Chapter 5758: Glorious Capabilities I

In the space where there had been only darkness, Noah’s brilliance spread out in every direction, and he brought his hands together.

Between his palms, a singularity bloomed!

It was blinding, a point of impossible density and light, and it was not empty. Noah drew it wider, and within it turned a whole domain, an empire vaster than hundreds of Dimensions laid together, seas of blue-gold, realms upon realms, a chrysalis of sleeping dreamers, an ocean that turned quietly with two sisters weaving upon it. THE Infiniverse!

He had reached and drawn the whole of his home into the singularity between his hands, into this space that was only his!

He looked at it, cradled in the brilliance, and he named the space that held it.

"Here, my existence can stand across time and space at once," he said.

"It is mine. Entirely mine. And unless a thing bears my signature and my power, and unless I wish it, nothing will ever enter here. Let this be the one place in all of existence that answers to no one but me. My...Existential Root."

WAA!

Then he waved his hand.

From THE Infiniverse, countless strings erupted, threads of light that stretched outward from the singularity and reached across the dark to touch illusory points hanging in the distance, every one of them a Dimension over which his empire had spread its influence! The strings connected, taut and bright, a web of belonging strung between his home and everything it had ever reched.

He could pull them here if he wished. He could draw every Dimension he held into this space and make it all safe with him.

He did not.

A life had to draw its boundaries. This was his space, and it would hold only what it needed to hold, no more. He would not hoard existence the way the architects hoarded it. His home was here, secure, and that was enough.

And it was truly secure now!

What had been his home, and was his home, and would always be his home, was sealed inside a space that answered to him alone. Even the beings whose Dimensionality stood higher than his own at this moment, even they could not reach this place, for a simple and absolute reason. They were not him!

With that done, Noah turned his blazing eyes outward again, and the sense of the vast turning equation of existence returned to him, and he spoke on.

"Time is relative. Distance is relative. Even now I am perceiving countless things at once, receiving knowledge that flows into me depending on where I am, and where I have been. And where I am and where I have been can be considered the same thing, the moment I set distance aside. Which means I should, in theory, be able to..."

He waved his hand, slow, as though rewinding something. But he was not rewinding anything. He was only taking himself, one point of his own existence, and displacing it toward another point, moving through the crystalline block of time the way a reader moves a finger down a page!

Existence flickered. It was as though pages were being unwound around him, leaf after leaf turning back.

And in an instant, because time was relative, Noah found himself gazing once more upon a Primordial forest.

The trees stood ancient and vast, budding Dimensions and Observable Existences upon their boughs like ripening fruit. And at the edge of a bright, quick river knelt an unfathomable existence, a small rough figure with her calloused hands cupped over the water, producing an endless stream of genuine Dimensions and pouring them down to the silver fish, who rose and gobbled them up as fast as she could make them!

He had been here before. He had been shown this, once, in a Runestone’s vision, as a distant observer.

This time, Noah took a step!

He moved from being a watcher of the record into the record itself, one clean stride across the impossible, and he appeared beside her on the riverbank!

The contrast between them was stark. Noah stood tall and radiant, a being of blazing blue light and blue-gold Provenance, freshly reforged, brilliant and new.

And she was small, and hunched, and rough, a caveman thing of thick limbs and unadorned skin, and yet she was beautiful, a terrible ancient beauty that had never once needed anything to make it so.

She turned her head and looked at him.

And she smiled. Fiendishly, exactly as the record had smiled at him before, a small knowing curve that should not have been possible on the face of a thing inside a memory!

"We are standing at a moment in time that can be considered a memory," Noah said.

"A record. And also, existence. I have never stood here, and I have stood here, because I am standing here right now. This is a record drawn from a Hieroglyph Runestone, and I have imposed my existence into it, so that I might learn more. Hello. I Am..."

"Osmont."

BOOM!

Lucy spoke, for the first time ever, and her voice alone was resonant and grand, a sound with the weight of the beginning of things in it.

She turned to him and rose from the river, and even as she rose she did not stop, her hands still cupped, still pouring out an endless stream of Dimensions into the water behind her without a single thought given to it.

"I have always had this conversation with you," she said. "Whether from a record of information or not. And I can see you have only just formed your Root, little guy, because you are looking at everything through that lens of past, present, and future, turning it over and over as though the distincton meant something."

Her fiendish smile softened, just barely.

"Relax. You are at the very beginning of your existence, only now setting out to gather what there is to know. In the beginning, all of us feel this way, this sense of being invincible, of having finally seen the whole shape of things. Be careful of it. Be cautious. Your existence is new, and a new existence can still be attacked in a great many ways."

" This beginning stage of life you are experiencing now is also the stage that has the highest rate of mortality. All because of that feeling of invincibility that makes you feel like you can go anywhere and do anything. While somewhat true it is also not. You are only starting out as there are others much grander than you. Be careful."

...!