Chapter 5844: Rage! I

<Existential Interlude- Existence>

Everything that is, is part of existence.

The smallest grain of dust, the largest Legacy, the dead under the snow and the living above it, a child’s first breath and an Ancient One’s ten-thousandth Age: all of it is held, carried, counted, and kept. To exist at all is to be part of something unimaginably vast, and to be made of it.

Most things live without thinking about this. They simply live, and grow, and end, and are taken back into the whole they came from. Existence holds them the whole way through. That is what it means to belong.

But some things grow too far.

Some things reach for what existence kept for others. They take what existence held back. They rise past the places existence set for them, and they keep rising, and every step they take is a step away from the whole that holds them.

What happens to a thing like that?

Existence is patient. It is grand, and it can heal. It can also rage. And when a thing sets itself against existence, existence has no need to hurry. It has every Age there is, every record of every step the thing ever took, every hand, every Immensity, every winter it will ever need.

So the question is simple.

If a thing is against existence itself, is its death not already certain? Only a matter of when, and how, and by whose hand.

And yet.

Every Age, a few things grow too far anyway. A few things set themselves against the whole and keep going. Most of them end exactly as the question says they must.

Most of them.

—

<THE True Human Emperor>

The record settled!

It came down around them all at once and stayed. The grey cavern of the first dungeon stretched away for light years in every direction, its stone walls rough and wet, its ceiling lost far overhead. Every rock, every puddle, every scorch mark from a fireball thrown yeras ago sat exactly where it had been.

And snow was falling!

It came down out of the dark above the cavern, heavy and thick and endless, snow that had fallen in that dungeon nowhere in its long record. It settled on the stone floor, on the shoulders of nineteen Immense Ones, on Noah’s white-gold hair. In the far corner of the cavern, the young man in the cheap jacket sat on the floor of the boss room with his book in his lap, and the snow fell straight through him, leaving him untouched.

The winter had followed them in.

THE Faceless Immense One drifted down out of the dark, and began to shake!

It shuddered from head to foot, its tall pale body blurring at the edges. Its too-long limbs pulled in, its too-thin fingers shortened, and its height came down and down until it stood on the cavern floor across from Noah, no taller than he was.

Its skin darkened to the color of a night sky. Blue-gold constellations drifted across it. White-gold hair fell to its shoulders, weightless. Two horns of blue-gold radiance rose from its skull. A halo of two turning rings lit behind its shoulders.

And then its face came in. Line by line. A jaw, a mouth, a nose.

Gold eyes, without pupils, with a single fleck of obsidian drifting in each.

Noah was looking at himself!

It had no face of its own. So it could wear anyone’s!

Light began to spill off it. Obsidian and white, cloudy and soft, rolling out across the cavern floor in slow tides. It moved exactly as Noah’s Dream moved. It felt utterly different.

|"Infinite Dreams, right?"| it said, in Noah’s own voice, and the sound of it was very wrong. |"The Provenance of Dreams."|

It lifted his own hand and looked at it, turning it over, as if trying on a coat.

|"It is one of the highest concepts of existence. I’ll give you that. I give you props for making yourself one with it."|

The obsidian-white clouds thickened around its feet.

|"But I hold the favor of existence. I am one of those steering its rage."|

It smiled with Noah’s mouth. |"Let me show you what Dreams truly mean. And mind you, I also want you to feel the rage. So... let’s do this cleanly. None of that dumb shit."|

It raised one hand, and waved.

High above, the outer ring of Immense Ones pulled back.

Fourteen Lineage heads drew away into the falling snow, the cinder giant and the mirror-faced duchess and the frost-veiled bride and all the rest, until they were only vast dim shapes at the edge of the dark.

And the four Night Lords came down!

THE Gaunt Regent from the north, thin and endless, its crown of finger-bones catching the cold light. THE Choir-Mother from the east, her ribs open, her choir already singing.

THE Drowned Margrave from the west, its orbit of drowned bones turning slow around it. THE Warden of the Heart from the south, armored in white ice, its every step shaking the cavern.

They stopped at the four corners of a square, with Noah at its center.

THE Faceless Immense One stood just outside the square, in Noah’s body, with its arms crossed.

|"Nothing for you to kill and somehow get stronger,"| it said pleasantly. |"You can’t kill Established Immense Ones yet. So I will torture you with them first."|

It tilted Noah’s head, exactly as Noah tilted it.

|"Oh, I also won’t sit still. But I will be honest with you. I need existence to study you a little more, and obtain a little more information, to truly ensure your ending at this point in time. So... even though I know I can beat you, I am buying time for surety"|

The obsidian-white clouds around its feet rolled outward.

|"I’ll also get to see your Dreams,"| it said. |"And then I can show you... existence’s true Dreams."|

...!

HUUM!

The four Night Lords brought their Immensities down at once.

|THE Gaunt Regent. Its Immensity: Keeping. What it holds stays held, and all warmth in its grip is drawn out of it.|

|THE Choir-Mother. Her Immensity: Penance. What hears her song bends, and kneels, and is sorry.|

|THE Drowned Margrave. Its Immensity: Drowning. What it reaches sinks, and keeps sinking, and does not come up.|

|THE Warden of the Heart. Its Immensity: Refusal. What it bars from passing does not pass.|

...!

The cavern ended!

The Regent’s Keeping fell first, a grey grip closing over everything within light years, and every warm thing in it began to drain. Behind it came the Choir-Mother’s song, a wall of grief and apolgy so heavy that the stone floor itself bowed under it, and from the west the Margrave’s Drowning rolled in like a black tide rising over a shore, cold water pouring out of nowhere and filling the cavern from the floor up. And the Warden’s Refusal closed around all of it, a square of white ice rising on four sides, and nothing inside could leave.

His Risen Dreams died!

The thirteen giants of the Chase went first. The Regent’s Keeping gripped them and drained the blue-gold out of their open ribs, and they went grey, and the Choir-Mother’s song pressed them to their knees, and the Margrave’s black water closed over their heads, and when the water went down again there was nothing left of them but grey dust drifting in the current.

Their scion roared and threw itself at the Warden, and the Warden lifted one armored hand, and the scion simply stopped where it stood, refused, and shattered.

The Huntsman’s horse went down under the black water and stayed down.

At Noah’s back, the golden shadow of the panda stood up on its hind legs, tall and fat and glowing, and spread its arms wide over him. The Drowning hit it, then the Keeping, then the song. It held for three long breaths, glowing brighter and brighter, and then it went out, quietly, like a lamp at dawn.

Only the Huntsman was still standing!

It knelt in the black water beside Noah, half its skinless body torn away, and as Noah watched, the torn muscle crawled back. Slowly. Painfully. It had died to Ending once, and come back harder, and whatever this was, it was learning to hold on.

It lifted its skull and looked at Noah, and held on!

The Lanterns broke!

Two thousand three hundred of them had ringed him when the record first formed. Now the black water was rising over their heads and the song was pressing them flat and the Keeping was pulling the last scraps of warmth out of their glass beads, one bead at a time, every tiny light going out.

They stayed. There was nowhere to run inside a square of white ice.

They held their beads up anyway, pressed them to each other’s chests, and tried, right to the end, to keep one another warm.

One by one, the lights went out.

In the middle of them, the Ember-Keeper stood up!

It rose to its full height for the first time since Noah had met it, cracked black iron and ash, its flame blazing red and gold in its chest, and it put itself between the falling song and the last of its Lanterns. The song hit it. Its iron cracked further. It stayed standing!

Behind it, very quietly, THE Gaunt Regent stepped out of the snow as its Immensity smashed onto the weakened and sick Ember-Keeper who power was not what it used to be!

Always a steward, it moved like one, without hurry, as if crossing a hall it had swept a thousand times. It reached around the Ember-Keeper with one long thin hand and took hold of the little cage of bone as its Immensity battered it again and again!

The Ember-Keeper turned.

|"No,"| it said. Its voice cracked down the middle. |"No. Not this. She left this. She left this for..."|

|"She left it in my hall,"| the Regent said softly. |"I kept her keys. I kept her halls. I will keep her fire."|

It pulled.

The cage of bone came away in its hand, and the red coal went with it!

The Ember-Keeper’s flame went out as if a door had closed on it, its existence shattering further!

It stood for a moment longer, cracked and dark, its great iron hands still open where the cage had been. Then it turned its head, slowly, and found Noah across the black water.

|"Warm one,"| it whispered. |"I am sorry. I could only carry it this far."|

Its iron came apart. Piece by piece, from the top down, it fell into the rising water, and the water closed over it, and there was nothing left but a little ash floating on the surface, going cold.

The Regent turned the red coal over in its long fingers, looked at it with its pale eyes, and tucked it away somewhere inside its robes.

Then it looked at Noah, and smiled.

All four Immensities turned onto him!

It was the heaviest thing he had ever felt. Heavier than the Judgment, heavier than the Shard of IT on his palm in Lucy’s garden. The Keeping gripped him from every side and pulled; the song pressed down on his shoulders with the weight of every apology ever made; the black water rose around him and tried to drag him under; and the Refusal closed in from all four sides, barring every direction he could move.

His layers of dreams held!

They held, and held, every layer ended and dreamed back and ended again, so fast it blurred. The Keeping failed to reach his warmth, the Drowning found no way into him, and the song failed to make him sorry.

But the weight.

The weight could reach him. It came down on the outside of every layer at once, four Established Immensities pressing as one, and it pushed.

His body lit up!

Blue-gold light poured off him, clouds of it, his Dream straining to burst out of him and fill the cavern, to stitch, to fight, to erupt. Every constellation under his skin blazed. His horns of radiance flared. The two rings of his halo spun so fast they screamed. Everything in him wanted out!

And it was pushed back down!

The four of them held it in. Forced it in. Pressed his Dream back against his own skin with a power grander than anything he had, every flare of light shoved down the moment it rose. His knees bent. He fought it. They bent further!

His right knee struck the stone floor of his first dungeon!

Then his left.

Noah Osmont knelt in the black water at the center of a square of white ice, with snow falling on his shoulders, surrounded by the dead, held down by four Immensities, while across the cavern a thing wearing his own face watched him with its arms crossed, studying every flicker of light that tried to escape him.

In the far corner, the young man in the cheap jacket sat on the floor of the boss room and stared at his book, and dreamed of a number without an end.

Noah lifted his head.

His face showed no break and no begging. His gold eyes were cold, and steady, and utterly imperious, and they went from the Regent to the Choir-Mother to the Margrave to the Warden, and then, last, to the thing wearing his face.

He opened his mouth.

And he roared!