Chapter 5855: Existential Epitropos I

<THE True Human Emperor>

Noah dreamed.

He sat upon the simple white throne at the bottom of the Descent of Chains with his eyes closed, and this time the seat dreamed right alongside him!

It started small. The Evergrave came first. Every snowfall across the Rim-Domain, every bitter wind sweeping over the burning fields, every frozen river, and every kept dead standing at every dark window. All of it surged through the white stone and straight into THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree, steady as the heavy current that turns a mill wheel, and he felt each piece of the land as clearly as his own fingers!

Then the seat lifted him highr!

Up, past the fractured sun of the Heart! Past the sealed rift! Through these low floots of THE Undersnow, traversing floor after floor of frozen dark, before bursting out into the vast light above, into a Legacy he knew well!

THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity!

Lucy’s Legacy lay spread beneath his sight, a thousand Elsedimension Mountains blanketed under falling snow, purple-gold rivers threading between them, and the Keepers’ Roads winding from peak to peak. Inside every mountain lay stacked Dimensions. Inside every Dimension, Observable Existences turned in their own skies. And at the heart of it all rested the bright, sealed knot of Lucy’s Lecture Hall!

And the seat kept expanding!

Out past the Legacy’s cracked border! Out across the dark between Legacies! Dimension after Dimension, Observable Existence after Observable Existence, rolling across gigaparsecs in every direction, domains and seas and forests and frozen wastes and lives beyond counting, all of it lying under the same falling snow!

HUUM!

|Within your charge: the flow of THE Long Night through this region of existence.|

|This region holds THE Evergrave, A small reflection of THE Undersnow present in THE Continuum of Existence here, THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, and the Dimensions and Observable Existences surrounding them for countless gigaparsecs, and a portion of another Legacy countless distances away.|

...!

Noah’s breath went out of him, slowly.

One small region of existense.

Why, it was unimaginably vast!

Then the seat showed him what an Epitropos truly sees!

Across the whole expanse, among all those countless warm lights, cold points of blue-white flickered.

They were scattered everywhere! A point of blue-white in a domain inside a mountain. Another in a sea under a strange sun. Thousands of them burned cold among the warm, and beside each one hung a stark number!

|Within your charge: those who carry Existential Judgment.|

|Judgment Debt is what a being owes existence for actions they took or for growth it was never granted.|

|THE Long Night walks toward debt. Those who carry it must end, one way or another.|

...!

Noah looked closer.

A Provenance Lifeform sat meditating on a monastery terrace, a single cold point burning in her chest. Judgment Debt: 1. A Progeny who had reached too high, too fast, carried a Debt of 2. A hermit in a frozen tower who had been growing in secret for Ages carried a Debt of 4!

Naturally, he let his gaze move inward, toward Lucy’s Legacy.

The Legacy’s Lecture Hall remained sealed to his Dream, and the seat found its interior just as heavily barred. Yet the seat required only the names and the numbers, and those came to it through every seal without friction!

|Within THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity:|

|Moriarty. Judgment Debt: 6.|

|THE Thinker. Judgment Debt: 11.|

|Immense Ones of the Lecture Hall: Judgment Debts between 2 and 9.|

|Beneath the Legacy, the sleeping statues: Judgment Debt: ?????|

...!

Naturally, Noah kept looking.

In fact, his Kin walked with completely clean ledgers! Ruination, THE Infiniverse, Emotive, Ul’moreth, the Amalgamation, Ling and Poona far away near the Chrysalis. Their lights burned steady and warm, free of any audit beside their names!

Then, at the very edge of everything, he felt another presence stir.

It lay at the far rim of his charge, across the continuum, so faint that at first he took it for the limit of his own sight. A cluster of power. Dense and cold and very old, sealed so tightly that his Dream slid off it as rain slides off glass.

Another Legacy, sitting right on the outermost frontier of his jurisdiction as he covered...barely a portion of it as its Epitropos.

He reached for it, and the seat let him reach only so far. The seat veiled the terrain itself: every mountain, every Dimension, every face remained hidden in the fog. It yielded solely what an Epitropos was owed: names, and debts!

|At the edge of your charge: THE Legacy of THE Keepers of Existence.|

|Sealed. Within it, those who carry Existential Judgment:|

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND. Judgment Debt: 28.|

|THE Verdant Regard. Judgment Debt: 19.|

|THE Warden of the Ninth Seal. Judgment Debt: 9.|

|THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages. Judgment Debt: 41.|

|THE Mother of Closed Doors. Judgment Debt: 66.|

|THE Unweighed. Judgment Debt: 103.|

|?????. Judgment Debt: 210.|

...!

Noah read the list twice over!

THE Sleepless Fiend. The Fiend whose finger had once pressed down on him like the weight of an entire mountain range!

Twenty-eight debts!

And it sat near the bottom of the ledger!

Above it hung numbers past anything he had imagined a being could owe. Forty-one. Sixty-six. One hundred and three. And at the very top, a name sealed even from the seat, and beside it, a number that made the throne beneath him feel very smal!

Two hundred and ten!

Noah opened his mouth, and a short, dark laugh broke from his chest!

THE Keepers of Existence, hmm?

As he thought about many things, a voice rose then!

It came from everywhere at once. It rose through the throne, drifted down through the falling snow, and rolled straight out of the flow itself, deep and slow and booming, moving to a rhythmic work cadence, like a song sung by an entity that had been turning existence for countless Ages!

|"Tend the flow. Turn the cold."|

|"Weigh the debt. Walk the winter."|

|"Where the debt is owed, the Night will go."|

|"Where the Night must go, the keeper goes."|

|"Let nothing owed stay warm."|

HUUM!

Then it began again, from the start, steady as a heartbeat!

|"Tend the flow. Turn the cold..."|

"Who are you?" Noah asked it.

|"Weigh the debt. Walk the winter."|

The cadence rolled forward, solitary and relentless. It kept time beneath everything, like an iron drum pacing an army through the snow!

Noah let it grind.

In truth, he understood a bit more about Epitropos now.

It was simple, as the heaviest things usually were. An Epitropos tended the flow of the Long Night through its charge, and the flow walked toward debt. Every being that owed existence for growth existence had withheld would feel the cold come for it in the end. One way or another!

|The flow will carry the cold toward debt whether you guide it or not.|

|Guided, it is precise. Unguided, it is a storm.|

...!

The flow moved whether he willed it or turned his back. If he sat on this throne and let it drift, the winter would still walk toward every cold point of light in his charge, blindly, a storm sweeping whole Dimensions just to reach a single debt! If he guided it, the edge would be exact. A scalpel instead of an avalanche!

Either way, the frost would reach them!

The Provenance Lifeform on her terrace. The hermit in his tower. Moriarty. The Thinker. The entire Lecture Hall that had taken him in and called him the Legacy’s Son!

All of them stood listed within his charge now. All of them owed!

And his own debt, while he sat on the throne that collected them, was quietly burning away!

But did he have to follow the Judgments of THE Long Night without any say? Because he...much rather preferred to make his own choices!

The rest of the board was waiting for him where he had left it.

The Key That Was Never Stolen, spent to dust. The Caretaker’s corpse, held quietly within his Dream. Her dream of a stair of light, settled at the base of his Tree, waiting to be explored. The Contingency at the edges of the Evergrave, slowed but still eating the land.

The Unanimous Frost hanging frozen in the ruined Heart, silent in the dark.

|Judgment Debt: 3. Erasing.|

|Future Judgments may lose sight of you within the flow.|

...!

Around him, his people stood close in the shallow seas. Emotive’s hand rested on his frosted shoulder. Ruination’s red eyes scrolled with running light, recording every shift. THE Infiniverse’s realms turned their dreaming toward him, and Ul’moreth stood very still, his dim Phonemes slowly circling!

The booming voice was his alone to hear.

Noah opened his eyes.

"Existence breathes, and epochs pass..." he said quietly.

Under the throne, under the snow, under everything, the voice kept time.

|"And across these epochs..let nothing owed stay warm."|

HUUM!