Chapter 5524: Fear and Doubt! IV
Chapter 5524: Fear and Doubt! IV
<THE True Human Emperor>
They were inside a pocket of space that never stopped moving.
Noah’s senses spread out and found no ground, no sky, no fixed point at all.
The golden island floated at the heart of an isolated bubble of stillness while beyond its unseen walls, countless strings of the Dimension tore past in endless luminous rivers, weavings of Infinity and Primordial Source and THE Lingering Word all streaking by like light bending around the center of a black hole.
They were within something that traversed THE Krazhor-Nul without pause, folded inside its wake, carried at speeds that made his earlier island-flight look like drifting!
And before them, the maker of this pocket floated.
Hvitrmarr!
The Cursed Steed’s massive body coursed through the Dimension without stopping, her vast white wings beating in slow sovereign rhythm as her pearl-scaled frame filled the moving dark, and her golden ring-in-ring eyes were turned back upon them, looking at him...and at THE Infiniverse.
THE Creature and Anaximander gazed at her with cautious eyes! Her terrifying power saturated the pocket even reined in, a sovereignty that had overruled the Steed of Oblivion.
As for Noah...
He was looking at this as a tremendous opportunity!
For this was exactly what he had been looking for from the moment they arrived in this Dimension and received the information of what Cursed Steeds were. Lifeforms stemming from Those Who Remain, their existences structured to be similar to Observable Existences, living Causes flowing through them! Back then he had envisioned it, and asked himself.
What could be the possibility, if he revived such Causes? If he resuscitated the terminal, dying Causes of such lifeforms?! When he had done it for Terminal Observable Existences, he had replaced their dying hearts with his own Nine Prime Causes, and it had only ever elevated his existence and his Infinite Cause thereafter!
And when he had been searching for directions to take his path as THE True Human Emperor, spreading his weavings across the vastness of existence, across all that was Human...the answer had been right there.
So at this moment, Noah reframed his mind, and began looking at the Cursed Steed before him as if she were Human.
And she fit!
She had gambled everything on hope, a brief and burning wager against certain death. She negotiated, offering her existence in exchange for salvation! She feared her ending and ran from it anyway, and carried uncertainty in her ancient voice the way every Human carried it into every unknowable tomorrow.
Strip away the scales and the size and the sovereignty, and what remained was the pattern he had crowned himself upon, striving, bargaining, hoping, afraid!
Human.
She could be labeled Human. And more practically...as a sick human, but filthy rich! Someone of high standing whose salvation, if he delivered it, would benefit him tremendously!
Was that not Human too? An exchange of favors? Helping one, and in turn, they help you? The oldest Human condition there was!
Noah was about to address this powerful Cursed Steed when her ancient voice rang out first.
"We will all die very soon."
...!
"I miscalculated, and there is no time. Jarl Skallagrim, someone whose power I underestimated, is chasing me with eight others just like me. He is a Cursed Descendant, true and true." Her golden eyes did not blink as the strings of the Dimension tore past beyond her pocket.
"I took a gamble to break my chains, because I sensed hope. Because my existence, filled with dying Causes, sensed it. Now, whether that is you, or her...if the promise really is true...do it now, and do it fast. Because I am chained in this Dimension while being Cursed, and I cannot leave it. I can only keep running across it." A pause, and her vast voice lowered.
"If the promise is true, fulfill it, and I will owe you my existence. If it is merely false weavings of my lineage...then death arrives for us all."
...!
And at this time, Noah sensed it, threaded through her last few words, unmistakable to him.
Uncertainty.
The very Human emotion of uncertainty, carried inside an ancient sovereign voice, a being who did not know if the promise her whole lineage had waited upon was real, and his expression hardened.
A Cursed Descendant with eight Cursed Steeds was chasing after her!
His eyes flashed with immensity as he looked at THE Infiniverse.
"Let’s go."
The two of them floated up grandly from the golden island!
Emperor and a unique living Observable Existence rose together through the moving pocket, dark-blue hair and cerulean threads streaming in the wake-winds, and they crossed the open space toward the Cursed Steed as her massive form turned slightly to receive them. And with every measure of distance closed, Noah felt it more.
It was like approaching a terrifying furnace of existence! He was drawing near the core of something that was similar to THE Infiniverse, structured like her, layered like her, Causes turning within a living frame like hers, and yet not her at all, older, wilder, seated by different hands, and wound through with something that made his marrow prickle even at this distance.
And beside him, THE Infiniverse’s composed face...broke.
A pained expression crossed her features, her cerulean eyes tightening as her own weavings resonated with the entity before her, and she asked...
"How... can you live with such pain?"
Hvitrmarr’s great head lowered slightly, and her answer came calm, and slow.
"One does not live with pain. It leaves no room for living with it." Her golden rings turned. "So one lives beside it. The pain fills every moment I stand inside. Every single one. But it cannot fill the moment that has not yet arrived. So that is where I lived. In the moment that had not yet come. I have lived entirely in tomorrow."
...!
THE Infiniverse’s hands curled slowly at her sides.
They neared her massive chest, and the terrifying pressure released from this creature was purposefully reined in, drawn back into her body layer by deliberate layer so that they could approach, and Noah got to take her in fully at last.
Her scales, this close, were wonders. Each one the size of a shield, worn smooth as ancient ivory, pearl-white with hairline lines of age running through them like the memory of every year they had survived, and beneath their surfaces, faint rivers of silver light moved slowly, like veins of a world.
They were warm. That was the shocking thing, warm as living skin, humming faintly with the deep engine-thrum of the Causes turning far beneath! And threaded through the warmth, so fine it could be missed, ran a wrongness, a cold gray filament tracing the border of every scale like frost that refused to melt.
Noah and THE Infiniverse reached out together, and put their hands on these scales.
The moment they did...
HUUM!
His existence shook.
Sharp prickles of pain lanced through him instantly, not from the scale, from everywhere, as if his entire existence was suddenly being hounded and pierced by ten thousand patient needles at once, his weavings flinching, his Causes recoiling, his marrow flaring in alarm!
|You have come into contact with a Lifeform carrying an extremely terrifying Curse, fused into its First Cause and all interlinking Causes within it. This is not ambient Lingering Word. This is a seated, sentenced, active Curse- too much contact, and this Curse can be transferred over to your own Causes.|
His expression became incredibly heavy.