Chapter 5756: Gonadotropin! II

It did not sit upon him like a boon bolted on from outside. It sank into him, wove down through his foundation, threaded into his two hundred decillion quarks, fused itself to his Provenance and his Teloi and the deep structure of what he was, an engine of his own ascension seated at his core and turning, and turning, and never stopping!

He would grow now. Not for free, never for free, but forever!

The Immense Ones grew on a hormone they were born to and did not understand. Noah would grow on one he had made and understood completely.

And only now, only after his own hormone was emerging infinitely within him, did he reach at last for the invisible thing Vakochev had given him.

He wanted to take it!

So he would take it!

Not because he had grown strong enough to hold an Immense One’s substance in a being that was not an Immense One. He no longer needed to. He had made a place for it. He took the Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin, the stolen impossibility of the mighty, and folded it down into his own, poured the borrowed hormone of Immensity into the endless self-made hormone of himself, and his own generation received it cleanly and made it one more thing it generated forever.

The straining stopped!

The thing that had spent a whole day trying to tear him open simply settled, quiet and whole, absorbed into a vessel built precisely to receive it!

Noah breathed out in the space between things, alone and unseen and changed.

Then... his existence began to fray at the edges.

He felt it before he understood it, a loosening, the seams of him coming apart, because a being cannot seat a thing this vast at its core and remain the being it was.

POOF!

In an instant, everything about him ceased!

In the same instant, his existence ceased. In the dream, in the sealed space between things, in THE Infiniverse where his body stood upon the golden shore, in Atlas’s Elsedimension of shattered hours, everywhere across existence that his weavings reached, every one of them ceased at once, all of him gone in a single breath!

---

<Sir Moriarty>

Far from anything, in a domain that existence itself had misplaced, an octopus wearing spectacles was dissecting the corpse of an Immense One.

The domain had no coordinates that any map still held. It drifted lost in existence and time both, a pocket that the ages had walked past and forgotten, and through it ran slow rivers of white and gold, currents of pure authority winding between islands of nothing.

Dimensions floated in the empty air of it, whole domains turning gently untethered, and over all of it, impossibly, fell snow, soft and constant, dusting the drifting worlds and the slow bright rivers with a fine cold white.

At the center of it all hung Moriarty.

He was vast, a titan of dark coiling flesh, a great octopus whose innumerable tentacles moved with unhurried precision, and upon what passed for his face sat a pair of spectacles, small and neat and absurd against his enormity, catching the gold of the rivers.

Before him, splayed and pinned in the drifting air, lay the corpse of an Immense One, a thing that should not have been touchable, opened and parted and studied, and Moriarty’s tentacles worked through it with the patience of a scholar who had all the time that had ever been!

He drew threads of white authority out of the dead architect, examined them, set them aside, and reached for more, murmuring to himself as he worked.

And beside his workbench of a corpse, spinning slow in the air, stood an hourglass.

It was old past reckoning, and its two bulbs were filled not with sand but with Dimensions, countless tiny domains pouring grain by grain from the upper glass to the lowwer, an entire drift of existences measuring out some span only Moriarty knew. It had turned quietly for as long as the domain had drifted.

And now, all at once, it began to buzz!

The hourglass pulsed. The Dimensions within it flared, bright and urgent, and a low resonant hum rose off the glass and spread through the snow-fall and the gold rivers, an alarm sounding in a domain that had known only silence for an age!

Moriarty’s tentacles went still.

Behind the small neat spectacles, his eyes shone, bright and sudden and cold. A pulse of pure authority released from his vast body and rippled outward through the domain, a summons flung across whatever distance needed crossing!

In the next moment, a Golden Slime appeared!

It dropped into the domain out of nothing, a shapeless blob of pure shimmering gold, and it landed upon the air and rose, and as it rose it changed. The gold flowed upward and took a shape, and the shape refined itself, and where a formless slime had been there now stood a young woman, delicate and slight, with a fall of golden hair and a face of quiet loveliness.

She held herself lightly, and the strangest thing about her was what could not be felt from her at all whatsover. No aura. No pressure. No weight of authority, no register of power, nothing. She stood in a domain built of white-gold rivers and dissected architects and gave off less presence than a candle, and she too turned her eyes toward the buzzing hourglass, and her eyes shone as brightly as his had!

"Sir Moriarty," she said softly, looking at the flaring domains pouring through the glass. "Is that..."

"The emergence of another impossibility." Moriarty’s tentacles pulsed as he spoke, rippling in slow waves down their great length.

His voice was dry and old.

"Somewhere across existence, a thing that should not be has been made. Find it, Poona. Find it before any of the others do and it is devoured yet again."

He turned one eye upon her, and the gold caught in his spectacles.

"The last impossibility I sent you to find, you failed to bring me. I have not forgotten that. If you fail this time..."

He did not finish. He did not need to.

Poona bowed, and she was smiling as she did it, a small easy smile with no fear in it at all.

"The last one was difficult, Sir. Truly it was." She straightened, unhurried. "But you needn’t worry about this one. Consider what has happened. First THE LONG NIGHT begins, and then, barely a breath later, another impossibility blooms right on its heels. That is not a coincidence. It means the necessary conditions are flowering, one after another, before the Night grows colder still and freezes us all."

Her smile widened a fraction. "I will find this impossibility for you. Until then..."

Boundless Provenance surged, and then...

WAP!

She was gone, the golden woman vanishing from the domain as suddenly as the slime had come, leaving only the falling snow and the humming glass and the vast spectacled titan among his rivers of gold.

Moriarty regarded the empty air where she had stood for a moment. Then he turned back to the corpse of the Immense One, and his tentacles resumed their patient work, drawing threads of dead authority from the opened architect, examining them in the gold light, setting them aside.

And as he worked, quietly, to himself, Moriarty spoke.

"When the scale is shattered, the shards become the floor," he said. "When belief is spent, the cold comes walking."

A tentacle drew a long white thread from the corpse and held it up to his spectacles. "What was counted shall come uncounted. The high shall be set upon the balance and asked what they weighed, and the balance shall not lie, for the balance is winter."

The snow fell over him, and the hourglass hummed, and the Dimensions poured through the glass grain by grain.

"And at the turning, count three," Moriarty murmured, setting the thread aside and reaching into the corpse for another. "One shall look upon all that is, and grieve. One shall take up every weight, and not set it down. One shall no longer remain, and yet remain."

His shining eyes narrowed behind the small neat glasses.

"By their three hands the cloth is torn," he said softly, "or the cloth is woven anew."

...!