Chapter 5783: Targets and Roots I

The achievement of one was the achievement of another.

Noah looked at Achilles sitting inside the fading pillar of his own light, and he could see it on the man’s face. The king’s eyes had gone wide and far away, full of something that had no easy name, a mix of awe and grief and a strange new hunger, as if he had just stepped outside a house he had lived in all his life and found the sky was bigger than he had ever been told.

Noah knew that look! He had worn it himself, not so long ago, sitting in a dark he had just reforged himself out of.

Achilles would be seeing existence differently now. The Existential Conduits rising through the snow, pillars of flowing authority stretching away into the grey. The small incandescent Conduit Lifeforms drifting under the monastery eaves, which a moment ago he would not have been able to perceive at all.

How beautiful all of it was, and how complicated, and how much of it had always been right there in front of him. And beyond that, maybe something more!

A man who had just swallowed a storm of raw Dimensionality of Time was probably not going to feel an hour pass the same way ever again.

Time...

Noah turned his head. Behind him, still wrapped in its bubble of dreaming Provenance, THE Quill of Chronos hung in the falling snow, purple and gold and perfectly still.

Then it was gone!

The bubble shrank to a point of light and vanished, and the voice of an old man rose out of the ring on Noah’s finger, dry as ever.

"You shine too brightly sometimes with what you can do," Atlas said. "Pulling a Root out of a stranger in the middle of a snowstorm. Honestly. I’ll take the Quill, unlock it, and confirm everything inside it still works after all this time. As for the Inscription I have in mind, a Rare Gu is still a requirement, sadly. No way around it. We can only forge it after you obtain one. When you do, we start. For now, you have attracted something with all that brilliance."

...!

Noah lifted his head.

High above the white shelf, where the snow thinned into the grey of the upper air, an eye was opening. It was enormous, gold-flecked and bright, and it bloomed across the sky like a lamp being uncovered, and Noah recognized it at once.

Poona!

|THE Dimensional Devourer, Poona, looks down on the Glacial Mountain with great interest.|

|She says she did not expect another Root to rise on the mountain you only just began residing in.|

|She is astonished. She is excited. She says she cannot wait to see what else might arise in the Legacy, now that you are here.|

The golden eye lingered a moment longer, bright with something that looked very much like delight, and then it closed and was gone, and the grey sky was only sky again.

The snow fluttered!

A figure stepped out of it onto the shelf.

Verys, the Legacy Keeper, in his immaculate black suit and his heavy fur-lined cloak, the ridges along his throat pressed closed against the cold. He crossed the snow and bowed to Noah, deep and correct, and as he straightened his large dark eyes slid, just for a moment, to the multicolored figure of Achilles, and stayed there a beat longer than courtesy strictly required.

"Sir," Verys said. "I have been tasked with passing on a message."

Noah waited.

"The Legacy wishes to ascertain the talent and power of its new entrants. Those who stand to become Immense Ones in the wake of the Long Night."

The Keeper clasped his webbed hands before him. "It is an opportunity to exchange information and Dimensionality in a controlled setting, without the risk of death. In one day, all Lifeforms with a Root of Immensity will have the chance to spar with others within this Legacy."

He paused, and his eyes went once more to Achilles.

"It appears the Legacy was waiting for one additional being before it began. That quota has now been met."

...!

Noah’s eyes shone, and he gave a slight nod.

A chance to see others on the path to becoming Immense Ones? Other Roots, other ways of climbing, other Dreams? That was worth seeing! And it was a day away, which meant he still had a day to get things done first. Very convenient!

He looked over at Achilles, and past him, at the green-haired woman standing a short way off in the snow, watching her king with eyes that were, frankly, a little hungry.

Noah rose to his feet.

"Take some time to settle into your new existence," he said to Achilles. "Then decide what you want to do. You could stay in this Legacy until you become an Immense One. If you leave for external existence as you are now, you may simply be eaten."

He brushed a little snow from his sleeve. "Your memories of THE Sealed One, and anything else that comes back clearer now, let me know once your existence has settled."

Achilles opened his multicolored eyes.

"I will not forget these favors easily," he said, and his voice was heavy. "I will be sure to repay you."

Noah only nodded.

Favors. Well...they were, in a sense. He had not done any of it purely for Achilles’s sake, though. Every step further the king’s Dream spun across existence would come back to him as Provenance, and he had just planted a very large Dream indeed. It was a good investment! He saw no reason to spoil a moment of gratitude by pointing that out.

He turned to the Keeper.

"He can get his own abode, yes? His own Elsedimension Mountain?"

"Yes, Sir." Verys bowed. "My colleague will take him there."

There was a flash, and another Legacy Keeper stood beside Verys in the snow!

She was a Provenance Lifeform, and she was gorgeous in a manner that seemed almost deliberate, as if someone had set out to design a servant nobody could look away from. Red hair fell past her shoulders in heavy waves, bright as a banked fire against all that white.

She wore the same black uniform as Verys, cut to a figure that was generously curved and made no effort to hide it, and a fur stole draped across her shoulders. Her face was fine-boned and warm, her smile easy, and when she bowed toward Achilles her eyes were shining.

"I am Tatiana," she said. "I will be serving Sir...Achilles, is it? I am here to lead you to your Elsedimension Mountain." Her smile widened by a degree. "And to serve any of your needs."

...!

Before Achilles could answer, Rose was beside him!

She had been a short way off in the snow. Now she simply was not, and was instead at his side. She reached up, took hold of the back of Achilles’s neck, pinched, and lifted, and the Emperor King of a thousand assimilated authorities rose to his feet exactly like a cat picked up by the scruff!

Rose did not look at him. She looked at Tatiana, and her voice was very cold.

"He won’t need anyone to serve him," she said. "Just show us to this mountain."

...!

Even Noah blinked!

Tatiana held Rose’s gaze for a long moment! Then she bowed, smoothly, with a smile that had gone just slightly cold at the edges, and a golden rift opened in the air beside her. Achilles, still held by the neck, managed to turn his head far enough to meet Noah’s eyes, and nodded to him one last time, a little ruefully.

Then Rose let go, and he stepped forward after Tatiana into the rift, and Rose followed right behind him, close enough to step on his heels.

The rift closed. The snow filled in where it had been.

Noah looked at the empty place a moment longer. A Keeper of Lucy’s Legacy had bowed first. Having watched Achilles get lifted by the scruff of his own neck, he could understand why!

Then he turned his attention inward.

Verys had not moved. The Keeper stood a respectful distance away on the shelf, hands clasped, waiting in the storm, and the snow came down heavier around both of them, thick enough now that the monastery’s golden walls were only a warm blurr. Noah sat back down in the middle of it and closed his eyes.

He had finished it. The first page!

A target handed to him by the Caretaker, in the frozen underworld, on behalf of whatever the Long Night truly was. The Assimilation Factor was severed from THE Sealed One, cleanly, and the man who had carried it was walking into his own new Root with a woman holding his collar. The Caretaker had told him that he would have his reward before the next page.

So what would the next page be?

He reached for the cold. Everything else in existence reached away from it. He reached toward it, down into the long quiet chill of the Long Night that lay under the snow and under the mountain and under everything. He let it fill his senses.

And he felt it take hold of him, and pull!

The Glacial Mountain fell away, and the golden monastery, and the patient Keeper in the storm, and Noah felt himself drawn down, and down, toward the Cold Place once more!

---

The Cold Place had not changed much at all.

The seas of white and blue still ran to every horizon, slow and shining and endless. The drifting crystals still hung in the air like dust in a sunbeam that had frozen solid. And on the rivers, rank beyond rank, the Hollow Night Lifeforms still sat in their silence, blank-eyed and cross-legged, each one wrapped in its own turning pillar of cold. Beasts and giants and things with too many limbs, lions with the wrong heads, shapes Noah had no names for, thousands upon thousands of them, and not one had moved since he left!

Before them the cold surged!

It came up out of the frozen seas in great rolling rivers and poured over the seated ranks and away into the dark, and the pillars around each of the dead drank from it, and the whole vast underworld breathed in and out with it, slow as a sleeper!

Noah stood among them, the only one standing, and felt the cold wash past his crystalline skin as a breeze.

It was strange, honestly! The last time he stood in this place he had been half-frozen, drinking a winter that was trying to kill him, and ten hollow things had come at him with shapes that could crush Dimensions. Now it felt almost like visiting a house he had once been sick in.

Familiar, a little grim, and nowhere near as frightening as the first time. Was that what it meant to grow? Places stayed the same size, and you did not?

"You finished the page."

She was there! The pages turned around her in the air, slow sheets of ice catching the pale light, and her frost dress moved like snow that never finished falling. The Caretaker looked at him with those cognizant eyes, the only eyes in all that frozen dark that actually saw anything, and her face held nothing at all.

"I did," Noah said. "The thread between two lifeforms is cut. The host is his own again."

"I know." She did not sound pleased, or displeased. "You chose to cut the thread and leave the man standing. It is already so, and it was already so before you chose it. Here is what I said you would have."

She lifted one pale hand, and something rose out of the frozen river at her feet.

It was small. That surprised him! A sliver of crystal no longer than a finger, pale blue at its edges and white at its heart, and its inside was not smooth but branched, fine and intricate, a snowflake grown down into itself layer apon layer until the pattern was too small to follow. It pulsed! Slowly, once every few breaths, a faint light moved through it from the heart outward, and every time it did, Noah felt his own Root answr.

He knew that pulse!

It was the same slow signal Vakochev had pressed into his hands in the snow above the frozen forest. Keep growing this. Do not stop. Fainter, much fainter, and cold all the way through, but the same!

The crystal drifted across the space between them and settled into his open palm, and his sight opened it.

|LESSER KRYOS EXISTENTIAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN|

|A natural treasure of THE Long Night. It forms only in the deepest cold, where the frozen remains of past Nights settle for an Age around what an Immense One left behind, and condense.|

|Potency: roughly one fourth of a genuine Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin.|

|Nature: a signal of becoming, frozen. It carries the chill of THE Long Night in every layer and will not warm.|

|Use: may be absorbed to feed the growth of an existing Root, or used as a seed around which a Root may be induced in another existence.|

|It will not disperse. Cold things keep.|

...!

Noah’s eyes shone!

A fourth of the real thing! That did not sound like much, until one remembered what the real thing had done! A single whole unit, pressed into his hands with a warning and a shrug, had become the seed of everything he was now. And this one would not run out in a day. It would simply sit in his palm, pulsing, and wait for him to decide what to do with it.

He already had a few ideas.

He closed his hand over the crystal. It was cold, and it stayed cold, and he did not mind at all!

"That is the reward," the Caretaker said. "Now the next page."

She plucked a sheet of ice from the air. It turned once in her fingers, and then she let it go, and it drifted to him and hung before his face, and in the ice an image was already forming!

A face. Or something wearing a face, as a hall wears a door. Vast, cold, and heavy with the weight of a trillion extinguished Dimensions. A gaze Noah had last felt closing around him over a frozen forest, greedy and patient, reaching for a newborn Root as if it had every right to.

THE UNPAID COLLECTOR!

...!

Noah looked at the page, then at the Caretaker, then back at the page again!

"Are you... serious?" he said.

The Caretaker did not answer, because she had already answered, and they both knew it.

"The first page was a man with half a monster in him, sitting alone in an orchard," Noah said. "I could do that. This one is an Immense One."

He tapped the ice. "The difficulty seems to have risen somewhat. From doable, to impossible."

Doable to impossible. Not even impossible for him to fucking boast about how his Dream could make impossibilities into reality. He had to be somewhat realistic!

Noah was not afraid. He did not do afraid. But he was honest with himself, and honesty said a being in the low six hundreds did not simply go hunting an Immense One on a whim!

The Caretaker’s pages turned around her, slow.

"The Cold believes you may be uniquely capable of drawing THE UNPAID COLLECTOR out," she said. "It does not ask you to kill him, or even to wound him. Bring him into whatever domain you are standing in, and hold him there. A few seconds."

Her flat eyes held his. "That is the whole of your part. After that, your part will be done."

...!