Chapter 5764: Legacy! I

Poona pulled him through existence, and Noah felt every layer of it pass!

He did not resist the tug. They sank down through layers of reality and up through tiers of Dimensionality, past depths he had never known were stacked beneath existence, with existence peeling open around them and folding shut behind, and he catologed every one of them as they went. It was a great deal to take in!

And then they arrived, and the place they arrived in was grand.

The Existential Conduits were here, the great pillars of flowing authority he had first seen threading the void above the sundered Train. But here they did not merely rise and stretch. Here they had been bent and shaped.

Woven into structure and form, the veins of existence itself coaxed into architecture, and out of them stood grand buildings and soaring towers, whole halls and towers raised from living rivers of Infinity and Source and Loom-light, coursing bright through walls that were somehow both solid and made of pure flowing authority.

And through those Conduit-buildings, moving freely, drifting between the towers and perching on the towers, went the Conduit Lifeforms, thousands of them, the incandescent critters of the deep, at home here in a way they had not been in the wild veins of the void.

It was an ancient place, and its Dimensionality was terrifying to stand within.

Above the towers, Dimensions and Observable Existences hung in the air like stars, whole domains turning gently in the dark as though they were nothing more than lanterns strung over a courtyard.

And beyond the towers rose mountains, vast ones, and they were not mountains at all, Noah saw, but Elsedimensions grown into the shape of mountains, great masses of sealed reality climbing into the heights with Existential Conduits running through them like rivers of light threading a range of peaks.

A civilization raised in the veins of existence, older than most things Noah had ever encountered, grand beyond the grandest empires!

And over all of it, heavy and constant, fell the snow.

The cold had reached even here. Even this ancient place of terrifying Dimensionality, this domain grown from the bones of existence, lay under the falling white, the Long Night’s chill permeating the Conduit-towers and the star-hung domains and the Elsedimension mountains all alike. It fell thick as beside him Noah saw Poona shiver.

She grimaced, and waved a small hand, and a coat wove itself around her out of nothing, thick and warm, and Noah’s new eyes saw that it was filled with boundless invisible authority, layer upon layer of it.

"Ugh," Poona said, pulling the coat close. "It reaches everywhere now. Even home."

Then she brightened, and turned to him, and there was real satisfaction in her face. "But look at this. Look at you, standing here safe! I did it. I actually did it this time!"

She said it with the pleasure of someone who had needed a win and finally gotten one.

"You should understand..." she went on, walking now, leading him in among the Conduit-towers under the snow. "Some Immense Ones, the greedy ones, the hungry ones, they would rather just eat the young. A fresh Root, swallowed whole, no thought given to it. That is what those two were. That is most of them, if I am honest."

She glanced at him. "But not all. Some of them care about legacy. About what comes after. About whether the path continues once they are gone. And you have arrived at a place built by one who cared about exactly that." A small, proud smile. "This place. This whole Domain. It was founded here by her."

She led him on, through the towers and beneath the hanging Domains, until they came to the foot of one of the great Elsedimension mountains, and there, at its entrance, stood a statue.

Noah looked up at it, and his new sight resolved what it was made of. Existential Conduits. The veins of existence themselves, bent and woven and set into the shape of a figure, rivers of flowing authority coursing through the carved form so that the whole statue glowed from within, blue and obsidian and white and a dozen colors he had no names for, an entire being sculpted from the living power of the deep.

And the figure it made was one he knew.

It was small, and rough, and hunched. A caveman shape of thick limbs and unadorned skin, calloused hands cupped as though pouring something out. And beautiful, terribly and anciently beautiful, even rendered in flowing Conduits a mile high.

It was Lucy!

Poona stopped before the statue, and she bowed her head, and when she spoke her voice had lost all its lightness and gone quiet and reverent.

"This is the one responsible for all of it," she said. "For this place. For me. For every one of us who ever awoke a Root and lived long enough to grow it. Before she left existence, she built this. An Immense Legacy, raised here in the deep, to give the young a place. Somewhere those who had awakened their Existential Roots of Immensity could thrive, and grow, and become what they were meant to become, without being hunted down and devoured for the treasure they carried before they ever had the chance to walk their path." Poona looked up at the glowing figure.

"This is her Legacy. She is THE Acharya of Immensity. Lucy!"

BOOM!

Noah’s eyes shone.

He thought of Lucy in the record, walking through her Primordial forest, telling him to go and experience existence for the first time now that his Root had emerged. She had not warned him how dangerous that would be. She had not told him that stepping out into the open with a fresh Root was to hang a jewel before every greedy Immense One nearby!

She had simply smiled and sent him out.

But now he stood before her Legacy, where someone belonging to it had found him at the exact moment two titans closed their hands around him, and pulled him free.

Had she expected that? Had she known, when she sent him out unwarned, that her Legacy would reach him before the hungry ones could? That a thing she had built at the beginning of existence would still be standing at the end of an Age?

He could not know. She was a record, and records did not answer follow-up questions. But standing here, looking up at her made of the veins of existence, he thought it was not impossible. It was not impossible at all!

Poona was already moving on.

"Come," she said, turning from the statue and leading him deeper toward the mountain’s entrance. "There is a great deal here, and you will need time to grasp all of it. In these Empyros Immense Legacy Mountains, you will find others like you, some who have awoken a Root of Immensity and not yet formed their Immensity, still growing, still becoming. And in some places, yes, you will see true Immense Ones, the ones who care about what comes after as they won’t try to eat you...for the most part."

She glanced back at him, and the lightness returned to her. "There is much for you to understand. But first things first. Let me take you to Sir Moriarty."

...!