Chapter 5767: Legacy! IV

He shook his head as he fished for more information.

"And an Immense One," Noah said. "In all of this...what is an Immense One, really?"

Moriarty looked at the drifting snow with luminous, terrifying eyes of power!

"A Root," he said, "is a seed. That is all any of you are, all of you young ones here. A seed cracked open, full of everything it could ever be, and nothing it is yet. And an Immense One is what happens when a seed is given enough time, and enough safety, and enough adversity in the right measure, to grow. From seed to sprout. From sprout to tree. From potential, all the way to bloom."

He turned his small spectacled eyes on Noah. "You are a seed. A strange one, an interesting one, a seed I cannot classify, but a seed. The tree is the goal. Immensity is only a Root that has finished growing. Out there across existence, many like you are devoured before you can bloom, unless you remain in your Existential Root Domain. But Immensity is hard to fully grasp by being idle as many try different things to survive."

The snow fell over the Domain relentlessly.

"And the winter," Moriarty added, "is very, very hard on seeds. This place...tries to make it a bit easier for seeds to grow. This place does not want your loyalty."

Noah looked at him.

"We are not some sect. We do not care whether you develop a fierce sense of belonging to us, or a deep sense of duty toward us, or whether you weep tears of gratitude every morning at the thought of our kindness."

Moriarty drifted along.

"You owe us nothing. Not belief, not service, not affection. Grow strong, leave when you like, forget my face entirely. It is genuinely all the same to us."

"That is a strange thing for a sanctuary to say," Noah said.

"It is a strange sanctuary." Moriarty’s tone stayed dry. "We are not run for our own glory. Everything here, every law, every kindness, every seed we save from the winter, is done for one reason, and one reason only. Because she wished it."

He did not have to say who!

"Lucy did not build this place to gather followers. She had no interest in being worshipped. She built it because she wanted the young to have a chance she did not have. And so we honor her wishes, all of us, the greedy ones and the kind ones alike. Out of respect for her. She is the only thing any of us truly bow to here, and she is not even present to see it."

WAA!

Noah found that on this particular ideal... he believed it. Their reverence towards that being!

"So no," Moriarty went on, "you will not be asked to swear anything, or join anything, or become one of us. But you will be given something, because she wished that too. A gift she handed down before she left, for every budding Root that finds its way here."

He slowed. "And it is the reason most of the young survive long enough to bloom at all. A Root grows on its own, you have felt that already, I imagine. It secretes its own Dimensionality, raises its own weight, climbs a little every day whether you lift a finger or not. That is the nature of a Root. But growing on its own is slow. Achingly slow. It is a seed pushing up through hard groud one grain at a time, and a seed that grows only at that pace will not become a tree before the winter finds it. Not in an Age like this one."

He turned his small eyes on Noah.

"So Lucy left us a way to grow faster. A Narrative Immense Inscription Art. And it does one thing, one beautiful and terrible thing! It lets a budding Root reach out, across the whole of existence, across Time, Parallel Time, Apocryphal Existences, Multidimensions, Elsedimensions...everything really, and pull in what it needs to grow!"

"Pull in...what, exactly?" Noah asked.

"Immensity." Moriarty said the word with weight. "Existence is not empty, you have seen that now. It is full. Full of authority, full of flow, full of the whole churning chaos of everything that ever was and is and will be, all of it moving through the Conduits and the deep at once. And scattered through that chaos, rare and fine, are slivers. Molecular units, if you like, of pure chaotic Immensity. Loose fragments of the very thing your Root is trying to become. They drift through existence unclaimed, across every distance and every age, and the Art lets you reach out and gather them, and feed them to your Root, so that it grows toward the tree not one grain at a time but by the mouthful. It is how a seed becomes truly Immense before the winter can kill it. It is how any of us ever did."

Noah’s existence sharpened with the interest!

"It is the hardest thing you will ever attempt. When you reach out across existence, you do not reach into a tidy shelf of Immensity waiting to be taken. You reach into everything. All of it, at once, the entire boundless flow of chaos, every current and every stream, information beyond counting, most of it useless, most of it wrong, most of it nothing to do with what you need. And you must reject all of it. Every flow but the one. You must reach into the roar of the whole of existence and refuse every single thing pouring toward you except the rare, fine slivers of Immensity, and then, across a distance and a time you cannot even imagine, you must pull those slivers, and only those, toward yourself, without dragging in a single scrap of anything else."

He let that sink!

"It is a sieve," Moriarty said. "A sieve held up against an ocean, and you are trying to catch a specific grain of a specific sand while the whole sea pours through your hands. Most of the time you will fail. Most of the time you will reach for a sliver of Immensity and pull in a great slop of chaos you did not want, useless information, foreign flows, things that fight your Root instead of feeding it. That is the ordinary danger, and it is bad enough."

His voice dropped. "But it is no longer the ordinary danger, because The Long Night has come. And the winter has changed what is out there in the flow."

The snow fell heavier around them, as if the words had summoned it!