Chapter 5792: A Boundless Dream of Time!

For a long while after he spoke, nothing in the purple sky moved except the clouds of dream drifting off Noah’s shoulders.

He let them drift. He was still sorting through what had just been poured into him, the microbe and the orc and the goblin with his very nice spoon, the Gu on the workbench, the Immense One who learned at the very end what every bug in the mud had always known. It was a great deal to carry. He found, a little to his suprise, that he did not want to put any of it down.

THE First Gu of Time watched him with her crown of burning eyes!

"Gu are a passive kind," she said at last. "We do not hunt. We do not hoard. For the most part, we do not even want. And a great many beings have taken that as permission."

The Ages in her eyes turned slowly. "The worst of them, and the one who took more of my children than any other, was an engineer. His name was Atlas."

...!

Noah kept perfectly still!

On his finger, the faint illusory ring that only he could see gave no sign of anything at all.

"He is gone now," THE First Gu of Time went on, "but his way of thinking has outlived him. Others study what he left and try to walk where he walked. They collect my children as ingredients, as though a living thing were a measure of salt."

Her voice stayed soft and even. "I will not ask you to make it your life’s work. But if you continue to travel this place, and you see any being grinding down a Gu, I would have you stop them. And save whichever of my children you can."

She let her gaze drift out over the frozen time-disks, the violet smoke, the vast drowning dark of the Chrysalis beyond them.

"I am a Gu myself, you understand. I am passive as well, most of the time. I would have remained so today. But the cold is spreading everywhere now, and a great many of my children will die in it no matter what anyone does. I could not simply watch while two more were taken on top of that."

Noah inclined his head. He had nothing to say to that which would have been worth saying.

"Existence is vast," she said, more quietly. "It does not have to be cruel."

The frozen disks trembled faintly in the dream-clouds around them!

"You should also know that with the coming of the cold, doors that were shut for a very long time are beginning to open again. Those who are already Immense will not find those doors easily. Most of them will never find them at all. Those who grasp Immensity in this cold, on the other hand, may have a chance."

Her many eyes settled on him. "I have a few children in whom I see that chance. There is a brilliance in them. I saw a similar brilliance in you when I passed this way, and in the two you brought with you. That is why I found it such a shame to see what the three of you were doing."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You have a chance. All of you do. But in existence, that is all it will ever be. A chance. Nothing at all is guaranteed."

Then her wings, which had gone still, began to stir again!

The two Rare Time Gu drew in close against her amber body. The stopped moments along her wings rippled like scales settling on a great animal about to rise. And as the vast shape of her began to withdraw into the purple sky, THE First Gu of Time turned her crown of eyes back to him one last time.

"I meant to tell you that you have been touched by time," she said. "But that is not quite right, is it. Your dreams are unusual. They have taken the time into themselves rather than the other way around."

The Ages in her eyes flickered, curious. "I doubt you will ever reach where I stand, where time is concerned. But should you grasp something profound, and wish to challenge time itself, you will find me at the very end of it."

BOOM!

The sky shook, once, and THE First Gu of Time was gone!

The two Rare Gu went with her, violet wings shrinking into nothing, and in the space where her vast amber body had hung there was only purple cloud and slow violet smoke. Around Noah, the frozen time-disks lurched, caught their spin again, and went on turning. The light started arriving on time!

The next moment came back into existence as quietly as it had left, and everything that had been pinned in place simply continued, as though it had never been stopped at all.

Noah stood alone in the dreaming sky!

He was quiet for a long time. Then he raised his hand and looked at the faint illusory ring on his finger.

Atlas had not said a word since the purple sky came down. Not one! The old engineer, who had an opinion on everything and could not bear to let a clever thing pass without comment, had been utterly silent while a First Gu named him the worst hunter of her children in all existence.

"Atlas," Noah said calmly. "The Time Inscription you meant to write with your Quill. What was it going to do?"

He asked without accusation. But he asked it knowing now, as he had not known that morning, that even the grandest inscription was not absolute. That behind every clever piece of engineering there might be a great many small lives that had never been asked.

The ring stayed silent a moment longer.

"It...was an inscription for advantage," Atlas said at last. His voicewas quieter than Noah had ever heard it. "Time, turned to your favor. As the seconds passed, you would charge it, and when it was charged you would activate it, and your Provenance and your foundations would gain the progression of days. Or weeks, or months, depending on the rarity of the Gu at its heart and the depth of your Provenance. That was the plan, anyway. But now..."

He did not finish.

There was no need. Noah had promised, in this same purple sky, not to hunt Gu or use them as material for anything he did. And an inscription with a Rare Gu at its heart was exactly that.

"Then I will make things simpler for myself," Noah said.

He lowered his hand.

"Gu are external. At the end of the day, that is all they are, to someone like me. Something outside of me, taken and made use of. Your engineering needed them because it was your engineering, built your way, on your terms. That is not a flaw in it. It is simply what it was."

He looked out across the turning time-disks. "But I can have my own existential engineering, and it can need different things. For me, my dreams are enough. My dreams are sufficient. And right now, my dreams have more perception of time, and more weavings of time, than anything I could have caught and put in a ring."

HUUM!

Noah closed his eyes, and raised his hands!

The dream-clouds around him surged! They rose off his skin thicker and brighter than before, rolling out through the purple sky in great slow banks of blue and gold, and through them, from somewhere deep inside him, rivers of Infinity began to pour. Dialetheic Infinity, the finite and the infinite at once, a truth that was also its own opposite. It had always run through him. But now it was different.

Now every river of it carried time in it, violet threads of lived and ended moments woven all through the blue and gold, running beside every current.

"An impossibility," Noah said quietly, with his eyes still closed, "is only a moment that has not been dreamed yet."

The rivers rolled out around him!

"People think Infinity means more. More and more and more, forever, a line that never stops. It is not that. Infinity is every moment at once. The beginning and the end of a thing, and everything between them, all held in the same hand. I have been every kind of life there is, from the first breath to the last. So I know." He opened his hands wider.

"Nothing is impossible that has a beginning. And everything has a beginning. Even the end of time began somewhere."

In that deep, strange stillness, he lifted one hand and laid it against his own chest.

Time poured out of it!

Boundless and violet and gold, spiling out of the spinning mobius at the center of him and away into the dreaming sky, and as it poured he remembered. Gashr in the doorway with her axe. Nib and his spoon. The small pale Gu on the workbench. The wolf in its den. The Immense One who had never once been told no. Every life he had lived, from its first moment to its last, and every stretch of time that had begun and ended inside each one.

"A dream, from its beginning to its end, is a measure of time," Noah said. "A dream can start. A dream can end. And that alone is enough to mark where time begins, and where it stops."

His hand stayed flat against his chest. "Between my dreams and existence, there is a gap. I can only ever try to close it. I can only ever live my dreams, across time."

...!

His Provenance raged around him!

It came off him in a great storm, as it had in the frozen underworld, but it was not blue and gold alone anymore. Purple ran through it now. Deep violet hues, the color of the Rare Gu’s burning wings and the amber of THE First Gu of Time and every stopped moment in her scales, threaded through every current of his Provenance, and the whole storm of it turned and turned and would not settle.

|THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer has acquired a Quality of Time.|

|Having lived and ended countless lives in the Death of Time, your Dreams now measure time from within.|

|The first Osmontian Inscription has been forged: THE OSMONTIAN INSCRIPTION OF THE DREAMING HOUR.|

|Ingredients: your Root. Your Provenance. Time. Nothing external.|

|Passive, THE Lived Hour: while you live, your Dreams live longer. Every second that passes in existence, your Provenance and foundations are refined as though far more time had passed within your Dreams. At present, days for each second. As your Provenance deepens, weeks. Then months. No charging is required. It does not stop.|

|Active, THE Dreamt Epoch: by entering a deep Dream, you may compress a far greater span of refinement into a single held moment. The span scales with the depth of the Dream and the density of your Provenance.|

|Passive, THE Hour That Dreams: weavings of time that act upon you are drawn into your Dreams. Near you, time does not simply pass. It dreams, and a dreaming hour moves as you would have it move.|

...!

It was everything Atlas had meant to build!

More, in places! And there was no Gu at the heart of it. There was nothing at the heart of it at all except Noah himself, his Root and his Provenance and the time he had lived through in the dark. It was his, entirely and truly, in a way no ring on his finger had ever been.

The illusory ring was silent for a long moment!

"I promised to teach you a great many things," Atlas said. There was something in his voice Noah could not quite place. Not bitterness. Something older and more tired than bitterness. "Why do I get the feeling that you are about to tell me you don’t really need my engineering?"

Noah opened his eyes.

"Everyone’s path is different," he said. "You were a grand engineer. You can still build things as you always built them. I am not an engineer. I am a dreamer, who can choose to engineer things when he wishes. And I dream of infinite possibilities, so what I do and what you do are going to part ways sometimes."

He looked at the ring. "You helped me. I can still help you. But I will follow my own path the way I choose to. I will learn every wonder existence has to show me, and then I will take them into myself however I see fit."

He lifted his gaze from the ring, out past the turning time-disks and the violet smoke, into the vast and boundless dark of the Chrysalis.

"Existence breathes. Epochs pass. Civilizations rise and become monuments, and the monuments crumble into memory, and by the time that breath comes again, even the memory is gone. All of them. Boundless civilizations, boundless dreams, every one of them lost somewhere in time."

His Provenance roared around him, blue and gold and purple. "And in all those epochs, in all of that lost time, I...want to reign supreme."

HUUM!

The dream-clouds rolled outward across the whole of the sky!

"I want to experience boundless existence," Noah said, "and reign supreme!"

BOOM!