Chapter 5781: Impossibilities! I

The core of the serpent was a storm that did not move.

Or rather, it moved in a way that had nothing to do with going anywhere. The four of them stood at the mouth of a chamber vaster than the coil that had brought them to it, and across the whole of that chamber ran rivers.

Rivers of time. They wheeled in slow circles around the center, ring inside ring, dozens of them, each one a current of raw Dimensionality of Time given a shape and a course, and where a river passed near the wall the stone aged a thousand years in an instant and un-aged a thousand more as the current curved away.

One ring ran forward. The next ran back. The next ran forward again, faster, and the air between them shimmered where the two speeds met, so that a mote of dust caught in the seam might be young on one side of itself and ancient on the other.

At the very center, held in the still eye where all the rings turned around nothing, a quill spun!

It was purple shading toward gold, no larger than a feather from a large bird, and it turned end over end in the emptiness at the heart of the storm, and it was the most patient thing Noah had ever looked at.

Everything in that chamber raged. The quill only turned, slow and even, as though it had all the time there had ever been, which, Noah understood, was very nearly the case.

"There," Atlas said. An old man made of light, standing at the mouth of a storm he had built. "THE Quill of Chronos. Exactly where I left it."

Rose looked at the wheeling rings watched intently. Achilles stood very still, watching the currents with an attention Noah had not seen on him before.

"I did not hide it behind a lock," Atlas said. "Locks are for things you expect a clever being to reach. I hid it behind time itself."

He gestured at the rings, and the light of him flickered where a current passed. "Every one of those rivers is Dimensionality of Time. Walk into them, and they will spend you and revert you for millions and billions of years with the degradation of Time itself. They will pour age into you until there is nothing of you left that has not already happened, and then they will keep pouring, and you will be a thing that was, and never quite is."

"It works on nearly anything. When I set it turning, I judged it strong enough to drain a being approaching the level of an Immense One."

The old man’s light dimmed. "But time did not sit still while I was gone. The rivers have been turning for ages, and a river of time that turns for ages grows deeper. Whatever I set them to drain when I built this place, they would drain something grander now. I do not know how much grander."

He looked at the rings for a long moment.

"My weavings here cannot carry us through that," Atlas said as he turned toward Noah.

"So, you may have to put in some work again."

Noah looked at the rings, and began to gather himself for the crossing!

But at this time...

"Can I be of use," Achilles said, "and not just stand at the back?"

Noah turned.

The Emperor King had stepped forward a pace, his crystalline eyes fixed on the wheeling rivers, and there was a hunger in his stillness that had nothing to do with battle.

"I wanted the first thing I assimilated after THE Sealed One to be grand," Achilles said.

"I have not taken anything into myself since you cut the old monster loose."

He nodded at the storm. "This... seems grand. Heavy Dimensionality of Time, grown stronger across the ages, strong enough to spend something nearing an Immense One. I would like to try."

...!

Noah considered him.

He was curious, in truth. THE Sealed One had wanted this Factor of Assimilation badly enough, and Noah had cut it free without yet seeing it used on anything worth using it on. A river of time that could drain a near-Immense being was worth using it on!

"Try," Noah said.

Achilles walked toward the storm.

He did not rush it. He crossed the floor of the chamber toward the outermost ring at an even pace, a young king in a coat of shifting color, and Rose took a half-step after him and then made herself stop with eyes filled with worry.

The first river caught him before he touched it!

Its influence reached out ahead of the current itself, and where it fell on Achilles his existence began to age! It happened without violence, without a sound. The young king’s face lined.

The color went out of his shifting coat, greying at the edges. His shoulders drew down, and his stride shortened, and by the time he stood a single pace from the raging river he was not a young king anymore!

He was an old man, bent and thin and worn, with a thousand extra years hanging off him that had arrived in the space of ten steps, and Rose clenched her fists!

Achilles reached the river. He lifted one aged, trembling hand toward it.

"Assimilate."

The word came out of him slow and cracked, an old man’s whisper, and the vibrant river of time buzzed at the sound of it.

Then it went out, not aside and not around, but into him! The whole raging ring of Dimensionality of Time buzzed once, a rising note, and poured into the old man’s outstretched hand and up his arm and down into the deep of him, the current unwinding from its course and vanishing into his existence entirely, until where a river had turned there was only empty air, and the ring inside it wheeled on as though nothing had been taken from beside it.

Noah watched, and read the body of the thing that had been an old man!

The age was already reversing. The moment the river entered him, the years it had poured into him found somewhere else to go, absorbed and reweighted and made a part of the whole, and Achilles’s bent frame straightened, the lines smoothing out of his face, the color returning to his coat, the young king coming back up out of the old one like how a drowned man comes up out of a river.

The snow in the surroundings whipped down heavily!

By the time he lowered his hand he was himself again, young-faced and ancient-eyed, and he did not stop.

On to the next river. He would Age, he would whisper, he would assimilate and come back young, and move again. Then the next!

One after another, Achilles Adrastia crossed the storm of time, and it was the strangest crossing Noah had ever watched. Every river spent him, and every river he took, and with each one the taking came easier, because his existence was becoming the thing it swallowed. By the sixth river he barely aged at all approaching it. By the ninth, the influence that had bent him double at the first ring passed over him like a draft through an open door.

Noah’s own eyes had grown heavy with time. Standing near so much raw Dimensionality of Time, even from the outside, even untouched, pressed a weight of ages against his existence, and he held it off with his Root seamlessly.

By the last river, there was nothing left to spend.

Noah looked at Achilles as he approached the final raging ring, and his sight told him a thing he had not expected. The signature of Achilles’s existence and the signature of the river had become the same. Not similar. The same.

The Emperor King had assimilated so much Dimensionality of Time that he no longer read as a being standing near a river of time. He read as a river of time that had learned to walk!

The last current did not age him at all!

Achilles stood before it, whole and young, and lifted his hand, and did not whisper. He did not need to. He waved his fingers, once, an easy motion, and the last river of Dimensionality of Time uncoiled from its ancient course and came to him, flowing and dancing around his hand like water poured over stone, curling between his fingers, before it too sank into him and was gone!

The storm was over, the chamber gone still.

Where dozens of rivers had wheeled around a spinning quill, there was only air, and a young king standing at the center of where they had been, shining.

His whole body held a stellar purple luster now, deep and slow and terrible! A light that pulsed the way the walls of the coil had pulsed, like something very large breathing in its sleep. He looked at his own hands, and then he looked up, past the empty air, at nothing Noah could see.

"It is not a river," Achilles said quietly. "I always thought it was a river. Everyone does. You stand in it, and it carries you, and one day it carries you off."

He turned his shining hands over. "It is not a river. It is a room. I have been standing in one room my whole existence, thinking the walls were moving, and they were not moving. And now I have taken the room into myself, and I can feel the shape of it, and it has doors I never knew were there."

His ancient eyes came down to Noah’s. "I... did not know time had so many doors."

HUUM!

Noah floated forward.

His eyes lingered on Achilles for a moment!

"The Dimensionality you just assimilated," Noah said, "may be enough to serve as the basis of your own Chorionic Gonadotropin. Get ready to use it soon."

He then crossed the still air to the center of the chamber, to the empty eye where the storm had turned, and there the quill still spun, patient, purple and gold, waiting. He reached the place where it turned and looked at it, and the weaving of it opened to him.

|THE QUILL OF CHRONOS|

|A Relic of the engineer known as ATLAS. Function: The inscription of Time.|

|With it, an inscription may be written into the weaving of a place that bends the flow of Time to the writer’s favor.|

|Grade: ??????|

|Origin: ??????|

|Remaining capacity: ??????|

|Further functions: ??????|

Half of what it was would not resolve! Question marks sat where the deeper truth of the thing hid behind a wall Noah could not yet read. It did not matter. Atlas would know, and Noah had not come to read the thing. He had come to take it.

A bubble of the Provenance of THE Human Dreamer closed around the quill, and it stopped spinning, held in a dream of stilness, and the whole chamber went quiet in a new way, as though the last turning thing in it had finally been allowed to rest!

He did not intend to linger in a place a dead man had warned him Immense Ones might sense.

"Let’s go."

He imposed his Provenance around all four of them, and the core of the serpent of time was gone!

—

The Glacial Elsedimension Mountain rose white and endless out of the deep of Lucy’s Legacy, and the snow never stopped falling on it.

It was a mountain that was also a sealed reality, and it climbed higher than a mountain had any right to, its slopes pale and clean and softened under a blanket of snow.

Near its shoulder, where the slope leveled into a wide white shelf, stood a monastery. It had been built out of golden Existential Conduits, the veins of existence coaxed into walls and a low roof and a single arched door, and the gold of it glowed warm and steady through the falling white, the one warm thing in a world of cold and quiet.

Snow gathered on its roof and did not melt.

Snow filled the air around it, drifting slow and soundless, each flake catching the gold of the walls as it fell, so that the monastery sat inside a slow golden storm of its own light!

Nothing moved on that mountain but the snow.

Nothing sounded but the snow, which made no sound at all. It was the most peaceful place in all of existence!

And Noah sat outside the monastery in the middle of it, on the white shelf, and let the snow fall on his crystalline shoulders and did not brush it off.

A golden bubble of light bloomed in the air before him soon after.

It held a spinning quill, held still. And a breath after it appeared, two more shapes came into being on the snow beside it. A green-haired woman and the king who shone with the luster of a hundred assimilated rivers of time. Noah nodded to them.

"Welcome to the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity," Noah said. "It is...somewhat safe here. As safe as anywhere is, now."

Rose looked at the falling snow, at the golden monastery, at the endless white slope, and for the first time since the orchard, her shoulders came down from around her ears!

Achilles did not look at any of it. He was looking at his own hands, which still pulsed with that slow stellar purple, his whole existence buzzing with Dimensionality it had not finished settling, a transformation still turning over inside him.

Noah watched him for a moment.

"Your existence is transforming," Noah said. "It will keep transforming for a while yet as that makes now as good a time as any."

He rose from the snow. "Why don’t we see whether the impossible is possible?"

He had done it once already. Inducing a unique Chorionic Gonadotropin in a being already turning with fresh Dimensionality of Time could not be so much harder than that, right?

And there was more in it than kindness. A Dream of Assimilation, spun out across existence through a being who became everything he touched, was a Dream Noah would be steering. The further it spun, the more Provenance it would return to the hand that dreamed it!

He looked at the shining king in the falling snow as his eyes burned with grand ambitions!

"Sit," Noah said. "And dream with me."