Chapter 5926: Existence III

He turned, and looked back at the crimson sky behind him.

Ruination’s existence. Ten times THE Infiniverse. Built from records and probabilities, growing every moment, holding an entire Legacy.

He looked at it, and something in his chest went very still, and then, almost, he laughed.

At himself.

Ruination. His Kin. His recorder of everything. She had given him every record she had ever kept. Every probability, every simulation, every report, every assessment. She had built an existence inside herself. She had asked him for nothing in return.

And every time he had reached for her, it had been with an instruction.

Report. Assess. Extrapolate. Get started.

In all that time, he had given her nothing for its own sake.

Well.

He reached into her existence.

He came with no task and no direction, and with no need for her to grow faster, extrapolate further, or hold more. He reached into the countless threads of her quantum probabilities, the decillions of branching possibilities she kept and kept and always held on to, and he let his authority flow into them, freely, the same way he had let it flow into the Gaps.

Here, for you, because I can.

|Master?|

|Authority received. No instruction attached.|

|Searching for task parameters.|

|None found.|

...!

A long pause, in which the scrolling of the whole sky seemed to slow.

|...Thank you.|

...!

Then her existence answered!

It began as a surge. The probabilities inside her, every branching thread, every kept possibility, swelled all at once, billowing up through her existence like great slow clouds rising off a warm sea. Immense concentrations of possibility, piling on each other, rolling and rising, so dense that the crimson sky turned bright with them, the scrolling records blurring into rivers of light.

And then, from beneath them, the soil came.

It erupted. Obsidian and gold, rich and glittering, surging up out of the crimson ground of her existence in great waves, the same soil that was spreading across the Gaps, but stranger here, threaded through with fine red writing, as if every grain of it were a record. And out of it, trees rose. These were different from the gold-leafed trees of the Gaps. Crimson trees, glass-barked, their leaves scrolling with lines of text, their roots running down into the decillion probabilities beneath them and drinking. Vines of red light climbed them. Flowers opened along their branches, and inside every flower was a single tiny steady sun.

Across the Legacy, old Immense Ones looked up.

Moriarty stopped pacing.

On a quiet slope, around Theon’s gold-and-black cocoon, a ring of crimson flowers opened all at once, and leaned toward him.

|My existence is changing.|

|The probabilities you gave are taking root. They are not becoming tasks. They are becoming ground.|

|I did not know... I could grow like this.|

...!

Noah watched the crimson forest rise through her sky, and felt the essence coming back from it, from her, from everything he had given to, a second tide on top of the first.

And then something deeper moved in him.

His Shinjitsu pulsed, slow and heavy, like something enormous turning over in its sleep.

|You have given to existence freely, across the Undefined Gaps and within THE Ruined Quantum Existence.|

|Existence has given back.|

|Your Shinjitsu has absorbed what returned.|

|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 5% to 6%.|

|VERITAS, PROVENANCE, PONDUS, OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: True Order III.6 to True Order III.7.|

|Tended Existence continues to spread.|

...!

Six percent.

He had broken down Shards of IT. Ancient Immense Ones. Whole armies of fallen Immense Ones drawn into a black eye.

And the thing that had moved him furthest in a single breath was letting go.

Oh!

One just had to let go!

---

<Aethon Pyrrhaeus>

Something was wrong with the Gaps.

Aethon Pyrrhaeus stood at the edge of the empty hollow where the Legacy had been, his fire banked low, and watched the dark change.

It had started as a smell of wet earth and green things. The last time he had smelled green things, he had still had a face. Then the grey of the Fallow-touched Gaps had begun to darken, and firm, and glitter, and now, light years in every direction, there were forests.

Forests. In the Gaps. Gold-leafed and black-barked, with rivers of light running between them and a hum rising off them that made his flame flicker in perfect stillness.

He had watched existence for a long time. He had seen Dimensions born and Dimensions die. This was the first time he had seen the empty places between them grow trees in seconds.

Behind him, one of the surviving Ancients of the Iron Psalm made a disgusted sound.

His name was Varkhul, and he had been angry since the eye opened. He had lost two-thirds of his command to frozen glass, and now a forest was creeping up to the edge of the Psalm’s position, a dark gold tide of growth unrolling across the dark toward them, branch by branch.

"Enough of this," Varkhul said, and raised his hand.

His Immensity came out of him like a falling cliff, grey and iron-hard, the weight of an Ancient who had held whole Dimensions in his grip. It struck the edge of the forest dead on.

HUUM!

And the forest pushed back!

It came up out of the obsidian soil all at once, a wave of authority, dark gold and black, rising out of every root and every river and every leaf at the same instant. Varkhul’s Immensity had met something nameless to Aethon. It was the forest. The ground. The place itself, answering.

It struck Varkhul full in the chest.

The Ancient Immense One was flung back across the dark like a thrown stone, tumbling end over end through a hundred light years before he caught himself, his grey Immensity scattered and smoking around him.

Where he had struck, the forest had paid for it. The trees at its edge had dimmed. Their gold leaves had gone brown and curled. A long stretch of obsidian soil lay cracked and grey again, the rivers there stilled.

But it had smashed back an Ancient.

Varkhul straightened slowly in the distant dark. He kept his hands down. He only stared ahead at the withered edge of the forest, his face slack with shock, as if a field he had stepped into had stood up and slapped him.

Aethon stared too.

What... the hell... was happening?

He turned his veiled head slowly, taking in the whole of it. The forests stretching off into the dark. The humming. The rivers. The faint, steady pulse of something moving through all of it, a rhythm, like breathing. Like a dreamer breathing.

The Fallow had come through. He had watched it come. Grey and old and full of nightmares, spilling out of a broken door. He had expected it to rot whatever it touched.

Instead, the Gaps had turned into this.

Even the ground was dreaming now. Even the trees carried nightmares in their roots.

Aethon’s pale flame flickered beneath his veil.

What in the iron hell was going on?!

---

<Existential Epigraph: THE Willow Keeper>

What you tend, tends you.

It is slow and quiet. It asks for nothing in return, and for that reason, it takes most people by surprise. But the ground remembers every hand that touched it, and how.

There was once a river valley with a mill at its heart. The miller was the richest man in the valley, and he grew richer every year. He cut the trees along the riverbanks for timber and sold them. He dug out the reeds to widen his millrace. He drained the marshes upstream to plant more wheat. Every bank he touched, he stripped bare, and every bare bank paid him.

Downstream, an old widow lived in a small house by the water. She had nothing to sell and no one to sell it to. So she planted willows. A cutting here, a cutting there, pushed into the mud along her bit of bank, watered by hand in the dry summers, tied up against the winter storms. The willows grew slowly. Their roots went deep. She planted reeds between them, and let the marsh behind her house stay a marsh, and kept a few geese, and asked the river for nothing.

The miller laughed at her. "You will be dead before those trees are worth anything," he said.

She agreed with him, and kept planting.

Forty years went by.

Then came a spring of endless rain. The river rose and rose. Upstream, where the miller had drained the marshes, there was nothing to drink up the water. Along the banks where he had cut the trees, there were no roots to hold the soil. The banks gave way all at once. The flood came down the valley in a single brown wall, and it took the mill, and the millrace, and the miller’s grand house, and the miller’s wife and his three sons, who were asleep upstairs.

It came down to the widow’s house next.

The willows held.

Forty years of roots, woven deep into the bank, held it as a fist holds a rope. The reeds slowed the water. The marsh behind her house drank the flood and swelled and kept it. The river rose to her doorstep, and stopped there, and fell.

In the morning, the miller stood in the mud where his house had been, alone, and looked downstream at a small house on a green bank, its geese paddling calmly in the brown water among the willows.

The widow was gone by then. She had died that winter, in her sleep, warm in her bed, a few months before the rain.

She went to her rest unaware her trees would ever be tested.

They held anyway.

Strip the ground, and it will feed you for a season. Tend it, and it will stand between you and the flood, long after you have forgotten you ever planted anything at all.