Chapter 5901: A Grand Action!

Noah held sixty-one percent of THE Verdant Regard, and he used it to study her.

He took his time. Inside the Quantum Dream, time was something he could afford, and a chance to study an Ancient’s existence this closely might come only once. So he sat inside her and watched how she worked.

Her Regard was a simple thing at its root, and terrible in its simplicity. When she looked at something, her gaze put down roots in it. Thin green threads of ownership, finer than hair, sank into whatever her eyes touched and began to grow, and the longer she looked, the deeper they went, until the thing she was looking at belonged to her garden and forgot it had ever belonged to anything else.

Every leaf in her dream was an eye because every eye was a root. Her whole existence was a single long gaze that had stayed fixed, Age after Age, on whatever it wanted.

|THE Verdant Regard’s Immensity: Regard.|

|Her gaze plants roots of ownership in whatever it touches.|

|The longer she looks, the deeper the roots grow.|

|Everything she owns, she owns because she once looked at it and did not stop.|

He followed the roots back through her dream, and found her memories at the bottom of them.

He found Minerva first!

Her daughter was everywhere in this dream. Minerva as a small child running through the orchard. Minerva learning to make her first flower bloom. Minerva standing tall and proud and stubborn, saying she would become Immense on her own. And Minerva at the very end, in the snow of the Long Night, her Root becoming a tree of light, the door shutting, the Root severed, her small body crumpling into the cold.

THE Verdant Regard loved her daughter. Noah could feel it, enormous and fierce and posessive, the kind of love that looks at something and keeps looking forever.

But he also found the pills.

Over the years, the Verdant Regard had taken dozens of Root Bearers from the lesser corners of the Legacy, quietly, a few at a time. She had ground them down in a stone bowl in a locked room at the back of her orchard, every one of them, until nothing remained but their weavings. She had pressed those weavings into small green pills, round and sweet-smelling, and fed them to Minerva.

Minerva had swallowed them, trusting.

Her mother had kept the answer to herself.

|She ground down dozens of Root Bearers for their weavings.|

|She fed their weavings to her daughter as pills.|

|Her daughter never knew where they came from.|

Noah looked at that memory for a long time, and his calm stayed exactly where it was.

Then he went further back, past Minerva, past the orchard, to the very beginning, and found the Fiend.

She had been young then, only a Newly Risen Immense One, bright and new and very proud of herself. And one day, THE SLEEPLESS FIEND had simply walked into her garden, smiling, his shroud of Causes murmuring around him, and looked at her with his ever-open eyes.

He had taken whatever he wanted from her. Her time, her power, her body, her loyalty. He had used her as he wished, for as long as he wished, and when he was done, he had stayed anyway, because it amused him to have her near. Over the Ages, she had grown loyal to him, as a vine grows loyal to the wall it climbs, because there was nowhere else for it to go.

And underneath all of that loyalty, in the deepest and quietest corner of her dream, Noah found something she had kept unspoken for Ages.

She was afraid of him!

Even now, even after all the Ages, even as an Ancient, she was afraid of him. She had seen his shroud slip once, a long time ago, for less than a heartbeat, and whatever she had glimpsed underneath it, her memory had refused to keep. All she had kept was the feeling. She had no idea how deep the Fiend truly went.

|She has served THE SLEEPLESS FIEND since she was Newly Risen.|

|She is loyal to him because she could never escape him.|

|She fears him.|

|Even she does not know the full extent of his power. ?????|

...!

And all the while Noah studied her, she fought him.

Somewhere deep in the thirty-nine percent of herself that was still hers, THE Verdant Regard was clawing at him. Her gaze kept trying to root into him and kept sliding off. Her Immensity kept surging up against his hold like a tide against a sea wall. She was hurt, and slow, and bleeding light from the reopened scar, but she was an Ancient, and she kept going.

|Control of her existence: 61%.|

|She is still fighting.|

|At this pace, full control will take a very long time.|

Noah considered that.

Then he smiled.

He was inside an Infinite Quantum Dream. He could do this as many times as he liked.

|Branch 1 ends.|

|Branch 2 begins. You enter her dream again, from the start, with everything you have learned.|

In he went again!

This time, he knew where her dream’s rhythm stumbled, and he slipped in through the stumble. He knew which eyes in her garden were sleepiest, and he walked past those. He knew exactly how her gaze rooted, and he kept himself perfectly empty of anything it could hold.

|Branch 2: Control of her existence: 68%. Time: 31 minutes.|

Again he went in.

|Branch 3: You know where her Regard gathers before it strikes. Control: 74%. Time: 19 minutes.|

|Branch 4: You enter through the memory of her daughter, where her guard is softest. Control: 81%. Time: 11 minutes.|

|Branch 5: You reach her existence before she wakes. Control: 86%. Time: 6 minutes.|

|Branch 6: You move through the reopened wound, where her Immensity is thinnest. Control: 90%. Time: 2 minutes.|

|Branch 7: Her dream remembers you as its own before you have finished arriving. Control: 95%. Time: 40 seconds.|

|Branch 8: Control: 99%. Time: 3 seconds.|

Each time he went in, it was easier. Each time, her existence felt more familiar, until he knew every root and every eye and every frightened corner of her as well as he knew the shape of his own hand. The garden that had clenched like a fist against him in the first branch now barely had time to notice he had come.

|Branch 9 begins.|

He went in one last time.

He moved through the rhythm of her dream as smoothly as breath. Past the sleepiest eyes he slipped, in through the memory of Minerva and down through the open wound, and he was everywhere in her before any part of her could gather itself to resist.

|Branch 9: Control of her existence: 100%.|

|Time: one nanosecond.|

...!

In the glass, THE Verdant Regard sat beneath her frozen plum tree, perfectly still.

Then she raised one hand.

Someone else had chosen it. It moved slowly, gracefuly, lifting into the falling snow, and every tree in her orchard leaned toward it at once. She lifted her head, and her eyes opened, and the green was gone.

They were gold, shining and pupilless, from edge to edge.

|Quantum Dream 5 has ended.|

...!

Noah opened his eyes on his throne in the Undersnow.

He moved at once!

He sent his Dream and his existence out into the snow exactly as he had in the dream, every flake carrying a little of him across the Keepers’ frozen Legacy, over the gardens and the halls, to a frozen orchard where an injured Ancient sat beneath a black plum tree with her hand pressed to her chest.

|You find THE Verdant Regard.|

|You enter her dream.|

Smoothly as breath, he moved through its rhythm, past the sleepiest eyes, in through the memory of Minerva, down through the open wound, exactly as he had nine times before.

|Control of her existence: 100%.|

|Time: one nanosecond.|

|THE Verdant Regard, Ancient Immense One, is yours.|

HUUM!

It felt like stepping into an enormous cloak that had been made for someone else and somehow fit him perfectly.

The weight of her came over him all at once. Ages of existence, heavier than anything he had ever carried. Her Immensity spread out around him like a vast green mantle, and the orchard leaned toward him, every frozen tree, as it had always leaned toward her. He could feel her Regard waiting under his will like a hound waiting for a command, the roots of ownership in a thousand things she had looked at across the Ages, all of them his to pull on now.

She was hurt. He could feel that too. The open wound in her chest ached with a slow, deep pain, and her Immensity was still thin and torn in places from Kir One’s blow. Whole, she would have been far beyond him.

Hurt, she was within reach, and he had reached.

Somewhere deep inside, very small, the real Verdant Regard was still there. He could feel her, trapped and silent, like a bird beating its wings inside a closed fist. She knew, because she had felt the nanosecond. There was simply nothing she could do about it!

HUUM!

|You have taken control of an injured Ancient Immense One.|

|Assimilation Rate: 2% to 2.1%.|

...!

Noah sat inside her for a moment, breathing her breath, looking out through her eyes at the snow falling over her ruined spring.

Then, carefully, he let the gold fade from her eyes, and the green came back, wide and calm and exactly as it had always been.

Just in time.

Behind him, the air of the orchard flickered.

Space parted like a curtain being drawn aside, and a figure stepped through it as casually as a man walking into his own kitchen. A shroud of Causes hung around him like a long dark cloak, murmuring softly with every vigil he had ever kept, and his eyes, open through all of his existence, were bright with easy amusement.

"Man," said THE SLEEPLESS FIEND, "that Little Riven is something else."

He strolled across the frozen grass toward the plum tree, snow crunching under his feet, and looked down at her with a smile.

"But how goes your healing?" he asked. "You could let me help you, you know. Those titanic things would take some time even for me."

...!

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND had appeared!