Chapter 5417: Veris-Gloom! |
Noah appeared in skies unfathomably far from THE Hallowed Demesne, surrounded by the nine women of the Dora Shath’yar.
He was turning over the words of THE Queen Regnant as he arrived, the talk of Those Who Remain, the lineage older than the oldest things, the insistence that anyone True was no longer alone. He shook his head at the memory of it. He was himself. He had clawed his way up from nothing with no inheritance handed to him by anyone, no ancient bloodline, no faction at his back, and whatever the Queen had felt looking at his eye, he was not in the habit of accepting a heritage just because a powerful being insisted he had one. He was himself, with no connection to another, and that had always been enough!
And as he thought it, he glanced up at the tentacle-like Estuary Eye turning slowly above him, the lemniscate pupil drinking in unfathomable waves of existence, elevating his Intent and his Osmontian Source Infinity with every silent revolution. It did feel ancient. It did feel grand!
But then, he was ancient and grand too. So that settled nothing.
As he studied it, one of the Dora Shath’yar drifted close to him and began to sniff.
She leaned in and breathed him in like a hound taking a scent, and a dangerous smile spread across her face, a smile that looked one wrong word away from devouring him.
"THE Great Ama had so many praises for you," she said. "Osmont. The New Sword....THE Great Ama does not praise. So you must be something." Her swirling black-hole eyes flicked upward, to the fleshy star turning over his head, and she pointed at it. "I am Eir. And I have to ask. Are you like us?"
Eir was tall, muscular, her bronze body carrying the easy power of a Mesozoic Scale being, and her face was extremely beautiful in a way that did nothing at all to soften the hunger in her smile. She waited for his answer with that smile, pointing at THE Estuary Eye as though it were the most interesting thing she had seen in ages.
"I don’t know," Noah said. "I’m like me. And I’ve found it’s very hard to find anything like me at all."
"THE Great Ama has deemed you to be Veris-Gloom," she said. "One of those who can strip away the illusions of existence and remain true always, no matter what the dark throws at them. It is not a designation she gives lightly. I have great hopes for you in these chaotic times, if she is right about you, and she is rarely wrong." She inclined her head. "I am Astrid. Leader of these useless Dora Shath’yar. We will arrive at THE Effluvium Sanctum shortly. After that, by THE Great Ama’s own instruction, we listen to you. Where you go, we go."
...!
Eir struggled against her grip the entire time, and Astrid manhandled her without breaking eye contact with Noah, holding the squirming Mesozoic Scale being in place the way an older sister pins a younger one, and the other seven Dora Shath’yar shook their heads at the pair of them with the long-suffering patience of beings who had watched this exact scene play out a thousand times.
Noah looked up, his eyes flashing, and THE Estuary Eye vanished completely from view. He hid it from all of them in that instant, so that even if some new being appeared now, they would see nothing at all above his head, only a new Sword standing among the Queen’s Daughters. The eye kept drinking. It simply did so unseen!
A moment later, Astrid pushed her spear downward, and a radiant obsidian river formed beneath all their feet, and they shot out toward the distance at speeds no Triassic Scale being could ever have matched, the obsidian current carrying them across the vast dark toward their destination.
Partway through the journey, Astrid released a frustrated breath and let Eir go.
Eir shot to Noah at once, delighted to be freed, and fell into pace beside him.
"So," she said. "Your Pantheon. What is it? I want to know what I’d be up against. Show me a little. You show me yours, and I’ll shown you mine..."
"I haven’t forged one yet," Noah said calmly.
Eir’s smile dropped into open shock.
"But," she said. "But that’s...no." She shook her head. "I can always sense which beings I can dominate and which I can’t. It’s a thing I have. And my sense is telling me I would not be able to completely dominate you. That at most, I would have to try really really hard. So how is that possible? How could you possibly have the power to stand against domination if you don’t even have a Pantheon? A being without a Pantheon is supposed to be open! Reachable! You’re not. You’re a wall, and walls are made of Pantheons!"
Noah answered her grandly.
"Most beings believe a Pantheon is needed to match a Pantheon," he said. "That to stand against a Mesozoic being’s dimension, you need a dimension of your own. And it makes sense, as far as it goes. But it isn’t necessarily true. It’s just the road everyone agreed to walk." He looked at her. "I decided, for myself, that I don’t need a Pantheon to match one. So I don’t."
...!
Eir’s shock cracked into a brilliant, delighted smile.
"Haha!" she crowed. "This fucking guy! Oh, I like you. I want to fight you right now. I want to find out exactly what ’I decided I don’t need one’ means when I put a spear through it. Come on, just a little, just a quickie, I want to-"
Astrid’s hand closed on the back of her armor and yanked her backward.
"We’re here," Astrid said flatly, as Eir flailed in her grip.
HUUM!
They arrived at THE Effluvium Sanctum.
The obsidian river slowed and let them out at the edge of it, and Noah took it in. Stellar obsidian-silver rivers surged across the region, and seas of the same, stretching out for light years, the liquid light of Pure Primordial Essence moving in slow vast currents. Floating landmasses drifted through the dark, and on them grew Source Herbs heavy with Pure Primordial Essence and threaded with the Primordial Source itself, spinning slowly across the void.
And from the multiple floating seas there radiated a terrible ambient Intent, a pressure of refined authority so dense that even Fourth Scale beings would struggle to survive within it. It was a forge for the Mesozoic-bound, a place calibrated to push a Fourth Scale being to the absolute edge of what it could endure, and lethal to everything beneath that.
Visible only to Noah, THE Estuary Eye reacted.
Hidden above him, the lemniscate pupil spun faster, drinking harder, because this was exactly the kind of place its properties favored. A region dense with Infinity and Primordial Source, saturated with Pure Primordial Essence, the richest possible ground for a being who grew simply by standing in grandeur. The bleed toward him became a flood the moment they crossed into the Sanctum, the eye feeding ravenously on the most nourishing existence it had yet tasted!
His eye felt like it wasbdrawing in all the lifeblood of Existence itself as it was extremely eerie!
|You have arrived at THE Effluvium Sanctum, a region of THE Source Lands. It is saturated with Pure Primordial Essence, Primordial Source, and a dense ambient Intent radiating from its floating seas. The ambient pressure is lethal to Third Scale beings on contact and capable of unmaking Fourth Scale beings over time. It functions as a forge for those at the Fourth Scale attempting to refine their Intent toward the Fifth. Source Herbs of high value grow upon its drifting landmasses. THE Devouring Estuary intake within this location is registering at flood capacity.|
Noah held the killing pressure off without effort, and then he sensed auras ahead of them.
There were several, deep in the Sanctum, and one of them was familiar!
He blinked. Because he knew that aura, and an instant later, as though it had sensed him in the very same moment, the familiar presence shot over toward them across the light years of obsidian rivers, closing the distance at a speed that bent the Sanctum around it!
WAA!
And...
THE Creature appeared.
Its titanic humanoid figure loomed up before them, shrouded in obsidian flames of terrifying, billowing concentration, the Way of Existence pouring off it pure and unblemished. And when Noah looked at it, he felt a sharpness he had not felt even from the Mesozoic Scale beings he had stood among, a clean total edge to its existence that cut at his perception. He reached for the measure of its Intent, and what he found stopped him, because it was not a Primordial Intent. It exceeded one. It had the unmistakable signature of something built on identity itself, something Egoic, the Intent of a being who had become a single concept so completely that it was no longer a power it held but the entirety of what it was!
THE Creature! In THE Effluvium Sanctum. And tremendously, monstrously powerful.
Noah shook his head with genuine incredulity. This whole time, through all of it, he had quietly believed that he held the fastest rate of progression in all of existence, that his cheats and his loot and his identity made him the one climbing quickest. And here was THE Creature, existentially fat, heavy with refined power, likely carrying an Egoic-grade Intent, having clearly devoured something extraordinary to get this swollen with existence in the time since they had last crossed paths.
What the fuck was THE Creature eating to be getting this heavy?
"Youngest."
His deep voice boomed out!