Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

The dust in the Maze had nearly settled when Noah turned to Lygara, who was still coiled on top of the golden wall with her long insect body wrapped loosely around a turret. Her beautiful face was turned toward the place in the sky where the silver light had gone, and her tentacles moved slowly while she thought about something far away.

“Lygara,” he said, and when her face turned toward him, he asked, “What else do you know about THE Sumeru Elysium?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then uncoiled and came down the wall in one long, slow pour until her face hung level with his. “Less than I would like, and more than most. Very well. Sit, Dreamer.”

Noah sat down cross-legged on the floor of the corridor with his robe pooling around him, while far down the corridor the Verdant Regard’s body watched them both with blank green eyes. Lygara settled across from him and asked, “Tell me first. When you think of existence, what do you see?”

He thought about it before answering, “Dimensions and Observable Existences, with Legacies built on top of them or around them, and the Gaps in between where nothing used to grow. Then THE Chrysalis, where we are, THE Source Lands, THE Infinite Carcosa, and now THE Fallow, all big regions and all far apart.”

“Far apart,” Lygara repeated. “Yes, that is how most see it, as islands in a dark sea with countless empty miles between them.”

Her tentacles drew a scattering of small circles in the gold dust on the floor, and she added, “But that is only what it looks like from the surface.”

Then she drew a line up through the middle of the circles, then another from beneath them, and then dozens more, all rising from one point at the center and branching out until they reached every circle.

“There is a mountain at the center of everything!” she said, and Noah looked down at the drawing as she went on. “THE Mountain at the Center of Everything does not sit in any Dimension or any region, because it sits underneath all of them, above all of them, and in the middle of all of them at once. Some say existence grew outward from it, and some say existence is still growing outward from it and always will.”

She touched the center point and said, “Out of its roots and its slopes and its peak run the Existential Conduits, the deep roads of existence, and every great region you named sits at the end of one or more of them, while every Dimension is fed by one.”

“So if someone could find the Mountain,” Noah said slowly, “they could reach anywhere.”

“If someone could find it, or even perceive it,” Lygara said, “though most cannot, and most live their whole existence without once sensing that it is there, the same as a fish lives its whole life without once wondering about the riverbed.” Her eyes rested on him as she continued, “But those who can perceive the Mountain, even faintly, can follow the Conduits and cross the dark between regions in a breath. They can step from THE Sumeru Elysium to the Chrysalis without passing through anything in between, and back again.”

“Those two,” Noah said, “the twins.”

Lygara tilted her head and answered, “Yes, their road of light may have come down a Conduit, because their father has walked the Mountain, and so have they.”

“And THE Sumeru Elysium?” he asked, and Lygara’s face softened slightly. “It is what grows on the Mountain’s lower slopes, around its feet, where the Conduits first leave it,” she said.

“There are endless feilds there, gold and green, under a sky that never quite sets, with rivers of pure Narrative running through them and Immensity so thick in the air that you breathe it and it breathes you.” She paused and added, “I have been there once, a long time ago.”

He asked what it had been like.

She smiled and said,

“Crowded, with the oldest and greatest things in existence, each one living out their Legacy as if on a stage. Ancients older than Dimensions argue there over the shape of the next Cycle under trees that bear fruit made of Narrative, and Firsts of every kind, Gu and otherwise, walk the fields as if they own them, because in a sense they do.”

Her tentacles drew slowly in the dust while she finished, “It is where existence goes to decide what it will become, and when a Cycle turns, the ones who will turn it gather there first.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” he asked, and Lygara’s voice dropped as she answered.

“Far more. The Chrysalis, the Source Lands, and the Carcosa are the ones everyone knows, with names spoken in every Legacy, but the Conduits branch into places almost no one has heard of, and the Fallow is one of those. I have heard whispers of others, like a region where every name ever spoken is kept and spoken again forever, so that the air there is nothing but voices, and a region made entirely of thresholds, doors opening onto doors, where nothing is ever inside or outside. There is even a region said to be the far side of the Mountain itself.”

She was quiet for a moment before going on. “There are Conduits even the Elysium does not map, roads that lead off the edge of what anyone has seen, and every corner of existence has its own mysteries. Some of them are sleeping, some of them are hungry, and some of them are only waiting to be noticed.”

Noah looked down at the drawing in the dust, at the dozen circles, the mountain, and the lines branching up from beneath, and then past the edge of it, where Lygara’s tentacle had not reached and there was only gold dust and the shape of everything nobody had drawn yet.

“How much of it have you seen?”

She laughed softly and answered, “Of existence? I am the First Gu of Destiny, and I have watched the threads of destiny run through more of it than almost anything alive, and still I have not seen a hundredth of it, perhaps not a thousandth.”

She looked up at him and said gently, “None of us have, not the Kings on their banner, not the twins and their father, and not the Firsts gathering in the Elysium. Every one of Those Who Remain has lived for Ages and Cycles without glimpsing the full breadth of what we are living in, and still so many of them spend their whole existence asking why they remained, why they stopped, and why the door never opened for them.”

She shook her head slowly and asked, “How could they expect to step through a door, when they have never even looked at how large the house is?”

…!

Noah said nothing for a long time, thinking about the Kings and their armies, about Those Who Remain sitting in their halls for Cycles while they polished their power and waited, and about the twins, who had walked the Mountain and still believed only individual power mattered.

He thought about himself a few weeks ago, when he had believed the whole of existence was something he could climb to the top of.

There was no top, only a mountain no one could see, with roads running out from it in every direction and another mystery at the end of every road.

He smiled slowly, got to his feet, brushed the gold dust off his robe, and looked at the drawing one last time. Existence was vast, truly and unimaginably vast, and he had barely begun to walk it!

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