Chapter 5780: Time! II

<THE True Human Emperor>

The twelve Provenance Lifeforms did not run!

Twelve foreign Provenance Lifeforms, standing at the base of a statue of time, had felt four beings appear out of nothing at their backs, and not one of them flinched toward flight. Instead they turned and spread, and came unhurried across the storming ground.

At their front walked a woman with hair the color of old bronze, bound back hard against her skull. Her eyes had held one expression for so long that Noah doubted they remembered any other.

She wore a coat of layered grey that the storms of time slid off without touching, and she moved like a magistrate carrying a sentence already written.

"You newcomers will be smart to leave," she said.

"This Elsedimension, and every Relic in it, has been claimed by THE Vheldrani Provenance Lineage. Claimed across ages. We have paid the toll on this place a hundred times over, in blood and in years, and it is ours by every weaving that binds a thing to a claim."

Her bronze eyes moved across the four of them and dismissed them in the moving. "You are trespassers on a hunt that was old before your Lineages had names. I do not know what you are. I frankly do not give a damn. Get out, and take your pathetic selves with you before we decide the trespass is worth the trouble of correcting."

Behind her, the eleven spread wider, and the storms of time bent around them as their Provenance buzzed and distored the surrounding Existence!

Noah looked at the twelve, and their measures opened to him.

|VHELDRANI PROVENANCE LIFEFORM| |VERITAS: 211. POTENTIA: 208. PONDUS: 214. PROVENANCE: 219.|

The woman was the strongest of them. The low two hundreds. The eleven behind her were less, all of them dense and self-made and genuinely grand by the measure of everything he had spent his whole climb fighting, and all of them beneath his own current standing by a distance where the number of it stopped meaning anything.

He had crossed six hundred not long ago! He grew forty to eighty more with every turn of Existence whether he lifted a finger or not. And twelve beings in the low two hundreds had come to shoo him away?

He looked at that and found it faintly, coldly amusing.

"You have made a mistake," Noah said.

The bronze-haired woman’s eyes narrowed.

"Hey, I really dont want to have a back and forth as it has gotten very cold recently. The mistake is yours as the best you can do is leave."

"Not that mistake." Noah lifted a hand, unhurried. "You looked at me, and you decided what I was, and you did it quickly, because your people decide things quickly. That is the mistake. You should have looked just a bit longer."

"I have looked long enough to know you are one and we are twelve."

"You have looked long enough to count us. You have not looked long enough to understand that the count does not matter. Even if there were a million of you, the count still would not matter."

WAA!

And he dreamed!

WAA!

His Provenance came off him, blue and gold, and it did not fall on them as an attack falls. It rose around them slowly, and the twelve moved to shed it as they would shed any hostile weaving, and found nothing to shed, because there was nothing hostile in it! It was only a dream, settling over them, asking their existences to agree.

"What is this?!" the woman said, and for the first time her voice held a sense of alarm!

"I dreamed of you," Noah said, "as statues."

The rivers of his Provenance closed!

There was no tearing, no burning, no unmaking. Noah simply dreamed that these twelve foreign Provenance Lifeforms were frozen figures, drifting statues, silent and still and carried forever on the currents of existence, and existence agreed!

The bronze-haired woman had time to open her mouth.

Then the grey of her coat turned to stone, and the bronze of her hair with it! The expression her eyes had worn for an age set hard and stayed, and the certainty in them was the last thing to freeze, still there and cold when the rest of her had already gone still. She did not fall, because there was no down to fall in.

She hung where she had stood, turning very slowly in the storms of time, a magistrate of stone holding a sentence she would never finish reading!

Eleven more went the same, one after another, mid-step, mid-spread, mid-thought!

Twelve statues where twelve claims had stood, drifting apart on the currents, growing smaller toward the far purple, not one of them having landed a single word of protest that existence had bothered to hear.

It was very quiet afterwards!

"Hmm," Atlas said.

Noah was already moving ahead!

He crossed the storming ground toward the base of the serpent, toward the purple barrier of time that hung across the way like a curtain of years, the barrier the twelve had spent who knew how long failing to cross.

He stopped before it, and did not touch it. His gaze went instead to the ring on his own finger, and he waited.

The ring shone!

Atlas’s light poured out along Noah’s hand and into the curtain, and the curtain knew it. The same hand had made both, keyed to the same maker, and the barrier parted before that key. The years drew back. A path opened into the coil of the serpent, dim and cold and older than the storms outside it!

They went in!

—

Inside the serpent, time waited.

The walls of the coil were stone that was not quite stone, dark and smooth, threaded through with faint lines of light that pulsed slow, like something very large breathing in its sleep! The path curved away ahead of them, spiraling down toward a core they could not yet see, and the deeper they went the quieter it became, until the only sounds were their own passage and that slow pulse in the walls.

Noah walked at the front, and he spoke as they walked, quiet, to the old man of light beside him.

"The Vheldrani were open to me when their Dreams ceased," he said. "Their memories, at least what they were thinking of when they died."

"And?" Atlas said.

"They did not come here on their own. They were sent to this place, to strip it of your Relics at the behest of another."

Atlas was quiet for a moment. "Whose behest?"

"THE SLEEPLESS FIEND."

The light in the walls pulsed once, twice, in the silence, and when the old man started forward again the warmth had gone out of his voice.

"Okay. Anything else?" Atlas said. "Tell me the rest."

"This is not their first hunt in your Elsedimensions. They have taken things from you across the ages in different Elsedimensions. Small things. Tools. Fragments. The Fiend has been picking your bones a very long time, one Relic at a time, and paying Lineages of Provenance Lifeforms to do so."

Atlas nodded for a moment.

"The small things they can take. I expected that. Let him have every workbench and every failed prototype and every clever little toy I left lying around, and much good may they do him."

The light in the walls steadied and hardened.

"But the truly critical things, Dreamer. The things I hid in the deep places, behind curtains of years, in the coils of serpents that eat their own tails. Those were never supposed to be grasped. Not by him. Not by anyone. One of them is here. THE Quill of Chronos."

Noah listened intently.

"I made a great many things in my life," Atlas said. "Most of them were cleverness for its own sake. Cleverness is worth having for its own sake. But a few of them were more. A few of them were what I built once I understood, finally, what I was up against, and how badly I was losing."

The light pulsed beside him. "THE Quill of Chronos is one of those. With it, I wrote an inscription. A single inscription, into the weaving of an Elsedimension, and that inscription twisted time itself to my favor. Do you understand what a being could do who could write time?"

"I am beginning to," Noah said. He thought of a serpent eating its own tail, and a place where hours blew past like seconds.

"You built this whole Dimension around the Quill, yes?"

"I built this whole Dimension to hide the Quill, and to hide the inscription I wrote with it, and to keep both out of the hands of beings who would use them to do to existence what I only ever did to a single Elsedimension."

Atlas’s voice dropped. "And now a Lineage sent by THE SLEEPLESS FIEND has found the door to it. Because they were here, THE Sleepless Fiend should sense something. I built these Elsedimensions to keep his kind out, specifically his kind, and he has never once set foot in one, which means he cannot simply follow us in. But nothing is guaranteed. Nothing has ever been guaranteed in existence. You saw that with the Vasiliou Provenance Lineage"

...!

"Then we move quickly," Noah said.

"Yes. We get the Quill. We get out."

The old man of light almost smiled. "And then, Dreamer, and only then, you can play at inducing Roots and dreaming impossibilities to your heart’s content. But first, my Quill. Before the winter and Immense Ones and everything else in existence remembers this place is here."

Noah looked down the spiraling path, into the deep of the serpent, and the slow light pulsed in the walls, and somewhere far below, at the core they could not yet see, something old and precise waited for the first hand in an age that had a right to it.

He did not intend to walk the whole of that path as he had a faster way now.

"I dream," Noah said, quiet, "that we do not have to search for long. That the Relic is close. That we are coming up on it now."

WAA!

|25 Provenance Essence expended.|

|You have dreamed a shortening of the way as you bypass many traps of time. Existence is adjusting to agree.|

|The distance between you and THE Quill of Chronos has begun to collapse toward zero...|

The spiraling path blurred! The slow light in the walls streamed past, faster and faster, the coil unwinding around them, the core rushing up to meet them, and the four of them dissolved forward into the deep of the serpent of time!

...!