Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5752

Chapter 5752: A Stranger! I

The chase had scattered them.

Across the two sundered halves of the Dimensional Provenance Train, the gathered gazes had broken formation and thrown themselves into the cracks of existence after the ghost who had killed one of their own.

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND, THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, THE CACKLING BUTCHER, all of them gone into the dark, howling and blazing after what remained of Vakochev, chasing a Fallen Hero back into the wound he had vanished through!

An Immense One had been slain! Every one of them wanted to be the hand that made certain it did not happen twice.

So the region emptied.

Noah watched it empty from the far rim, his masked eye hanging quiet in the falling snow. Where the sky had been crowded with the eyes of monsters, now there were only a few, and then fewer, gazes flickering out and vanishing into the deep dark, each one gone on its own hunt or its own retreat from the cold that had begun to fall.

While one of his bodies stood at the threshold of the Atlas Elsedimension of shattered time, ready to begin the search for something, this body, this masked dreaming eye, simply watched the aftermath of a thing that should never have been possible.

He watched Calliope.

Down in the wreckage of the Cluster, the Writer of Mythos sat in the ruin of her own spent existence, and she was cold. The fascination had gone out of her, worn down by the snow and the blood she had lost.

She lifted an ink-stained hand and wrote a single flowing line upon the air, and out of it unfolded a fur coat, thick and warm, that wrapped itself around her thin shoulders. She pulled it close and huddled down into it against the chill. Even she, who had just written the death of an architect, sat shivering like anyone else, wrapped in a coat she had written for herself!

In the distance, THE Creature still stood.

The titanic King had endured the storm and the suppression and the fall of the Overseeing One, and he remained, a silent mountain, his obsidian flames guttering low against the cold!

But he did not stay long. Slowly he turned, gathered the tatters of his conquered army and began to retreat slowly, watching in the corner of his eyes.

Adrastia, The Sealed One, The Infinity Eater...many seemingly sensed the sudden change and began pulling back slowly, as if they were being cautious first to see what else would happen!

And above it all, Noah looked up.

He turned his gaze toward the place where the corpse of the slain Immense One hung in the churning obsidian foam, and he strained his infinite sight upon it, and he could not see it!

Not truly. Not even now. The Overseeing One was dead, snuffed out, his Trueness put out by a fire-wrapped fist, and still the corpse sat past the reach of Noah’s eye, a wrongness in the foam, a shape his sight slid off of and could not hold, there only as a pressure and an absence and a low buzz in the weavings around it.

And that, more than anything, made him think about what an Immense One truly was.

He had watched a battle between titans, and he had seen almost none of it. His gaze was Infinite now. His sight was a dream with no far wall. And still, when Vakochev and the Immense Ones had truly clashed, they had simply left the reach of the perceivable behind.

He had caught fragments. Slivers torn out of a chaos too big to hold. An arm through a curtain. The sound of a jaw breaking. A coffin drifting through storms of Source. He had seen what their blows left behind and never the blows themselves. He had watched Vakochev seem to close his hands on a throat and seem to snap a neck, and even that, even the killing, had come to him in broken pieces, like a man trying to watch lightning by the shape of the burnt ground it left behnd.

That was what an Immense One was!

What did it mean when a mind that possessed hundreds of attributes could not even form a complete image of a dead lifeform? Was the gap between a Provenance Lifeform and an Immense One merely a count of numbers, or was it a gap of category so profound that standard perception broke upon contact with their physical remains?

Their power did not just beat his. It beat his ability to see it happen! They fought at a height where sight itself gave out, where even a being of Infinite dreaming caught only the wreckage after, because the true shape of their war was simply too vast and too high to be held by any eye below their own. He had spent this whole stretch thinking of himself as something grand, an author sitting unseen among them, steering their stories from the dark, and he was.

But he had just been reminded, hard, of the gulf that still lay between a masked watcher at the rim and the beings whose battle he could not even watch.

The Overseeing One was dead, and Noah still could not see the corpse! A dead Immense One was more than his living sight could hold. What did that say about the ones still breathing? About THE SLEEPLESS FIEND, whose brightness he had barely dared to look at? About the gazes chasing Vakochev through the dark right now?

He had watched one of them die, and he had not really seen the death, and he could not really see the body, and if he ever meant to stand against such beings instead of just hiding from them, he had a very long road left to walk.

But even as that settled into him, he felt something else.

Existence was buzzing around the corpse he could not see!

The weavings near the dead architect were stirring. Gathering. Trembling, as though the death were not an ending but the start of something, as though somethng were about to come out of the ruin of a fallen Immense One that had not yet shown its face.

So Noah did the thing he was best at.

He watched. Masked, quiet, unseen, a patient eye at the rim of an emptying battlefield, snow falling silent across his dreaming form, he fixed his gaze on the buzzing weavings around a corpse he could not perceive, and he waited to see what would rise from the death of an Immense One!

The battlefield was somewhat empty now, and the snow kept falling.

Noah looked out over the ruin of a thing that should never have happened as he watched it!

And then the cold began to move.

It did not fall on the corpse like how the snow fell on everything else, soft and scattered. It gathered. Across the whole vast region the descending cold drew together, thickening, condensing, and it began to flow toward the dead architect in rivers, great pale currents of it pouring in from every direction, rushing into the corpse and vanshing inside it!

Noah watched the white streams converge and drain into the thing he could not see, and a deep wrongness crawled through his dreaming existence, because a corpse should not drink. A death should not pull the cold into itself like a mouth pulling at water. A dead thing should lie still!

This one drank, and drank, and drank!

The cold poured into the unperceivable corpse for a long moment, more and more of it, concentrations that would have flattened lesser existences gathering into a single dead point. And Noah, watching, felt something begin that he had no name for, a pressure building where an ending should have been, a held breath that would not release.

Then, where a death had been, a life bloomed!

Something formed from the corpse. Something titanic!

Noah strained his infinite gaze upon it, poured his whole definition of endless sight into the single act of looking, and even so he could barely perceive the thing that rose. It came up out of the drinking corpse slow and vast, a shape of blue-white cold and jagged rime, humanoid and utterly wrong, its edges never resolving, its features refusing to hold under his sight!

Where its eyes should have been, there were only two points of pale ice, cold and depthless. It moved with a terrible unhurried grace, a thing in no hurry at all, a thing with all the time in Existence.

|An unfathomable event has occurred. A life has bloomed from the death of an Immense One.|

|The region is being reclassified. Existence here is being overwritten by an unknown weaving.|

|A frozen growth has taken root: dormant Observable Existences and Dimensions are forming within it, held still and cold.|

|This is beyond current understanding. The nature of the emerged existence cannot be perceived or measured...|

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