Chapter 5932: Know Your Limits!

In the Maze of Destiny, Noah was being thrown into a wall.

BOOM!

The golden walls of the Maze rang like a struck bell. He slid down them, robe of dreams and nightmares settling around his ankles, obsidian crown still turning calmly above his head, and stood back up, brushing gold dust off his shoulders. One eye gold. One eye obsidian. The thin film of Shinjitsu over his skin, veined black and gold, stayed perfectly smooth.

Across the corridor, Kir One loomed, its many faces turning, one of them still chewing on something, its Ancient Immensity rolling off it in thick waves that made the golden seas beyond the walls slosh.

"Are you alive?" one of the faces asked.

"I am!" Noah said.

"Unfortunate," said another face, and Kir One came at him again.

They had been doing this for some time. Kir One was an excellent sparring partner. It hit very hard, and it had no idea how to hold back, and it seemed to genuinely enjoy the work.

Off in the distance, at the far end of the corridor, the Verdant Regard stood and watched.

Her body, at least. Her eyes open and blank. Her name was gone. Her identity was gone. Only her dream remained, held inside Noah’s, and her body stood where he had left it, watching the spar with no more interest than a statue watches rain.

But Noah’s attention was only partly here.

The rest of him was elsewhere. On a crimson terrace. In a snowy town. In forests across the Gaps. And at the edge of all of it, two pairs of vast silver wings, cutting through the dark toward THE Chrysalis.

Toward here.

He thought about them as Kir One’s fist came down.

Something past Unfathomable, probably. A Shinjitsu his own slid right off. A father on the banner, near enough to the top that a King’s Legion looked small to them. And they were coming to collect someone.

Monsters, honestly. Very pretty, very arrogant monsters!

Kir One’s fist arrived.

And Noah stopped fighting it.

Blocking and dodging both fell away. He let his Shinjitsu settle, still as glass, eight percent and steady, higher now than anything Kir One carried. And he felt the connection. The Maze around him. The golden seas beyond its walls. The Chrysalis beyond the seas. His forests beyond the Chrysalis.

All of it, one woven thing, every part touching every other part, and under all of it, faint and slow, the pulse.

Kir One’s fist was moving with that pulse. Its whole body was. Its Ancient Immensity, its momentum, its many faces, all of it riding the same current as everything else.

He simply went with it.

He put one hand on the fist as it came, not to stop it, but to follow it. He turned, gently, as a leaf turns in a stream.

And the whole weight of an Ancient Immensity, which had been pouring forward, kept pouring forward, exactly where it had been going, except that Noah had already moved aside and his hand was guiding it just slightly around.

Kir One spun.

All of it. Every face, every limb, every ton of Ancient weight, wheeling around Noah’s palm in a full circle like a door on a hinge, and then away, faster than it had come.

BOOM!

It hit the opposite wall of the Maze so hard the golden stone cracked from floor to ceiling.

Noah stood in the center of the corridor, one hand still raised, his gold eye and his obsidian eye perfectly calm, his robe of dreams and nightmares settling slowly around him, the thin film of his Shinjitsu glass-still over his skin, veined with gold and obsidian. Gold dust drifted down through the air like pollen.

Brute strength had played no part in that. His Shinjitsu had, and his own understanding, and nothing else.

He looked, for one long moment, like someone who had sat under a tree for a thousand years and had finally stood up.

As if he had meditated and grasped something as he smashed away Kir One...who had decimated THE Verdant Regard before!

He looked at his hands. Could he now oppress...Ancients?

Somewhere above, on the top of the Maze wall, Lygara and Lifthrasir blinked.

Lygara’s beautiful face tilted on its long insect neck, her tentacles going still. Lifthrasir’s mouth fell slightly open.

Then Lifthrasir clapped.

"Wow!"

...!

Kir One peeled itself out of the cracked wall and turned its many faces toward him.

"Are you...alive?" one of them asked, sounding almost hurt.

"I am." Noah said.

He lowered his hand.

He felt calm. As if a knot he had been carrying in his chest since long ago had quietly undone itself while he was busy looking elsewhere.

Calm. And then calmer.

Was he becoming some kind of sage now?

He shook his head at himself. No. That sounded insufferable. He was the same as he had been!

He just felt more at ease.

As if he finally knew what he wanted. How to get it. How to face whatever existence threw at him next, and the next thing, and the thing after that.

He stretched, arms over his head, joints cracking pleasently, and looked up at Lifthrasir on the wall.

"Oh, by the way," he said. "You’re about to have some very interesting guests."

...!

Lifthrasir’s clapping hands slowed.

"Guests?"

The golden seas beyond the Maze went still.

Then the sky over THE Chrysalis split, and silver poured in, entirely ignoring the Maze that had been set up and meant to confound.

Two pairs of wings first. Vast, bladed, silver, sweeping in across the golden seas for light years, each feather a gleming edge, so wide that the seas themselves seemed to shrink beneath them. Then the twins, stepping down out of the light onto the top of the Maze wall as easily as two women stepping off a carriage.

Phaedra and Thessaly Arcanthe.

They looked around.

At the Maze. At the golden seas. At the cracked wall below and Kir One still standing beside it. At the blank green figure of the Verdant Regard, far down the corridor. At Lygara, coiled at the top of the wall with her beautiful face gone very still.

Their eyes passed over Noah and kept going.

Zero pause. Zero flicker. As if he were a bit of gold dust on the floor of the corridor, not worth the effort of noticing.

Then they turned to Lifthrasir.

"Little sister," Phaedra said.

Lifthrasir stayed silent as her eyes squinted.

"Father has commanded that you be brought back," Thessaly said. "Into the family. Where you belong."

The Maze was very quiet.

Lifthrasir looked at them for a long moment. Something in her face went tired and old.

"No," she said. "I wish to live the rest of my life the way I want."

Her chin lifted. "And I do not particularly care for the progeny of the old man. None of you even know me as there is not an ounce of care between us."

Phaedra’s eyes stayed perfectly steady.

"Then care about your mother," she said. "Our dear stepmother. THE First Gu of Calamity itself."

...!

Lifthrasir’s gaze changed.

The defiance went out of her face, not all at once, but slowly. Something underneath it came up instead. Something younger. Something that had been waiting a very long time to hear that name said aloud.

She closed her eyes.

Then she sighed, and nodded.

"Okay," she said quietly.

...!

The twins said nothing to that. They had expected nothing else.

Lifthrasir turned and looked down at Noah.

He looked back at her, and smiled, and nodded.

"Go," he said. "You can reach me anytime you need me. If you need any help or someone is bullying you, just let me know."

...!

For the first time, the twins looked at him.

Thessaly did, at least. Her silver eyes came down slowly and settled on him, and moved over him, up and down, the dark-and-gold robe, the crown, the mismatched eyes, the dust on his shoulders, measuring him as one measures a dirty stray dog that has wandered into a palace hall.

Her lips parted, as if she were about to say something. A rebuke, maybe. A correction.

Then she shook her head, very slightly, as if even that was beneath the cost of her breath, and looked away.

Instead, she turned to Lygara.

"First Gu of Destiny," Thessaly said, and her voice changed, became formal and ringing, the voice of an envoy delivering a summons.

"All the First Gu are invited. The eldest of every kind of Gu that has ever been, called to gather in one place for the first time in this Cycle."

Lygara’s tentacles stirred.

"Where?" she asked.

"THE Sumeru Elysium," said Thessaly.

The name rang through the Maze.

"Beyond the Source Lands and above the Chrysalis, where THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rises out of the fields of rest. Where the oldest and the first have always gone when existence turns and needs them to decide what kind of turning it will be. Its golden meadows have not been walked by so many Firsts at once since before THE Long Night. They are gathering now. All of them."

She inclined her head, very slightly. "You are...welcomed."

Lygara was quiet for a long moment.

"I will consider it," she said.

"Consider it quickly," said Phaedra.

Then it was time to go.

Lifthrasir came down off the wall, past the twins, to where Lygara coiled at its edge. She stood in front of her for a moment in silence. Then she put her arms around Lygara’s long insect neck, and pressed her face against that beautiful human cheek, and held on.

Lygara’s tentacles came up, slowly, and wrapped around her.

"I will come back," Lifthrasir said, muffled.

"Mmm," said Lygara softly. "Destiny keeps a very good memory. It always brings back what it is fond of."

Lifthrasir laughed and pulled away.

Then she turned and called, and her Kin came.

Kir One stepped away from its cracked wall, faces turning toward her. And out of the shadows at the far end of the Maze came Kir Two, larger and quieter, its own many faces silent and watchful, every eye open. The two of them came to stand on either side of her, one at each shoulder, a pair of Ancient guardians closing ranks around their mistress.

The twins glanced at them and said nothing.

Kir One’s faces turned, one last time, toward Noah.

"Are you...alive?" one of them asked.

"I am," Noah said. "Look after her."

"Mmm," said another face.

Lifthrasir stepped back onto the wall beside her sisters, Kir One and Kir Two at her back.

The twins spread their wings.

Silver light rose around all five of them, and they began to fade, their shapes thinning against the golden sky of the Chrysalis.

And then, as they went, Phaedra turned her head.

She looked down at Noah. Directly at him, for the first time. Her silver eyes held him as the sky holds an inaignificant ant crossing a road.

"A word of advice," she said. Her voice came down from above, cool and calm, with no anger in it at all. Only certainty. "Existence is vast. Some creatures in it should learn their limits. Some should learn who they are fit to stand beside."

The Maze was very still.

"To group yourself with those far too grand for you is a fine way to be crushed when they move. Those who rely on the strength of others have nothing when that strength turns away. In the end, only one thing matters in existence. Individual power. Yours, and no one else’s."

Her eyes narrowed, just slightly.

"Do not reach out to my little sister. Know your limits."

...!

Silver light flared.

And they were gone.

Noah stood in the corridor of the Maze of Destiny and looked at the empty air where they had been.

Then he shook his head.

He was the one who had brought her back in the first fucking place!

He had brought Lifthrasir back himself. If it weren’t for him, there would have been no little sister for anyone to come and collect.

Ah, well.

Such was existence!

Those two thought they stood at the top of everything, looking down. And in a way, they did. But for all their power, they had walked straight through his forests blind to them. They had stepped onto his soil and assumed it was theirs. They had looked at the trees bowing to them and spared not one thought for who had grown the trees.

How everything was connected remained beyond them.

For now.

But damn.

He had to give them this much. As they left, as their attention turned away from guarding themselves and toward the road home, his Shinjitsu had finally slipped past some of their question marks.

|Phaedra Arcanthe.|

|Thessaly Arcanthe.|

|Daughters of THE Dissolved Progenitor|

|Immensity: Excedere Unfathomable Immensity.|

|They stand beyond the Unfathomable.|

|Shinjitsu: estimated above 10%. True rate: ?????|

...!

Noah read it, and let out a long low whistle.

Excedere.

They were arrogant. Unbearably so!

But they had every right to be!

He smiled, and dusted the gold off his shoulders, and looked around the empty corridor.

The cracked wall. The settling dust. Lygara, coiled on the wall above, already thinking about golden meadows. The Verdant Regard’s blank green figure at the far end, still watching nothing at all!