Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5917: Dominion IV

Noah stood on the narrow terace with the snow falling through him, and he noticed how little he felt.

Before, standing beneath something like Brunhild Varr, there would have been a hundred small pressures in him: gaps measured, branches counted, a man’s fear, quiet and constant, telling him how badly this could end.

That fear was still there. He could see it. It simply belonged to someone...smaller.

He looked up at the nine Unfathomables and saw nine very old beings, standing at the corners of a Legacy that belonged to someone else, beneath a sky they had covered over with their own gates. He saw the ranks behind them, the snow, the shape of what would happen next, and what would happen after that.

This was what the other side of the dream was like.

Sandy light began to leak from him!

It rose off his skin and his robe and the slow-turning crown above his head, obsidian and gold together, glitering like crushed glass. It came in clouds, then in long threads of plasma that crackled quietly through the clouds. It poured down the Elsedimension and across the snow and out into the torn sky, and it kept spreading.

In an instant, it covered Gigaparsecs.

Then the sky above him went dark.

Moriarty arrived first, in a rush of shadow, and then the others, more than a hundred Immense Ones of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, appearing around Noah in a ring so thick it blotted out the iron gates overhead. Their Immensities flared, held to a quarter of their strength and still enormous. They stood with their backs to him, shoulder to shoulder, facing the iron sky.

They were protecting him.

Noah looked at their backs.

It was a grand gesture. He could see that. A hundred old beings who had lived through Ages, putting themselves between an Unfathomable and the youngest thing in their Legacy.

He could also see what was underneath it.

They were doing it for themselves, looking at him and seeing a door, the Legacy’s Son, the one who might lead them somewhere past Those Who Remain. What they guarded was a way out they had been hoping for since before he was born.

That door existed only in their hoping. There was only him, and he was something else entirely.

Oh well. Such was existence!

Above them, Brunhild Varr tilted her head and looked down at the ring of Immense Ones, and then through them, at him.

"Is this the current leader of the Legacy?" she asked. Her voice was mild, almost curious. "A bit weak."

Her eyes narrowed. "You wouldn’t happen to be the Legacy’s Son, would you? For all of them to circle you like that?"

Noah took one step.

He was simply beyond the ring, standing on the air in front of Moriarty and the others with his back to them and his face to the iron sky. Eyes on the sky, he raised one hand and moved it once, sideways, as one brushes dust from a table.

The ring of Immense Ones was pushed gently back, every one of them, a dozen paces through the air!

"Does it matter?" Noah said.

His voice was quiet. It reached every corner of the Legacy.

"Names are small things. They are what we call each other so we do not have to look too closely. Leader. Son. First Hand. King. Strip the words away and there is only what stands here, and what stands there." He looked at her, and the gold eye and the obsidian eye were perfectly still. "What matters more is you."

The iron ranks stayed motionless. But some of the Ancients’ eyes flickered.

"You are strong. I can see exactly how strong. Your Immensity is older than most of the Dimensions beneath us. The eight behind you are the same. Any one of you could take a Legacy apart in a single morning and be home before night."

He paused. "And yet all nine of you kneel to someone else. All nine of you carry another’s gate over your existence. All nine of you came here to do another’s will, in another’s name, beneath another’s sky."

He let that settle over the snow.

"Did you never have dreams? Were you never small, once, looking up at something and deciding you would become it? Did you never have aspirations of your own?"

His voice stayed level. It only grew heavier. "No one is born a First Hand. No one is born kneeling. You were someone before the gate closed. I would like to know what became of her."

HUUM!

The sandy light around him exploded outward.

It burst from him in every direction at once, a great slow tide of obsidian and gold, rolling across the Legacy and past it. It wrapped over Elsedimensions and halls and frozen gardens. Over the white Totems and the shut gates in the sky it went. It poured out through the torn veils into the dark beyond, Gigaparsec after Gigaparsec, until the whole vast region around the Legacy drifted in it like a valley drowned in fog, and every grain of that fog was his.

Brunhild watched it come, and harrumphed.

"Dreams," she said. "Aspirations. Yes, I had them. I had them when I was small and foolish and believed existence would hold still long enough for me to reach them."

She looked down at him with something close to pity. "Then I learned what existence is. It is a long war. The only ones who keep their dreams are the ones strong enough to protect them. I was strong. My King was stronger. So I chose the stronger dream, and I have never once regretted it."

Her eyes hardened.

"You speak to me as though you understand what stands in front of you. You do not. You do not know what Unfathomable means."

She let go.

Her Immensity came down on him all at once. Vast, grey, iron-heavy, a weight that had flattened Legacies, a pressure that bent the light around it. It struck the sandy cloud. It struck the crown. It struck Noah full in his Nightmare face.

And it found nothing to grip!

It went through the cloud, and the cloud closed behind it. It went through Noah, and Noah remained exactly where he was. All around them, the Totems hummed and searched and read nothing, because there was no Immensity in him to read. There was no Root for an iron gate to close over. There was no handle for a hand to grasp.

Brunhild’s eyes widened, very slightly.

She struck again, harder. Her Immensity came down like a falling mountain, and the snow on every Elsedimension for a hundred leagues was blown flat to the stone.

Noah let it pass through him.

Then he answered.

Around him, in the sandy cloud, a scene began to bloom.

A village, small, in a mountain Dimension, with stone houses under turf roofs, smoke curling into a cold sky, and a forge ringing at its edge. And at the forge, a girl. Big-shouldered even then. Iron-haired even then. Sweat on her face, a hammer in her hand, her tongue caught between her teeth as she beat a horseshoe into shape.

Brunhild went very still.

"You are nine years old," Noah said. His voice was calm and even, and it carried through the fog like a voice reading from a very old book. "It is the end of autumn. Your hands are blistered. Your grandmother is calling you in for supper, and you are pretending not to hear her, because the horseshoe is almost right."

In the scene, riders came over the hill.

"Then they come," Noah said. "They gather your village in the square. They offer the same choice you offered this Legacy an hour ago. Kneel and keep your homes, or refuse and learn what refusing costs."

In the scene, the girl’s grandmother stood at the front of the crowd with her hands shaking. "They want you most. Even then, you are the strongest one there. So you kneel, and your village keeps its turf roofs for another hundred years, and your grandmother dies warm in her bed. That is the road you walked."

The girl in the scene knelt in the snow.

"It was not a foolish road," Noah said.

Then the scene shimmered, and the girl stood back up.

"This is the other one."

"Enough," said Brunhild.

Noah went on.

"In this road, you do not kneel. You walk up to the rider at the front, with the hammer still in your hand, and you tell him to get off your grandmother’s land. You break his jaw with a horseshoe. Your forge burns. You stand in front of your house through one whole night against beings who should kill you in a single breath, and they do not, because you will not fall. By morning, your village is running for the mountains with its children on its backs. You carry two."

The scene moved as he spoke: fire, dark, a long climb through snow.

"Your grandmother does not survive that night. You live in caves for forty years. You teach other children how to hold a hammer. Then how to hold a Root. Then how to hold a line."

The scene showed a big iron-haired woman, older now, high in the mountains, at the head of a long stone table, firelight on her face, laughing at something a child had said. "And then you come down from the mountain with three hundred behind you who have never knelt to anything, and you build something small. Something that is yours."

He looked up at her.

"In that road, you are weaker than you are now. Far weaker. You are also free." He watched her face. "I do not say which road is better. Existence does not say. Only you can. But you should know it was there. You should know that you left it."

Brunhild stared at the laughing woman in the fog.

"That," she said, very flatly, "is not my life."

"No," Noah agreed. "It is the life you threw away. It has been waiting a long time for someone to remember it."

For a long moment, everything held still.

Then Brunhild Varr spoke one word.

"Stop the bullshit."

BOOM!