Chapter 5487: Across Dimensions! Across Time!
Chapter 5487: Across Dimensions! Across Time!
Every journey begins with a lie, and the lie is this: that the traveler knows where they are going.
They never do. Ask the ones who arrived, and they will tell you, if they are honest, that the destination they reached was never the one they packed for. A being sets out toward power and arrives at grief. Sets out toward vengeance and arrives at a family. Sets out toward a simple answer and arrives, years later, at a door in the dark that no map ever mentioned, wondering how the road knew them better than they knew themselves.
The road decides more than the traveler does, and many arrive at places they never once imagined, carrying selves they would not have recognized when they began.
Some journeys are so incredibly dangerous that arrival was never promised to anyone. The dark between destinations is full of the ones who set out bravely and simply stopped, their roads ending in places with no names, their stories finished by things that never learned them. For every traveler who crosses, many more are crossed out.
But consider, then, the ones who survive. The ones who walk the perilous road all the way through, who are unmade and remade by the crossing, who arrive at the far side carrying everything the journey burned into them. Something happens to such beings that no quiet life can purchase. They ascend past the reach of the ones who stayed home, past even the reach of the ones who traveled safely, and they come, at last, to stand at the very peak of the mountain of evolution. And from that height, looking down at all the multitudes below, at the cautious and the settled and the ones who never left, even mighty things appear as what they are from a peak.
Insects. Small, and far away, and no longer capable of following.
The wise fear such survivors. The wiser question is never asked: what did the mountain take from them, on the way up, in exchange for the view?
---
Noah floated before all of them, and the backbone of THE Quintessential Pantheon of THE Infiniverse answered his will.
The faint geometry that had traced itself around his seated figure now expanded outward, growing from a sketch into a structure. Lines of light stretched and joined until a vast frame hung in the air before the white pool, its stanchions running in blue and gold and crimson, three colors for three True Lifeforms, arranged into something that was not quite a ship and not quite a palace. It was large enough to hold everyone present with room to spare, and as each of them crossed its threshold, blue light bloomed softly across every surface their feet and auras touched, the vessel acknowledging its passengers one by one.
The Dora Shath’yar entered in formation. Amser Modred followed, wrapped in his patient purple. THE Creature stepped through last of the guests, his obsidian flames dimming politely within another being’s dimension, which was its own kind of courtesy.
Ryaenara paused at the threshold, and frowned.
"I will say this once before we are past the point of saying it," she voiced out. "I have not sensed the frequency of this Dimension before. That means whatever waits on the other side has never once leaked into the parts of existence I know. There could be unfathomable dangers there, Osmont. Dangers that even I may not be equipped to handle."
It was, by any reasonable measure, a serious warning from a serious being. And Noah considered it for exactly as long as it took him to smile.
"That’s fine," he said. "Look at who is aboard. Every lifeform here has thrived tremendously on Adversity. Some of us are practically built from it."
He turned toward the white pool.
"The more, the merrier."
...!
With that, he felt the strangeness of The Pantheon, or really, the backbone currently displayed for others currently.
Inside him, inside the vessel that was her appendage, the actual Infiniverse rested whole. All of her, realms and rivers and three nested Observable Existences, Seo-yeon and Amelia and Henry and every human under his crown, folded within the Pantheon that was itself an expression of her!
Where did the container end and the contained begin? Was he inside her, or was she inside him, or had the question stopped meaning anything the moment three True Lifeforms agreed to share one architecture? Every body he owned was aboard as well, every thread of his consciousness gathered into this single crossing.
All of him was making this journey. Nothing stayed behind to watch the era they were leaving!
When he came back, what would he find? THE Great Usurper spreading Unity through the Gilded Observable Existences, Alexander beside him, THE Primordial Paradox guiding his student across the deep lands. Days might pass here while they crossed. Or months. Or years. He might return to find them grown into powers he barely recognized, or return to find that only a moment had slipped by and nothing had changed at all. There was no knowing.
He shook his head and commanded the backbone of his Pantheon to delve into the pool, and the vessel obeyed.
The white swallowed them, and the crossing began.
What did the space between Dimensions actually look like? Noah had wondered, and the honest answer turned out to be that it looked like nothing, because looking was the wrong sense entirely!
Outside the stanchions of the vessel stretched a dark that was not darkness, and through his evolved Sight, that dark resolved into something wondrous.
Foam.
At the smallest scale, existence was not smooth. It bubbled. The dark between Dimensions frothed with structure at a fineness beneath fineness, positions boiling in and out of definition, and the longer he watched, the more he understood what he was seeing. Out here, position was not a fact. It was a question.
A thing in this dark did not have a location the way a stone had a location; it had a spread of possibilities, wider or narrower, and the act of looking at it was what pressed the possibilities into a single answer. He tested it, gently, letting his Sight settle on one bubbling region, and watched the froth calm into definiteness exactly where his attention landed. To observe, out here, was to participate. To look at the road was to help choose it.
It was trippy!
In fact, the more he read, the more he suspected the road itself worked this way. Their path through the dark did not exist ahead of them as a fixed line. It existed as a spread of might-be roads, all of them faintly real at once, and the vessel’s passage was the thing collapsing that spread into one traveled truth, moment by moment.
Was that why an Anchor mattered so much? Not as a rope to a place, but as a promise to a possibility, the one road among the spread that had already agreed to become real for them?
He shook his head, and turned his Sight to the strings.
They were everywhere out here, and they were naked. Within Dimensions, the strings dressed themselves as things, as matter and light and law, their vibrations wearing costumes. Out here they simply vibrated, and Noah could read the grammar of it directly.
The open threads, the ones with loose ends, anchored themselves to the great membranes drifting through the dark, and now that he looked, he could perceive those membranes too, vast sheets hanging at distances that were not distances, each one a potential road and pathway to an Unknown Dimension of Existence.
The closed loops, though, the threads that ended nowhere, belonged to no membrane at all. They slipped between the sheets freely, carrying their influence across gaps that anchored things could never cross!