Chapter 5532: Dimensionlapse!
Chapter 5532: Dimensionlapse!
Riding was a sensation Noah had to adapt to.
Not the seat. The seat was effortless, anchored by boons into a fact of existence! What required adapting was everything flowing through the seat, the drumming of a Fealty-heart the size of a realm beneath him, the tidal rhythm of Valor’s lungs, eighteen mixing Causes turning under his palms like an engine of virtues, and his own seas pouring down into all of it while her ancient rivers poured back up.
Two existences breathing in each other’s rhythm, and every breath of it settling deeper! It felt far, far too intimate than he expected.
And with his reformed body, reborn light and sharp from the Root, in addition to this ridiculous empowerment that came from mounting Hvitrmarr...Noah was able to very clearly sense the power that made this Steed want to run away.
His gaze rose across the blackened gigaparsecs.
And he looked upon the maddened figure of the Cursed Descendant.
Jarl Skallagrim burned against his own darkened skies, titanic and rotting and terribly awake, carried forward on his throne by eight dying Steeds whose eyes were all fixed on Noah, and from that distant lucid figure rolled a power that pressed against Noah’s newly-risen senses with a texture he had never once encountered.
It was terrifying enough to give a sense of hopelessness.
Even now! Even at A-Rank Idho, even seated on a First-lineage Steed, even twenty-five million strong, the presense of the thing on that throne registered in his weavings as something his frameworks simply could not hold! It did not belong to the Fifth Scale. It did not belong to the Sixth! It did not belong to ANY Scale, and Noah realized, with the cold clarity of a man updating his maps mid-journey, that he would need to find entirely new rankings of power outside of Vakochev’s Scales altogether, because...damn.
If Hvitrmarr, uncursed and eighteen-Caused and sovereign, still chose to run away from this monstrous thing...
Then they ran.
"Go."
Noah whispered it calmly while clasping the scale of Hvitrmarr below him, and in the next second, he and the massive White Steed beneath him turned their gazes across the dark, glared coldly at Jarl Skallagrim, rider and mount delivering one shared look of unhurried, imperial promise...
And disappeared!
The white-blue pillar collapsed inward on the empty ice, and where a queen and her Liege had stood, there was only falling snow!
And Jarl Skallagrim glared forth madly!
His rotting face twisted around its terrible lucidity as he rose from his throne, and he WHIPPED the reins of cursed lightning, and eight rejuvenated Steeds screamed against their harness and tore forward through the blackened sky, an entire hateful cluster hurling itself after the vanished point of its salvation as the chase began in earnest!
—
In this snowy area, upon the emptied ice where two impossible things had just departed, a golden cloud drifted down through the falling silence, and upon it stood a shocked old woman.
THE Recorder of Wilds stared at the point where Noah and Hvitrmarr had just been, and her ancient eyes were shining.
"Who is he to actually dare to reverse an action of one of Those Who Remain? Does he even know what he just did?" Her voice was hushed, and for once, it was not narrating.
"And more than that...a Cure for the Curse of this Cursed Dimension! This...how does this affect things..."
She had been speaking to herself when, in the next moment, the ice shook.
She turned.
And behind her, descending through the storm on legs like dying mountain ranges, was the Steed of Oblivion!
Ghrimhest’s colossal gray frame filled the snowing sky, chains screaming, its guttering eyes stretched wide and fixed on the horizon where the pillar had stood, and shockingly, atop the burden-bearer’s vast back, small against its enormity and burning with desperate power...
Was Jarl Erling.
The dying titan himself as he had seen the failure of his party through Ghrimhest’s senses, and he had used whatever unique power his Steed possessed to cross the Dimension himself! Now that he knew another Jarl was involved, there was no need for secrecy! The race was naked, and the prize was fleeing, and his titanic bronze face was filled with such regret and such pain that it had cracked new fissures beside the crimson ones.
He may have even missed out! The cure had been here, and Jarl Erling roared with everything his remaining years could carry!
"GO! GO GO! CATCH UP TO THEM!"
The Steed of Oblivion bellowed, and the mountain-frame surged forward through the storm, keeper and burden-bearer tearing off after the same vanished point as the Jarl before them, and THE Recorder of Wilds stood upon her cloud and watched them go, and slowly shook her head.
A Steed that was no longer cursed. So long as the fleeing ones were not stupid, they should not be caught.
They would be far from this Dimension soon. And the pursuit? It was impossible for the Cursed Steeds to leave this Dimension, fenced by the sentence itself. And for the Cursed Descendants, leaving was merely...hard. Not impossible, just very hard!
And more than hard, it was priced.
For she knew what few remaining beings knew. One of the promises made to the Descendants for their sin was this: if they left this Dimension, they would have no chance of Salvation from their curse. The fence around the bloodline was not a wall. It was a wager! Stay, and hope. Leave, and be certain! And so for ages, dying generation after dying generation had stayed, orbiting the faint promise like moths deciding the lamp was a dawn.
"Mm. And now the dawn has run off," the old woman murmured. "Words should be handled with the same care as eggs, but I will say this much. Among all the Descendants of all of Those Who Remain, the ones seeded under THE Sleepless Fiend have always hated their ancestor the most..."
But as the Recorder was thinking all this, in the next moment...she was surprised.
For off to the side, another aura arrived.
It did not creep, and it did not announce! It was simply there, seated into the storm as if it had always been part of the weather, and it looked straight at her, through every fold of unsensability she wore, and the old woman felt the rare, almost nostalgic pleasure of being seen...
And she smiled.
Out of the billowing snow walked a titan.
He was massive, a gorilla-like humanoid whose shoulders moved like hills deciding to travel, his whole vast body draped in fur of pure obsidian that drank the storm-light and gave back none of it! Waves of majesty rolled off of him with every unhurried step, the pressure of something earlier than frameworks, and in one enormous hand he carried a black bow taller than True Lifeforms, its limbs burning along their length with a low, patient fire, and any being with the senses to read that flame would have understood instantly that it could scorch and melt Ananke Intent effortlessly, the way morning melts frost!
A Primeval One.
The titan’s deep-set eyes swept once across the emptied ice, across the residue of the pillar, and settled on the old woman upon her cloud, and he nodded.
"Recorder." His voice was the sound of a mountain being courteous. "I have been waiting for you. Though I did not expect to find you at the scene of an incident."
His gaze moved to the horizon where two hunts had vanished. "Did you see what happened here?"
The Recorder smiled at this.
"I saw. But that is the second thing I will talk about, as the first thing, the one that brought many of us to this Dimension, has to be discussed before it." She settled her sleeves, ancient eyes twinkling. "Haha, where are the other Primevals? O, Doku?"
Doku, the obsidian archer, rolled his vast shoulders.
"The others are meeting with the Jarls. The ones who still have many years left to live, and thus still have manners left to spend." His deep voice carried a plain, unhidden distaste.
"But I do not really agree with our approach here. Just because Cursed Descendants are easier to deal with...does not mean we have to work with them. There are countless possibilities out there. We are reaching for the nearest branch and calling it the best fruit."
The Recorder smiled wider.
"And yet we are here." She poured herself tea without hurry, the storm bending politely around the ritual. "Because someone, and we still have not figured out the culprit, mind you, someone is causing Dimensionlapses across many nearby Dimensions. Pitting different forces into war as separate Dimensions begin fusing into each other! The many Dimensions we hold are being threatened. So here we are, in a cursed backwater older than the Scales, seeking any point of knowledge and cooperation we can find."
Her wrinkled eyes gleamed over the rim of her cup. "Haha, and what do I find in this place? Someone curing a Curse of THE Sleepless Fiend!"
...!
Doku heard this, and his deep-set eyes shone!
The black bow’s fire flared along its limbs as the obsidian titan leaned toward her, majesty rippling off him in eager waves.
"What? We can use that for our own aims!" His voice dropped into the register of strategy. "Who? Which Descendant figured out the cure? Or was it one of us?"
...!
The Recorder blinked.
For perhaps the first time in several eras, the old woman who had a narration for everything did not quite know how to answer, and her teacup hovered, and her expression folded into something genuinely conflicted.
"Well..." she said slowly. "They are neither Primevals nor Descendants..."
...!
Doku straightened to his full titanic height, the storm parting around his shoulders, genuine surprise moving through his ancient face.
"Then who could they possibly be?"
At this question, The Recorder only smiled, and looked out to where a certain Steed had disappeared.
The snow in this region had turned into a billowing storm, white veils folding over the emptied ice in slow colossal waves. And through all of it, if one only looked closely, the snowflakes themselves were pulsing. Each falling flake carried a silent blue-white light, faint and patient and new, the light of Causes mixing together for the first time in existence...
Still prevalent.