Chapter 5995: Brilliance!

The giving went down into the ground of THE Center, and the ground took it.

Noah felt it go. His authority sank through the moss and the black soil and the gold the pig had laid, warm and vibrant and without measure, and for one long instant nothing answered. The charge was a few meters away. The one blazing eye was fixed on his chest.

Then something under everything beat once.

He knew it at once. He had felt it before, at the very edges of his greatest giving, a slow, deep beat underneath everything that existed. Every time he had reached for it, it had slipped away from him.

It was not his heart.

It was existence. And this time it was closer, so much closer and so much grander, and it was beating right under his feet!

Everything slowed.

The pig’s charge went on, but it went on at a crawl, the one white wing spread above it, its hooves lifting and falling through the air in long, heavy arcs. The beams of golden light hung still. The constellations inside the black-glass trunks stopped turning.

And Noah felt his senses open outward, wider and wider, until it seemed he could feel the dark itself breathing.

Wonder went through him. Then something warmer came after it, a rising joy he had no name for, a joy that went all the way down into the oldest part of him!

He loved it at once, with the whole of his human heart still pounding in his chest. Everything around him had slowed to a crawl, and he was the only thing moving at the speed of thought. How long could he hold this? How far could he see from inside it? He wanted to find out both!

The pig’s forehoof came down onto the gold in front of him.

And he saw the impact.

He did not see it with his eyes alone. Out of the point where the hoof struck, a wave of golden light went out across the ground, and under the ground, and through the existence beneath it, a ring spreading in every direction at once. It ran under his feet. It passed over him and through him and out the other side, and kept going, out between the trunks and past the edge of his sight and on into the dark.

Everything the wave touched, it moved, a little. The moss. The roots. The trunks. Him.

Everything truly was connected!

The waves showed him where everything was going. The force of the pig’s charge was not only in the pig. It was spread out through the ground under it, through the gold it had laid, through the air it pushed ahead of itself, every part of it rippling outward along paths he could suddenly see.

Noah took a step.

It was a small step, to the left, unhurried. And out of the place where his foot came down, blue-gold waves went out across existence, his own, rippling outward through the ground and the air, meeting the gold ones and passing through them.

The charge went past him.

It went past him by a hand’s width. He had not dodged it. He had simply been somewhere else when it arrived, standing in the flow of existence where the charge was not going to be. As the great golden body slid past, he reached out with his right hand, almost gently, and closed it around the pig’s one remaining tusk.

It was warm. It was heavier than anything he had ever held. Heavier than a million Dimensions.

Around him, he felt the flow of existence, boundless and moving in every direction, and every force within it laid out plain. The pig’s charge, spread through the gold beneath them. His own walls and their endless rebuilding. The weight of the pure existence pressing all around them. The Narratives of the trunks, humming slowly through the black glass. All of it was moving. All of it was going somewhere.

He took hold of it!

He did not take it. He did not make anything new. He simply gathered the forces that were already moving through the pulse, his and the pig’s and the place’s, and carried them where he wanted them to go.

He pulled.

The pig, the abomination...left the ground!

It rose. The whole massive, gold-hided body of it, dense enough to break multiple Unfathomables in a single blow, came up off the gold in a slow, impossible arc, its one wing flailing, its hooves kicking at nothing. Noah’s arm went up with it. The force of its own charge carried it, and the weight of the pure existence carried it, and his walls carried it, all of them flowing through his one hand on the tusk. Up it went, past his head, past the lowest black-glass branches, until it hung above him in the golden beam with its belly to the light.

Then he brought it down.

BOOM!

The ground shook. The gold the pig had laid shattered outward in every direction, and the black soil beneath it heaved, and the constellations in every trunk within a hundred meters jumped in their glass. The sound rolled out through the forest and away into the dark.

Then silence fell.

It was a heavy silence. Nothing called from beyond the trees. Nothing moved. The pig lay on its back in a crater of broken gold, its one wing crushed beneath it, its legs slowly going still, and it stared up at the beams of light above it, dazed.

Noah let go of the tusk.

Gular rose into the air.

He came up off the ground without a sound and floated over the fallen pig, his cracked face calm, the eyes along his knuckles blazing white. In Noah’s slowed sight, the pig’s pulse was laid bare, and far down at the very bottom of it was a small, bright knot, buried deep under everything it had ever grown. Its first instant. Gular’s reach went down into the pig and found it at once, now, with nothing to search past.

He clenched his remaining hand, and the light where his lost hand had been clenched with it.

Half of the pig’s body faded away.

It simply stopped having been. The hind half of the great golden body, the crushed wing, the back legs, all of it was gone, and in its place was only empty ground. The pig’s eyes, still turned up toward the beams of light, dimmed slowly from blazing white to a dull, faraway gold.

Gular came down beside the crater and turned to look at Noah, and his pale gold eyes glinted.

"It may have actually been a good choice to bring you here!" he said.

Noah did not hear him.

He was still giving. His Dreams were still flooding down into the ground of THE Center, and with every moment, the pulse grew stronger in him. Small silent waves were moving all around him now, everywhere, from every trunk and root and stone. A leaf of black glass shifted far overhead, and he felt its wave. Gular breathed, and he felt that one too. Everything around him had become ridiculously clear, layer after layer, until he could not tell where his sight ended and the pulse began.

He kept going.

He gave and gave, and the pulse grew, and the clarity grew with it, and then, all at once, something in his mind and his Dream let go.

It was a release. A coolness spread out from the center of him, through his chest and his arms and his face, quiet and clean, and the whole of THE Center seemed to breathe out with him.

Noah stood in the broken gold with his eyes open, and he spoke to himself, very quietly.

"Giving..." he said.

The small waves went on moving all around him, through the trunks, through the gold, through him.

"Every time I gave, I was touching this, the beat under everything, and every time it gave back, it was the same beat coming home. I never grasped it before because I kept reaching for it, the way you reach for something outside yourself. But it was never outside. I was standing in it the whole time."

HUUM!

He looked down at his own hands.

"This place has never once been asked for anything. Nobody gives here. They come to take, and it strips them of everything they took before they even step through the door. It answered not because I am strong. But because I chose to give where nothing asked me to."

The coolness settled deeper.

"Everything truly is connected. The pig’s charge and my walls and the trunks and the ground. Every force goes somewhere, and every force is carried by all the others. Nobody stands outside it. Not Immense Ones. Not the beasts. Not me." He smiled, very slightly. "I do not have to be the strongest thing in a place. I only have to know where everything is going."

He closed his hands.

|Acclimation has been entirely exceeded.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin extends a new Branch.|

|Branch of THE Quintessential Pulse of Existence: Level 1.|

|Born of: giving to ???? where it had never been asked.|

...!

|Pulse Sense: within your reach, the pulse of all existence lies open to you in every direction at once. Every lifeform, every Narrative, every force that stirs in ground, air or sky is known to you the instant it moves. Darkness cannot blind you. Distance cannot hide from you. Sight is no longer needed.|

|Pulse Step: you walk where existence walks. Each step travels the paths its forces have already carved, and existence moves with you. What strikes at you strikes only the place you were.|

|Pulse Redirection: the myriad forces flowing through the pulse answer to your hand. Your own, your enemy’s, and the vast weight of existence itself can be gathered and turned wherever you will. The charge meant to shatter you becomes the force that lifts your enemy from the ground.|

|Limit: the pulse carries all that moves and creates nothing. Where everything moves, it carries everything.|

|Reach: grows without end as you give.|

...!