Chapter 5997: Evolution? II

THE Schema!

Was this the flow of information from the surrounding Existence that had been organized and presented to him and Gular and any others in this place?

He shook his head and thought about the given Pursuit of Existence.

Three conditions, and only one of them was hunting.

The second condition was stranger. What counted as exceeding himself? A Branch climbing? A Narrative growing on Xerion? Something opening that had been closed?

The third was unique.

Then there was the clause about company. The pig had probably counted for less than it should have, split between two, and the plan Gular had laid out, one to hold and one to strike, was a plan this place taxed.

Basically, moving with others was safer, but reduced the adversity and the boons one could make.

He thought a bit more as he returned his thoughts to his surroundings.

THE Schema, he theorized as he couldn’t truly feel any gaze, and with his experience with Ruination and THE Infiniverse...THE Schema felt like it was a framework laid over this whole place that processed information for tbe lifeforms here. But it seemed to have a purpose as it could affect existence since it had given an Introductory Narrative of Existence, and now a Pursuit of Existence.

And based on what he saw, the purpose behind both things seemed to be...Acclimation and growing stronger. So why...would the existence of THE Central Mountain want things within it to grow stronger?

It was a question with no answer!

Beside the crater, Gular had gone very still. His pale gold eyes were fixed on Noah, and the eyes along his knuckles were open too, all of them.

"THE Schema..." Gular said slowly.

Noah was about to turn to this being when something inside him moved.

It was the seed in his chest. The small brown-gold Quintessara of Existence that existence had given him freely, quiet and rooted near the center of him since the Carcosa, was pulsing. It pulsed once, then again, stronger, and then in time with the beat under everything!

|The Quintessara of Existence within you has felt boundless giving into a pivotal part of existence.|

|The second Vein is opening.|

HUUM!

Every mote of gold hanging in the beams dropped at once!

His whole existence pulsed with a glory he had never felt before, and deep inside him, from the place where the seed had always waited, something vast began to rise slowly!

He had not expected his giving to THE Central Mountain to trigger a change in his Quintessara!

The process began slowly as he was about to reply to Gular to discuss THE Schema and see if this being held any additional information when at such a time, his existence buzzed as he looked up!

He had to look up!

A pulse came through the air from above, and everything slowed!

The wave came down from somewhere far above the canopy, blue and white and enormous, so wide that its edges ran past the limit of his sense in every direction at once. It was a different kind of wave from any he had seen. The pig’s had been gold, quick and sharp. Gular’s came in flickers, and his own spread blue-gold from every step. All of them moved across existence.

This one moved through it.

It came down through the canopy and the trunks and the ground beneath his feet and kept going, into the seas.

Behind it came more, smaller waves, dozens of them, each a deep blue ring of its own, layering until the whole sky above the canopy was a slow storm of them. Even the least of them reached deeper than anything on the forest floor!

How large did a thing have to be to move existence that far?

A few seconds later, the ground began to tremble. It was a low vibration, steady and growing, coming up through his feet and into his knees. Overhead, something cracked, and the canopy split open.

The great black-glass trees bent apart, trunk after trunk, leaning away from one another with a long, grinding groan, and golden light came pouring down through the widening gap in a flood. Noah narrowed his eyes against it. Trees that size bent for one reason only. They had parted to let something through.

It swam into the gap far above them, and it kept coming.

It was... a whale. When its head passed over the gap, its body was still coming, and still coming, a long white shape sliding across the golden sky. Its scales were white jade, each one as wide as a field and edged with soft blue light, and clouds gathered along its back as it swam.

Its head was the grandest part. Two long whiskers drifted from its jaw, curling slowly through the air, and from its brow rose a pair of branching horns, pale blue and shining.

Its fins spread wide to either side, thin and broad and edged with light, so wide they were wings, and beneath its belly white clouds rolled and gathered. It swam on them across the sky, in the one place Gular had told him never to go, and nothing came to take it.

It turned its head. Its eyes were blue all the way through, deep and clear and very cold, with no pupils in them at all. They came down through the gap in the canopy and found Noah and Gular standing in the broken gold beside the crater.

WAA!

Inside every trunk around the clearing, the constellations stopped turning. The gold dust hung still in the flood of light. Even Noah’s giving faltered, the warm flow through the soles of his feet thinning to a thread under that gaze.

It looked at them for a moment, and it weighed them at the size of two small insects on a leaf.

Noah’s heart began to beat faster. He had stood in front of many powerful lifeforms, in the snow of the Carcosa with a whole Legion on the slope, and in the temple of THE Primordial Gu of Provenance with thousands of eyes on him, and his heart had stayed slow through all of it. Now it was pounding with a sense of fervor and excitement, through every steady breath he took!

He set his giving flowing again, on purpose, under the eyes of the thing. It was a small act, and it was entirely his.

Then he looked at the whale calmly, a range he had yet to cross, and measured it. Gular’s brilliance had been the brightest thing he had felt in this place. The whale’s was ten times that, then twenty, and he reached fifty and stopped counting, because the number had stopped meaning anything. Its pulse filled his whole sense of the sky.

It was vast, and it was above him, though both of those were only true for now.

The place spoke again. Well, THE Schema spoke again.

|You have glimpsed the Narrative of an Essara 3 Abomination, leading its followers.|

|It has glimpsed you, and deemed you too weak and feeble for its attention. Your Narrative briefly interested it.|

...!

Essara 3!

Two whole designations above the three of them, the pig included, and it had looked down and judged them beneath its attention!

Then the rest came. Behind the great whale, through the gap in the canopy, the smaller ones were swimming, each the length of a hill instead of a range, white and blue, with the same long whiskers and the same wide fins, riding the same rolling clouds. They followed the great one in a long, slow line, and as Noah looked at each one, a tag rose over it.

|Essara 2 Abomination.|

|Essara 2 Abomination.|

|Essara 1 Abomination.|

|Essara 2 Abomination.|

|Essara 1 Abomination.|

On and on they went. He counted thirty-eight followers, twenty-two tagged Essara 2 and sixteen tagged Essara 1, and under the Pulse every one of them was bright. Even the sixteen at his own designation dwarfed the pig that had broken eleven of his walls with one cry.

They kept their eyes ahead. A few turned one blue eye toward the forest floor in passing and turned it away again. The last of them was the smallest, an Essara 1 trailing a little behind the line, and it kept its eye on the crater a breath longer than any of the others had before it hurried on after its kin.

He stood in the broken gold and looked up at them, and the true nature of this place opened in front of him.

Kingship stayed outside the door. Out there, Gular and other Immense Ones were grand and illustrious. Out there, Noah was grand and illustrious. In here, they were two small things on a forest floor, at the very bottom of a ladder whose top lay beyond his sight.

The designations went up from one. How far? Three, at least. Higher than three? Almost certainly. And what swam in the skies above those?

The whale had passed them by because they were beneath its notice, and for that reason alone. Their scent was masked, so its nose had probably told it nothing. When the mask lifted, every hunter in this forest that hunted by scent would know exactly where they stood.

It was a place full of unknowns. Very few beings in existence understood it, and all of them had walked in at the bottom, whatever they had been outside.

And yet his heart, still pounding, was pounding for a second reason too.

Everything here pointed toward THE Mountain at the Center of Everything. The beasts were returned to it. The crystals came up from the seas beneath it. Every wave he had felt ran back toward the same spine that held every region in its place. If there were answers anywhere about THE Mountain, about the Doorway, about what the Kings had been reaching for all this Cycle, they were here.

He was at the bottom of the ladder. Okay! Then every rung above him was still waiting!

And one day, that whale would look down through a gap in the canopy and find something beneath it worth looking at. He meant to make certain of it. Noah smiled up at the passing procession, and his eyes shone.

The last of the smaller whales slid across the gap and was gone, and the trembling in the ground eased. Overhead, the great trees bent back toward one another with the same long, grinding groan, closing the canopy trunk by trunk, and the flood of golden light narrowed to beams again. Then the beams thinned.

Darkness came back over the forest floor. Inside the trunks, the constellations took up their slow turning, and the gold dust began, very gently, to fall.

Gular was still looking up. He stood at the edge of the crater with his head tilted back and his crystal forgotten in his fingers, and slowly, he smacked his lips.

"Almost," he said softly. "I almost sensed beginnings ending there for a moment. Almost..."

Noah barely heard him.

The warmth in his chest had now become heat. It spread outward from the seed, deeper and hotter with every breath, and inside him, the Quintessara of Existence began to grow!