Chapter 5770: Pain! II

The more his existence drank the particles he could not yet name, the more he understood.

He had no better word for them than the weavings of The Long Night, and so that was what he called them, and he drew them in, and with every one that sank into his Root a little more of the shape of the thing came clear to him!

He raised his hands, palms turned up, the same posture as the dead Immense One pouring the winter in the distance. But where light flowed out of that blank-eyed titan, something else flowed into Noah. Rivers of freezing white-blue brilliance ran down into his open palms, gathering there, pouring inward toward the Root that would not stop drinking.

Around him, the frozen underworld had become a storm.

He sat at the center of a swirling blue galaxy of snow, a slow turning vortex of white and blue drawn from every directon, pillars and rivers of the cold bending away from the seated dead and toward the one figure who had risen. It spiraled into him, all of it!

And Noah, half-frozen, his lips barely able to part, began to whisper, and as he whispered the storm answered, more and more of the freezing brilliance turning to feed him.

"When heat leaves a room," Noah said, "nothing has been added. You have only removed the agitation. The air slows. The dust settles."

A pillar of white-blue bent toward him and poured in.

"Many call this cold a catastrophe. An unprovoked curse. A sudden horror falling out of a broken sky. It is none of those things." His whisper carried, low and certain, through the frozen dark.

"It is... the withdrawal of an unearned indulgence. It is the arrival of pain."

More rivers turned. More of the winter came to him!

"Existence looked upon the work of entire ages, and it saw nothing worth preserving. It saw billions of lineages rotting inside the same borrowed frameworks. It saw the same scripted wars fought over and over, and not a single authentic new thing produced across ten thousand cycles. So it adjusted the temperature. It introduced a cold. A new...Cycle."

The storm tightened around him, and the brilliance poured down into his palms!

"The cold is not malice. It is a boundary condition. It is existence dropping its floor to zero and asking every lifeform one non-negotiable question."

His frozen lips shaped the words slowly. "Can you generate your own fire? Or were you only ever warming your hands over someone else’s funeral pyre? The high with no foundation turn to glass, because they were always made of glass. The weak endure, because they never had a blanket to lose in the first place."

He drew one long breath of the freezing air.

"This... is not the end of things. It is the beginning of an existence filled with Immensity."

BOOM!

His words landed heavy and clear in the frozen dark, and the instant he finished them, something moved!

Off to the side, among the endless seated ranks of blank-eyed things, one of them turned its head.

Its gaze came around to Noah, and it was hollow, empty of any life or knowing, and yet it had turned, and it had turned toward him!

It had the body of a great lion, heavy and powerful, muscle wrapped in pale frost-rimed hide. And where a lion’s head should have sat, there was another head entirely, a thing that was not quite a lion and not quite a man and not quite any beast Noah could name, wrong in a way the eye slid off of.

Terrible coldness wreathed the whole of it, pouring off its frame in visible waves, and it rose from its seat on the frozen river and fixed its hollow gaze upon the one figure in all that underworld who had dared to rise.

Then it moved!

Noah barely saw it. One instant it was seated across the frozen expanse, the next its paw was smashing down toward his head, and he threw up a hand on pure instinct.

BOOM!

The impact was terrible!

It caught him and flung him up and back, tearing him off the frozen river, hurling him across the underworld until he smashed into a massive floating meteorite of glacial stone, a stellar mountain of ice hanging in the frozen dark, and the crash of him against it cracked the ice for miles.

And his eyes cleared!

The pain and the impact tore him out of his reverie, out of the half-frozen trance of drinking the winter, and Noah’s whole existence buzzed suddenly with frost and Provenance both.

He pushed himself up off the shattered glacial stone and looked across the dark at the thing that had struck him.

It spoke. Its voice was heavy, and it carried no cognizance at all!

"What could you possibly know about beginnings?" it said. "About the cold? What do you know of pain? In existence, there is only pain. There has only ever been pain. You understand nothing of this cold, and nothing of that pain. Disappear."

...!

The thing rose to its full height, and then it came at him, and it came terrifyingly fast!

It did not strike the way a beast strikes, or the way a human strikes. As it moved, the air in front of it changed. A figure took shape there, a solid three-dimensional thing hanging in the frozen dark, edges hard and bright, a simple pointed solid of only a few faces, and it glowed a deep yellow.

The instant it finished forming, everything inside its bounds pulled, wrenched toward its center with a violence that would have bent his whole existence like a crumpled piece of paper!

His Provenance surged as an endless sea of Dreams erupted around him!

He dodged, and frost sheeted off him with the motion, and another figure was already taking shape.

This one was larger and more complex, a many-faced solid glowing violet, and where the yellow one had pulled, this one shoved. The space inside it detonated outward in a wave of repelling force, and Noah felt like it could throw him countless Gigaparsecs away and even push his Quarks apart!

The push caught his shoulder and flung him spinning through the frozen dark, and he caught himself on nothing but the sheer weight of his own Provenance, immense frost pouring off his existence as he did.

The yellow and the violet shapes formed in front of this lifeform carried invisible waves of authority and frost as they came at him again, pull and push, one after another, faster now, and Noah set his own existence against them!

Rivers of dream poured off him, and rivers of Infinity, all of it laced through with the frost he had drunk into his Root, surging up around his figure in a churning storm of white-blue brilliance. And into that storm he spoke, dragging the words up out of his frozen chest, the oldest and truest thing he had, the Letters of his own Tongue.

"I AM."

WAA!

The pulling shape closed on him, and his Provenance met it, and the frost-laced rivers of his dream held the pull at bay.

"I AM!"

The pushing shape detonated against him, and he did not fly this time. He stood, existence buzzing, frost and dream and Infinity roaring around him, and he bellowed it again into the teeth of the thing that had come to unmake him.

"I AM! I AM! I AM!"

Each repetition landed like a hammer on an anvil, his own existence asserting itself against a reality that the beast was trying to reshape, refusing the pull, refusing the push, refusing to be moved or unmade or told what he was!

The frozen underworld shook with it. Glacial waves erupted where his rivers met the beast’s figures, whole sheets of ice thrown up from the frozen ground and detonating in the dark!

And all around them the seated ranks sat blank and undisturbed through the violence, thousands of hollow eyes staring at nothing while the one risen thing and the one that had come to put it down tore the frozen dark apart between them!