Chapter 5778: I Am Me!

<THE True Human Emperor>

Noah’s hand rested on the crown of the crystalline king’s head, and beneath it, he marveled.

He had expected the lifeform to be unique. The Caretaker had said as much. But expecting a thing and holding it under your palm were not the same, and what he held now was stranger than anything he had braced for.

Achilles Adrastia had not devoured the facets of existence he carried. This existence was a chameleon. It did not eat what it assimilated. It became it, seamlessly, so that the Prime Causes and the First Causes and the Primordial Source and the Infinity inside him were not swallowed things siting in a stomach. They were him. Every one of them, as native to his weavings as his own name!

And that, Noah understood, was exactly why he should have died weeks ago.

Because a chameleon that becomes what it touches has no defense against touching something too large to become. He had assimilated the weavings of THE Sealed One, and by every law of his own nature he should simply have become THE Sealed One, the way water poured into a larger vessel takes that vessel’s shape.

THE Sealed One was far too complex, far too vast, far too old for a single existence to become and remain itself. And yet Achilles had held on!

He had become a piece of the ancient monster and, by some stubbornness Noah could feel humming in the crystal under his hand, refused to finish becoming it. He had stopped halfway, and lived there, in a place no assimilator should have been able to survive.

So the task was not to pull two things apart. It was to find, inside a single existence, the line between what was the king and what was the monster, and cut along it without cutting the king.

Fortunately, Noah had been made for exactly this kind of work.

He had two Provenances, and they had never before been asked to do one thing together. THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer had become terrifying in the manipulation of dreams since his Root formed, terrifying in a way he was still learning the edges of.

And THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign, could reach into the genome of existence itself and alter it, excise it, edit what a thing was at the level of its deepest weaving. One of them could see. The other could cut. So he set them to their tasks!

The Dreamer’s Provenance went in first, and it did not go looking for THE Sealed One. A being’s existential genome was a tangle beyond reading, and the monster’s weavings were threaded through every strand of it.

But a being’s Dream was not a tangle. A Dream was the simplest true thing in any existence, the thing under all the other things, and Achilles had just shown him his! Rose! His children! Existence itself, assimilated whole!

So Noah followed the Dream! He let his Provenance sink down along the shape of what Achilles wanted, and every strand of the genome that answered to that wanting, that pulled toward Rose and the children and the hunger to become everything, lit up gold in his sight. And every strand that did not, every thread that pulled instead toward sealing and collecting and finishing and owning, stayed dark.

There was the line! Not a seam Achilles had failed to find, but a seam that could only be seen by a thing that read Dreams, because the Dream was the one part of a man an ancient monster could not counterfeit!

Then the Immense Sovereign’s Provenance came down like a knife along the line.

It was cold work, and it was fine work, the cutting of a single existence into what it was and what it had been made to carry!

The dark strands parted. The gold ones held. The Assimilation Factor, the living thread that ran from this crystalline king back through the deep to THE Sealed One, came free under the edge of his Provenance and was severed, cleanly, completely!

The golden storm of Provenance Essence roared around the two of them, and Achilles Adrastia opened his eyes.

He did not move at first. He sat in his crystalline form in the middle of the storm and simply listened.

"It’s... quiet," Achilles said.

His voice was hoarse with astonishment.

"I don’t hear the buzzing. There was always a buzzing. An old horror, incessant, at the back of everything, every moment since I took him in." He turned his head slowly, as though the silence might be hiding somewhere. "It’s gone. I can’t hear it at all..."

Noah nodded, and reached to withdraw his hand, and was about to finish the work when something caught his sight.

Oh?

The excision had cut the thread. It had not cut the memories. Those had been assimilated, made native, become Achilles the way everything he took became Achilles, and so they had stayed on the king’s side of the line, and now they lay open under Noah’s palm like pages in a book he had not meant to read.

They were hazy. Rough. Half-ruined by the cutting, almost unrecoverable. But he could see enough of them to know what they were about, and what they were about made him look at the crystalline figure under his hand a second time.

Immense Ones. And a Legacy!

Memories THE Sealed One himself had carried, of dealings with Immense Ones, and of a Legacy, a structure of the kind Lucy had built, though whether it was hers or another’s the ruin of the memory would not say!

Noah had not thought THE Sealed One was so deeply connected to the Immense Ones. He remembered the words of The Caretaker about how THE Sealed One was protected by dredges and legacies as he couldn’t help but sigh!

"Existence is infinitely vast," Noah said, looking down at the king, "and it has so many weavings of power that no one has ever counted them. I recently made grand advancements. Advancements that let me see existence, and even time, differently than I did. I have already begun outlining how I might share that advancement, and that way of seeing, with those closest to me."

He let the hand on Achilles’s head rest a moment longer. "And I could always use an experimental subject."

Achilles’s crystalline eyes rose to his.

"As you elevate your Dimensionality, I learn. You will eventually need to reach the point of forming a Root of Immensity of your own. It is not easy. It does not begin where you might think. It begins with your own Chorionic Gonadotropin, the signal of your own becoming, and you have a unique Factor of Assimilation, which means you could very possibly form a unique kind of Assimilation Chorionic Gonadotropin, with my help."

He glanced, briefly, at nothing, at a clock only he could feel running. "But I am out of time here, and I will have to change scenery to experiment with you further. Do you want to try?"

...!

He asked it calmly. But the man beneath his hand was smiling now, brilliantly, the smile of someone who has just been handed back his own existence and offered a road on top of it, and Achilles reached out with his senses.

"Thank you," Achilles said. "And yes. Just give me one second..."

The golden storm faded!

The dreaming seas rolled away, and the heavy clouds thinned, and the two of them stood once more in the sealed Elsedimension among the blue gold trees and the hanging snow, exactly where they had left it. And Achilles Adrastia stood up.

He was flesh again, the young king’s face and the ancient eyes, though the eyes seemed younger now by a great deal. He turned. He looked at the beautiful green-haired woman standing behind him with her flames burned down to embers and her face heavy, and he crossed the distance to her in three strides and pulled her against him and held her so tightly that Noah, watching, thought he might crack her.

Then he kissed her. Then he laughed, out loud, the laugh of a man who has been holding his breath for weeks.

"I am me," Achilles said into her hair. "All me!"

...!

"Really?" Rose pulled back to look at his face, her hands on either side of it, searching. "Really?!"

"All me."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else, and then she was kissing him, and he was kissing her, and the embrace between them went from relief to something a good deal warmer with a speed that suggested the two of them had forgotten, entirely, that they were not alone.

Noah, being human, allowed them a moment. He had a family too. He knew what it was to hold someone and find them still themselves.

Prompts bloomed across his sight while he waited.

|You have interfered in, and steered, a grand unfolding Dream.|

|Your Provenance increases by 25.|

|The gaze of an unfathomable existence is seeking to understand how one of its grandest tools was just separated from it.|

...!

Noah looked at that last line, and raised his brows.

Then he looked at the two embracing lifeforms before him, who showed no sign at all of stopping.

"Time’s up," he said. "Let’s go."

His Provenance blared!

It flooded out of him and took the orchard, the king, the woman, the whole of the small sealed space, and drew it into his Dream, and he took Achilles Adrastia and Rose out of the Elsedimension where they had hidden and carried them, in a single beat of his Root, toward another.

One with far heavier security. One where a part of him already stood among broken clocks and numbered meteorites, in a Dimension that had come apart from time itself. Atlas’s Elsedimension of shattered hours!

HUUM!

They were gone.

---

The orchard stood empty. And slowly, the way a held breath lets go, the blue gold drained back out of the trees, and the leaves returned to their vivid pink, and the snow that had hung motionless in the air remembered that it was falling, and fell.

For a few moments the Elsedimension was only an orchard on drifting stone again, with no one in it.

Then, moments later...

BOOM!

The sky tore open!

Not a page this time. Eyes! Multiple massive eyes forced their way open across the heights of the sealed Elsedimension, one after another, gazes the size of Dimensions blinking into being where no gaze should have been able to reach, and the pink trees bent under the weight of being looked at.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND casts his gaze across the orchard, and is displeased.|

|"A Root was just here. The scent of it is still on the trees."|

|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR’s gaze narrows.|

|"The same one. The one that slipped us in the frozen forest."|

|THE GLOATING JAILER is puzzled.|

|"How did it sense our coming so quickly? We had not even finished arriving."|

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND does not answer the Jailer. His gaze turns downward, toward the orchard floor.|

|"And you. You were the one who alerted us to this place. You said a project of yours was taken away here."|

...!

The words fell into the orchard from the sky, and below, existence opened.

Infinity spilled out of the air between the pink trees, and THE Primordial Source spilled with it, the two of them pouring open together the way no two authorities in existence were supposed to be able to pour, and out of the joined flood stepped a humanoid figure.

He was young, and he was ancient, and the two facts sat on him without quarreling. Tall, and lean, and pale as a thing that had never once needed the sun.

Long hair fell past his shoulders, pale gold shading toward white, and his face was cut fine and cold and aristocratic, every line of it composed.

His eyes were gold. Not warm gold. The gold of a thing found at the bottom of a very deep place. He wore a long dark coat that hung to his boots, severe and old-fashioned and immaculate, and he stood among the pink trees as though he had stood in a thousand such places and found them all equally beneath him.

It was THE Sealed One!

And it was not a vessel.

This was not a puppet. This was the genuine article, the hand behind every vessel! and his existence pulsed, slow and heavy and unfathomable, with a Root!

A Root of Immensity, seated in him, growing, and so dense that the snow could not get near him. It fell all around him and stopped, a hand’s breadth from his coat, and drifted away, as though the winter itself had decided he was not a thing it cared to touch!

He looked around the orchard coldly, at the pink trees, at the drifting stone.

"A Unique Existential Factor of Assimilation," THE Sealed One said, "that would have made for a unique Aspect of my growing Root. Taken. It is a great shame."

He turned one pale hand over, as though weighing the loss in his palm. "Though I believe I may know who is responsible."

He raised both hands then, pale and long-fingered, into the air around him, and breathed in.

"I can smell his arrogance, tyranny, ans brilliance," he said. "And his Infinity. I know that Infinity. It is my greatest loss across the whole of existence, so far."

His gold eyes lifted to the massive gazes hanging in the sky. "The culprit should be a lifeform known as Noah Osmont."

...!