Chapter 5848: Perseverance!

<THE Maker of Scales>

Far from THE Undersnow, far from any Legacy few ever heard of, an island floated in the dark.

It was an Elsedimension, and it was green!

It held the green of every forest that had ever grown, gathered in one place and set adrift. Its trees rose higher than mountain ranges, their trunks wider than cities, their bark grey and silver and soft with moss. Their canopies spread so vast that whole Dimensions rested in their branches like nests, and inside those Dimensions, Observable Existences turned slowly in green light. Roots hung down beneath the island for light yeras into the dark, trailing like the hair of something sleeping.

This was part of THE Legacy of THE Unwithering Grove. It had stood since before the last Cycle began, and it had sheltered a great many things.

The Long Night had found it anyway!

Snow fell here too. It fell heavily, endlessly, out of a dark sky with no sun, and it settled on the high canopies and slid down through the leaves and gathered in drifts between the roots. The cold pressed on everything. And yet the trees still shone.

Their leaves gave off a soft verdant light that held against the snow, so that the whole floating island glowed green through the storm, warm as a lamp in a winter window.

Beneath the trees, thousands sat in silence.

Provenance Lifeforms, every one of them. Some were shaped like men and women, some like beasts, some like nothing with a name. They sat in long rings between the roots, legs crossed, eyes closed, snow gathering on their shoulders and in their hair.

They left it where it fell. Around each of them, the Provenance of Life rose up out of the ground in slow green tides, through their bodies and out again, a pulse as steady as breath.

A small Provenance Lifeform near the outermost ring, little more than a child, had been sitting there for nine hundred years. She had felt the Provenance of Life move through her the whole time. In all that time, she had kept her eyes lowered.

They all kept their eyes lowered.

They knew better.

At the center of the island, in a clearing so wide that its edges were lost among the trees, lay a coffin.

It was obsidian and green. Black stone, veined through with a deep emerald light, smooth as still water and vast as a mountain range laid on its side. Snow fell on it and slid off it. The verdant light of the trees bent toward it and stopped short of it. Around it, the Provenance of Life ran thickest of all, pooling in the clearing like water in a basin, and the oldest of the meditators sat closest to it, and trembled.

On top of the coffin sat a slime!

It was small, for a thing that size. Round and soft and obsidian black, its surface rippling slowly, catching the green light and swallowing it. It sat in the very center of the lid with the patience of a cat on a warm stone. Now and then a snowflake drifted down onto it, and vanished, leaving the lid bare.

THE Dimensional Eater was calm.

Above the clearing, the sky began to burn!

THE Unwithering Grove had gone without a sun since the Long Night came. But now, one after another, lights opened in the dark above the coffin, and every one of them was brighter than a sun.

Nine of them!

They hung in a wide ring over the clearing, and their light was so vast that the snow in the air between them turned to silver. The meditators below felt it on their backs and bowed lower. Even the trees seemed to lean away. The shapes inside those lights were impossible to make out. A crown, perhaps, a great eye, a hand holding something, a long coiled thing. They were barely there at all, hidden behind their own brilliance, and every one of them pressed down on the island with a weight older than most of existence.

Nine Ancient Immense Ones!

|THE Gardener of Ended Ages looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Sun Who Remembers Before Light looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Unsetting Eye of the Ninth Horizon looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Tide-Mother of the Burning Seas looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Clockless King looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Silence Between Stars looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Lantern That Outlived Its Hand looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Crowned Hunger of the Pale Sky looks down upon the coffin.|

|THE Weaver of Unfinished Roads looks down upon the coffin.|

...!

On the lid of the coffin, THE Dimensional Eater rippled once, and stayed where it was.

|THE Gardener of Ended Ages speaks.|

Its voice was soft and green, and it came from everywhere the trees grew.

|"You have slept in my Grove for a long time, Maker of Scales. Long enough for the snow to bury the lower branches twice. I have kept you, as I keep everything that is worth keeping. But even a Grove cannot hold a sleeper forever."|

|THE Sun Who Remembers Before Light speaks.|

The oldest of them. Its light was white and patient and very still.

|"Existence has a winter. It has always had one. When a Cycle has grown long enough, and enough has been taken that was not given, the snow comes, and the cold, and the long dark. It prunes. It clears. It lets what is overgrown fall away, so that something can grow again after. I have seen it come before. Many times."|

|THE Unsetting Eye of the Ninth Horizon speaks.|

Its light was sharp and gold, and it held perfectly steady.

|"And every time, it came and went in balance. A season, nothing more. This one is different."|

|"This one grows. Every Age it is colder than the Age before. It devours instead of pruning. It is a natural cycle, and something in it has gone wrong, and the root of it lies beyond the sight of all nine of us."|

The Provenance of Life in the clearing shivered.

|THE Tide-Mother of the Burning Seas speaks.|

Her light was red and gold and rolling, like fire on water.

|"A winter comes only when its conditions are met. Before the snow can fall, certain things must happen. Certain doors must close. Certain names must end."|

Her light turned toward the coffin. |"You were among the last conditions, Maker of Scales. When you ended THE Overseeing One, the final condition was met. The Long Night began behind you."|

|THE Clockless King is amused.|

|THE Clockless King speaks.|

|"Do not look so solemn, Tide-Mother. It would have begun with or without him. A door that is ready to close finds a hand to close it. He simply happened to be holding the handle."|

|THE Silence Between Stars speaks.|

It made almost no sound at all. Its words arrived as a pressure behind the eyes.

|"There are answers. Some have been tried. Some have only been imagined. Some say sleep, and outlast it in stone. Some say feed it, until it is full. Some say find the hand that turns the Wheel of the Cycle, and break the hand."|

|"The most straightforward of them is IT."|

At the word, every tree in the Grove went very still!

|THE Lantern That Outlived Its Hand speaks.|

Its light was dim and steady, and it flickered once, as if remembering a hand that had carried it.

|"IT’s pieces lie everywhere now. We have some of them."| The flicker came again. |"So do you."|

|THE Crowned Hunger of the Pale Sky speaks.|

Its light was pale and cold and hungry, and when it spoke the snow fell faster.

|"You made the Scales of existence. For the whole of the last Cycle, the vast majority of existence weighed itself on what you built. Every Legacy, every Dimension, every life, measured and balanced on your Scales. The narrative you gathered was profound. The Immensity you gathered was more."|

|"Your Cause became bound up in existence itself. Pull one thread of it, and you pull the other."|

|THE Weaver of Unfinished Roads speaks.|

Its light was many-colored and restless, and threads of it trailed down from the sky like loose ends.

|"And you were hasty. When THE Keepers of Existence moved against you, you went to meet them alone. We offered aid then. You refused it."|

|THE Gardener of Ended Ages speaks.|

|"Even now, you want none of our aid. We know this. But existence is vast, Maker of Scales, and many things can change. We hold Shards of IT. So do you. Working together, we could carry our Legacies past this Cycle."|

The green light of the Grove rose softly.

|"And you could take hold of existence itself."|

...!

The snow fell.

For a long time, that was all that moved. The nine lights hung above the clearing. The meditators sat bowed beneath them. THE Dimensional Eater sat on the lid of the coffin, and rippled.

Then the coffin spoke!

The voice came from inside the black and green stone, low and even and very calm. It filled the clearing without rising, and took its time.

|"You speak of existence as if the answer lives inside it."|

The nine lights stilled.

|"It has always lived elsewhere. Existence is vast. It is grand. It has winters and Cycles and doors and Wheels and hands to turn them. It has Shards of IT scattered across it like seeds on a road. And all of it, every piece, is outside of you."|

|"The answer lies with oneself. It always has."|

The Provenance of Life in the clearing pulsed once, hard, as if something had pressed on it from below.

|"Take anything,"| the coffin said. |"Anything at all. Infinity. Time. Or something small. Water. Air. Fire. Earth. Things most would call too simple to matter. Take any one of them, and persevere in it. For longer than a lifetime. Longer than an Age. Persevere in it past the point where anyone else would stop, and past the point after that, and keep going, to the very extreme of what that one thing can be."|

|"That one thing alone could stand at the top of existence."|

|"I have seen water do it. I have seen a single breath of air do it. The thing matters little. The persevering is everything."|

The voice paused, as if turning something over.

|"For me, it is THE Source. THE Primordial Source. It always has been. It always will be."|

|"You offer me IT, as if IT were the answer. IT is something less. IT held a path once, and broke, and its pieces are useful. I will take them, if they come to my hand. But IT is a tool. Existence is full of tools. Full of components and pieces and parts, all of them waiting to be used by whoever is patient enough to pick them up."|

|"The answer, for me, is THE Source. Everything else is a tool."|

THE Clockless King’s light flickered, very slightly.

|"Existence is also full of rats,"| the coffin went on, and for the first time something cold moved under its calm. |"Things that gnaw at it. Things that hide in its walls and eat what belonged to others, and call themselves Keepers while they do it. Many of them need to die."|

|"I need to go to war with a Legacy or two."|

WAA!

The snow seemed to slow in the air.

|"I will do it with your support, or without it. I thank the Gardener for the shelter of the Grove. I hear what the nine of you have said, and I will remember it. But I have always gone forward without waiting for anyone’s aid, and I will keep doing so."|

The voice settled.

|"Like always,"| the coffin said, |"I will... persevere."|

...!

The silence that followed was heavy enough to bend the trees!

Nine Ancient Immense Ones hung above the clearing in silence. Their lights turned, slowly, toward one another. The Gardener’s soft green toward the Sun Who Remembers Before Light; the Unsetting Eye toward the Tide-Mother; the Clockless King toward the Crowned Hunger, whose pale light had gone very still. Whatever passed between them, it passed without words, in a language of light and weight too old for the meditators below to follow.

The child in the outermost ring, nine hundred years in her seat, felt her heart beating in her throat.

Then, with a long, low sound like a mountain shifting in its sleep, the coffin opened!

The lid slid back. Green light poured out of the black stone, and with it a pressure so vast that the snow above the clearing stopped falling and hung where it was, every flake frozen in the air. The Provenance of Life in the clearing rose in a single green wave and broke against the edges of the Grove. Every meditator bowed until their foreheads touched the snow.

And from inside the coffin, a man sat up!

He was tall, and he was ancient, and he looked like an emperor of countless Ages. The kind for whom crowns had been invented, rather than one who merely wore them. His skin was bronze, warm and deep, as though some long-gone sun still remembered him.

Dark hair fell past his shoulders, and his eyes were darker still, black as the stone of his coffin, and utterly calm. He wore a long robe of black and green, plain and heavy, and on him it looked like the armor of a conqueror.

He stood, and stepped out onto the lid of his coffin, and the whole floating Elsedimension settled slightly beneath his weight.

THE Dimensional Eater hopped!

It bounced across the black stone, once, twice, and on the third bounce it landed on top of Vakochev’s head and sat there, round and black and rippling.

Vakochev left it there.

He lifted his dark eyes to the nine blinding lights in the sky above him. To the oldest Immense Ones the Grove had ever sheltered. To beings whose names the meditators below would only ever whisper.

He looked at them as one looks at equals!

And the nine Ancient suns, after a long moment, looked back.