Chapter 5820: THE Dreaming Human Origin!

Noah looked at the three roads.

THE Dreaming Origin, where existence would dream along with him. THE Unsated Sovereign, where he would grow heavier with everything he ate, forever. THE Quintessential Human, where everything human in him would become infinite. Each one hung before him in the stillness of THE Existential Root Domain, complete and real and waiting for him to step onto it.

He looked at them for a long time.

Then he laughed, very quietly.

"All of these are a part of me," he said.

His voice was calm.

"I am a human. I have been a human through everything, through the casting out and the death of time and every door that ever shut in my face. I am a dreamer. Everything I have built, I dreamed first. And I am a sovereign. I rule what is mine, and I take what I need, and I have yet to apologize for it once."

He looked from one road to the next. "Each of you is me. So why the hell do I have to choose?"

The stillness of the Domain trembled around him.

"I want it all," Noah said.

His voice rose.

"I WANT IT ALL!"

BOOM!

His existence shook!

It shook from the center out, every packed quark in him vibrating at once, his saturated existence lurching toward all three roads at the same time. The roads answered. They bent toward him, and toward each other, and began to bleed together, the Dreaming Origin’s gold running into the Unsated Sovereign’s dark into the Quintessential Human’s warm and living light. Something began to bloom in him!

Something enormous. His skin split along the tendrils of light and blazed. His crown of radiance flared so bright it lit the whole Domain white.

The transformation had begun!

And above him, the sky of THE Existential Root Domain split open.

It cracked from horizon to horizon in a single jagged line, and through the crack poured light that belonged nowhere in his Domain.

Obsidian gold. Black and gold together, like the mists over the Legacy, but colder. Older. It came down out of the crack in great falling shapes, and each shape was a piece of existence itself given weight and aimed at him.

He could feel what they were as they fell!

A Provenance of Ending. A Provenance of Order. A Provenance of Stillness, a Provenance of the Counted, a Provenance of the Door.

Aspects of existence, concepts as old as anything that had ever been, crashing down toward the one being in the Domain who had just tried to become something existence had forbidden!

|How dare you.|

...!

The first one hit him!

It struck like the fall of countless Dimensons, and the blue-gold hills around him flattened into glass in a ring a hundred miles wide. The light of it was so bright that for an instant he saw nothing at all, only white, only the weight.

|How dare you.|

A heavy voice boomed out!

The second hit him. The third. They came down out of the crack one after another, an endless cascade, Ending and Order and Stillness and the Counted, each one a judgment, each one heavy enough to unmake even a certain big fat panda per strike, and every one of them aimed at him.

He raised his hands, furious, and met them!

The blasts landed on his palms, his arms, his chest, and burst. Their residue sprayed outward across the Domain in waves of obsidian gold, and where it touched, things stopped being what they had been. The river of light froze into a ribbon of crystal. The orchards went still and clear. And at the edge of the flattened ring, the residue washed over Ruination and THE Infiniverse.

Their bodies began to turn to glass!

It crept up Ruination’s legs, clear and hard, freezing her mid-step. It climbed THE Infiniverse’s coat of many colors, turning fur to frozen crystal. They roared, both of them, a sound Noah was hearing from either of them for the first time, and the glass cracked across their arms as they fought it, and kept climbing.

|Source of this Judgment: ?????.|

|A portion of existence objects to your becoming.|

|You were never meant to find this road.|

|Return to what was counted.|

...!

A portion of existence, then. Some part of it, old and obsidian and gold, reaching down through the crack in his own Domain to stop him from becoming what he was becoming. Who? What?

The blasts kept coming.

And Noah began to take them.

He felt it happen the moment he understood it. Every blast that landed on him was a Provenance. Ending, Order, Stillness, the Counted, each one a piece of existence’s own foundation, raw and pure and pouring down on him without end. THE One Foundation kept every ounce of their weight and built it into floor. His Hunger refined them as they struck, breaking them down without waste. Every judgment existence threw at him, he swallowed, and every one he swallowed made the transformation burn hotter!

|Warning: the Judgment is being consumed.|

|Provenance of Ending: integrated.|

|Provenance of Order: integrated.|

|Provenance of Stillness: integrated.|

|Your evolution is accelerating.|

The crack in the sky widened. Faster and heavier the blasts came, the obsidian gold pouring down in torrents now, enough to bury many things, while the glass crept up Ruination’s chest and THE Infiniverse’s throat, and the whole Domain groaned under it.

Noah threw his head back and bellowed.

"This is my Domain!"

His voice tore through the falling light.

"MY DOMAIN! MOVE!"

BOOM!

Dream erupted out of him!

Boundless waves of it, blue and gold and infinite, roaring up from his body in every direction at once. They hit the falling Provenances and swallowed them, and washed the residue away, and swept over Ruination and THE Infiniverse, and the glass on their bodies dreamed itself back into flesh and fur and crimson coat. And then they rose to the crack in the sky, and closed it.

The crack sealed shut with a sound like a great door slamming!

The last obsidian gold light vanished, and the Domain went quiet. His dream-seas settled over every hill and river, closed off from everything above, his and his alone.

He had withstood it.

|The Judgment has been withstood.|

|Your Domain has been sealed from within.|

|The three roads have joined.|

|Evolution: THE Osmontian, THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|Human. Dreamer. Sovereign. All three, and more.|

...!

Then his existence shook one final time, and Noah fell asleep!

He went down into the dream like a man sinking into deep water, slow, and easy, and complete.

Around him, everything that had ever made him rose. His Provenance came first, blue and gold, wrapping around him in long slow bands. Then his Dream, soft and endless, layer over layer, and his Infinity winding through both, the finite and the infinite at once, and through all of it, the Long Night’s cold he had carried, and the Provenances of existence he had just devoured. Every memory, every life he had lived, every death, all of it wrapped around him, tighter and tighter, until he hung in the center of the Domain inside a cocoon of everything he had ever been, and began to change.

The Domain changed with him!

Its blue-gold hills rose and rolled into new shapes, valleys deepening, ridges sharpening. The frozen river thawed and ran again, wider now, brighter, its star-pools multiplying until they spread like a second sky along its bed. Orchards bloomed with fruit that glowed.

Overhead, a single unmoving star above the Domain split into many, then hundreds, a whole new heaven of stars opening across a sky that had once held only one. Time ran differently along the edges of the Domain now, slower in some places, faster in others, a living hour breathing in and out.

Ruination and THE Infiniverse stood where his dream had freed them, and watched.

And they felt it.

A suffocation, rising out of the cocoon at the center of the Domain, so heavy and so total that the air turned thick in their throats. It pressed on them. More than the Warden’s gaze!

Oh!

And it made them happy!

Ruination’s crimson beams trembled. THE Infiniverse pressed a hand to her chest. They looked at each other, and then at the cocoon, and something lit in both their faces that was very close to joy.

Was their Master truly this strong?!

HUUM!

The cocoon opened.

It came apart slowly, bands of Provenance unwinding, Dream peeling away layer by layer, and the figure inside floated free.

He was tall. Taller than before, and leaner in some places and broader in others, his proportions shifted just past what a human body could have held.

His skin was the deep dark of a sky at night, and beneath it, slow-drifting rivers of blue-gold light moved like constellations wheeling across that sky, so that looking at him felt like looking up on a clear night far from any city. His hair hung weightless around his head, long and white-gold, drifting as though he stood underwaterr.

The crown of light had become part of him: two great curving horns of blue-gold radiance swept back from his brow, rooted in his skull. Behind his shoulders, faint and half-real, a slow ring of light turned, a halo made of time, ticking.

He was almost alien. He was also, unmistakably, grand.

Noah opened his eyes.

They were pure gold. Every part of them, white and iris alike, a single unbroken gold, with no pupils at all. They shone softly in the dark of his face, calm and bottomless and very old.

He looked down at himself.

|Evolution complete.|

|Lifeform: THE Osmontian, THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|The first of its kind. A lifeform that exists by its own design, apart from Immensity and beyond the bounds of a Root.|

|Evolution count: 1.|

|From the Human: your emotions generate without end. Those you hold dear grow as you grow. You keep the capacity to fear, to love, to be wrong, and to learn; all of it is now infinite.|

|From the Dreamer: what you dream near you becomes true, and the reach of that truth grows as you grow. Existence near you dreams, and you hold the dream.|

|From the Sovereign: you devour without end and grow from all you devour. There is no ceiling on what you may consume or become.|

|And more: the Provenances of Ending, Order, and Stillness, taken from the Judgment, are now your own.|

|VERITAS: Uncounted. PROVENANCE: Uncounted. POTENTIA: Infinite. PONDUS: Uncounted. OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Uncounted.|

|Existence no longer measures you in numbers it can write.|

|Eyes: THE Gold Without Pupils. You see a thing as it truly is, all of it at once.|

|Next evolution: Saturation 0%. The Absolute of your new existence is beyond present estimate.|

|Immensity: ?????|

...!

Noah read it all.

Then he read the last line again.

Immensity. A string of question marks, where every other line had an answer.

He had taken a different road, leaving Immensity ungrasped, its door unpassed, its thrones to others. Walking away from all of it, he had become something that door had no power to stop.

So what was he now?

He looked up through his new gold eyes at the sealed sky of his Domain, and wondered, compared to the Immense Ones out there in the storm, exactly what he had become!