Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5836: Order II

Noah set the hoe back against the fence where he had found it.

He looked at the garden one last time. Weeds lay piled at the end of the path, the beans stood tied to their poles, and the apples sat in the bucket by the well. It was unfinished. A farm always was.

He walked back to the doorway at the edge of the fields and stopped.

A hundred Immense Ones were waiting on the other side of it. He could feel their attention pressing faintly against the door like a crowd against a window. The moment he stepped through, they would want answers.

He wanted a few of his own first.

So he lifted THE Orb of Immensity and asked it, plainly, for somewhere quiet.

The Orb answered!

Lucy’s script turned inside it in slow gold rings, and the tiny door at its heart swung to face a different way. When Noah stepped through the brightness, he stood on the shoulder of a lonley mountain at the far edge of the Legacy, snow up to his knees, wind howling across bare rock. An old shrine sat half buried in the drifts. Below it, a frozen pond lay cracked straight across from the war.

The Legacy had heard its Son, and sent him where nobody would be watching!

Noah sat down in the snow, crossed his legs, and closed his gold eyes.

Then he let his Dream go as he wanted to test out his existence...at Order II.

It went out of him like breath on a cold morning, and it kept going.

Over the shrine. Over the cracked pond. Down the mountain’s side and across the valley below, over the purple-gold rivers running dark between the peaks, up the next mountain and the next. His Dream spread across the snow like a tide coming in over a beach, soft and wide and quiet, and everything it touched became something he could feel.

He felt the Keepers’ Roads winding between the mountains, every stone of them. He felt the Existential Conduits rising out of the rivers, every thread of light in their columns. Then came the thousand Elsedimension Mountains, one after another after another, and then, as his Dream sank into them, he felt what lay inside.

Dimensions!

Every mountain held them. Some held one, vast and quiet. Some held dozens, stacked inside the stone like rooms in a great house. And inside those Dimensions, Observable Existences, turning slowly in their own skies, each one full of light and motion and life.

Domains, Wheels, Frequencies, Cosmos, Galaxies, Seas. Forests under strange suns. Peoples living out their lives inside the mountains of a Legacy they would only ever know from within.

His Dream passed through all of it, and all of it began, very faintly, to dream.

He felt the lives in them, all at once rather than one at a time. Countless points of light scattered through the Legacy like stars through a night sky, each one a life, each one going about its day.

A child running down a street in a city inside a mountain; a farmer in a field under a sky with three moons; a Progeny meditating on a monastary terrace, a Root humming in her chest; a Keeper sweeping snow off the steps of a throne.

He felt the Immense Ones!

They burned among the lesser lights like suns. These were apart from the hundred in Lucy’s Lecture Hall; that place sat apart from everything else, a bright sealed knot in the weavings of the Legacy, too tightly woven for his Dream to enter. These were the others.

The Immense who kept to their own mountains. Dozens of them, scattered across the Legacy, each one deep, each one different. One sat alone on a peak of red stone, unmoving, its Profundity going down past his sight.

Another drifted through a Dimension of endless water, singing to itself. A third walked the Keepers’ Roads in the shape of an old woman with a basket, and the snow fell differently around her.

Every one of them went on, unaware of him!

His Dream lay over the whole Legacy, touching every one of them, and every head stayed exactly where it was. The old woman with the basket walked on, the singer in the water kept singing, and the Immense One on the red peak sat as still as it had sat for Ages.

His dreaming slid past their senses entirely!

Noah sat very still in the snow on his lonely mountain, and let that settle.

He went deeper!

Beneath the mountains, beneath the purple-gold rivers, beneath the snow-buried floor of the whole Legacy, his Dream found something unexpected.

Domains!

Existential Immense Domains, sunk into the foundations of the Legacy like vaults beneath a palace. Dozens of them. Sealed, silent, dark. His Dream slipped into the first one, and found it full of stone.

Statues!

They stood in rows in the dark, vast and still. Statues of Immense Ones, every one of them different. One the shape of a great Sphinx with antlers like the branches of a winter forest.

Another, a woman made of interlocking rings. A tower with eyes. A beast so large its head was lost in the dark above. Some as small as a man. Some larger than the Domain that held them, somehow, their edges trailing away into a scale his Dream could barely hold.

And every one of them was sleeping!

He could feel it. Under the stone, something breathed. Slowly. Once an Age, perhaps. A Profundity in every statue, deep and quiet and enormous, curled up in the dark like a seed in winter ground.

He moved to the next Domain. Statues. The next. Statues. Dozens of Domains, hundreds of statues, all of them Immense, all of them asleep, all of them hidden beneath a Legacy whose living Immense Ones walked over their heads every day and kept every word about them to themselves.

|Sensed: Existential Immense Domains beneath THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.|

|Within them: Immense Ones, in the form of statues, sleeping.|

|Their nature: ?????|

...!

Noah’s breath went out of him, slowly.

Who were they? Lucy’s students, who had remained and found it too much to bear? Companions of the leavers, put to sleep before the crossing? Something the Legacy had chosen to forget? Did Moriarty know? Did the Thinker?

The answers lay beyond him, for now. He held the questions, and kept going.

There was more to learn, and he learned it fast.

Each of those countless lights scattered across the Legacy, every Progeny, every Provenance Lifeform, every being with a Root humming in its chest, lay inside his Dream. He could feel their Roots. He could feel the edges of them.

And he understood, with a cold and perfect clarity, what that meant.

If he wished it, he could end them. From here. A Root-holder on a mountain at the other end of the Legacy, meditating peacefully on a terrace, would simply stop. He could dream their end as he had dreamed the Guards’ ends on the Basal Floor, and its source would stay hidden from them forever. Or he could open his mouth on this lonely mountain, and their Roots would come to him across the whole Legacy and go down into his Tree.

He could be anywhere! He reached out to the monastery terrace, and his Dream gathered there, and for a moment he was standing beside the meditating Progeny, close enough to see the snow on her eyelashes. She kept her eyes closed.

He reached to the water Dimension and stood beside the singing Immense One, close enough to hear the words of its song. It sang on.

He could stand beside a Newly Risen Immense One in its own Domain, and strike, and it would feel only the blow, after it had already landed.

All of it was his to do. Across the whole breadth of a Legacy!

This was his power! His Infinite Dream!

Noah opened his eyes.

The snow fell on his lonely mountain. Far below, the cracked pond lay quiet.

He thought, calmly, that this was what it was to be a dreamer at Order II. To lie over a whole Legacy like the night lies over a sleeping town, seeing every window, every lamp, every life, and to be seen by none of them. Every one of those lights was a choice he could make. End it. Keep it. Eat it. Leave it alone. Watching them from here, he could see every way each of them might go, every branch, every future, all of it laid out like the lines on an open palm.

It would have been very easy to stop seeing them as people.

He refused to let himself. He looked at the child running down the street inside the mountain, and made himself see a child. And on the terrace, the Progeny: he saw the snow on her eyelashes.

Then he let his Dream draw back, slowly, from all of them.

Power like this was a grand thing. He would carry it as he carried everything else, and use it when he chose.

At the very edge of his withdrawing Dream, in the bright sealed knot of the Lecture Hall, something clicked.

A single bead, sliding along a string.

Noah went still!

He waited. Silence followed: one click, faint as a pin dropped in snow, and then stillness.

Perhaps it was nothing.

He doubted it.

—

He tested the rest quickly.

THE Keystone Dream first. He looked at the old shrine’s ward, a faint skin of protection laid down over its stones by some Progeny long ago, and the ward lit in his sight like a web of frost, every strand leading inward to a single rune cut into the lintel. He dreamed it loose, and the ward came apart in silence, falling away like frost melting off glass. Then he dreamed it held, and the ward knit itself back together, good as new.

Then he tried the Legacy itself, out of pure curiosity.

He followed Lucy’s weavings inward, every river and Conduit and mountain bound together in threads so old they had hardened into something like stone. He followed them down toward the place where they all had to meet.

And lost them!

They went down past his sight, into a Profundity his gold eyes were unable to follow. Lucy’s keystone lay below him. Far below. So did his own; when he turned THE Keystone Dream inward, it found only the endless trunk of his Tree going down past anything he could see.

Last, the edge of his reach. He pushed his Dream out past the farthest mountain of the Legacy, toward the cracked sky at its border, and tried to dream a single snowflake beyond the border into a Dimension.

The dream thinned as it went, stretching like honey pulled too far, until at the Legacy’s edge it simply stopped. Inside the border, a Dimension bloomed in the air, blue-gold, and drifted down into the drifts as a snowflake was made into a Dimension. Beyond it, the snowflake stayed a snowflake.

Order II: a Legacy’s whole breadth, everything inside it!

|Order II, measured.|

|Your Dream covers the whole domain of a Legacy. Within it, you perceive every Dimension, every Observable Existence, every Root, and every Immensity, and none perceive your dreaming.|

|Within it, you may stand anywhere as though dreaming there, and impose your power wherever you wish.|

|Within it, those who hold only Roots are yours to end, or to devour.|

|Within it, a Newly Risen Immensity will sense you only when your blow has landed.|

|Established and Ancient Immensities will sense you when you act near or upon them.|

...!

|A notice, on your progress.|

|The Sap thickens as it nears a Bough.|

|You rose swiftly, carried by a Shard of IT. That was a gift, and gifts of that kind are rare. From here, your Tree grows at its true pace.|

|The final stretch toward the Second Bough will demand far more than the first. Ordinary loot will barely stir the Sap. Only grand loot will move it: the corpses of the Immense, the Ergospheres of Roots, and more.|

|Sap risen toward the Second Bough: 90%.|

...!

Noah read it twice, and almost laughed out loud!

Ten percent. And those ten percent would cost him more than the ninety before them.

Okay!

But he learned a great deal.

A Dream that covered a whole Legacy, unseen. Every Root inside it his to end or eat. Newly Risen Immense, open to him before they knew he was there. THE Keystone Dream, proven. A secret beneath the Legacy that its own Immense Ones had kept silent about.

He was stronger than he had ever been. And somewhere under the Legacy, a few hundred Immense Ones were sleeping in stone.

He turned his face toward the floor of everything.

Beneath the Legacy, beneath the snow, beneath the frozen dark of the Basal Floor, he could feel them now that he was quiet: several warmths, faint and far down, calling to the grain of IT in him like coals answering a spark.

Shards below. Unclaimed!

When he went down into THE Evergrave, he would let his Dream go there too to learn.

Noah lifted the Orb. The tiny door at its heart turned back toward the Lecture Hall, and opened.

He stepped through, and came out at the bottom of a bowl of obsidian and gold, where more than a hundred Immense Ones were still sitting exactly where he had left them, leaning forward on their thrones.

And on the innermost ring, the Thinker’s beads clicked once, slowly, as he passed.