Read Novel Full Chapter 5803: THE Undersnow I
Chapter 5803: THE Undersnow I
A dying Immense One wanted to back him.
Noah sat on the mat with that thought. He was being offered protection to go and uncover mysteries he could not even begin to fathom yet. The cold that had grown teeth. The door that had shut in Minerva’s face. A Night that was never supposed to be obscene, tainted by something no Immense One should have had the power to touch.
And he had his own questions too.
Every second that passed, his attributes grew heavier. THE Osmontian Inscription of THE Dreaming Hour pressed and pressed at him, one passing second worth an entire day, compressing his Provenance down tighter and tighter, and he was climbing. He could feel it. He was walking toward Immensity one packed second at a time!
And existence had just made it perfectly clear that nothing was allowed to become Immense.
He wanted to understand that. He wanted to understand it very badly!
But more than that, under all of it, he thought of his mother, his son, his daughter. Of his women, and every life sleeping in THE Infiniverse, dreaming their long dreams on a golden shore. He did not want those dreams frozen solid. If things were only going to grow colder, and harder, as time passed, then he needed to know why. And if it could be put right, he needed to put it right.
It would have been easy to call this a natural cycle of existence. But THE THINKER had said the Night was tainted. He had said it was a bill, coming due for something the Immense had done a very long time ago.
What had they even done?
There were so many things he wanted to know. But first things first.
"You said you want to back me," Noah said. "How?"
The beads clicked. The tears kept falling. In THE Thinker’s lap, Ling lay curled and silent, her ashen eyes open.
|"The existence that is now taking shape will give very different priorities to different lives,"| THE Thinker said.
|"The lives of those who might change things will matter more than ever. And the ones the Immense believe to be among the three will be the most critical of all. To be watched. To be guarded. They are the only answer many of the Immense believe in. The only way through the cold that still opens the door, so that they need no longer be merely Those Who Remain."|
A long, rumbling breath echoed.
|"I do not believe in chosen ones, as I have told you. But you are still a figure who will need protecting while you do what you must. Because I do not believe it, but others do. Moriarty believes it. And it is very hard to say what believers will do, given enough time and enough cold."|
The purple flames settled lower.
|"There is more. A friend of mine, in another Legacy, has told me that they hold someone they have affirmed as one of the three. They have held that belief for a very long time. THE Sealed One."|
...!
Noah’s eyes narrowed.
|"And among the things he has discovered is your name. It has gotten out, you see. The first Root to form after THE Long Night began."|
The Thinker’s voice stayed mild. |"Though he is no longer sealed, so I suppose he is simply Riven now. THE Riven. He is being groomed as one who can reach the answer and find the key. And among the many things he has said he wants is you."|
The beads clicked, once, very slowly.
|"So I expect Immense Ones will move at his word to obtain what he wants. Out of their own belief. Because they want him to be the key. Because they want the door opened, so that they are no longer only Those Who Remain."|
|"Existence has become so brutal and so ridiculous that it is reaching a point where lesser beings merely wave their hands and give commands, and the Immense move to fulfill them."|
The pale, weeping eyes held him.
|"Until I die, I can be your backer. That much I can promise."|
Noah thought about that for a long moment.
The fucking Sealed One. Riven!
He had dragged himself into a position like that, the favored candidate of an entire Legacy of Immense Ones, with Immense Ones ready to move at his word? And he was still gunning for him?
Of course he was!
Noah’s eyes flashed with decisiveness. He nodded.
"Very well. I will go and confirm things regarding the Cold Place....THE Undersnow, for now."
THE Thinker’s weeping eyes shone!
For the first time, they did not look distant at all. They blazed, bright and resplendent, as though something very old had just been given a reason to keep going a little longer. The great hands moved in its lap. Tenderly, it lifted its daughter, and turned her round to face Noah.
|"Take her as well. Remember, it will be brutal, and hard, and you cannot do this alone. Little Ling is one of my greatest accomplishments. She will not slow you down."|
Ling’s eyes had changed.
The ash was gone from them. In its place was fire, bright and furious. She wiped her tears away with the back of her wrist, hard, and turned her head to look up at her father.
"Something in there did this to you. Yes?"
The Thinker did not answer.
"Then I’ll just have to fuck it up myself," Ling said. She turned back to Noah, and her face was fierce and burning and very young. "Hey, Big Boy. Let’s go."
...!
Her eyes burned with a furious light!
Noah lifted his hand. Rivers of his Provenance slid out of him, blue and gold, and wound around her wrist, binding her existence to his for the crossing. Then, still sitting on the mat, he closed his eyes and turned his thoughts downward. To the Cold Place. To THE Undersnow.
His Root pulsed. It held the weavings of THE Long Night inside it, packed into every quark he owned, and those weavings answered.
He felt himself begin to sink.
Down, out of the purple-lit cavern and the kneeling burning giant, down through the stone and the snow and the dark, his existence sliding toward that unfathomable place!
—
He opened his eyes in the Cold Place.
The frozen seas stretched away to every horizon, blue and white and shining, as they always had. Drifting crystals hung in the air, and the rivers of cold still rolled out of the dark.
But the Hollow Night Lifeforms were gone!
Every one of them. The countless seated dead, the ranks upon ranks of blank-eyed things in their turning pillars of cold, the beasts and giants and lions with wrong heads, all of them gone. The rivers ran over nothing, and the great frozen expanse lay empty as far as he could see.
And the place where the Caretaker had always stood, her pages turning around her in the air, was empty too.
Noah stood very still.
Beside him, the air shivered, and Ling appeared.
She landed in a crouch on the frozen sea, then sprang up and turned in a full circle, looking everywhere at once. Her face was ferocious. It was also, somehow, still a little cute, round-cheeked and fierce, a small furious thing glaring at an entire frozen underworld as if it had personally insulted her family, which, as far as she was concerned, it had.
She finished her circle and looked at him, and her voice was earnest.
"You didn’t have to agree to anything. So thank you in advance. For moving on this, and looking into it." She planted her hands on her hips.
"My father can say he’s dying all he likes. But his Immensity is exactly that... immense. He’s THE Thinker at the End of Existence. Just think how well that name fits these times." Her eyes sharpened. "If you make any headway into all this, I’ll reward you too."
Her words were sharp and her eyes were sharper.
Noah listened while he looked around. The empty seas, the empty place where the Caretaker should have been, the rivers of cold pouring on over nothing.
His gaze grew firm. He rose, and looked out across the endless frozen seas.
"Let’s go."
He dove!
Straight down, into the sea of cold, and it closed over his head like a lid. Ling hit the water a heartbeat behind him, and followed.
The sea was colder than anything he had ever touched. Colder than the rivers he had drunk in the frozen underworld, colder than the Collector’s gaze, a cold so deep it seemed to have a weight of its own, pressing in from every side. It was white-blue and faintly luminous, and the deeper they went the darker and denser it grew, until it was less like water and more like diving through the frozen heart of a glacier.
Noah’s body drank it.
The cold poured into him through his skin and ran straight down into his Root, and his Root took it and refined it, pressing it down into the packed quarks alongside his Provenance and the Long Night already waiting there. Every stroke deeper, he grew a little denser. A little colder. A little more himself.
Beside him, Ling swam down through the freezing dark as though it were a warm pond in summer. The cold did not touch her at all. It slid off her bare arms and her powerful legs and her fluttering white ribbons and found nothing to take hold of. She was a Root, all the way through, with a unique quality!
Down. Further down. The light above them dimmed to nothing. The pressure mounted. Down past anything Noah had ever reached in the Cold Place, past anything he had even known was there!
And after a long while...
POP!
They passed through something. A barrier, thin and taut as the skin on a drum, and it burst around them. The sea’s pressure vanished all at once, and instead of sinking further they were rising, carried upward, breaking out through the surface of a white-blue sea into open air.
Noah surfaced, and looked around, and went still.
It was terrible, and it was wondrous!
Radiant frozen landmasses floated all around them, vast islands of blue-white ice glowing faintly from within, drifting slowly through a dim, endless sky. Trees grew on them, towering trees taller than mountains, their trunks and branches filled with cold, rimed so thick they glittered like frozen lightning. And everywhere, hanging in the air between the floating islands in their thousands, were Dimensions and Observable Existences.
Broken ones.
Every single one of them was shattered. Ripped in half, some of them, cleanly, as though something enormous had taken each one in its hands and torn it apart. Others were cracked through like dropped plates, their broken halves drifting slowly apart with seas and continents and dead frozen cities spilling out of the tears. Thousands upon thousands of them, a whole sky full of torn realities, hanging frozen in the dark.
Ruination’s prompts came fast. She was reading every thread of information she could reach, as quickly as she could reach it, and her words came clipped and urgent.
|Master. You have arrived at THE BASAL FLOOR of THE Undersnow.|
|Multiple dangerous lifeforms sensed nearby. Designation: EMPOWERED HOLLOW NIGHT LIFEFORMS.|
|Each one appears to hold a LESSER KRYOS EXISTENTIAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN within its existence.|
...!
Noah let out a long, heavy breath.
There truly was more to the Cold Place than he had ever known. A whole existence under the ice, and he had been standing on its doorstep all along. Would the answers be here, somewhere, among the broken realities and the frozen islands? Would anything here be willing to give them up?
Before he could even settle his thoughts...
KAAA!
A cry split the frozen sky!
Something came down out of the dark and landed on the edge of a floating island directly above them, and the whole island dipped under its weight.
It was a crow.
It was the size of a mountain range, and it was wrong in evry way a crow could be wrong. Its feathers were long jagged shards of black ice, layered and overlapping and chiming faintly against each other whenever it moved, and through the gaps between them Noah could see its ribs, white and bare, glazed in frost.
Its beak was a great curving tower of dark rime, cracked along its length, long enough to impale a Dimension, and its talons hooked over the edge of the island like iron grapnels, and where they gripped, the ice spread in white veins.
It had many eyes. They ran in rows down both sides of its head, a dozen or more, each one a pale cold blue and each one fixed on him. And on its head sat a crown. A tall, jagged crown of frozen spikes, branching like the antlers of some dead king, glittering with a light that was colder than light had any right to be.
Tattered banners of snow trailed from its wings. A halo of drifting frost circled it slowly, like a ring of dust around a dying star.
It looked down at Noah with every one of its eyes, and the weight of it came down on him!
It was suffocating. Not Immense. Not quite. But heavy, crushing, a presure that pressed on his Root and on the Counting’s weight already sitting there, and made both of them heavier.
|You are not allowed here.|
|Return.|
Noah’s gaze grew heavy.
"What if I do not wish to return?" he said. "What if I want answers?"
The crow looked down at him, cold and unblinking, and slowly spread its great wings. Rivers of snow streamed from them in the dark.
|There are no answers.|
|There is only THE Long Night.|
...!
Noah breathed out.
He rolled his shoulders. He stretched, loosening his arms, his back, his neck. And golden clouds began to spill from him, soft and bright, drifting out across the white-blue sea.
Beside him, Ling had gone utterly still, and then not still at all. Her thighs were trembling with readiness. Her whole body hummed with it, every muscle drawn tight, her powerful legs vibrating faintly beneath her, as though her entire existence had become a single coiled weapon waiting for someone to let it loose!
Noah looked up at the crow again.
"In this epoch, I intend to be supreme," he said. "And it seems I will have to become more dominating than I have ever been. Existence wants to be brutal? Okay!"
His eyes shone. "Then I will be more brutal. I will be unfair."
"I can be very unfair!"
HUUM!
An infinite pillar of dreams erupted out of him!
It tore up from the white-blue sea in a column of golden light that did not end, stretching up past the floating islands and the broken Dimensions and away into the dark. And out of it, wreathed in it, a fiendish creature made of dreams, Noah shot upward toward the frozen crown!