Read Novel Full Chapter 5537: Ordinary! I
Chapter 5537: Ordinary! I
"> <THE True Human Emperor>
Noah turned his gaze to Ryaenara after THE Creature completely disappeared.
She had been quiet since he pulled her out of that poisoned sea, which was not like her at all, for the Mirthful Antiquity did not do quiet, she did loud, and profane, and right now she was standing on a disc of white light above a Steed’s scales with her arms folded, looking at him with something working behind her eyes!
She had many things on her mind.
And then she asked her question.
"It seems you were able to cure a Cursed Steed." Her voice came level.
"A curse passed down across its whole lineage, stemming from Those Who Remain themselves." Her vibrant eyes did not leave his face. "Can you do the same for my brother? Do you already have the capability to cure him too?"
"..."
The dark between Dimensions flowed past as the strings hummed their long notes, and Noah did not answer quickly.
He thought about it properly first.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
Ryaenara said nothing as she waited.
"Hvitrmarr’s curse was rooted in her Causes." Noah rested a hand flat on the ivory beneath him.
"Her First Causes were failing, one by one, on a schedule somebody else wrote for her, and everything else about her was just a thing standing on top of that failure. So I didn’t cure her, not the way a healer would. I went in and I replaced her Causes. I took what was terminal and I collapsed it, and I gave the space it left a new meaning, and I seated my own Causes into her Organs where the dying ones had been."
His eyes stayed on Ryaenara’s.
"That is what the cure was."
"..."
"Your brother is different." He said it plainly. "Ulf’s curse is sitting on top of his existence. It isn’t a failing organ I can cut out and replace with a better one. It’s woven into the same weavings that make him Ulf."
"Which means to cure him the way I cured her, I wouldn’t be replacing Causes. I would have to replace an entire existence. Collapse the one he currently has, all of it, and give it new meaning on the other side." He shook his head once.
"I do not have that capability, not with what I know now, not with anything I currently hold. If I tried it today I would not cure your brother. I would end him."
WAA!
Ryaenara looked at him for a long moment.
And then she nodded silently.
"Then I remain with you," she said, "and give what I can to ensure your growth as we head towards IT."
"..."
And she was not finished.
"There is something else." Ryaenara’s tone changed, going lighter in a way that meant the opposite of light. "After we left THE Krazhor-Nul, messages from THE Sealed One reached out across my existence. Asking for updates on you."
...!
The name moved through the little gathering on Hvitrmarr’s back!
Anaximander’s head came up slightly, and Noah felt a slow cold interest settle in his chest.
Ryaenara held his gaze without apology.
"What shall I tell him?"
Noah thought about it.
He thought about the shape of the answer, because say too little and the thing gets suspicious, and say too much and you have handed a monster a weapon.
Say something true, but small, and slightly boring.
"Tell him I’ve begun skipping across Dimensions," Noah said thoughtfully. "That I’m trying to establish myself. Nothing more specific than that."
He smiled slightly. "And tell him you’re getting close to me, but keeping your distance."
Ryaenara’s mouth curved as she nodded calmly.
Noah then turned his gaze to Anaximander.
The scholar had been standing there through all of it in his white robes with his tousled hair, saying nothing, and he was extremely thoughtful at this moment.
Then he looked up.
"Could you," Anaximander said, "actually come with me?"
Noah raised an eyebrow.
"To that Dimension I mentioned. The one I have to go back to." The scholar’s plain voice picked up a little warmth. "You have talked about Humans. About being a Human Emperor, about gathering everything Human wherever it stands. And these beings, these Superpowered Lifeforms, are some of the more human beings you are going to meet anywhere."
"..."
"They are like me, and also not like me, and I have never quite been able to explain the difference to myself, which is one of several reasons I have not stopped thinking about them." A small self-aware smile.
"I think you would benefit from meeting them. And from seeing what they have built."
He paused.
"And when I left, an incursion was about to happen as they were defending against Infinite Lifeforms."
...!
"What do you think?"
Noah considered it.
He genuinely did not have a preference, because THE Krazhor-Nul had been chosen for him by his own Anchor, and THE Krazhor-Nul had been far too heavy! Cursed Descendants who converted gigaparsecs into a fist! Steeds whose ambient presence stopped his Pantheon from unfurling! He had walked out of it alive and crowned and riding a steed, and he had walked out of it knowing exactly how close the whole thing was, and he had even died in there!
So. Would this place be more his speed?
Beings without authority, whose identity made existence conform, a whole society of them, defending their own borders against many enemies.
And there was the other thing.
Anaximander had mentioned a Panacea. A cluster of Observable Existences producing something that Source and Infinite True Lifeforms would wage war to take, that they had been waging war to take, for long enough that the defense had become a civilization!
A Panacea!
Noah, who currently had a Dimension full of dying tyrants preparing to hunt him for exactly that kind of thing, felt his interest sharpen.
"Okay!"
His eyes shined as he looked at the scholar.
"What is this place called?"
And Anaximander smiled.
"THE Ymnaros," he said. "It is an old word, older than the beings living there now, and as far as I have been able to trace it, it means something close to Ordinary. They named it that themselves. I have never worked out whether it was a joke."
Noah smiled lightly.
He turned toward the great white head at the front of it all.
"Hvitrmarr."
"I have this Dimension within my internal map," she answered before he finished asking, her ancient voice warm through the bond and through the dark both. "I will take you there."
And her wings began to beat.
WUU!
The long strokes shortened and quickened and gathered as Hvitrmarr banked across the naked strings of the deep, turning them onto a new heading, and Noah felt her capability wake beneath him!
It was the same one that had saved them from a closing obsidian hand.
He felt it come up through her scales into his seat, the First-lineage blood in her threading them into the gaps between things, laws and membranes and distances all agreeing to step aside for a lineage that had been crossing this dark since Those Who Remain designed it, and the frothing black stretched and folded and...
HUUM!
In a matter of seconds, they arrived!
They appeared before a shimmering endless boundary! She was that quick. A steed was that grand!
Noah looked at it, and it was unique.
It hung across the whole of his vision and past it, a vast surface of soft shifting light, and it was not a wall and not a door and not a membrane like the ones he had watched drift past out here, it moved like the surface of water seen from underneath, and it had a warmth to it.
|Analysis of the periphery is complete.|
Ruination’s voice came clean and immediate.
|The outer boundary of this Dimension carries an active drawing authority. Its function is not to repel. Its function is to route. Any foreign existence that crosses the boundary is caught by this authority and pulled, regardless of its intended point of entry, into one of many centralized domains maintained across the interior. These are designated THE Muster Halls.|
|Purpose: everything foreign that arrives is delivered into a prepared place, and is treated on arrival as an enemy until proven otherwise. Defenders are stationed. The routing is automatic and constant. The overwhelming majority of incursions are stopped in the Halls and never reach the interior at all.|
|Assessment: this is a Dimension that has been invaded so many times it has built its front door out of the invasions.|
|Some beings are simply too powerful for the drawing authority to hold, and bypass the routing entirely. Those beings arrive wherever they wish. It is reasonable to assume the Halls exist because of how much damage the ones who bypass them have historically done.|
...!
Noah’s eyes twinkled!
An entire Dimension that had turned being attacked into an architecture! That had accepted, as a permanent condition of its existence, that things would keep coming for what it held, and had answered by building a system that greeted every single arrival as a hostile act and processed it accordingly!
He liked them already.
’Would you be pulled to one of those?’ he asked through the bond. ’If we cross here.’
Hvitrmarr’s answer came calm and entirely without arrogance.
’No. I am a Dimension Steed. Routing authorities are for things that must use a Dimension’s doors.’ Her great head turned as one gold eye found him. ’I can enter directly into any point of this Dimension I choose.’
Noah nodded slowly.
"Let’s go then!"
WUU!
Her wings spread wide across the shimmering endless light, and rider and Steed and scholar and Antiquity moved as one toward THE Ymnaros, and the boundary opened its soft shifting folds around them, vibrant and warm and utterly unlike the cold rind of the Dimension they had left, and they disappeared into it!