Read Novel Full Chapter 5837: THE Evergrave! I
Chapter 5837: THE Evergrave! I
Every gaze in Lucy’s Lecture Hall landed on him at once.
More than a hundred Immensities, each one a weight, each one a question, and all of them looking at his eyes. Gold, as before, pupil-less and bright. And drifting in the gold, a fleck of obsidian, new since he left.
Moriarty rose halfway from his throne. "THE Legacy’s Son," he said. "What did you find?"
Noah had pondered on this question.
The farm, the letter, the garden, the hoe, the grain of something unbearably heavy turned up in the soil: all of it was his now, and he had already decided how much of it this hall would know.
He would keep many things to himself as there were too many monsters in Existence, and he was just up and coming!
"Lucy left behind a legacy," he said. "A way of...seeing."
A murmur ran through the rings!
"It lets me see possible paths." He looked up at the endless tiers. "That path lies with IT as many here already knew."
"IT is no longer whole," Noah went on. "IT was shattered, long ago, and its pieces were stretched out across existence. Scattered. Lost. Any mention of Immense Ones holding it is merely false, as what they hold at most is... a piece of IT."
He opened his hand. "What Lucy left behind has let me sense where some of those pieces may be."
His existence hummed as he said this!
"If we gather the pieces of IT," he said, "all of them..."
He let the words hang, and looked around the bowl at every one of them. "I can use the methodology Lucy left behind to potentially open up a pathway. There... may no longer be Those Who Remain!"
WAA!
The hall went utterly silent!
He bullshitted them so calmly as his existence didnt even flutter!
Moriarty took off his spectacles. He sat with them in one tentacle, looking at Noah for a very long moment, and something in his crimson eyes cracked open.
"Where...can we find them?"
"Some of them are close," Noah said. "Others are far. I can feel them as you feel a fire through a closed door. Warmth, and a direction. Across existence, and in... THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering too."
Discussion bloomed as many talked amongst themselves, but Noah had laid the seeds to send others looking, and to use Immense Ones as his own personal valets to get what he wanted!
Moriarty put his spectacles back on and rose fully.
"We will need to move," he said. "All of us. Soon!"
The hall agreed with him in a long, low rumble!
What came next took a while.
Discussions on where The Immense Ones of The Legacy would go based on where Noah felt a Shard of IT might be!
Moriarty laid out the dangers plainly. THE Keepers of Existence had come into this Legacy for Noah, and THE Sealed One had apparently been given or claimed access to IT as he may have a shard.
There wers other Legacies too as Existence was vast and filled with boundless terrors. Established Immense Ones were abundant. Ancient Immensities were abundant, and there were likely those above lying in wait for when any answers provided themselves!
Noah even wondered where someone like Vakochev stood as he had to at least be Ancient, right?
"Everywhere we go," Moriarty said, "assume other Legacies are already there. Assume others are ahead."
That sobered the hall more than anything else that day!
Then Moriarty turned back to him.
"And THE Legacy’s Son," he said. "Where will you go?"
Noah smiled!
"Where it is coldest." he said.
The hall quieted.
He didn’t say anything else as only THE THINKER and Ling truly knew what he meant with this!
The Thinker spoke quietly to him at this time.
|"Immense Ones who go into THE Undersnow,"| he said mildly, |"tend not to come back. You can be considered an Immense One now as you may face a heavier rejection, will things be okay?"|
His own back, where the frost-wound leaked, he left unremarked.
"I know," Noah sent back mentally. "That is why I am going alone. You may need to take Ling looking elsewhere. Take Poona as well and see if you can grasp any of the Shards in THE Chrysalis!"
...!
Ling, on the arm of her father’s throne, seemed to almost hear being talked about as she frowned.
But Noah had decided!
Information was shared and given in a limited fashion as many Immensities began to move!
The Council broke near what felt a few hours.
Achilles was waiting on the Plain of Accord, Rose wrapped in his cloak.
Among The Immense Ones setting off...many would take their Progeny and those with Roots to search across Existence as Achilles would be among many who would search across Existence.
The Shards of IT had been stretched out across existence for ages and had not been found. Being Immense did not matter as something not Immense could find it...so long as they were looking in the right place.
Like this...an entire Legacy was slowly mobilized!
—
Noah’s existence remained steadfast as he stretched himself out in multiple areas.
The Basal Floor was quiet without anyone beside him!
Noah crossed it alone. Ling and Poona were on their way to THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering with the Thinker. Ruination and THE Infiniverse still slept in their cocoons. For the first time since he had come into this winter, nobody walked at his side, and nobody’s voice was in his head. Even Atlas had gone quiet!
He found he liked it.
As for this first region of THE Undersnow...half the floor was gone. The great frozen plain where the Warden had sat for Ages had broken into a thousand drifting pieces when Ling kicked him off his ring, and those pieces still turned slowly through the dark like the wreck of a sunken fleet. Slabs of ice the size of mountains. Pillars of frost with frozen challengers still locked inside them, faces pressed to the glass. Torn Dimensions hanging between it all, their skies gone black.
He walked on the empty air between them, and the cold came up to meet him.
It was a different cold. Up here, it had only pressed. Down there, past the north, it pulled. It caught at every part of him and tugged, patient and steady, downward. The Long Night’s cold that had lived in him since the frozen underworld stirred in answer, eager, as if it knew the way home.
He let it pull!
The rift split the dark from top to bottom.
He stood at its edge and looked down. Blue ice, glitering with frost so old it had turned to glass, falling away into a blue so deep it swallowed his sight. Somewhere far below lay THE Evergrave of THE Unthawed Ages.
He stepped off the edge!
The walls rushed past in great blue sheets, and things lay inside them. Bones first, whole skeletons curled up as if they had lain down to sleep and stayed asleep. Then bigger shapes. A hand the size of a Dimension pressed flat against the inside of the wall, fingers spread, as if something had tried to push its way out and frozen in the trying. An eye a mile across, wide open. A mouth.
They were all looking up!
Noah looked back at them as he fell, and felt, under the cold, something older. A pressure on the back of his neck. Faint, for now.
He hit the bottom!
The gate filled the floor of the rift from wall to wall.
It was a ribcage. Each rib a curving pillar of white bone thicker than a city wall, rising out of the ice and arching inward to meet its twin along a spine far overhead. Something enormous had died here, long before the First Sundering, and its chest had become a door. A skin of frost lay over the whole of it, thick and old, put there by something that wanted the living kept out.
Noah looked at it with THE Keystone Dream.
The seal lit up in his sight, a web of frost across every rib, so dense and tangled that for a moment he saw only more of it. He followed the strands inward. They ran up the ribs and along the spine, thousands of them, all leaning toward one point at the very top of the arch, where a single small bone glowed.
That one!
He reached for it with his Dream. It fought him, cold and stubborn, the weight of something very old refusing something young. He leaned in. The grain of IT in his chest pulsed once, deep and sure, and the fleck of obsidian in his gold eyes brightened.
CRACK!
The little bone slid out of its place and drifted up off the spine. Every strand of the seal let go at once, falling away from the top down like snow shaken off a branch.
The gate stood open!
He walked through. Behind him, he dreamed the bone back into its place, and the frost closed over the ribs again.
—
The first thing he saw was the sun!
It hung high in a sky of deep frozen blue, round and white and perfectly bright. A dead star. It shone on everything and warmed nothing, and its light on his face felt like snowmelt.
Beneath it lay the Evergrave.
A Dimension, or the bones of one. Light years of distance of Streets of black ice ran out from the gate in straight lines wider than rivers, so smooth they held the dead sun’s reflection. Towers and halls and houses lined them, built for bodies other than human, dead so long their shapes had stopped making sense. A few windows glowed a faint blue. Shapes moved slowly behind some of them, as if every step cost them something.
And over all of it, the anger!
It came down on him the moment he passed the gate. Heavy, and constant, and old. It settled on the back of his neck like a hand and stayed there. The anger soaked the ice under his feet and the dead sun overhead and every stone of every frozen house. It had been here so long that it had stopped being a feeling and become the weather.
And it looked at him. The only living thing in its home.
|You have entered the place where existence keeps its anger.|
|It will press on you.|
|It will remember you.|
...!
Noah rolled his shoulders under the weight, and smiled.
Across the street, a door creaked open.
A dead thing stood in it, weaker than anything with a Root. Tall, thin, wrapped in rags stiff with frost, its face a grey shape with dark hollows where its eyes had been. It had come to the door slowly, drawn by something it had no name for.
Then it felt him!
It flinched back so hard it hit the doorframe. Its hands came up in front of its face as if he were a fire roaring in its doorway. A sound came out of it, thin and cracked, a word in some language older than any he knew. Noah understood it anyway.
Warm.
It said the word as a man alone in the dark might say knife.
Then it was gone, the door slamming, its footsteps scraping away inside. Up and down the street, the blue windows went dark one after another.
Noah watched them go out.
He had walked into many places in his life. This was the first where warmth was the thing people hid from.
Night Lifeforms here were interesting!
None antagonized him so far, so he didn’t rush out to be a genocidal maniac just yet.
He sat down on the black ice, crossed his legs, closed his gold eyes, and let his Dream go.
It went out over the Evergrave soft and wide and silent, as it had gone over the Legacy, rolling down the streets and in through the dark windows and out across the frozen land beyond. The Evergrave was bigger than any Legacy. His Dream covered only part of it before it thinned and stopped. Maybe a tenth.
He felt the dead. Thousands upon thosuands of them, in the city light years vast, alone, kept awake in the cold. Every one of them went on, unaware of him passing.
He felt them gathered in families. Clans and Provenance Lineages. Each one held a stretch of the city or the frozen land beyond it, with high walls of ice, banners of stitched skin, and a strong one at the center. The clan heads burned among the lesser Night Lifeforms like cold suns, deep and dangerous, every one of them Immense. Newly Risen, and even Established!
He felt the clans at work!
On a long street near the city’s edge, a column of weak dead stood chained together, and tall figures in grey robes walked the line with glass needles. Wherever a needle went in, something pale and gold drifted out of the dead and up into glass jars. The dead in that line went dimmer every time. Warm memories, he understood: a fire, a hand, a summer day. They were draining the last warmth out of the weakest dead and keeping it in jars.
Beyond the city, he felt fields where the dimmest of all had been planted upright in the ice, row on row, and set alight. They burned slowly, with a pale fire that gave no heat, and their light was carried away in lanterns to light the clans’ halls.
He felt four things that were bigger than the Provenance Lineages. Much bigger!
A king of frost on a throne of bone at the city’s heart, thin as a starved man, wearing a crown made of finger-bones; a cathedral shaped like a woman, with a choir inside her singing something that sounded like an apology; a giant drowned and frozen under a sea of black ice, screaming without a sound; and far off, at the very edge of his reach, something armored and old and utterly still, sitting before a gate.
Established, all four. Their Profundity went down past anything he could see. Four lords over all the Night Provenance Lineages!
And past the armored thing, past the gate, at the very center of the Evergrave, beyond the reach of his Dream, something pulsed against the grain of IT in his chest so hard it ached.
A Shard!
Noah drew his Dream back slowly, and opened his eyes.
A city of the dead, cold and awake. Clans of Immense dead, feeding on the weak. Four lords above the clans. And at the center of it all, behind every one of them, a single Shard of IT.
One Shard. Four Established Immense Ones. A great many lifeforms in the way. And his Sap needed feeding anyway.
He found he was looking forward to it!
Noah stood and brushed the frost off his knees.
Far down the street, at the edge of what he could see, something howled. Long and high and hungry, the sound of a hunting horn blown through a throat. Another howl answered it. Then another.
A dozen shapes came over the rooftops in a running pack, low and fast, their eyes cold points of blue. At their head ran something taller.
It was sniffing!
And then it turned, all at once, and looked straight down the long black street at the only warm thing in the Evergrave.
Towards him, and the glorious weavings of an Infinite Dream beginning to spill out of him!