Chapter 5849: Glorious Script! I

<THE True Human Emperor>

Noah was still in the grand state of dreams, and he meant to stay there.

The compressed seas of blue-gold cloud still turned around him, and the event horizons along his arms still opened and closed, and his Dream still reached out through everything at once. And the longer he stayed in it, the further it went.

He could feel the edges of what Infinity meant moving outward with every breath. What his Dream could hold. What it could do. Things that had been impossible an hour ago were starting to look like doors.

He looked across the square at the thing wearing his face.

It was still studying him. He could feel it, through something behind its eyes rather than the eyes themselves, a thin thread running from the seam in its face out into existence itself, into the vast patient mind that had made a record of every step he had ever taken. The Existence this lifeform had access to was reading him through it. Learning him.

Every fact it held about Noah Osmont, every habit, every power, every choice he had ever made, all of it laid out and weighed and turned over in search of the one way to end him.

It knew his first dungeon, his Fireball and his blank number, his Kin and a bit more.

It was building a cage out of everything he had ever been.

Noah almost smiled.

Then the answer was simple. Stop being only what he had been!

If existence was studying him to find his end, he would give it something else to study. He would bring in something new. Something it had no record of. A variable it had no record of, so that everything it had already learned about him became useless, and it had to start again, and adapt, and chase him.

He would make existence keep up with him.

His Dream branched.

It went out through every possibility at once, as it had when he found the path to the Regent’s death, but faster now, easier, a thousand futures unrolling around him in the frozen instant. He walked through them looking for a single thing beyond existence’s foresight.

He found it inside THE Infiniverse!

—

Deep inside her, past her thousand realms, inside the Dream Engine on THE Early Veiled Shore, his people were sleeping.

They had been sleeping a long time. Living whole lives in there, centuries of them, in dreams he had built so they could grow while he fought. Existence could see very little of that place. He had made sure of it as it was his Dream, inside THE Infiniverse.

And one of the dreamers in there was an old teacher of his.

Noah remembered the day he had walked through the Dream Engine and looked in on each of them. Most of them had been dreaming of family, of battles, of quiet places. One of them had been dreaming of a language.

Ul’moreth.

THE Big Stepper!

The old one who had first told him that his infinite Mana was only a shout. That Mana was a tongue, with grammar and syntax and structure, and that existence listened to those who could speak it. In his dream, Ul’moreth had been standing in an endless hall of light, speaking.

A whole language, spoken all at once, far beyond any single word or sentence, every sound of it ringing off walls that went on forever, and Noah had stood in the doorway and listened.

It had been one of the grandest dreams in the whole Engine!

And it was still only a dream. It needed more to become anything else.

Noah looked down at all that was left of the Gaunt Regent.

Existence knew everything about him. It knew nothing about what his old teacher had been dreaming.

He smiled.

His Dream gathered the Regent’s remains, then he turned to THE Infiniverse beside him, and she understood before he said a word. She opened a single thread of herself, deep down into her own vast body, and Noah sent the whole of it through.

Down through her realms. Into the Dream Engine. Into the dream of an old teacher standing in a hall of light, speaking a language no one else could hear.

He felt it land!

|Given: the corpse of an Established Immense One, to Ul’moreth.|

|Given: the Core of Immensity of an Established Immense One, its keystone collapsed, to Ul’moreth.|

|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has kept count of your giving.|

|You have given the corpse of an Established Immense One, freely, to a teacher.|

|THE Tide answers.|

...!

Two lights opened in the frozen air beside him!

The first was a key. Gold, warm, simple, the kind of key that might open a farmhouse door. It hummed with a quiet power.

The second was a Core of Immensity, and it was warm too. A deep amber knot of light, slow and steady, like a hearth that had been banked for the night.

|Returned: THE Key That Was Never Stolen. Made by no hand but the Tide’s. What it opens, it opens freely. What it locks, no theft can open.|

|Returned: THE Core of an Unkept Hearth. A Core of Immensity of Warmth Given Away, the answer to the Keeping you broke.|

|They are of Order III.|

...!

Noah looked at them, and closed his hand. Both lights sank into his Dream and settled there, held, waiting.

Then he reached into the Dream Engine one more time.

He let his Adynatic Infinity go down the thread after the gift. The new definition, still blooming in him. The impossible, dreamed until it happens. He sent it into Ul’moreth’s dream and let it run, and felt the dream begin to move faster, and faster still. Centuries in a breath. Ages in a heartbeat. Everything the old teacher had been dreaming of, everything he had been reaching for in that endless hall, all of it rushing toward him at once, fed by an Established Immense One’s corpse and pushed by an Infinity that refused to accept the word impossible.

"My Old Teacher," Noah said softly. "Come live your dream once more."

The seas around him surged.

"Let existence witness what you have dreamed of THE First Tongue."

...!

BOOM!

Space cracked open in front of them!

Right there in the square, before Noah and Emotive and Ruination and THE Infiniverse, the air of the record split down the middle, and through the crack came hair.

Obsidian and gold. Endless. It poured through the opening like a river breaking a dam, coil upon coil, strand upon strand, unfurling across the black water and up the walls of the cavern and out into the falling snow until it filled half the record. And behind it came Mana.

HUUUM!

Blue Mana. Boundless. It gushed out of the crack like an endless sea, pure and roaring, a tide of it so vast and so clen that the record itself shook under it. The stone walls of the first dungeon rippled. The snow in the air turned to blue light. Everything the Mana touched began, very slightly, to change, as if existence itself were being spoken to in a voice it had missed for a very long time, and was listening.

In the middle of it all, a shape stood up!

Humanoid, and enormous, and filled with hair. Countless strands of obsidian and gold wound together into a body, a chest, two long arms, a head crowned with more hair spilling down its back and across the water for miles. Around it, small lights turned in slow orbits.

Eighteen of them, eighteen colors: blue-gold fire, liquid silver, bronze, pale green, deep purple, white-gold, indigo, emerald, grey, amber, azure, platinum, a flicker of every color at once, golden threads, silver fractures, dawn yellow, dusk violet, and crimson laced with black.

The eighteen Phonemes of THE First Tongue!

And its eyes opened, deep and blue and very old, and looked down at Noah.

Ul’moreth!

THE Big Stepper!

|Ul’moreth has woken from his dream.|

|His dream has become true. A Dream Immensity has risen.|

|THE Dream Immensity of THE First Tongue. Newly Risen, on the cusp of Established.|

|His title: THE Orator Who Dreamed the First Word.|

...!

|Within his dream, he has spoken for Ages.|

|His own distinguished Mastery of THE First Tongue, crossed in his dreaming:|

|Novice Speaker. Crossed.|

|Competent Speaker. Crossed.|

|Fluent Speaker. Crossed.|

|Eloquent Speaker. Crossed.|

|Linguistic Architect. Crossed.|

|Philological Master. Crossed.|

|Primordial Linguist. Crossed.|

|Primal Orator. Attained.|

...!

|As a Primal Orator, he speaks THE First Tongue in near-perfect fluency. He may hold whole conversations in it. He may rewrite Genesis Principles, or make new ones. Within his reach, he may change the grammar of existence itself.|

|His Genesis Principle of Undifferentiated Mana has deepened and become a core of his Dream Immensity. He stands in the moment before anything is decided, and speaks from there.|

|Every Immensity is made of words. He can read them.|

...!

Noah looked up at his old teacher, and for the first time since the record had formed, he laughed out loud!