Chapter 5993: OINK I

Gular stepped through the curtain first.

It took him without a sound. One moment he was standing in front of it, broad and still, and the next the pulsing horizons had closed over him and he was gone. Noah looked at the place where he had been for exactly as long as it took to breathe once.

Then he stepped through too!

At first there was nothing to feel. Then he was being read. Every possibility in the curtain passed through him at once, countless small horizons opening and closing against his skin, and each one touched something in him and asked a single question!

Whose is this? His walls. His Dreams. His Nightmares. The seed in his chest. The infinity behind all of it. One by one, everything he carried was asked, and one by one, everything answered the same way.

His!

Nothing was taken. Not a wall, not a thread, not one leaf of the Endless Retelling!

And the transition was rapid and quick as he felt a grand heaviness pressing on his body!

He came out the other side standing on soft ground, and Ruination was already working.

|Location: unknown.|

|Records: none.|

|Preliminary analysis: in progress.|

|Preliminary analysis: failed.|

|Preliminary analysis: failed.|

|Preliminary analysis: failed.|

Three failures in a row!

Then he breathed in, and the air was good. It was clean and cool and faintly sweet. Existence was here, pressing gently against his skin, and it was rich, far richer than anywhere he had ever stood. But richness was not the word for it.

It was pure!

Out there, every scrap of existence he had ever touched had been carved and bled and fought over, layered with Narratives and Kings and old wars. Here, nothing had touched it. It was soil before anyone had ever planted in it, and every part of him that had ever given anything leaned toward it at once.

He was standing in a forest. The trunks rose out of the dark on every side, wider than three shell houses, made of a deep black glass, and inside the glass, slowly, constellations were turning, small points of white and blue and pale gold drifting through the black at the speed of something very old and very patient. The roots ran away across the ground in long dark ridges. Far above, the leaves were black glass as well, edged with starlight.

Between the trunks, the dark was complete. And through it, from somewhere so high above that he could not see where it began, fell long, still shafts of golden light.

He tried to look further, and his sight simply stopped. Thirty meters out, perhaps forty, everything ended in a soft blankness, not black and not empty, only unreadable. His Dreams went exactly as far as his eyes and no further. His possibilities, the countless roads he could always see, had thinned to a handful, short and faint, fading a few seconds ahead.

Then...the surroundings spoke to him with waves of information.

It did not come from Ruination. He knew her voice in every prompt she had ever given him, and this was not her. This came from the place itself, from the pure air and the black glass and the golden light, rising out of everything around him at once and settling in front of his eyes!

|You have arrived at ?????.|

|Your Lifeform has been designated as Essara 1 Existence.|

|If you do not build your Existence to a higher designation after 1 month here, your lifeforce will be extinguished and returned to THE Mountain.|

|To ensure a fair chance of survival for your existence, your scent will be masked for 5 days.|

|An introductory Narrative of Existence has been triggered due to a second Essara 1 Existence being near you.|

|A nearby Essara 1 Abomination has been drawn over to aid you in acclimating to the environment of ????.|

...!

What?!

Noah read it again, slowly!

Essara 1 Existence.

Essara.

Noah stared at the word. Outside, an Essara was the very essence of existence itself, a piece of it given shape, with Veins running through it and Powers of Existence waiting along every Vein.

So what was he here? A piece of existence, walking on two legs?

If he was one, then so was everything else in this forest. Every beast in the dark. Did their bodies carry Veins of their own, the same as the seed in his chest? Did they strike with Powers of Existence as easily as they breathed, breaking walls all the way down to nothing, the same as Roxanna had?

If they did, every creature here was born holding what Immense Ones carved existence open to get!

And this place had looked at everything he was, every wall and Dream and the seed in his chest, and given him a number. Essara One. The lowest, by the sound of it!

One month to raise it, or his lifeforce would be pulled out of him and handed back to THE Mountain, the spine that held every region in its place. Not killed. Returned!

Five days with his scent masked. So the things here hunted by scent, and the place had decided to give newcomers a head start before it stopped protecting them. A fair chance. It had used those words! What...was this?

And lastly, an introductory Narrative, triggered by a second Essara 1 Existence near him. He turned his head.

Gular was standing a few paces away, at the edge of one of the golden tree nearby. He had not moved since Noah arrived. His pale gold eyes were fixed on nothing, and Noah understood, watching him, that the same information had just gone through him too.

"Essara 1 Existence," Gular said slowly. "That is what it named me the first time I came, and every time after. Here, nobody keeps the stature they had outside. The place weighs only what you are, and it starts everyone low."

He was quiet for a moment. "But the rest of it is new. Three times I came here alone. It never once triggered anything for me. It never once sent something to help."

"Help..." Noah said.

"Help," Gular agreed, and for the first time since Noah had met him, he did not sound certain of anything. "In this place, that word could mean a great many things."

He lifted one hand, and the eyes along his knuckles opened and turned toward the dark.

"Listen to me, then, while there is time. What is truly yours grows stronger here, and Provenance does very well. Our Narratives will rise the longer we survive here. I have closed the beginnings of 3 beasts in this forest. I reach into a thing, find the first instant it ever was, and close my hand, and then it has never begun. But here, the beasts are...well, ridiculous isnt even the right word, and finding their beginnings takes time. Ten breaths. Twenty, for the large ones."

He looked at Noah. "Your Narrative is defensive, yes? Can it take hits?"

Sixty-seven walls, every one of them his, and three more regenerating every second. Whatever lived here, its power was its own, so the Return and the Abominations would find little to work with. But the Bleeding Nightmare would seed every strike, and he could stand in front of almost anything for a very long time.

"I can take hits." Noah said.

"Then you hold their attention, and I find where they began." Gular closed his hand, gently. "That is how we live through a bit longer...well, we will see."

Noah looked up. The golden light was falling all around them from a height he could not measure, and he followed the nearest tree with his eyes as high as they would go. A few seconds of flight and he would know what was up there.

"I would not fly," Gular said.

Noah lowered his eyes.

"We are not the strongest things here. Not even close. The skies are the most dangerous place in this domain. I lost my first body there before I ever cleared the canopy, and I never saw what took it." His voice was very quiet. "Stay on the ground. Use the five days. What we need to do is acclimate, and obtain Xerion."

"Xerion?"

What was Xerion?

"Xerion," Gular said, "is a unique thing in this place. It is the reason many Kings are down here bleeding. It comes from the..."

Noah’s instinct screamed ay this time!

He felt it a fraction of an instant before anything happened, a pressure so sudden and so enormous that every wall he had folded inward at once without being asked. He turned his head. He saw a flash of gold!

That was all he saw!

BOOM!

Something hit Gular. It hit him so hard that the sound came after, a great flat crack that shook the constellations in every trunk around them, and Gular’s body was simply not there anymore. It was flying backward through the dark, through the edge of a golden tree and out of it, and Noah heard it strike a trunk somewhere beyond the edge of his sight, and then another, and then nothing.

The thing that had hit him stood where Gular had been.

It was a pig.

It was the size of a small hill, and every inch of it was muscle. Its hide was gold, hammered and gleaming, and the muscle beneath it bunched and shifted in thick, brutal cords across its shoulders and down its forelegs. Its tusks were long and pale and very clean. And folded along its back, white and enormous, were wings, feathered wings of a pure, soft white, completely still.

It did not breathe hard. It did not move at all. It stood in the golden light a few meters in front of Noah and looked at him with two small, calm, intelligent eyes, and the whole forest went silent around them.

|Essara 1 Abomination: arrived.|

|Introductory Narrative of Existence: begun.|

Noah did not move.

So this was the help!

The pig tilted its great golden head very slightly, considering him, and opened its mouth.

"OINK."

...!