Chapter 5784: Targets and Roots II

Leaving the Cold Place was easy. It was the page that came back with him.

Noah drew his attention up out of the frozen underworld and settled it into the body that waited for him in his Existential Root Domain, and the sheet of ice came too, hanging at the edge of his thoughts with a vast, greedy face set into it. THE UNPAID COLLECTOR!

An Immense One. Bring him into a domain and hold him there a few seconds!

Impossible, he had told the Caretaker.

Well...maybe not entirely impossible!

The Collector was a being who wanted things. That was the whole of his nature, written into his very name. And not so long ago, in the Vasiliou Elsedimension, that same Immense One had looked at Thalia and promised, very calmly, that at any moment he chose he would rip them in half.

Noah did not need to find the Collector. He needed the Collector to come looking for something he wanted, in a place Noah had chosen. And for that, he needed Thalia.

The plan was only budding yet. But it was budding nicely!

He set it aside for now, because there was something closer in front of him, and he had been meaning to get to it.

The Existential Root Domain stretched out around him in every direction, soft and boundless and entirely his. Blue-gold clouds drifted through it without any wind to move them at al, and far below, THE Infiniverse turned slowly in its singularity, a whole empire held the size of a breath, its Realms glittering like frost on glass.

Threads of light ran out from it into the dark, strung to every Dimension it had ever touched. It was quiet here in a way nowhere else in existence was quiet. Nothing entered unless Noah wished it. Nothing could.

And floating before him, waiting, were the two who had been with him longest!

THE Infiniverse hung in the clouds with her starlit eyes half-lidded, her long hair drifting around her like a slow tide of night sky. Beside her, Ruination floated straight-backed and composed, her crimson gaze steady on him, the Circlet of the Quintessential Ruin catching the blue-gold light across her brow.

"Enough experimenting," Noah said. "Enough theories. What needed to be proven has been proven. The two of you can forge your own Roots now."

"And there should be an overabundance of boons sitting in THE Tide That Owes Nothing by now. Everything I have given lately. Cutting a man loose from THE Sealed One. Handing a Root to someone who never had one. Use all of it. Every return. Take everything the Tide has been holding and spend it on two Roots of Immensity for the two of you."

...!

THE Infiniverse’s eyes opened fully.

Then prompts began to bloom, Ruination’s prompts, crisp and orderly as ever!

|All nine Foundations, including THE Tide, have exceeded their previous ranking. All nine have been granted a ranking of THE INEFFABLE VERSE.|

|THE Unkneeling Crown: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Tide That Owes Nothing: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Mirror That Keeps: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Hunger That Refines: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Unmoved Verdict: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Pure Trajectory: INEFFABLE.|

|THE All-Drawing Stillness: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Remembered Truth: INEFFABLE.|

|THE Sovereign Existence: INEFFABLE.|

|Of note: THE Tide That Owes Nothing no longer returns a number. Its return upon giving has transformed. It now returns what can be dreamed.|

...!

What can be dreamed!

Noah read that line twice. For as long as he had carried the Tide, it had paid him in multiples. Twenty thousand times. A hundred thousand times. Big numbers, but numbers, with a ceiling somewhere even if he had never reached it.

Now there was no number at all. The return on a gift was whatever he could dream it into being, and he was THE Human Dreamer.

He nodded once.

Then he sat down in the air, cross-legged, as if the clouds were a floor, and closed his eyes. Across from him, THE Infiniverse and Ruination did the same, three figures seated in a loose ring in the middle of a boundless blue-gold sky.

He already knew what he wanted for each of them.

Ruination had always been information to him, from the very first. The voice in his head that counted his enemies, predicted their blows, kept his records, told him when he was about to do something grand and foolish. So her Root would lean toward information. Toward knowing, and keeping what she knew.

THE Infiniverse had always been existence to him. His whole empire lived inside her. Realms, oceans, the sleepers in their chrysalis, all of it held in her as a world holds its seas. So her Root would lean toward existence itself, and toward Dimensionality, toward growing more of both.

He would only guide the lean. What each of them became would be theirs.

He raised his head.

Above the three of them, existence tore!

It split open like a seam in cloth, and out of the tear poured light, liquid and heavy, blue and gold, flooding down into the Domain in slow rivers that shone as they fell!

|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has released its returns.|

|Recent acts of giving recognized: the severing of the Assimilation Factor from THE Sealed One; the forging of a Root of Immensity in another lifeform; the steering of a grand Dream; and all that has accumulated since the last release.|

|Return: PURE NATAL BUILDING BLOCKS OF CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN.|

|The raw material of becoming, unshaped and unowned, as it exists before any being claims it.|

...!

Noah looked up at the pouring light!

Nine attempts. He had needed nine attempts in the snow to force a single Root into Achilles, out of nothing but the king’s own failures. And here was the thing itself, the stuff that becoming-signals were made of, pouring out of the sky by the river.

He reached up and took hold of the rivers!

There was no grabbing in it, only guiding, as a farmer guides water into a field where the channels are already dug. Half the flood he drew down toward Ruination, and it poured into her, and she stiffened where she sat as the light filled her.

The other half he drew toward THE Infiniverse, and she tipped her head back and received it with her eyes closed and her lips parted, like dry earth taking in the first rain of a long season.

And inside both of them, two signals began to form!

He kept his hands on the work, steady, turning Ruination’s toward information and THE Infiniverse’s toward existence. He watched for the first crack, the first wobble, the first dark line spreading out from a half-built signal, and it never came!

It was nothing like Achilles!

Both signals rose clean and whole, turning without a tremor, each one brighter than the last moment, drinking the pure material of becoming from the Tide and settling it into themselves as if they had always known where it went. There was no strain. No fracture. No roaring for another try.

Noah had come prepared to spend everything, and he had not even needed to reach for the Lesser Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin sitting cold in his keeping. The Tide’s gift was simply enough!

And while he worked, he looked at the two of them.

They had always been there. From the beginning! Ruination was connected to his budding infinity, and THE Infiniverse was a floating island in the Beast World!

Through the wars and the casting out and the long dark under the stone, through every mad, greedy, reckless thing he had ever done, they had stayed, and they had never once asked what it would cost them. His most loyal companions. And he wanted more for them than worrying about him. He wanted them to be happy. Fulfilled. Something more than the two voices that kept him alive.

But he also knew them, and he knew what they were. They had been made from him and alongside him, and they were so tangled up with him that their fulfillment would always come back to him somehow, whether he wanted it to or not.

Very well, then. If their happiness was bound to him, he could at least make sure that what they were bound to was grand.

He smiled, and finished it.

The two signals closed, and held, and brightened, and in one breath THE Infiniverse and Ruination blazed!

THE Infiniverse changed first. Light ran down her arms and out through her fingers and did not stop there, spreading outward into the clouds in branching lines, and along those branches, small bright things began to bud.

Observable Existences. Tiny Dimensions, swelling like fruit on a bough, each one turning with its own light. Her drifting hair lifted and spread above her into a canopy of stars, and when she opened her eyes, a whole slow sky of new Dimensions was turning in them. She looked like a tree that had learned to grow Domains!

Ruination changed differently. Script rose across her skin, fine lines of it, climbing her arms and throat and brow beneath the Circlet, a tongue Noah did not know written in charcters that looked very old. But unlike the marks on a Hieroglyph Runestone, which crawled away from any eye that tried to read them, these held still. They let themselves be seen.

They simply refused to be changed. Her crimson eyes filled with text, line after line of it scrolling past too fast to follow, and every line stayed exactly where she had put it!

|THE COSMOGONIC CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN has formed within THE Infiniverse.|

|Root of Genesis. Type: PHYSICAL.|

|Signal: "Grow more of existence." She generates new Observable Existences and Dimensions from her own authority as this elevates her towards her Immensity.|

|Grows into: a Dimension-producing being. THE Infiniverse becomes a tree that grows boundless Dimensionality.|

|THE ARCHIVAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN has formed within Ruination.|

|Root of the Record. Type: CONCEPTUAL.|

|Signal: "Keep what you have seen, and obtain endless information." She grows by information and its use. Everything she observes is kept, perfectly, and her Root thickens with every record she holds. She may reach across existence to obtain more.|

|Grows into: a being whose memory cannot be edited. Those Who Remain rewrite the Records of existence. The only un-editable memory known is a Hieroglyph Runestone. Ruination may become the first living existence to approach a Runestone’s nature: a self-made record no Immense One can overwrite.|

...!

Two Roots! One Physical, one Conceptual.

Noah sat in the clouds and looked at them, the tree of domains and the living record, both of them still blazing with the first light of their own becoming, and he felt something move in his chest that was not grand or cosmic at all.

He was human, after all!

And there was a fear he had carried for a long time without saying it to anyone. That one day he would climb so high that no one he loved could follow. That he would stand at the top of everything and look around and find the view was his alone, because every face he cared about had been left somewhere far below, too small to see.

He looked at THE Infiniverse, budding domains at her fingertips. He looked at Ruination, the unchangeable record written across her skin. Both of them looking back at him.

Whatever height he reached, it seemed, these two at least would be standing beside him when he got there.

Noah did not interrupt them.

THE Infiniverse sat with her eyes closed and her hands open on her knees, and small new Dimensions kept budding along the branches of light that ran from her fingers, swelling, turning, settling into place like fruit ripening on a bough in fast time.

Every so often one of them flickered and went out, and she frowned very slightly and grew another in its place, a little better than the last. Beside her, Ruination had not moved at all. Only her eyes moved, the text in them scrolling past line after line, and every so often her lips parted as if she had just read something she had not expected to find written anywhere.

They were both somewhere far away, inside the first hours of their own becoming! He knew that place. He had sat in it himself, in the dark, reforged and alone, with nobody to tell him what any of it meant. Nobody had interrupted him either. He would give them the same courtesy.

So he let his thoughts go elsewhere.

There were hours before the Legacy’s sparring gathering. A whole place of beings with Roots of Immensity, all of them on the same road he was on, all of them curious about each other. He was curious too. And then there was the Collector, whenever Noah decided the time was right, which meant whenever Thalia was ready to play her part. Two big things ahead of him, and neither of them urgent yet.

Another was him finding a Rare Gu, but that should be the easiest.

Which meant that, right now, he had time.

And right now, if he was honest with himself, he missed his family.

They were all dreaming. Amelia, Henry, Seo-yeon, Adelaide, Eon, Barbatos, the Queens, all of them, living their long lives inside the Dream Engine while their bodies floated in pools of Sanguine Mana on the golden shore.

He had put them there himself. It had been the right thing. Growth in a sheltered dream, centuries for every day outside, a place to become grander without being eaten while they did it.

But he missed them anyway!

He could do something about that, couldn’t he? They were in a Dream. He was THE Human Dreamer. And his existence did not much care about time anymore, or distance, or which room of existence he happened to be standing in. So why exactly was he sitting here missing them?

He smiled, stood, and stepped down into THE Infiniverse!

The Domain fell away behind him and he came out onto the Early Veiled Shore, onto golden sand under a sky of drifting blue and gold, with the endless sea whispering in on his left and the island farmland stretching away on his right. Warm. Always warm here, even now, with the whole of existence freezing!

The great chrysalis of the Dream Engine hummed on the shore ahead of him, pale and shining, and all around it, in their pools of crimson-gold Mana, floated the dreamers.

He walked among them, slowly.

Henry, with his old face at twenty and his brow creased in some dream-argument. Seo-yeon, curled small and smiling. His mother, very still, very peaceful. Eon’s jaw set hard even asleep. And there, in a pool a little apart from the others, the Mana lapping softly at her shoulders, lay Adelaide.

Her blue hair floated out around her in the pool like ink in water. Her face was calm, but not quite peaceful. There was something in the set of her mouth that looked like concentration, as if even asleep she was in the middle of working on something difficult.

Noah smiled at her.

Then he took one step forward, and chose, simply, to step into her dream!

|You have entered the Dream of ADELAIDE.|

|Time within this Dream runs far faster than time without. Estimated time lived within since the Dream began: many years.|

...!

He was standing on a balcony!

It was wide and made of pale stone, with a carved railing cold under his hand, and it looked out from the height of a great castle over a city that went on for miles. Towers and halls and bridges climbed the slopes belo him, roofs of dark slate and red tile, banners snapping in a hard wind. And everything was white!

Snow fell thick out of a grey sky and lay deep on every roof and every street and every ledge, blanketing the whole city so completely that the towers looked carved from sugar.

And the streets were alive!

People moved everywhere down there, small at this height and busy. Humans in heavy cloaks, carrying loads across a market square. Beastmen among them, broad-shouldered and fur-maned, a wolf-headed guard leaning on a spear at a gate, a pair of horned children chasing each other through a drift, a bear-shouldered merchant shouting prices across the snow.

Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys. Somewhere a smith’s hammer rang, steady and patient.

Noah stood very still.

He knew this place! Or rather, he knew the place it was built from. The Beast World. It was not a copy, quite. It was grander than the real thing had ever been, tidier, more beautiful, as if someone had taken the memory of it and spent years building it back up with love and very careful hands.

"I wondered when my husband would come see me in my dream."

The voice came from behind him.

"Years have passed, you know!"

...!

Noah turned.

Adelaide stood in the doorway of the balcony, and she looked like an empress!

Her blue hair was bound up in a high crown of braids, a few loose strands falling past her cheek. She wore a gown of deep sea-blue trimmed with white fur, heavy and imperial, the kind of dress meant to be seen from the far end of a throne rooom.

And around her, on every side, moved Mana. Not a trickle. Waves of it, boundless and slow, rolling off her in visible currents and swirling back, so thick that the snow falling near her melted before it could reach her shoulders!

She looked at him for one long moment.

Then she crossed the balcony in three strides and threw her arms around him, and held on hard!

Noah held her back.

And as he held her, he felt her existence against his, and he blinked. She had grown. A great deal! Her Dimensionality had climbed past everything she had been when he laid her down on the shore, past the whole of the Finite Verse, and was just beginning to press into the first stages of the Transfinite. Years of dreaming, all of them spent growing. In a dream he had given her, she had simply refused to sit still.

He smiled into her hair.

"Sorry it took so long," he said. "What have you been up to?"

Adelaide pulled back just far enough to look up at him. Her eyes were pulsing, light moving in them in slow waves, blue and bright.

"Just trying to continue what you cast out," she said. "Your First Infinite Scale, THE Genesis Scale. Your Second, THE Source Scale. I’ve been rebuilding them. And I’ve started designing a Third. THE Dimensional Scale!" Her mouth tightened.

"But forget all that. Time is unforgiving in this place, do you know that? It’s been so long I almost dreamed another version of you, just to have someone to... talk to!"

She did not wait for an answer.

Her hand closed on the front of his garment, and her pulsing eyes flashed, and there was something in them now that was not scholarly at all.

"Get over here," Adelaide said. "I have missed you!"

...!

And Noah, THE True Human Emperor, who could step through time and dream impossibilities into existence, was yanked bodily off the balcony and into the room behind her before he had the chance to say a single word!