Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5469: The Painter! II

Noah read all of it, and felt the grand effects moving over his own existence, and every line of it pointed the same direction. Rejuvenation. Preservation. A place built to refuse a death. He wanted to ask himself why a being like Ryaenara would spend three-quarters of everything she was on a garden, and the first clear answer was already standing in his mind before the question finished forming.

She had someone sick here.

He looked around further as they moved. Vibrant canvases floated everywhere through the seasons, paintings drifting untethered between the trees and over the rivers, hundreds of them. Most depicted Ryaenara herself, rendered in careful loving strokes, laughing or ancient or mid-transformation. Others showed grand places Noah had never seen, temples and skies and seas belonging to no realm he could name, painted by a hand that had either visited them or dreamed them thoroughly.

Ryaenara drifted ahead of him, deeper into the seasons, and spoke without turning.

"Everybody in existence has a why," she said. "For power. For pleasure. For greed. Ask any grand thing why it does what it does and dig long enough, and you’ll find one of those three wearing a costume." Her voice was quiet in a way he had not heard from her. "Mine is none of them. I simply want to save someone."

...!

And as she said it, Noah finally sensed it.

A flicker of life, faint past all reason, buried deep in the heart of the seasons. It felt like a single thread stretched to its last fiber, a pattern one breath from unraveling, held from that unraveling by nothing except the entire dimension pressing gently around it. He had felt dying Observable Existences and guttering Sources and beings at their ends, and none of them had felt this close to gone while still being here.

They drifted into a region of vibrant trees, autumn and spring woven together, paintings floating thick between the trunks, and there, between the trees, Noah’s eyes opened wide.

A young man sat at an easel.

He was pale past pale, his skin nearly translucent in the mixed light, dark hair falling soft around a face that was thin and frail and delicate and, beneath all the sickness, unfathomably handsome, the kind of face that illness had thinned rather than ruined. Tubes ran into his nose, slender lines flowing with rich multicolored air, and the tubes stretched away in every direction, dozens of them, connecting to different parts of the dimension itself, to the summer and the winter and the rivers and the light, the whole domain plumbed directly into his breathing. His wrists were narrow as a child’s. His shoulders barely held his shirt. No power sat on him anywhere, no authority, no Intent, nothing, and the absence was its own kind of terrible, because everything else in this place was vast and he was a thread.

And at this moment, he was painting.

His brush moved over the canvas in small careful strokes, unhurried, absorbed, a dying young man making something in a garden built from three-quarters of an Antiquity’s power, and it truly felt, watching him, like he could die between one brushstroke and the next.

Ryaenara stopped at the edge of the trees and did not go closer, and when she spoke, it was a whisper meant for Noah alone.

"This is my little brother," she said. "Ulf. This is why what I do is so critical. Why IT, for me, is so critical."

...!

Noah’s eyes flashed, and the prompts came.

|You are beholding the existence designated Ulf. All weavings of his life are terminal. Every thread of his existence trends toward ending, held at the edge only by the full working of this Dimension, and the holding is a stalemate, not a recovery. Nothing here heals him. Everything here merely refuses, constantly, to let him finish dying.|

|Cause: he is under a Curse stemming from a Lineage of Existence of Those Who Remain. Designation of the Curse: THE Withering of the Remembered Root.|

|All further details are beyond my reach.|

|Name: Ulf.|

|Curse: THE Withering of the Remembered Root.|

|Intent: ?????|

|Source: ?????|

|Scale of Existence: ?????|

|Records: ?????|

|Everything else: ?????|

...!

At this time!

The brush stopped mid-stroke.

Ulf turned from his easel, slow the way everything he did was slow, and when his eyes found his sister, he smiled. It was a thin smile on a thin face, but it was real all the way through, the smile of a dying man for the one person who refused to let him finish.

Ryaenara’s own face opened at the sight of it, ages of masks forgotten in an instant. Whatever else THE Mirthful Antiquity was across existence, in this garden she was somebody’s sister first.

Then Ulf’s gaze moved past her, and found Noah, and the smile died.

HUUM!

Shock took its place. Shock, and something past shock, an incredulity that had recognition inside it, the look of a man seeing a face he already knew arrive somewhere it should not be. The brush slipped in his fingers. His whole frail frame went rigid, and the multicolored air in his tubes stuttered with his breathing.

Ryaenara was at his side before Noah registered her moving.

"Ulf." Her hands hovered at his shoulders, not touching, afraid of breaking what she touched. "Ulf, are you all right? What is it?!"

He could barely speak. He tried, and the words failed, and instead the dying young man did something that told its own story. He moved behind his sister. Slowly, weakly, gripping the back of her arm with fingers narrow as reeds, he put THE Mirthful Antiquity between himself and Noah, and peered around her at the visitor with eyes that held apprehension and excitement tangled so tightly together neither won.

Ryaenara frowned!

"What..." she said. It was not a question aimed at her brother.

Ulf shook his head against her arm, and when his voice finally came, it was almost a whisper.

"You...have to see it to believe it," he said. "I... I’ve recently been painting many new things. New things keep coming, faster than they ever have. And I painted these... in the last day."

He raised one sickly hand, and waved it.

Around the grove, three massive paintings emerged, rising up out of the drifting flock of canvases and unfurling to their full size between the trees, each one taller than the man who had made them, each one rendered in the same small careful strokes Noah had watched him laying down a moment ago.

The first... showed Noah!