Chapter 5785: Targets and Roots III

Time, Noah was learning, had stopped being a thing that happened to him.

Inside Adelaide’s dream, months went by. Snow came and went over her imagined Beast World, festivals were held and forgotten, and she built whole new Chapters of the Third Scale on paper covered in tight blue script. Outside, on the golden shore, barely an hour passed over her floating body.

And Noah, who stood in both places at once, felt neither of those clocks. His existence was anchored to itself. However fast or slow the room around him ran, his own perception ticked by at its own steady pace, and to him, the whole of those months felt like a few pleasant minutes.

He could not interfere with her dream too much. It was hers, and a dream steered too hard by someone else stopped being a dream and became a cage. But he could guide it. He could sit with her over her papers and point at a line and ask why it had to end there. He could tell her what he had learned about Infinity, the Absolute and Transcendent and Dialetheic kind, and watch her eyes widen and her pen start moving again. So he did.

Then he went visiting others.

Barbatos was fighting a war of necromancy in her dream, a glorious and completely unnecessary one, and winning it with great style.

Henry was running a farm as he looked happier than Noah had seen him before. Seo-yeon was forging one Observable Existence after another while designing new causes.

His mother sat in a garden and grew things, and when Noah sat down beside her she took his hand without saying anything, and they stayed there a long time.

Kazuhiko...well, the swordsman had pivotted entirely and had writen forty novels. All of them trash smut!

But at least they were his!

And then there was THE Emperor Penguin.

Noah stepped into that particular dream and stopped, because he was standing in a throne room of polished black ice, and it was full of soldiers. Tall, gleaming, robotic Dimensional Lifeforms, rank upon rank of them, standing at perfect attention. Every single one of them had... Noah’s face.

At the far end of the hall, on a throne carved from a glacier, sat a small, round, flightless bird with its flippers crossed importantly over its belly.

"Soldiers!" the penguin cried. "Polish my throne! Fetch new fish! Bow, Osmonts, bow!"

A thousand Noah-faced soldiers bowed.

The real Noah looked at this for a long, quiet moment.

Then he walked down the length of the hall, between the bowing copies of himself, and the penguin saw him coming and went pale under its feathers!

"RAA! Master!" THE Emperor Penguin flapped off the throne and hit the ice. "Master, this is just a dream! I would never dare think of you as a servant! Never! Ah! AH!"

THE Emperor Penguin received a correctional beating. A thorough one! It was, Noah felt, important that such a dream never be repeated.

Hours of his existence passed like that, and they were good. Almost relaxing!

—

HUUM!

Some hours later, a body of his stood in the Vasiliou Elsedimension, and the Vasiliou Elsedimension was empty.

The great halls were silent, and the gardens lay under snow. Every family of the Lineage had been relocated, one family after another, and all that remained of them here were their houses, standing quiet with their shutters closed, and the long white avenues between them.

Snow was falling even here. The Long Night had reached this sealed pocket like it had reached everywhere else.

It was beautiful, though.

The snow came down slow and silent, catching the pale gold light of the Elsedimension’s sky, and lay on the roofs in soft round drifts and along the garden walls in neat white lines. The bare trees were iced to the tips of their twigs, and the air smelled clean and sharp. It was the kind of snowfall that makes a person want to stand still and breath, the kind children remember for the rest of their lives.

In the middle of the main avenue stood three figures.

Thalia, and on either side of her, her parents. Aurelius and Rosalia Vasiliou. Thalia had used THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign on both of them, reaching into their existential genomes and remaking them, and now they were Elselifeforms. Their existences shone differently, rewritten from the root, their Provenance forever altered. They stood straighter. They glowed faintly in the falling snow.

Thalia looked at them both.

"I will take revenge on THE UNPAID COLLECTOR," she said. "For our Lineage. For everything he took from us."

"But none of you can stay to witness it. Go, for now."

...!

Aurelius looked at his daughter with nothing but love in his face, and nodded.

Rosalia did not look at her daughter. Rosalia looked at Noah, and glared, with the full weight of a mother who believed her daughter’s troubles had all started the day this man walked into her life. Which, to be fair, was not entirely wrong.

His mother-in-law was troublesome. Noah paid it no heed.

He lifted a hand, and the two of them vanished, carried away into THE Infiniverse where nothing that hunted the Vasilious could follow.

Then it was only him and Thalia, alone in the snow!

He crossed the white avenue to her. She wore a great heavy coat of Provenance authority, deep gold and crimson, turned up at the collar against the cold, and her red-gold hair had come loose and blown across her face. He brushed it aside. Snow was catching on her lashes. Her freckles stood out bright against her cheeks in the cold.

"So," Thalia said, looking up at him. "How do you plan to draw out an Immense One?"

"Simple." Noah did not lower his voice. "That fucker promised he would appear the next time I held you. To split us both in half. So that we would be afraid of so much as touching each other."

He slid his hand to the back of her neck. "So I am going to hold you. Loudly. And we will see whether THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, one of Those Who Remain, will do anything at all while the prize he promised himself is taken by someone else."

There was that, and there was also the fact that by having their records read, Immense Ones could know or sense something. If he directly adressed an Immense One and an obsession of theirs? He would definitely come!

And so he kissed her.

He kissed her there in the falling snow, slow and unhurried, and while he did, he let his voice go out with all his authority behind it, booming across every white avenue and silent house of the Vasiliou Elsedimension.

"THE UNPAID COLLECTOR," Noah said, "must be a cluster of trash and worthlessness. The kind that sits on s couch and watches while what was his gets taken. What a bum of one of Those Who Remain!"

Thalia smiled against his mouth!

"An Unpaid Collector," Noah went on, still kissing her, his voice rolling off the snowbound roofs. "He cannot even collect. Some debt he is. He made a promise and then went back to sleep. I am holding her right now, you senile little shit. I am holding her and I will keep holding her. Where are you? Did you forget which Dimension you left your remnant balls in?!"

...!

Not even a second passed.

HUUM!

The Vasiliou Elsedimension shook!

It shook to its foundations, the houses rattling on their stones, the iced trees shedding their snow all at once, the whole sealed pocket of existence groaning like a ship in a storm! And above Noah and Thalia, in the pale gold sky, two eyes opened.

They were utterly cold. Vast, and flat, and filled with a hatred so complete it had gone past anger into something quiet.

|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR looks down upon the two of you.|

|He says he has never once, in all his existence, been so insulted by an insect and a whore.|

|He says your deaths will not be light ones. Even if THE REMINISCING WIDOW comes here herself again, nothing will change.|

...!

Noah looked up at the eyes, and went quiet.

There was nothing he could do about this. Not yet. Not right now! The weight of the thing above him currently was so grand that it made the Fiend’s grip over the frozen forest feel gentle. Even with his Root, even at six hundred and growing, he was nowhere near an Immense One, and he knew it.

At that very moment it was taking everything he had just to keep himself and Thalia from trembling under the pressure bearing down on them from above.

|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR notes your silence.|

|"No more words from you?"|

Noah held Thalia a little tighter.

"Well," he said. "I am only buying as much time as possible."

...!

The eyes above them blinked, once, in the middle of their rage.

And in the next instant, the snow thickened.

All at once it was everywhere, pouring out of the gold sky so densely the houses vanished behind it, heavy and white and driving, and a sound erupted out of the heart of it, a booming sound that did not come from anywhere Noah could point to. The cold eyes of THE UNPAID COLLECTOR were forced downward, dragged out of their height, and as they came, a body came with them!

A massive hazy form now stood in the skies above the Vasiliou Elsedimension. Noah could barely perceive it, a shape too vast and too grand for his sight to hold. But he could see one thing clearly on it now, and that thing was grimness.

The Collector raised both hands to the sky and pushed.

Above him, a thin film of white had appeared across the heavens, pale and smooth as frost on a windowpane. He pushed against it, and it did not break. He pushed harder, and the whole Elsedimension shuddered, and still it held. It was a barrier, and a terrible one, and it had not been put there to keep anything out. It had been put there to keep him in!

Then, directly above Noah, the snow began to gather.

It converged, spiraling in from every direction, thickening, taking shape. A figure formed out of it. Blue-white and jagged and never quite resolving, with two pale points of ice where its eyes should be, and a face Noah had seen twice now. Once in a Runestone’s memory, smiling at him across an age. Once rising out of a dead Immense One’s corpse above a frozen forest.

The frost-visage of Lucy!

It looked up, calmly, at the vast hazy form of THE UNPAID COLLECTOR held beneath the white.

|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR stares down at what has formed below him.|

|"What...the fuck is this?"|

...!

Noah’s Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin beat faster in his chest!

His job was done. Draw the Collector out, hold him a few seconds. He had done exactly that. But he had not known what would come to finish it! This Hollow Night Lifeform wearing the image of Lucy herself, standing calm beneath an Immense One who was pushing at the sky and failing to get out.

He was curious!

Why did the Long Night want THE UNPAID COLLECTOR dead? What was this thing, really? And just what was he about to be allowed to witness?!

The snow began to wrap around him at this time.

It came in close around him and Thalia, thick and deliberate, and Noah frowned. From somewhere inside it, flat and quiet, came a voice he knew.

"Your task is complete," said the Caretaker. "Your presence here is not conducive to what needs to occur."

...!

Motherfucker!

Before he could see a single thing more, the snow took hold of his existence and moved it. Just moved it, bodily, out of the Vasiliou Elsedimension and across existence and down, layering this body of his onto the one already sitting in the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.

He was on the Glacial Mountain, in the snow outside the golden monastery.

And beside him, blinking and still flushed, stood Thalia!