Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5904: The Maze of Destiny!

THE Verdant Regard stepped out of the green light and into the Chrysalis.

She arrived in a region where the silk had given way to seas, vast slow seas of gold that rolled and turned in every direction, and every wave in them was a destiny. Some were bright and short and crashed quickly. The air above them hummed with all the futures they carried.

A moment later, the space beside her rippled, and Noah stepped through, with Kir One looming at his back like a black mountain that had followed him home.

THE Verdant Regard turned her head and looked around.

Her face was the same, beautiful and still, her dark green hair stirring in a warm wind off the golden seas. But her eyes were not green anymore. They were gold, pupilless and shining, Noah’s eyes looking out of her face.

And what they saw was walls!

Massive golden walls of destiny rose all around them on every side, so tall their tops vanished into the haze, so wide they curved away out of sight. They were made of the same stuff as the seas below, solid destiny poured upward and frozen, and they shifted slowly as he watched, sliding and turning, opening new passages and closing old ones.

It looked as if the three of them had arrived in an enormous open courtyard at the heart of something far larger, a space walled in on every side by fate itself.

In the distance, two figures stood together at the edge of a golden sea.

One was Lifthrasir, small and calm. The other was Lygara, THE First Gu of Destiny, vast and strange, her insect body and her slow-moving tentacels curled around the shore, and above them all, the face of a beautiful woman, serene and watchful. They had been talking quietly. Now they both turned toward Noah.

Lifthrasir looked at Kir One, and then at him.

"Were you fruitful," she asked, "in using Kir One?"

Noah and Kir One looked at each other.

Kir One said nothing. One of its many faces was still, very slightly, chewing.

"Very," Noah said. He looked up at the towering golden walls. "What happened here?"

He reached outward with his Dream as he spoke, and found that he could barely send it past the walls at all. His senses ran up against them and slid back like water off glass, and what little got through came back blurred and uncertain, as if the walls themselves were deciding what he was allowed to know.

Lygara answered him.

"Destiny cannot be escaped," she said, and her voice rolled out over the golden seas like a slow tide. "Fate cannot be outrun. Every lifeform that ever lived has tried, and every one of them learned the same thing at the end of its road. You cannot leave your destiny behind. You can only turn and face it. So Lifthrasir and I chose to face hers here, on ground of our own making. We built a vast Maze of Destiny around her, to trap and confound everything that comes for her, and to let us sense it long before it arrives."

Her tentacles stirred against the shore. "There is an art to weaponizing destiny. To taking the fate of those who oppose you and crushing it in your hand."

Her beautiful face turned toward the Verdant Regard. "And you seem to be learning that art well. You have covered this woman with your weavings. She appeared not long ago, and I can feel your hand all through her."

The eyes narrowed slightly. "I did not think you could touch an Ancient yet."

...!

Her eyes shone with a dangerous light as she said it.

Noah smiled, and waved one hand easily toward the Verdant Regard.

"I know my limits," he said. "I used an opportunity, an injured woman, and possibilities you could not even imagine to make this happen. I don’t think I can bully an Ancient Immensity just yet."

So he said.

Though that might change in a day or two!

Lygara watched him for a long moment, and the dangerous light in her eyes faded, slowly, into something like interest.

Noah turned back to THE Verdant Regard.

She stood on the golden shore beside him with his eyes in her face, perfectly still, waiting for whatever he wanted. He looked at her for a while and wondered about her destiny. Where it had begun, a proud young Newly Risen in a garden. Where it had gone. Where it would have ended, if he had stayed out of her dream.

He stepped in front of her.

"You lived a horrible life as a victim," he said quietly. "And then you lived as a bully too. You ground children into pills and fed them to your daughter and called it love. And you came for my head along with the rest of them."

He tilted his head. "In existence, one either wins or loses. I will keep your dream." His voice stayed calm. "But the rest of you...does not need to stay."

He let his Dream flow into her!

It went in like a river into a dry riverbed, slow at first, then wider, then everywhere. Her identity was a long sentence she had been writing about herself for Ages: who she was, what she had done, who she feared, who she hated, what she wanted. Noah’s Dream read that sentence from start to finish, calmly, from far above.

Then it began to erase it!

One word at a time, the Verdant Regard went away. Her name loosened and blurred. Memories of the Fiend dissolved like sugar in warm water. Her pride, her fear, her hatred, her long cruel habits, all of it thinned and faded and washed out of her, until the only thing left standing in that riverbed was the one thing he had promised to keep.

Her dream.

It glowed there alone, small and green and very bright, the dream of a mother who wanted her daughter to rise.

|THE Verdant Regard’s identity has been erased.|

|Her dream remains.|

|Her Immensity, her Regard, and her place in existence are now held by your Dream.|

Noah went deeper!

Past the dream, past the empty space where she had been, into the deepest part of her Immensity, where she had always kept the thing she loved most. There, everything was green. An endless green brilliance spread in every direction, soft and warm and humming, and floating at its center was a small, curled figure, a severed Root frozen in ice beside her.

Minerva!

Her body was trembling. Her eyes fluttered open and shut, open and shut, as she drifted in and out of conciousness, too weak to stay awake and too restless to sleep. Soundlessly, her lips moved. The severed end of her Root hung beside her, jagged and cold.

Noah looked down at her.

"Pledge fealty to my dreams," he said, "and be bound to them. Your mother’s dream will be achieved. And you will achieve your own dream of Immensity."

He reached out, and his Dream poured into her Root.

It flowed into the severed end like light into a cracked glass, filling every jagged edge, every frozen break, every place where her path had been torn away. Blue and gold brilliance spread up through her Root and into her body, and her trembling grew and grew until she was shaking all over, and then her eyes snapped open.

She saw him!

Shock filled her face, then horror. She saw the brilliance pouring into her, saw the figure of night-sky skin and blue-gold constellations standing in her mother’s place, and for a moment, memories flashed across her eyes, too fast to hold. Her mother’s garden, the cold, the door shutting, a voice somewhere telling her what she had lost.

Minerva bit her lip hard.

Then, slowly, trembling, she bowed her head, and knelt before Noah.

|Minerva has pledged fealty to your dreams.|

|Her severed Root is being filled with your Dream.|

|Her path toward Immensity has opened again.|

...!

Noah looked down at her calmly.

He had done this for more than its own sake.

Part of Minerva came from THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.

Progeny mattered. There were many ways to reach a father through a daughter, even when that father thought his daughter worth less than dirt, even when he had already crushed her in his palm in another possibility just to watch her mother’s face. Blood carried threads, and threads could be followed.

Of course, that was only one possible way. Noah knew there were many possibilities and many paths ahead, and he would see most of them before he walked any.

And there was one thing he wanted to bring to a close right now.

This fucking roundabout with THE Sealed One.

The Sealed One was in THE Keepers of Existence. After forty-one borrowed lifetimes there, Noah knew exactly where. And whatever made him unique, whatever his many identities and his old, old history...

Could he, right now, truly be grander than an injured Ancient Immense One?!