Chapter 5533: Breathe!
Chapter 5533: Breathe!
They found Ryaenara in a sea of poison.
The chase had torn across the Dimension in folds of white-blue light, Hvitrmarr’s inherited might swallowing gigaparsecs between wingbeats, and through the bond, Noah felt the moment her borrowed senses and his emulated weavings finally triangulated on a single vibrant thread, burning loose and profane and utterly alive at the heart of a region drowned in verdant miasma.
Ryaenara!
The poisoned expanse opened below them, an ocean of green-gold murk where toxin had replaced weather, and at its center, the Antiquity was fighting! Her radiant figure wove through collapsing structures of venom as her opponent filled the horizon behind her, a Cenozoic True Lifeform in the shape of a massive verdant frog, mountainous and glistening, its throat-sac swelling with lakes of miasma, its bulbous eyes tracking her with the patient hunger of a creature that had dissolved everything it had ever met.
And Hvitrmarr did not slow.
She descended upon the region like a verdict, and her Intent ERUPTED!
THE Autarkis Intent!
It poured off her body in a sovereignty that sat above inevitability itself, the third order, the texture past the door, and as it flooded the poisoned sky, Hvitrmarr’s claw extended! The Claws of Mercy-and-Tyranny reached down and out, talons of white flame stretching until they seemingly covered light years, five curved horizons of burning ivory descending over the frog’s entire existence, and before the Cenozoic True Lifeform could so much as swell its throat...
The claw crashed onto it.
There was no battle! There was not even an exchange! The verdant titan’s Ananke-grade Intent collapsed instantly beneath the touch of an order it could not argue with, its Trueness caving inward alongside it, the seamless "I am" of a Cenozoic apex crumpling like wet parchment under a mountain, and the massive frog was driven down into its own miasma, unmade of everything that had made it mighty, in a single descending motion!
"...!"
And in the same motion, light wrapped around Ryaenara.
The Antiquity froze inside the gentle white cocoon, and her wide eyes found the colossal White Steed above her, and then the small crowned figure seated upon its back, and the look on her face was pure, spectacular incredulity. Osmont. Riding a monstrosity of wonder!
"Come!" Noah called down grandly.
And Ryaenara disappeared into Hvitrmarr’s chest!
And in this fraction of an instant, in the sliver of time it took to do this one action...behind them, all of existence changed.
Noah felt it through every Cause he owned, and turned.
The Dimension itself was transforming.
For gigaparsecs behind them, everything, the storms, the strings of Infinity and Primordial Source, the drowned green horizon, the very dark between all of it, was becoming a hand.
Not covered by a hand. BECOMING one! An obsidian hand of Jarl Skallagrim, assembled out of existence itself, storm-fronts folding into finger-joints, light-years of sky hardening into obsidian knuckles, the ambient essence of an entire region converted wholesale into palm and grasp, and from its closing curl came a suction force so terrifying that the poisoned ocean below rose whole off the land and streamed toward it, that distance itself leaned backward into the grip, a horrific phenomenon that rewrote the simple concept of "behind them" into a single word.
Caught.
"OOOOH!"
Noah bellowed out as he grasped onto Hvitrmarr’s scales tightly, his A-Rank seas slamming down through the bond, and he and Hvitrmarr both roared as one! Her nine Organs churned! Fealty’s heart hammered into a war-drum, Valor’s lungs drew a breath the size of the sky, and his Nine Prime Causes spun into her 9 like engines coupling at full burn, two existences igniting every joined Cause they shared against the pull of a grasping Dimension!
And gloriously, the truth revealed itself.
Hvitrmarr had already begun slipping across Dimensions the moment she acted to bring Ryaenara in! The catch and the crossing had been one maneuver, started before the hand ever formed, her First-lineage blood threading them into the gaps between the Dimension’s weavings even as her claw was still descending, and they were only completing the action now.
This...was the only reason they were not caught.
The obsidian fingers closed.
And in the next instant, rider and Steed turned into pure white-blue light!
The radiance pulled away from the obsidian hand like a thread drawn out of a closing fist, phasing into the gaps of this Dimension, between its strings, beneath its laws, and OUT of it entirely, and against a suction that had swallowed a poisoned sea, the light of Noah and Hvitrmarr...
Disappeared!
The obsidian hand closed on nothing.
Gigaparsecs of converted existence clenched around an absence, and slowly, the vast fingers dissolved back into storm and string and dark, and at the center of the unraveling, a titanic figure manifested upon the emptied sky.
Jarl Skallagrim had risen from his throne to arrive here first.
He had outrun his own harness. He had spent power that his two remaining years could not afford, converted a region of an ancient Dimension into his own grasp, and he floated now in the miasma-tainted silence, staring at the point where his salvation had phased out of existence, and his rotting face was very, very calm.
Behind him, the Steeds arrived.
The eight of them tore into the region dragging his empty throne, and the moment their senses swept the emptiness, they began to howl.
Long, cracking, terminal howls of pain, for the uncursed one was gone, the proof was gone, the first new hope in years had left the Dimension they could never leave, and their dying Causes screamed the loss through every chained channel!
Jarl Skallagrim floated coldly amid the howling.
Then he reached out, and grasped one of the eight.
His obsidian hand, the small one, the merely titanic one, closed around the nearest Steed’s neck-ridge, and he began to calmly and brutally tear it apart.
SQUELCH!
There was no fury in the motion.
He worked with the unhurried thoroughness of a man taking down a tent, peeling the dying colossus open along its chained weavings as it screamed, its terminal Causes guttering out one by one in his grip, and the other seven Steeds watched in absolute frozen fear, howls strangled into silence, an entire harness learning in real time what their keeper’s calm was worth!
"Do you know what that was?" Jarl Skallagrim asked, conversationally, to the thing coming apart in his hands.
"That was the answer. I chose lucidity in the dark while my brothers drowned themselves in feasts, I waited for her to MOVE, and she moved, and the answer walked into this Dimension and cured her and sat upon her back." The Steed’s last Cause guttered. He let the ruin drift.
"And because you were so useless...such a chance disappeared."
He looked at the seven remaining, and they did not meet his eyes.
"The promise says that those who leave are abandoned by Salvation." His fissures glowed dull red as he turned toward the far dark, toward the direction of a departure only he had been close enough to taste.
"But Salvation has left first. The promise is now a fence around an empty field." He stepped back onto his throne, and took up the reins of cursed lightning. "So now...I have to leave this Dimension. And find them."
...!
—
<THE Krazhor-Nul>
The ancient Dimension, for its part, barely noticed any of the wonders that just occured.
Across all their battles and forges and feasts and cure, Noah and THE Creature and Ryaenara had only ever been moving around its periphery. The outer shell of THE Krazhor-Nul! The thin cold rind of an existence that predated the Scales, where lone Jarls kept lone mountains and lone Steeds walked out their sentences.
Deeper in, the Dimension was inhabited.
Deeper in, whole clans of Cursed Descendants held courts across continental thrones, generations of the bloodlines of Those Who Remain living and scheming and dying on schedule.
Deeper in, broods of Steeds beyond counting walked their burdens across lands no outsider had ever mapped, and deeper still, in halls older than the sentence itself, some of those Clans were, at this very moment, meeting with Primeval Ones, ancient guests speaking carefully of fusing Dimensions and fusing borders.
And somw of the most powerful beings in those depths had sensed something, when a certain pivotal event took place upon the periphery. A pillar of obsidian turning white-blue. A texture of Causes mixing that existence had never once tasted!
So far, only two Jarls and two Primevals knew exactly what had occurred, and just what had appeared.
Only two, and two.
How long would it take before more than two Jarls knew?
And what would all those Cursed do...when they learned there was a Panacea in existence that could cure them of their misery?
What indeed!
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
For the first time in what felt like several lifetimes, Noah breathed easy.
He sat upon the back of Hvitrmarr as she crossed the region between Dimensions and Time, her great wings beating in long unhurried strokes through a dark that was not darkness.
The foam boiled at the finest scales, possibility frothing in and out of definition wherever his attention was not pressing! The strings ran everywhere, undressed of matter and law, vibrating their sustained notes in directions that were neither ahead nor behind.
And in the far unmeasurable distances hung the membranes, vast sheets of Dimensions drifting through the black like islands through an ocean, each one wearing the dark around its shores.
The last time he had crossed this place, he had done it inside a vessel, wrapped in his Pantheon’s stanchions, reading the grammar of the deep like a passenger pressed to a window.
Now he rode through it on the back of a queen, and the dark parted for her like it remembered her lineage.
And Noah, breathing easy, reflected seriously.
The Cursed Descendant. Jarl Skallagrim!
He turned the memory of that power over. It had not been a gap of ranks. It had been a gap of categories! His A-Rank Idho facets, his twenty-five millions, his reborn body of Primeval Cells, all of it had not been much! To stand against something like that, he would need more than elevation. He would need power that lived far, far outside the Scales entirely, the way the Descendants did, the way her Autarkis order did.
And his Estuary Eye, his own Anchor, had led him straight into such a terrifying place.
If he used an analogy from his homeworld...it was like he had been a level 10 being who confidently opened a door and arrived in a zone filled with beings at level 100 and above! THE Krazhor-Nul had been, by every honest measure, out of his depth. He had been a bit weak for it!
And walking out of a zone like that alive, let alone walking out with a First-lineage Steed beneath him and a cure to his name, was a terrifying boon that he intended to respect properly.
Especially because of what the boon made possible.
It had now become unfathomably easy to cross from one Dimension to another! The roads were mapped in the blood beneath his seat, walls had become doors, and entire unknown zones of existence sat one stride away in every direction...
And he purposefully chose not to take a single one of them yet.
He just wanted to breathe for a moment.
’You are quiet.’ Her voice came through the bond, a warm ancient current beneath his seat.
"I am thinking." Noah said aloud, smiling slightly.
"Mm. You gave me back my existence before you ever knew my full name," Her wingbeats slowed into ceremony. "I am Hvitrmarr, a Remnant Dimension Steed. A Progeny of the Cursed Mounts of Those Who Remain, specifically...THE Sleepless Fiend. The last unbroken thread of the First lineage his living hands seated."
"..."
"And you must understand what follows you out." Her voice lowered. "You have seen two Jarls. THE Krazhor-Nul holds many. Many across its depths, each with its Clan, its harness, its experiments, and its expiration date. Some have a million years left and fear nothing yet. Some have less than a decade and fear everything. And every single one of them, from the patient to the desperate, wants exactly one thing more than they want their next breath."
Her great head turned slightly, one gold eye finding him across her own horizon.
"The moment they find out what you can do, they will not send parties to capture merchandise. They will come themselves, as Erling came, as Skallagrim comes. They will seek to utilize you first, politely, richly, with every treasure their ages have hoarded. And when you refuse, or when you are too slow, or when two of them want you at once...they will seek to break you. They will do everything in their power, everything, to tear the cure out of you, because you are no longer a being to them, rider. You are the answer to the only question their entire civilization has ever asked."
The dark between Dimensions flowed past in silence for a moment.
"I sensed hope, and I ran toward it, and I pulled you into the center of all of that." Her ancient voice carried guilt.
"I feel as though I have doomed you. I reached for my salvation and hung a mark upon your existence that many dying tyrants will now hunt across all the Dimensions."
And Noah smiled.
He leaned forward and set his palm flat against her scales, warm ancient ivory under a reborn hand, and his voice came easy and certain.
"I made my own choices. Every one of them." He patted the scale once. "I chose to fly toward your Cause when running was free. I chose to put my hands on a Curse. I chose to step inside, and I chose to keep going after it killed me once. None of this is your fault. You did not doom me."
"..."
"And since we are doing introductions properly." He straightened upon his seat, and the dark itself seemed to attend. "I am Noah Osmont. THE Quintessential Osmontian. THE True Human Emperor." His eyes gleamed.
"I am still gradually forming the vision of what I want to do. But its shape is coming, and every version of it helps me gain more power. And with more power...I can defend what is mine against monstrous threats like the Jarls, instead of running from them."
Hvitrmarr’s Organs pulsed beneath him.
"Then I vow it here, in the dark between all things." Her voice rang with the immensity of the Spine of Honor itself. "Whatever that vision requires of me, I will do anything to aid in it."
Noah nodded.
"Good. Because as THE True Human Emperor...I may have to spread my rule across all Dimensions. And across Time."
"...!"
"All that is Human, wherever it stands, whenever it stands."
HUUM!
Hvitrmarr did not flinch from the size of it! Her wings spread wider across the frothing dark, and her vow came back level and absolute.
"Then I will take you to every Dimension you need. Many are mapped in my lineage, and they are yours now. You need only say where." Her voice settled into something older than the formality.
"I will repay the debt of my curse however I can, for however long the repaying takes."
Noah’s eyes shined brightly at this, and he nodded!
And in the next moment, he sent his thoughts down through the bond, and an instant later...
WAP!
THE Creature, Anaximander, and Ryaenara appeared upon the back of Hvitrmarr!
A white platform formed below the three of them the moment they arrived, a disc of pale sovereign light holding them just above her scales, for they were not considered to be riding Hvitrmarr, and by every law of the saddle and the lineage, they shouldn’t be able to!
Shouldn’t.
But who knew what monsters like Anaximander were capable of? The scholar was already looking down at the white platform beneath his feet with the mild, curious expression.
Ryaenara’s gaze swept from the naked strings of the dark, to the colossal uncursed queen beneath her, to the crowned figure seated at the head of it all.
And Noah looked at all of them as he wanted to hear their input!