An unfathomable distance from THE Braneworld, from THE Infiniverse, from anything Noah had a name for, his body arrived inside a dying Observable Existence, and it was an ocean.
He had sent THE Loyal Reach back to another of his bodies in THE Braneworld, the one that would face the Mesozoic Scale Gilded One descending out of the gold sky. He had thought about that, before he split his attention. Facing a Fifth Scale being might genuinely be a reach for him right now. He knew little about that stage, its power, its mechanics, and the jump in strength between the Fourth Scale and the Fifth was not a small thing even within Vakochev’s careful framework. Beings did not cross it lightly.
But he was not afraid of the Ealdor in the gold sky, and the lack of fear was not bravado. He was a True Lifeform now! He had fused Infinity and THE Primordial Source into one cerulean authority. He carried an Intent that exceeded Primordial. With those three terrible factors stacked beneath him, he should at the very least be able to weather the strikes of a Mesozoic being, and learn, firsthand, exactly what such a creature was made of.
That body would handle the testing.
This body had other work.
This body stood inside a Terminal Observable Existence, and it was drowning.
Seo-yeon’s gaze had gone pained the moment they arrived. She looked around them with that pain in her big eyes, the hurt of a being who could feel the dying of Observable Existences the way others felt cold.
They stood inside a swirling ocean of storms, violet and blue, the colors bleeding into one another across a sea that had no shore and no surface and no floor. Oceans stretched out in every direction, vast beyond the eye, churning with a light that was beautiful and wrong, the beauty of a thing that had been magnificent once and was now only magnificent in its ruin.
Noah closed his eyes and spread his Intent out across the whole of it.
He saw it then, the full shape of the dying Observable Existence. It was a domain of water, mainly, an existence built around the sea, and across it failing Primordial Realms and collapsing Folds burned with oceanic brilliance, guttering toward their ends. Realms that had held cities once. Folds that had held peoples. All of them flickering out, drowning in the slow apocalypse of a foundation that had stopped holding, the whole of it lit violet and blue like the inside of a wave caught at the moment before it breaks forever.
The prompts surfaced as his Intent read the bones of the place.
|You have arrived within a Terminal Observable Existence. Designation: THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch. Status: terminal. All nine of its Prime Causes are failing. Death is advanced and accelerating.|
|Recovered records of THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch, drawn from its Terminal Infinity:|
|This was an anomalous Observable Existence, untouched across its full history by the Gilded Ones, by the Infinite Lifeforms, and by the Source Lifeforms. It grew alone, in the deep dark of the Undefined Gaps, an ocean-domain that no grasping hand had ever reached. And it produced, in its long isolation, something that should not have been possible. A Bounded Lifeform who exceeded every limitation of a Bounded Lifeform. An Emperor.|
|Designation of the Emperor: Thalassarch Nereon, THE Drowned Sovereign. He rose from the deep peoples of the oceanic Folds and climbed past every ceiling his kind was supposed to possess, until he stood at the Fifth Scale, a Mesozoic-equivalent power forged entirely within a Bounded Observable Existence that had never been told such a thing was forbidden. He carried an Akashic Civilizational Intent of the second rarity, and he ruled the whole of it as its protector across an age of peace.|
|Then the Gilded Ones found it.|


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