Read Novel Full Chapter 5814: Poisonous!
Chapter 5814: Poisonous!
<Sir Moriarty>
Moriarty’s Elsedimension Mountain looked like a study that had kept growing for an Age and never once been tidied, and it could always look different.
Currently...
Shelves climbed its hollow heart in spirals, bowed under books and bones and jars of things that still twitched. Instruments of brass and glass hung from chanes overhead, some of them measuring, some of them only remembering how. Down the center of the great chamber ran a long stone table where specimens lay in careful rows, labeled in his small precise hand, and at the far end of it, under a sheet, lay the half-dissected remains of an Immense One he had been studying for a while.
The snow had reached even here. It drifted down from somewhere high in the dark and settled on the shelves, and Moriarty had given up brushing it off his books.
Poona sat cross-legged on his table, between a jar of preserved eyes and a tray of his pastries, eating the pastries!
"You could at least pretend to have come about the Council," Moriarty said, without looking up from his notes.
"I did come about the Council." She licked sugar off a finger. "I just also came about the pastries."
He adjusted his spectacles. There was a great deal to think about before the Legacy gathered. The Convocation had ended in a severing and a voice. The Counting pressed on every Root under Lucy’s roof. And three of the thrones had stopped speaking to him in the corridors.
At this time...
The air in the chamber changed!
It grew warm, and green, and smelled suddenly of spring. Moriarty lifted his head. Poona stopped chewing.
THE Verdant Regard stepped into the study!
No door opened for her. She simply arrived, a tall figure of soft green light with a gaze like new leaves, and the snow nearest her turned to petals and fell. Her head inclined to Moriarty with perfect courtesy, and to Poona with slightly less.
Then she raised her Immensity!
It rose out of her in a slow green tide and poured up the hollow of the mountain, and closed over the whole of it like a dome. Moriarty felt it seal. Every thread of perception that ran in or out of his Elsedimension was quietly shut. Nobody outside could see in now, or hear, or sense so much as a breath. He had never once, in all the ages he had known her, seen her ask for that kind of privacy!
Poona set down her pastry!
"Is this Osmont truly one of the three?" THE Verdant Regard said.
Her voice was gentle, and tired, and very reasonable.
"Will we risk our Immensity and rally around him? Because I have watched him, and it does not seem he will do anything different from any of the others. He does not show any brilliance."
Moriarty frowned!
He took off his spectacles and set them on the table beside his notes. Poona went very still.
"What exactly is your point?" he said. "We are to gather as a Legacy in a little while to decide a direction on all of this. So why say it now, here, under a dome where no one else can hear?"
THE Verdant Regard did not answer at once.
She walked slowly along the length of his table, past the specimens and the jars, trailing one green finger along the stone. Where she touched, small shoots came up through the snow.
"I have begun to think differently," she said. "About a great many things. About the three, and the door, and who should and could be the one to open it. About this Legacy, and what Lucy built it for, and whether what she built it for still matters when the snow is this deep."
She stopped at the end of the table, by the sheeted corpse.
"I think our weavings may no longer be aligned, Moriarty."
"That is a strange thing to come and tell me."
"It is." She turned to face him, and her gaze was sad and green and very old. "I did it only as an assurance, you understand. I never wanted to use it. I hoped I never would."
She tilted her head.
"But do you remember all that tea we drank together, over the years?"
...!
Moriarty remembered!
He remembered it all at once, as a scholar remembers the one line in a text he read a thousand times without seeing. Ages of afternons. Her domain, spring and warm, and a cup in his hand that always tasted faintly of green. He had liked it. He had asked her once what was in it, and she had smiled and told him it was only leaves.
She waved her hand!
Green light came out of him!
It leaked from his skin, from the corners of his eyes, from under the seams of his tentacles, a poisonous glowing green that had been growing inside him quietly for longer than he could count. Rather than burning, it bloomed, spreading through his existence along every path the tea had ever taken, and wherever it bloomed, his Immensity went soft and slow and far away.
Moriarty stumbled!
He caught himself against his own table, knocking a jar of eyes to the floor, and the glass shattered, and he stared at his tentacles where green light was pouring out.For once in his long existence, he had nothing at all to say.
Poona’s face changed!
The cheer went out of it entirely. There was no shout and no laugh. Poona slid off the table, and as her feet touched the floor, her shape let go of itself. Her body went soft, translucent, and swelled outward into a vast gleaming mass of living slime, shimmering with every color at once, filling half the study and rising toward the dome of green light, and inside it, turning slowly, her one enormous bright eye fixed on THE Verdant Regard without a trace of warmth.
Then the whole mountain buzzed!
It shook from its roots to its peak, every shelf rattling, every instrument swinging on its chain. The green dome overhead flickered, not breaking, but opening, deliberately, in one place, to let something in.
The air above the long stone table split open like an eyelid!
A vast dark eye looked out of it. Sleepless. Patient. Burning with an attention that had never once blinked. It looked at Moriarty, stumbling and bleeding green light against his own table, and at Poona, vast and gleaming and silent. Last of all, it looked at THE Verdant Regard, standing at the end of the table beside the corpse, and something in it seemed almost fond.
|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND regards you.|
|"It is a time for revolution, old friend Moriarty."|
...!
Outside the dome, far below on the snow-covered floor of the Legacy, the purple-gold rivers had begun to run faster. Conduits hummed in a pitch no Keeper had ever heard. On a dozen mountains at once, figures that did not belong to THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity were stepping out of the blizzard, and the snow around them was falling crimson gold.
The incursion had begun!
---
<THE Creature>
Anaximander sat on nothing.
There was no floor in the undefinition where their home had once been, only the slow obsidian foam and the snow drifting through it, but Anaximander had found a place to sit anyway. He had a book open on his knee. Where the book had come from, THE Creature did not know.
THE Creature watched him.
He had been watching him for some time. Since Anaximander had agreed to take his weavings from the future, since those weavings had come pouring back into the scholar all at once, the friend beside him had changed. His eyes were older. His hands turned the pages more slowly. And there was something in him now that THE Creature could sense clearly, sitting at the very center of his existence.
A Root!
That was what it looked like, to THE Creature’s senses. The shape of it was plain. A Root of Immensity, whole and bright, rooted in the middle of the man as surely as the fractured one was rooted in THE Creature’s own chest.
And yet Anaximander carried no authority at all, not a single thread of it, the same as always. There was no power coming off him, no weight, no pressure. A Root should hum. It should press outward on the existence around it. This one did nothing.
THE Creature looked closer, and understood.
It was no Root that Anaximander had grown. It was a hollow, exactly the shape of a Root, and existence itself had leaned in and filled it. The foam around the scholar curved toward that hollow. The snow drifting past him bent its fall very slightly inward. Existence had looked at the man, and at the space in him where a Root would go, and simply agreed that one was there.
"You’re staring." Anaximander said, without looking up from his book.
"I am," THE Creature said.
"Between the two of us, I am certainly not the bigger monster though?"
"..."
THE Creature said nothing. He went on looking at the hollow full of agreement in his friend’s chest, and felt, faintly, something he did not often feel.
Marvel!
Then, in the next moment, he frowned as existence distorted!
Rather than tearing, it bent all at once, the obsidian foam around them warping inward toward a single point in the undefinition, as though something very heavy had just set its foot down on a sheet of cloth. The snow stopped falling. It hung in the air, every flake of it, and trembled.
Anaximander closed his book.
A figure stepped out of the bend!
He was tall and pale, his long hair pale gold shading into white, his eyes gold and bright and very calm. He wore a long dark coat that did not move in any wind. And he was shining, faintly, from the inside, pale gold light seeping out through his skin as though he had eaten something enormous not long ago and was still digesting it.
THE Creature knew him as those eyes were unforgettable!
Everyone from their home knew him. He was the reason there was no home. He had taken their Observable Existence and left nothing behind but this foam.
"Hello again," said THE Sealed One.
His voice was warm, and courteous, and interested, the voice of a scholar greeting another scholar at a lecture.
"It has been quite some time. And yet, not." He tilted his head, taking in the foam, the hanging snow, the two of them. "I am sorry to say that I come this time bearing death."
...!
THE Creature and Anaximander moved closer together!
Neither of them decided to. They simply did. Anaximander rose off his seat of nothing and drifted to THE Creature’s side, and THE Creature’s white and obsidian flames rose around both of them, and their faces were grave.
THE Sealed One walked forward, unhurried, and the pressure of him arrived!
It came down on the undefinition like a sky falling. It was not Immensity. THE Creature could feel that it was not; there was no door behind it, no completion, no finished shape. But it was close. It was so close that the difference barely mattered, a weight that pressed on the foam and the snow and on THE Creature’s fractured Root until the crack across his chest began, very faintly, to glow.
"People fear death," THE Sealed One said, "because they think it means being erased. They think the lantern goes out and the room stays cold and empty forever. But that is not what dying is."
He stopped a little way off, and his gold eyes rested on THE Creature.
"Death is just an open hand tipping over a bowl, so something better can drink."
The snow trembled in the air between them.
"Sometimes, death is actually a kindness. When an old tree rots in the brush, it does not curse the dirt. It feeds the ground, so a taller trunk can climb toward the sun. Nothing ever truly vanishes in existence. The weight stays. The heat and the stubborn marrow you carried simply get poured into someone else’s blood." His voice softened.
"In a strange way, you do not really stop walking. You just live on through me."
THE Creature did not answer.
"And look," THE Sealed One went on, almost apologetic. "I do not want to be unfair. You can see the shapes standing behind my shoulder. I am not alone. I have never been alone."
Behind him, the undefinition shifted!
Shapes rose out of the foam at his back, vast and hazy, their Dimensionality flowing so deep that THE Creature could not see them clearly at all. Only the auras came through, pressing out from behind THE Sealed One like five suns rising behind a single hill. Five of them. Each one heavy with the unmistakable, finished weight of true Immensity!
Five Immense Ones, standing in the foam where a home had been.
"But I never liked ganging up on a man," THE Sealed One said. "It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, like chewing on burnt gristle. So those behind me will not move. They will not lift a finger. They will not take a single step toward you."
He smiled.
"They are just here to watch the wood get split. It is only you and me."
...!
Five Immense Ones watching. A being very nearly Immense himself walking forward. And THE Creature with a fractured Root and a friend who carried no authority at all.
It was catastrophic!
THE Sealed One’s gold eyes drifted down to THE Creature’s chest, to the crack glowing faintly there, and to what lay inside it.
"You really should be more careful," he said, "and not hang about outside existence with a Root that bright."
His eyes lit with open, delighted curiosity. "A Root of Existence? Man. That is an anomaly worth exploring."
...!
THE Creature looked at him.
He looked at the pale shining figure, and at the five suns rising behind it, and at the foam that had once been everything he came from. He felt the weight of all of it pressing down on him, on his fractured Root, on his friend at his side.
And he began to buzz!
It started low, deep in his vast body, a vibration running up out of the undefinition and into him. His white and obsidian flames rose higher. The colorless Provenance around him began to simmer and churn. The crack across his chest blazed, the fractured Root inside it flickering and flaring, and THE Creature stood up straighter under the weight of five Immense Ones and a devourer, and did not bend!
"Existence," THE Creature said, "is fearless."
The foam around him shook.
"Existence perseveres."
His flames roared up into the dark, and the hanging snow scattered.
"I simply have to... persevere."
...!
THE Sealed One watched THE Creature blaze, and his smile softened into something that looked almost like respect.
"You are a grand being," he said. "I mean that. There are very few things in existence that would stand straighter under this."
He glanced back at the five suns rising behind him, then returned his gold eyes to THE Creature. "But I am afraid it is the end of the line this time. Even Osmont will be, or should already be, very preoccupied right now."
THE Creature’s flames did not waver. But something behind his eyes went very still at that name!
"In existence, there are some who believe themselves invincible no matter what," THE Sealed One went on. "Let us put that to the test for you today."
He rolled his shoulders, loosely, like a man about to lift something heavy. "Will you somehow survive standing before me?"
He took one step forward!
"You never know," said a voice. "Crazy myths and legends get written all the time."
...!
It was a lazy voice. Unhurried, faintly amused, as if its owner had been leaning against a wall somewhere listening to all of this for a while and had finally gotten bored enough to join in.
THE Sealed One stopped. And his smile, instead of fading, widened!
He turned.
Something was descending through the undefinition above them. Ink came first, rivers of it, black and glittering, pouring down out of the dark and curling through the obsidian foam without spilling a drop. Then pages, thousnds of them, drifting down around the ink like white leaves. And in the middle of it all, sitting on the air with one leg crossed over the other, came a woman!
She was tall and slender, with long dark hair pinned up carelessly by a single pen driven through the knot. Her robes were the pale white of good paper and hung loose around her, and every inch of her exposed skin, her hands, her wrists, her throat, the side of her face, was covered in writing.
Fine, dense lines of script in her own neat hand, running and shifting slowly across her body as though they were still being written. Her eyes were dark, and when they moved, faint lines of text moved in them too.
Behind her, so faint it could barely be seen, something vast and patient stood among shelves that climbed out of sight. Only its brilliance showed. An immense, quiet glow of ink and parchment, watching over her shoulder, as a library watches over whoever sits reading in it.
THE MATRIARCH OF INK.
THE Writer of Mythos had arrived, and her name, THE Creature felt, written on the air behind her in letters of ink, was Calliope!
She came to a stop above THE Creature and Anaximander, a little to one side, and looked THE Sealed One up and down with open, unimpressed interest.
"I’m taking a little detour," Calliope said. "It might be disastrous."
She shrugged. "But I just can’t watch a myth come to an end, you know? It would be such a shame."
Her dark eyes narrowed, and the script on her skin quickened. "And you seem to be a black hole where myths go to die."
...!
THE Sealed One laughed!
It was a bright, genuine, delighted laugh, and it rang out through the whole undefinition, and the five Immense suns behind him did not so much as flicker.
"Quite the opposite, actually," he said, still smiling. "I will make all your myths live on across history. Your capabilities will be remembered. Every one of them, kept safe inside me for as long as I exist."
He spread his pale hands, almost welcoming. "Now. Let us see who lives, and who dies."
HUUM!
Crimson brilliance erupted from him!
It tore out of his chest and his eyes and his outstretched hands, a light that was Infinity and was also somthing older, bound together and fused, pouring out of a source so far down inside him and so vast that THE Creature could not see the bottom of it.
It roared outward in every direction, through the foam and the snow and the pages drifting around Calliope, and wherever it touched, the color went out of everything else.
The obsidian foam turned red, and the falling snow with it. Rivers of ink, the white of Calliope’s robes, the white and obsidian of THE Creature’s own flames, all of it, painted crimson in an instant.
All of existence, as far as THE Creature could see, was red!