Chapter 5786: Death and Progeny I

The snow on the Glacial Mountain came down as quietly as ever, as if nothing at all had happened anywhere.

Noah stood in it, solemn, with the Vasiliou Elsedimension still burning behind his eyes!

Somewhere across existence, an Immense One was being held under a white film of sky by a thing wearing Lucy’s face, and he had been moved out of the room before the first blow landed.

Thalia stood beside him, breathing hard. Her furry coat was still dusted with the snow of another Dimension.

"What happened?" She looked up at him, and there was frustration in her gaze. "We won’t be able to know his fate?"

He had told her the shape of the plan before they went. Not all of it, because he had not known all of it, but enough. That he meant to bait THE UNPAID COLLECTOR into showing himself. That when the Collector came, something else would come after him, something grand enough to handle an Immense One, and that their part ended the moment the trap closed. She had agreed at once, before he even finished the sentence.

Of course she had!

That being had hunted her Lineage. Thalia had not agreed because she wanted to watch him fall!

And instead, they had been swept out of the room like dust.

Noah did not like it either! He had stood there with his Root beating faster in his chest, staring up at a frost-visage and an Immense One and the beginning of something few had ever seen, and the Caretaker had simply decided he did not need to see it.

"I’ll try to keep track of exactly what happens," he said. "For now, go and get your parents settled into THE Infiniverse..."

Thalia looked at him a moment longer. Then she nodded.

Noah waved his hand, and she was gone.

He stood alone in the snow outside the golden monastery for a little while after that. Then he sat down, closed his eyes, and reached for the cold!

—

The Cold Place received him without ceremony!

The frozen seas ran to every horizon, blue and white and shining. The Hollow Night Lifeforms sat in their thousands on the rivers, blank-eyed in their turning pillars, breathing the winter in and out.

Nothing here knew or cared that an Immense One was being brought down somewhere across existence. Nothing here had ever cared about anything.

And The Caretaker was already waiting, her pages turning slow around her in the air!

"I want to see it," Noah said in a very straightforward manner!

"You cannot."

"I still want to."

"Wanting has never once been a kind of sight." The Caretaker regarded him with those flat, cognizant eyes, and the pages turned.

"Your Dimensionality could not hold that battle if I laid the whole of it before your face. Two Immensities are touching. Where they touch, existence does not record the event so much as look away from it. You would perceive a pale smear and a sound with no source. You would learn nothing, and some part of you would tear in the effort of learning it anyway."

Her voice did not change at all.

"I will give you glimpses later. When it has ended, I will give you what remains. That is the measure your sight can hold, and so that is the measure you are given."

Noah’s eyes pulsed!

Well. She was not wrong! He had watched Vakochev and the Immense Ones clash over the sundered Train, and with an Infinite gaze turned on it he had caught an arm through a curtain and the sound of a breaking jaw and nothing else. Glimpses were all he had ever gotten. At least this time someone was offering a bit more.

"The page is finished," The Caretaker said. "What was owed for it is owed."

She lifted one pale hand!

Two slivers of crystal rose out of the frozen river at her feet, pale blue at the edges and white at the heart, their insides branched into snowflake paterns too fine to follow. They pulsed together, slow and cold, and Noah’s Root answered them before he had even reached out!

|LESSER KRYOS EXISTENTIAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN x2.|

|The reward for a page completed. It wasn’t that much work, anyways.|

Two more! He now had three sitting cold in his keeping, each one a quarter of a genuine unit of true Immensity, and none of them would ever disperse.

Then a third thing rose from the river!

A page. A sheet of ice, thin and clear and faintly glowing, and it drifted across the air toward him and turned once as it came.

"Here is the next," The Caretaker said. "Look at it for as long as you need."

Noah took it out of the air!

On its surface, letters formed! Not the crawling script of a Runestone but plain obsidian characters, black and sharp against the ice, and they spelled a name he knew.

THE REMINISCING WIDOW!

And beneath the name, an image. Eyes. He recognized them at once.

Noah stood in the frozen dark and said nothing for a long moment.

He thought about Atlas. Of course he did! She was Atlas’s widow, in every sense that counted.

And here she was on a frozen page in a dead place, handed to him by the winter.

"Is she marked for death?" Noah said. "Am I meant to lure her to her end, as I lured the Collector?"

"No."

The word came without weight and without reassurance.

"This page asks for a messenger, not a hunter." The Caretaker’s pages turned. "Carry what I give you to her, and bring her to a place. She holds a power that was made for exactly one lock, and there is exactly one thing behind that lock, and no other hand in existence can turn it. Deliver the message. Have her agree to go. Then the page is finished, and nothing further is asked of you. Of her, a great deal. Of you, nothing."

Beside her, the air thickened, frost gathered out of nothing, and a scroll formed. Ice and rime, bound closed, cold as the botom of the sea, and it floated across the space between them.

Noah took it, and his gaze was heavy!

"What does all of this mean?" Noah said. "What is the purpose here? I severed a thing from THE Sealed One. I held an Immense One in place so something could fall on him. Now I am to move another Immense One across existence to a place of your choosing."

He lifted the scroll slightly. "Three pages, and not one of them resembles the others. So what is the end goal?"

The Caretaker was quiet!

Around her the pages turned, and beneath her the thousands of Hollow Night Lifeforms sat in their cold, and somewhere far above, an Age went on freezing.

"You are basically asking what the winter is for," she said at last.

Her flat eyes did not leave him.

"A winter is not a tool. It does not lift, or carry, or strike. It comes, and it takes whatever cannot hold itself, and what remains, remains. No hand forged it to drive a nail."

The pages stilled around her, all at once, as if they were listening.

"And yet. Threads are being cut that were tied before the first of Those Who Remain ever drew breath. What was scattered is being gathered. What was gathered is being scattered. And a door that was shut a very long time ago has begun, in places, to be unshut. In these epochs and boundless others...the cold has always remained supreme."