Chapter 5765: Legacy! II

<Those Who Remain>

Seconds after Poona and the anomaly vanished, the sky changed.

An aura descended over the frozen forest and the sundered halves of the Train, and it was Immensity of a weight that even THE SLEEPLESS FIEND and THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, who were no small things, felt in their own existences.

The two hazy titans, who had loomed so terribly only moments ago, went somber beneath it.

Then it took a shape.

A figure formed in the churning snow, hazy and purple, humanoid in its outline but wrong in its crown, because from its head rose a pair of horns that did not stop. They twisted upward and outward endlessly, spiraling into the dark above without ever reaching an end, coiling on and on past where sight could follow.

The purple haze of it pressed down on the ruined region, and the two Immense Ones who had been the mightiest things present a breath ago now stood in the presence of something mightier still.

The horned figure spoke, and his voice boomed out across the frozen dark as it came edged with the flatness of a being who was used to being obeyed.

"Where is the Anomaly that was just here?"

It was almost a command. Almost. And THE SLEEPLESS FIEND, who did not care to be commanded by anyone, let a cold light pass behind his luminous eyes at the tone of it.

But he did not act imposingly. He weighed the horned figure’s Immensity against his own, and he simply answered!

"One of those from the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity came," the Fiend said, "and took him."

...!

Existence seethed!

The purple haze roiled, the snow whipping violently around the horned figure, and he looked at the Fiend and the Collector like a colleague looks at others who have broken something priceless through sheer stupidity.

"You did not think," the horned one said slowly, "that an emerging Root, forming in the very first hours after the Long Night began, might be a thing worth holding on to?"

Neither answered.

"One of the few things we were able to scry, across the whole of existence, through all the fog the winter has thrown over the future," he went on, and each word landed heavier than the last, "was this. That one of the three named in THE AUGURY OF THE LONG NIGHT, one of the three at the turning, would be the first to form a Root after the Night descended. The first. And you had that thing in your hands, both of you, hands closed around it, a piece of the single most important puzzle we face in this dreadful cold..."

The horns coiled endlessly above him. "And you let anothrr walk up and take it out of your grip? Really? Truly?You fucked it that badly?"

...!

The Fiend’s threads buzzed, and the Collector’s mass seethed, their own Immensity flaring at the humiliation of the words! And the Fiend looked over, and his voice came cold and imperious.

"None of that information was shared with us," he said. "We were told nothing of a scrying, nothing of an Augury. We caught a scent, we found a Root, we moved to take it. Perhaps if belonging to a Legacy actually granted us the benefits it is supposed to grant, rather than leaving us to guess in the dark like common hunters, we would have known to hold it more carefully."

The horned figure waved a dismissive hand, and the snow settled.

"The Long Night has only just begun," he said, the anger cooling into something colder and more organized. "There are things the ones who are not core to this still do not know. That is a failure of ours, not of yours, and it will be corrected. Let us go back, so that everything is made clear to everyone, and so that nothing like this ever happens again."

He turned his endless horns toward the deep. "We have known for a long time that one of the three is little Riven. He has been groomed and contained this whole time. If we could have gotten our hands on a second of the three as well, then surviving the Long Night would have been all but guaranteed."

"But we know where they took him now. So it may be that we simply do everything in our power to take him back. Come. There is a great deal to prepare."

...!

He turned and dissolved into the deep of existence, his endless horns the last of him to fade, and a breath later the Fiend and the Collector followed, gone into the dark after him, and the frozen forest was left empty under the falling snow with no one to see it grow.

—

Far away, in a Domain lost in existence and time, Sir Moriarty worked at his corpse and watched a screen.

The illusory screen hung in the drifting snow of his hall, and upon it moved two small figures, Poona in her lovely borrowed shape and the anomaly at her side, walking the road of Conduit-light toward him.

Moriarty drew a thread of pale authority from the dead Immense One splayed before him, held it to his small neat spectacles, and set it aside, and did not look away from the screen as he worked.

Behind him, silent, a verdant eye opened in the air.

It was vast, and it was filled with an Immensity Moriarty did not turn to measure, and it wached the screen over his shoulder.

"The first Root formed after the Long Night," it said. "Is it confirmed that he is one of the three? We cannot build what we are building on guesswork."

Moriarty did not stop his work.

"We will know for certain in due time," he said, calm as still water. "EvenPoona does not know what he might be. None of the others do either. So I will take charge of it myself, and confirm it quietly, as we go. Do not worry."

The verdant eye did not answer at once. It gazed at the figure of Noah on the screen intently.

"I never much cared for the future," it said at last. "Why would I? I can always change my present. And I never much cared for this Augury of the Long Night, all its cryptic little verses about turnings and threes."

A pause, and the eye narrowed. "But THE Acharya of Immensity took it seriously. Lucy took it seriously and she told us that when the Night came, it would be our chance. Our one chance to stop being what we are. To no longer be Those Who Remain."

The verdant light deepened. "So we make sure. We gather every piece the Augury names, and we hold them, and we do not let a single one slip away because someone was careless. With the Long Night, the path is open again. The door that closed on us all those ages ago has cracked. And we cannot, we will not, merely Remain."

The eye held on Noah’s small figure a moment longer.

Then it closed, and was gone, and Moriarty was alone with his corpse and his screen and the falling snow.

He drew another thread of dead authority from the splayed Immense One, and he simply murmured to himself again!

"And at the turning, count three," Moriarty said. "One shall look upon all that is, and grieve. One shall take up every weight, and not set it down. One shall no longer remain, and yet remain."

He set the thread aside, and reached into the corpse for another, and on the screen the two small figures drew closer to his hall.

"One shall no longer remain, and yet remain," he said again, softer, and watched the anomaly come!