Chapter 5480: Dimensions and Time! II
Chapter 5480: Dimensions and Time! II
While this happened, far away in Ryaenara’s Dimension of Existence, another one of Noah’s bodies sat calmly in the ancient temple among the still stellar lakes.
Ryaenara returned at this time. She came through the gateway alone, and she looked at him seriously, the mirth still absent from her face, her brother’s collapse still written in the set of her shoulders.
And Noah looked back at her through his new Quintessential Sight, and saw her for the first time.
Her composition unfolded before him in layers. On the surface ran the strings of her graceful form, fair and slender and humming with an Antiquity’s density. Beneath that sat something she had never shown him, a hidden Pantheon, folded down small and quiet inside her structure like a palace collapsed into a locket, its golden threads wound tight and deliberately silenced.
Deeper still coiled her Intent, and it was a terrifying thing to read. THE Ananke Intent did not vibrate the way other Intents vibrated. It ran through her as taut, unbending lines, threads pulled so tight they had stopped humming at all, inevitability rendered as strings that permitted no other note!
And past all of it, at the very bottom of her, lay a foundation of heavy obsidian strings, black threads of a weight that pressed on his Sight itself, so dense that reading them felt like lifting them. He looked deeper, following the black weave down, and at its heart he found a manifestation. An archaic structure, older in its making than anything else in her composition, shaped unmistakably like a coffin. And within the coffin, rendered in strings so still they might as well have been stone, lay a corpse.
Noah held his Sight on it for exactly one breath, then let it go, and kept his face as calm as the temple stones. A coffin with a corpse in it, buried at the foundation of her existence!
What a unique thing she was.
"Is Ulf okay?" Noah asked.
Ryaenara nodded.
Noah studied her for a moment longer, then spoke once more.
"I have already begun peeking at possibilities across time," he said. "The anchor is being set as we speak. So let us see where you can point me when it comes to Dimensions." He rose from where he sat, and the temple’s ancient stones seemed to straighten with him.
"You told me the road runs through Dimensions of Existence scattered across space and time. Littered with Infinite, Source, Primeval, and True Lifeforms. And if those Dimensions truly lead to True Lifeforms, and even to Those Who Remain, then let us start toward them. I will get my own answers. And you..." He looked at her plainly. "You can save your brother."
...!
Noah gazed at Ryaenara, and she gazed back at him.
Then she breathed out, slow and long, as if setting something down. The seriousness that had wrapped her since her brother’s collapse loosened by degrees, and her old air returned piece by piece, the ease, the looseness, the ancient mirth settling back over her like a coat she had briefly forgotten she owned.
She began to tap her fingers against the air.
Each tap left a point of light hanging where her finger touched. Singularities. One, then ten, then hundreds, blooming out from her idle rhythm like sparks off a wheel, and they kept multiplying, rising and spreading through the temple space until thousands became millions, a field of burning points stretching out around them both in every direction.
Then she waved her hand, and the space reframed itself.
Below them, an obsidian sea unrolled, stretching out endlessly, black and slow and heavy, its surface catching light the way deep stone catches it. Above them, a cerulean sea spread just as far, churning and blue and dense with potential. And between the two seas, holding the millions of singularities like dust caught in a sunbeam, was darkness. Immense, unlit, unmeasured darkness.
She drifted upward into her own map.
"Existence is so unfathomably vast that even Vakochev himself never mapped all of it. The being whose Scales measure every power you have ever met gave up on measuring the territory. He built a ladder and left the geography alone, because the geography defeated him." She gestured downward at the black sea.
"The obsidian below, take that as THE Source Lands. The blue above, THE Infinite Carcosa. The two great heartlands. They have stood for more ages than anyone knows, and they are still full. Powerful lifeforms reside in their corners even now, old things in deep territories."
Her hand swept across the field of burning points between the seas.
"And these. The countless singularities between them. These are both Observable Existences and Dimensions of Existence, scattered through the dark that separates the heartlands. The Observable Existences you know." Her mouth curved.
"The Dimensions are the part of the map they never show you. Because the places where Primeval Lifeforms and True Lifeforms actually reside are not the heartlands, and not the Observable Existences. They are here. In the Dimensions between."
She plucked one singularity out of the dark and let it turn above her palm.
"Most beings will never know they exist. Never perceive them, never brush against one, never earn access, unless their power reaches a grand enough level that the Dimensions stop being invisible to them. Some are as small as an Observable Existence. Others are many times larger, vast territories folded into the dark. And every one of them, every single one, has its own Anchor across Time."
Noah’s eyes sharpened at that!
"The ones who raised these Dimensions, or the Dimensions that formed naturally around beings of sufficient weight, they are all extremely True to themselves. And a being that True eventually asks a very simple question." Her voice dropped into a mimicry of ancient arrogance.
"Why should I adhere to the flow of time that everything else obeys? Whose rule is that? Not mine!" She let the singularity drift back into the field.
"So many of these Dimensions are literally located across Time. Anchored to their own eras. Some stretch back to before Vakochev ever laid down his Scales. Some sit alongside us now. And some, some may be far ahead of us, waiting in years that have not happened yet. Within them lives an indeterminate number of lifeforms. Weak ones. True ones. Primeval ones. Things that have no category because no one who could categorize them ever came across them."
She turned to face him fully, and the mirth in her eyes sharpened into purpose.
"Each Dimension is unique to itself. But the built ones, the ones raised by hands rather than formed by nature, share one trait. They invite challenge. The True Lifeform or Lifeforms within certain Dimensions exist solely for struggle and Adversity. It is the whole architecture of their existence. Across many Dimensions, lifeforms seek one thing, to establish their Trueness, and there is only one way Trueness has ever been established. Against others. So the truly powerful move across Dimensions of Existence the way lesser things move across realms, seeking worthy existences to validate themselves against, era to era, Dimension to Dimension, an entire hidden civilization of the True testing itself across time."
She spread her hands, and the whole map, the seas and the dark and the millions of burning points, seemed to lean in around her words.
"So that is the road. We go to the Dimensions where the brutal True Lifeforms wait. You express your existence against them, at the highest levels, again and again, until your Trueness has been validated against everything the dark between the seas can offer. Until you reach the heights of the Primevals themselves. Until you stand near enough to the weavings of Those Who Remain to touch them."
"And by that time, THE Sealed One will be a matter you can handle easily. An afterthought. A chore you finish on the way home."
...!