Chapter 5486: The White Pool!
Chapter 5486: The White Pool!
THE Quintessential Pantheon of THE Infiniverse wrapped around Noah’s body.
How did one describe being connected to a home this way? He had lived within her, grown her, filled her with his people and his Letters, and all of that had been closeness of a kind. But this was different. Her realms turned at the edge of his awareness now the way his own fingers did, present without being watched, and when Seo-yeon laughed somewhere in THE Mirrored Hearth. He was more connected to THE Infiniverse than he had ever been, and threaded through every strand of that connection ran his crown, Ruination’s weave humming quietly along all of it.
Of course, the thing was only budding. A Pantheonic Dimension shared by three True Lifeforms was minutes old, its rules unset, its laws unwritten, its true shape still gathering itself the way a newborn Observable Existence gathered its realms. They would have to establish all of it in time. What could enter and what could not. What the dimension permitted and what it refused. Everything.
But it was so grand already that the rest was simply a matter of patience. It was all slowly coming together.
And for the purpose in front of him, for serving as a vessel once his Intent laid out the path, it was more than enough.
Noah opened his eyes and focused.
Through his evolved Sight, the threads of his own forming Pantheonic Dimension lay spread around him, blue and gold and crimson woven into a single vast composition, and he took hold of his Intent and cast it out along them like a fishing line paid out across the rigging of a ship. His Intent ran the length of the Pantheon’s threads and then past them, stretching out beyond everything known, out toward the unknown itself.
Above him, THE Estuary Eye began to spin and pulse.
The Anchor woven through it caught his Intent and tugged, and pulled, and Noah felt himself connect to a vast and endless darkness. It was the dark between the seas made intimate, pressed up against his awareness from every side, and his Intent moved through it as filaments of fine string, drifting, brushing, listening for the shape of a door.
He was looking. He was searching!
---
At this same time, outside the settling storm, Amser Modred watched the blue clear away.
The figure of THE Infiniverse pulled back from her Master, stepping lightly out of the fading winds, and what she left behind made the breath catch in more than one ancient chest. Noah sat in a meditative position on the open ground, silent and still, and around him faint geometric lines had begun to form, the barest suggestion of a structure tracing itself through the air in slow blue and gold. It was incomplete, hardly more than a sketch of something vast, and yet the hearts of Amser Modred and the others vibrated just from looking at it!
What exactly had been built inside that storm? None of them could say. All of them could feel that the answer was large.
Amser breathed out, shook his head, and took his gaze away from the one he now followed, turning instead toward the one he used to.
THE Creature stood where he had stood all along, obsidian flames banked low, with Emotive still near him. Amser floated over, and for a moment the two old existences simply looked at each other,.
"I would ask if you have been well," Amser said, "but I know better. Out of all of us, you were always the one who exceeded."
THE Creature looked at him calmly and nodded.
"I do exceed." There was no boast in it!
"But how are the others? THE Living Origin? THE Living Hunger? Osmont took you all in, so they should be doing well."
"It’s all relative." Amser smiled slightly. "But they are good. Better than good, perhaps. They have more peace now than we ever had in those years. Of course, you have a sack of shit like THE Living Elemental still imprisoned, but for the most part..."
He was about to continue when the ground answered instead.
The whole region around Noah began to shake and tremble, temples humming on their foundations, the stellar lakes rippling in rings, and directly in front of the seated figure, the ground split wide open!
Out of the split, a pool began to expand. It was white. Not pale, not bright, but a radiant, pristine, ancient white, a whiteness deeper than any color had a right to be, spreading wide before Noah and shining with an air of profound ancientness that pressed gently on everything around it!
Amser stared, and his thoughts stumbled over themselves.
Had his Master actually found a Dimension that quickly? From everything they had learned, the search could take minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks, all of it depending on the strength of one’s Intent, and most beings paid the longer prices. Was his Intent truly so ridiculous, so grand, that not even a few minutes had passed between the beginning of the search and this? Or was it not the Intent at all, but the Eye, or the Anchor, or something in the man himself that the dark between the seas had simply been waiting to hear from?
He did not know! He suspected the second possibility more than the first, and suspected the third more than the second.
Noah rose to his feet before the pool, and his expression was heavy as he looked into it. He did not step forward, and he did not speak. He simply watched the white surface with the particular stillness of a man expecting something to rise out of it.
Amser was not the only one who thought so.
---
Nearby, THE Infiniverse looked at her Master and the pool with a somber expression of her own.
She knew what the others did not, because she had stood inside his memories of a dying painter’s garden. A vast pool of pure white nothing, and a kneeling figure, and an enormous ancient hand rising out of the white to grasp his forearm in greeting. Ulf’s first painting, rendered stroke for stroke, and here was the pool itself, spread out before her Master exactly as the brush had promised.
But as she watched, her Master did not kneel. And no hand erupted from the pool. It only remained there, shining brilliantly, ancient and patient and white, radiating its quiet age across the temple grounds and offering nothing else at all.
Was the painting wrong, then? Was the future it showed a dead possibility, one of the ones Ulf said never came to pass? Or was now simply not the time, and the hand would rise from some other white pool, in some other place, on some day when her Master finally knelt? She could not say! She had been apprehensive from the moment the ground split, power gathered just beneath her manifestation, ready to erupt at the first sign of an ancient grip.
Nothing came. Only her sister’s prompts, blooming calmly before their Master as if nothing about any of this warranted alarm.
|We have accessed the pathway of an unknown Dimension of Existence, anchored in an unknown time. What lies past it, when it lies, and why it answered this quickly, I cannot say. My projections return the same answer they returned about our Pantheon. Insufficient precedent.|
...!
Her Master had succeeded! Faster than any of the ancient beings present thought possible, toward a destination none of them could name, through a door shaped like a painting whose promise had not yet been kept.
Noah looked into the white a moment longer. Then he turned to those gathered behind him, calm and glorious, the faint geometry of a living Pantheon still tracing itself around his body.
"Let’s go."
...!