Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5858

Chapter 5858: Unquestionable! I

<THE Heart That Dreams in Every Color>

Emotive’s eyes kept going back to him.

She tried looking at the snow drifting through the broken roof of the Heart. At the dead chains hanging in the dark. At the splintered white throne. Every time, her gaze slid right back to him, as if he were the only grand thing left in existence.

Noah sat on the fractured throne with his chin resting on two fingers. Frost lined the left side of his jaw. A streak of snow-white ran through his hair. When he breathed out, his breath fell as snow, and around his body, his seas of blue-gold cloud turned slow and heavy, event horizons blinking open and shut along his forearms.

He looked tired and not!

Her chest was overflowwing!

That was the trouble with being THE Heart That Dreams in Every Color. Other lifeforms felt one thing, maybe two. She felt everything at once, all the time, and right now every single feeling she had was pointed straight at him. Pride, hot as a forge. Fear, thin and sharp underneath it. Joy so loud it made her existence ache. And under all of it, something enormous she had no name for.

He had plunged his hand into her chest!

The Caretaker of the Long Night, the woman they had come all this way to free, the woman every one of them had watched him walk toward! And he had reached straight through her ribs of frost, turned a key in her heart, and taken her weavings and her throne!

Holy shit!

She had felt it happen from the inside. She felt everything he felt, louder than anyone, and when his hand closed on that seat, there had been nothing in him but calm, clear certainty. Like a man setting a stone exactly where it belonged.

Her Master was more capable than she had ever let herself expect!

And others had felt it too.

Ruination stood at the edge of the shallow seas with her circlet dimmed, recording, always recording, and under the steady scratch of her loyalty, Emotive could feel awe pressed flat and tidy.

THE Infiniverse filled half the chamber, vast and quiet, and her heart rolled like a tide, proud.

Ul’moreth stood near the wall with his restored hair blazing obsidian and gold, and his heart pulsing. A teacher’s pride, and a teacher’s unease. He had watched his student do something beyond any lesson a teacher would give.

And up in the ruined dome, the Unanimous Frost hung frozen, its sixteen voices screaming in confusion.

Good!

She spoke before she had quite decided to.

"May I...ask you something?"

Noah’s pupil-less gold eyes moved to her.

"Why did you do it?" Her voice came out soft and even, though her hair flashed gold, violet, red, white, faster than she could stop it. "Every one of us walked down here believing we were there to save her. I believed it. She believed it. The Curator believed it, which I suspect was rather the point."

She tilted her head, a small smile at the corner of her mouth.

"And then you reached through her ribs and took her whole fucking throne. I’m not complaining. I would simply... like to know how you think."

For a moment, he only looked at her.

Then he smiled!

HUUM!

The moment he did, his grand authority moved. His seas of blue-gold turned all at once around his body. The frost on his jaw glittered. And far below them, so deep she felt it in her teeth, the whole flow of THE Long Night through his charge leaned when he leaned, like a river following its master.

Her knees went weak!

"Existence always has countless choices," Noah said quietly. "But few of them are guaranteed. And fewer still are right."

He lifted one hand, palm up, and looked at it.

"When I came down here, I could see every path from where I stood. Every branch. Every turning. All of it laid out at once, like the lines on this palm."

"In most of them, I saved her. That was the obvious move. The heroic one. The one he wanted me to make." 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

"And the others? We fight the Frost head-on, and it has no keystone, and it grinds us down while the Contingency eats the floor out from under us. We run, and the rift is sealed. We wait, and he wins by waiting. Every road was closed."