Chapter 5791: The Death of Time! III

THE First Gu of Time considered his question for a long moment.

Snow fell heavily all around them!

The Ages kept burning in her crown of eyes while she did. A Dimension was born in one and died in the next. A war was won, then lost. Somewhere in the frozen amber of her body, a whole civilization went on standing exactly where it had stood when she sealed it, and never noticed that it had stopped.

"They acted at your behest," she said at last.

Her gaze moved, unhurried, across THE Infiniverse with the dust of her domains still drifting around her, and across Ruination with her eyes still writing.

"They took my children because you wished my children taken. So I will not ask them to pay for it any longer. Let us see instead what you are made of."

Her voice stayed as cool and even as still water. "You may take their pain for them. In exchange for letting them go, and for letting you go, you will experience the Death of Time itself."

...!

Experience the death of time itself?

Noah did not know what that meant. A being that could take the next moment out of existence did not offer a price that could be understood before it was paid.

It was a heavy thing!

He nodded anyway, without a word.

At once, the instant loosened! Not around him, but around the two beside him. He felt the anchoring locks on THE Infiniverse and Ruination come undone, felt their Roots catch their next beat and their authorities start to move again, and he saw THE Infiniverse’s starlit eyes turn to him, and Ruination open her mouth.

He waved his hand before either of them could speak!

They were gone, sent back through the Chrysalis and down into the safety of his Existential Root Domain. Better that way. He did not want to argue with them, and he did not want them to watch.

Then he stood alone in the frozen purple sky, before THE First Gu of Time.

The two Rare Time Gu had slipped free of their many-colored chains the instant THE Infiniverse left. They drifted now near their ancient mother, their violet wings burning bright again, their long lures swaying, and the Past-bound one turned its eyeless head toward him with a slow, satisfied tilt that was nothing but gloating. The Future-bound one looked at him as if it already knew how this ended.

Perhaps it did.

"Hold still," said THE First Gu of Time. "There is nothing you can do to make this easier."

Her wings opened wide!

Every stopped moment laid along them came loose at once, thousands upon thousands of frozen instants, and they turned into rivers!

Boundless rivers of time, violet and gold and roaring, poured off her wings in a flood that filled the whole sky, and every one of them came down on Noah.

Instead of striking him, they entered him!

Through his chest, through his eyes, through the spinning mobius at the center of his crystalline body, the rivers of time surged in, and Noah felt himself come apart into every direction at once!

—

He felt like he was dreaming, but it was not a dream.

He...was very small!

He was so small that he had no eyes, no mind, nothing at all except a wall of thin skin and a hunger. He drifted in a warm dark sea he could not perceive and divided, and divided again, and ate, and divided, and never once knew he was alive. Then the warm sea grew cold, and he stopped. That was the whole of it. A microbe, born in a drop of water somewhere, and dead when the water dried.

He was an insect.

Six legs, a hard green shell, and one summer spent climbing the same tall stalk of grass, again and again, toward a light at the top he could never quite reach. Eating. Singing with his wings in the evening. On the last warm day of the year a bird took him from the stalk, and he felt its beak close, and that was that.

Then a virus, never knowing what it was. A mouse, afraid for its entire short life, and right to be. A great grey wolf that ran for eleven years across a winter forest and died old and alone in a den it had dug itself.

Time started, and time died!

He was an orc!

His name was Gashr, and he was born on a battlefield in a Dimension that did not remember him, in the mud behind a war camp, to a mother who died that same night. He grew up hard. He grew up fast. He learned to swing an axe before he could read a single runne, and he learned to read runes anyway, secretly, by firelight, from a stolen book he hid under his bedroll for twenty years.

He fought in nine wars and won six. He married a one-armed smith who made him laugh. They had four children, and he buried two of them. He was eighty-one when a young warlord with a borrowed Intent burned his village for the ore beneath it, and he died in the doorway of his own house with the axe still in his hands, and the last thing he thought was that he had never finished the stolen book.

Time moved.

He was now a fae, glass-winged and bright, and lived nine hundred years in a moonlit forest singing songs to the trees. The forest was cleared for a road. She followed it for a while, then stopped following, and faded away into the morning light.

He was a goblin named Nib, who stole shiny things and was proud of every one of them and was, all things considered, very happy. He was hanged for a stolen spoon at the age of forty. It had been a very nice spoon!

He was a Gu!

Small and pale and new, a Common Gu, born out of loose existence in the drifting light of a Chrysalis, a hundred of one thing and nothing of anything else. It did not want much: to drift, to be warm, to be left alone.

For a while, it was. Then a hand closed around it. A great, patient, greedy hand, and he felt himself taken, and bound, and set on a workbench, and slowly, carefully, ground down into material for someone else’s ring. It hurt the entire time. It took a very long time. Nobody asked him anything, and when it was over, there was nothing left of him but a faint glow in a stranger’s craft.

Noah felt that one more than any of the others!

Time moved on.

He was a Provenance Lifeform, self-made, proud, who spent three million years building a Lineage out of nothing and watched another Provenance Lineage collect it in an afternoon.

He was a Descendant, born with a sentence in his blood, who lived four hundred years in a gilded court knowing every day of it exactly when he would die, and died exactly then, cursed.

And at the very last, he was an Immense One!

An Immense One!

No one could have held all of it. He stood at the top of existence for longer than there had been anything to measure it by, and existence agreed with every word he spoke, and he grew bored, and then cold, and then far beyond cold.

He watched Ages rise and fall like breath on a window. Whatever he wanted, he took, because nothing had ever told him no. And then one day something did, something he had never seen coming, and his vastness caved around it, and he learned, for the first and only time, what the smallest bug in the mud had always known.

That everything ends!

Microbe, insect, orc, goblin, Gu, Immense One. Killed or faded or simply finished.

Each life he lived, he lived through to its very last moment, and he felt each last moment arrive. And when the last life ended, he was not released.

He was held there, at the end of all of them at once, and made to feel every death he had just lived, not one after another but together, all of them, the whole weight of time running out for everything at the same instant.

That was the death of time.

It was the worst thing he had ever felt!

Even the cold of the Long Night felt mild!

It went on and on, past anything that had a name, past the frozen underworld, past any lives he lived!

He had no body to scream with and no mind left to break, and he did not break anyway, because some small stubborn thing at the very center of him refused.

It was human, that thing. It was the part of him that had lived every one of those lives and remembered, even in the worst of it, that every one of them had been worth living.

He held on to that.

He held on to it through the end of everything!

—

Around Noah, in the frozen purple sky, his body changed!

The rivers of time were still pouring into him, but they were no longer flooding him. They were being taken in. Drawn down into his Root, which had begun, very slowly, to beat again, and every beat it took pulled more of the lived and ended time inside it and pressed it close.

His Provenance did not grow. That was the strangest part of all. It did not swell or surge or climb. Instead it compressed!

Every life he had lived pressed down into it like snow packing into ice, layer on layer on layer, countless years of living and ending crushed into something smaller and denser and harder with every beat of his Root, refined past anything a mere number could hold.

His Root drank it and was reinforced, deepened, hardened, until it turned inside him with a weight it had never had, the weight of having been every kind of thing there was.

His body followed!

The crystalline frame thickened, broadened at the shoulders and chest, the long lean lines of him filling out with the dense, heavy muscle of a man who had lived more lives than there were stars.

The youth drained out of his face. Not old, not bent, but older. Fine lines settled at the corners of his eyes. His jaw set harder. He looked like someone who had worked a very long time and endured a great deal and come out the other side stronger for every day of it.

And around him, clouds began to bloom!

Clouds of dream. Soft, pale, shining faintly blue and gold, they rose off his skin and spread out through the frozen sky, slow and silent, and where they drifted near the weavings of time, the weavings flickered!

The stopped disks of time, frozen mid-turn, trembled in their places. Currents of old violet smoke wavered and blurred at their edges.

Even the time-scales laid along THE First Gu of Time’s own wings shivered as the dream-clouds brushed past them, and for one long, astonishing moment, something in all that frozen time stirred, and softened, and began, faintly and against every law that had ever governed it, to dream.

Time itself was dreaming!

THE First Gu of Time pulsed!

Her crown of eyes, which had watched countless Ages without once looking away, turned toward the clouds drifting through her wings. The Ages burning in them flickered. For the first time since she had appeared, she did not look like a being who already knew how everything ended.

The two Rare Time Gu had stopped gloating. They shrank back against their mother, lures trembeling.

In the middle of the dreaming sky, Noah opened his eyes.

They were not young eyes anymore. They held an age that had nothing to do with years, the age of a microbe and an orc and a goblin and a Gu and an Immense One, the age of every life he had just lived and every death he had just felt, and they were so ancient that for a moment that one could mistake them for the eyes of an Immense One.

He looked at her for a long while before he spoke.

"Thank you," Noah said.

His voice was quiet, and deeper than it had been.

"Thank you for showing me that." He glanced at the two Rare Gu pressed close against her amber body, and then back up at her crown of burning eyes. "And I apologize for what I did. Wholeheartedly. I will not use Gu as materials for anything I do. Not again."

The dream-clouds drifted around him, and the frozen time went on dreaming.

"My dreams. My time. My humanity," Noah said. "That will be enough."

...!