Chapter 5769: Pain! I

Pain was one of the most important things an existence could feel.

Most of the time, pain was a message. It was the plain, screaming report that something harmful to your existence was happening right now, and that you needed to act, to pull away, to run, to make it stop.

When a person put their hand over a fire and it burned, the pain was not nonsense. The pain was information. It was existence saying urgently, get your hand away from the fire, you dumb fuck.

And most of the time, people listened to their pain!

Most of the time, they should. A great deal of survival is nothng more than the wisdom to obey the thing that hurts.

But not always.

—

Noah was in a tremendous amount of pain.

The cold of THE Long Night was inside him now, and the freezing of it was not like heat’s burn. It was slow. It was a stilling. He felt every quark of his existence beginning to drag, to thicken, to lose the quick bright motion that made it alive, as though the whole churning engine of him were being packed in slower and slower ice!

His Provenance slowed. His Infinity slowed. The endless illusory pages that flickered off him came slower, and then slower, and his existence, the whole vast grand thing he had just become, was being brought grinding toward a halt.

Every existence, when The Long Night descended, had turned its authority and power to one task, which was to hold the cold OUT. To wall it off. To spend everything it had keeping the winter from reaching the core of it.

Noah had done the opposite. Noah had reached out and pulled the winter INTO the very Root of his Immensity!

And the pain of that was beyond bearing. He felt his Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin, the always-turning heart of what he was, go translucent, whitening, taking on the pale blue of deep ice. And from the Root the change spread outward, up through his weavings, out along his frozen threads, into his body, until Noah sat in the drifting snow of the Domain and became, in every visible way, a statue of ice.

...!

Moriarty stared at him with utter incredulity.

And in the next moment a verdant eye bloomed into the air, its own Immensity roiling off it, and it looked at the rivers of snow still pouring endlessly into the frozen figure, and it blinked.

"Are you fucking serious?" it said. "This was our piece. This was one of the three, maybe, and you let him turn himself into a block of-"

"Wait." Moriarty’s deep voice rolled out across the hall.

"Wait? Wait for WHAT?" The verdant eye flared. "How did you let a potentially key figure turn himself into a popsicle in front of you? Why would such an idiotic chain of events be permitted to happen? I cannot fathom what possessed you to sit there and watch while he-"

"Wait," Moriarty said again, and he did not look away from Noah’s frozen figure, not for an instant!

His small neat spectacles were fixed on the statue of ice as though he could read something in it the eye could not. "Wait."

But wait for what?

The rivers of the Long Night went on pouring into the frozen thing, into a body that held no life now, no aura, no breath, no sense of anything living at all. By every measure the eye and the octopus both possessed, Noah Osmont had ceased. He had frozen solid at the core, and a Root frozen solid did not thaw!

They watched. And the winter poured in. And the ice held still.

—

Inside the pain, inside the profound stilling cold, Noah felt one thing that would not stop.

It pulsed. At the very Root of his existence, beneath the freezing and the slowing and the grinding halt of everything else, his Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin kept beating, and each beat carried a small terrible warmth. It was full of him!

Full of his boundless Infinity, his self-made Provenance, everything he had built himself into from nothing. And where the cold pressed in on his thoughts and his weavings and whispered to all of it to cease, to stop, to end, the pulse at his Root answered.

No.

The cold said cease. The pulse said no!

The cold said stop. The pulse said no!

Again, and again, and again, a heart that had generated itself from nothing refusing, with each beat, to be told it could not go on.

Until.

"AHH!"

Noah’s existence drew breath, as though it had a breath to draw, as though it had ever needed to breathe at all. Blue and white poured off him and through him, and slowly, gradually, his existence began to acclimate to the thing it had swallowed, and a prompt bloomed before his frozen eyes.

|By standard convention, your existence has ceased to function.|

|Your existence has arrived at ??????|

His existence had ceased. Hah!

He would never agree to such words. Cease was a thing that happened to lesser existences. He had died and returned already, more than once, and he was not about to accept the verdict of a convention that had never met a being like him. His existence had not ceased.

But the other line was true. His existence had arrived somewhere. And exactly where, the prompt would not say.

The thought had barely formed when everything around him became clear, and what he saw was enough to make even Noah go still.

He was somewhere no living gaze had ever fallen!

It was....

Oh!

It was a place of cold beyond cold, a frozen domain stretching out further than sight, and everything in it was ice, or frost, or the deep blue stillness of things frozen forever.

The ground was rimed. The air itself hung heavy with drifting crystals.

And across the whole of that endless frozen expanse ran rivers and seas of white and blue, slow shining currents of pure cold winding away to horizons Noah could not find the end of, a whole existence built out of the substanse of the Long Night.

And seated upon those rivers were...the dead!

Not dead, quite. Worse than dead. Countless lifeforms, of every race and shape and size Noah had ever seen and a great many he had not, sat cross-legged upon the frozen currents, meditating, still as the ice around them.

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, and more beyond that, seated in silent ranks across the frozen seas as far as he could perceive. And every one of them had eyes that were blank. No cognizance. No life. No spark of any awareness behind them at all, just open blank eyes staring at nothing while a swirling pillar of pure cold rose around each seated figure, wrapping them, feeding them, holding them in whatever frozen trance had taken them.

They sat. All of them sat.

Only Noah had risen!

He stood among the endless seated ranks, the one figure in all that frozen underworld who was upright, who had opened his eyes to cognizance instead of losing it, who looked around at the drifting crystals and the shining rivers of cold with alarm sharp in his gaze.

He turned, searching, taking in the impossible scale of the place.

And in the far distance, he saw a figure he knew.

It stood raised above the seated ranks, illusory and vast, and around it rose the single largest pillar of light in all that frozen expanse, a column of cold so immense it dwarfed every other. Its hands were lifted high. Its eyes, like all the rest, were blank, empty of any life or knowing. And from its raised palms poured endless rivers of the cold, feeding out into the frozen seas, feeding the whole terrible place.

Noah knew that figure. He had watched it die. It was The Overseeing One, the Immense One Vakochev had torn apart on the sundered Train, sitting here in this frozen underworld with blank eyes and lifted hands, pouring out the winter itself!

...!

Noah felt the chill sink deeper and deeper into his existence, and alongside it, threaded all through the horror of it, came understanding, and wonder.

Because even now, even standing in this frozen place of blank-eyed meditators and a dead Immense One pouring out the cold, his existence had not stopped doing the thing it had begun. It went on drinking!

The winter kept flowing toward his Root, and around his own risen figure a pillar of cold swirled and rose, exactly like the thousands around the seated dead, and he absorbed it.

A pillar of cold for every seated thing.

Thousands of them, blank and lifeless and still.

And only Noah had risen.