw it. The faintest change at the place where a mouth would be. A light smile, calm and majestic, the smile of something that had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
And a voice came out of the bubble.
A voice that sounded like his own, if his own had been carried across more Ages than existence had names for.
{Hello.}