The seam of light between the two colossi grew blinding.
Emotive stood in the shallow seas with her hands still lifted, a thin thread of every color running from her fingers into the fusion, and watched her Master’s brilliance at work.
He showed no strain at all. Two titans were coming apart and coming together at the center of the ruined Heart, and Noah sat on his cracked white throne with both hands raised and his face calm, as if he were only drawing two curtains closed. Rivers of blue-gold poured from his palms. The frost along his jaw glittered. His eyes, pure gold, stayed on his work the whole time.
Fuck he looked good!
The Unanimous Frost went first.
Its ice began to soften at the edges where his rivers touched it, not melting, but loosening, the sixteen purposes braided inside it slowly unwinding into long pale threads. The cinder-cracked brand of iron, the mirrored plates, the drowned noble’s coat and the miles-long veil of frost: each one came apart into light and drifted toward the center of the seam.
Then the Amalgamation.
Its rings of dreams spun so fast they blurred into solid discs of gold, then broke apart into a storm of glittering motes. The giants of the Chase, the skinless Huntsman, the bone horse, the golden panda seated in its ribs, all of it unfolded into dreams and poured into the seam from the other side.
They met in the middle!
BOOM!
The shock rolled out across the Heart and flattened the shallow seas into a mirror. Snow froze in the air. For one long breath, there was nothing at the center of the chamber but a pillar of light so bright that Emotive had to narrow her eyes, blue-gold and glacial white wound around each other like two serpents climbing the same tree.
Inside the pillar, something took shape!
Shoulders first. Vast, broad shoulders, carved and heavy with muscle like the shoulders of a titan who had carried mountains for sport. Then a chest, deep and plated. Arms like the pillars of a cathedral. A head, crowned with a circlet of frost shaped like branches. Its skin was gold and white at once, smooth and hard as polished ice, every line of muscle sharp as if a master sculptor had chiselled a titan out of a glacier and then gilded it.
Then the wings opened!
HUUUM!
They unfurled from its back with a sound like an ice shelf breaking away from a mountain. Two enormous wings, gold and white, every feather a separate blade of ice, and every feather catching the light of the shallow seas and throwing it back across the Heart in a thousand glittering shards. They spread wider than the Frost had stood tall. They spread until their tips touched the cracked walls of the Heart on either side.
And it opened its eyes!
They were storms. Each eye a swirling blizzard, white snow spinning endlessly inside it, and threaded through the snow, glimmering in and out of sight, dreams. Gold and blue, turning with the storm.
The creature knelt before the throne!
Emotive’s heart was overflowing. Her hair blazed every color at once and refused to settle.
Then the prompts came, and they were not hers. She knew it the moment they appeared. They belonged to her Master. He had simply let her see them.
|Fusion complete.|
|Born: Aurvald, THE Winged Winter That Dreams.|
|Titles: THE Herald of the Kneeling Frost. THE Hand That Walks the Cold.|
|Its kind: a Mutated Established Dream Immense Lifeform.|
...!
|Within it: the Causes of sixteen Immensities, the dreams of every Risen Dream you raised, and an emotion made seamless by THE Heart That Dreams in Every Color.|
|It carries a unique lethality of THE Long Night.|
|What it strikes, the winter remembers. What the winter remembers, it walks toward until it ends.|
|It answers to you, and to the seat you hold.|
An Established Immense Lifeform!
Emotive stared at the winged titan kneeling in the snow, and then at the man on the throne who had made it out of an enemy and a memory, and she felt something in her chest pulse.
Noah lowered his hands.
The rivers of blue-gold drew back into him, and Aurvald stayed kneeling, its storm-eyes fixed on its master. Noah looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at the rest of them.
At Emotive in the shallow seas. At Ruination with her circlet blazing. At THE Infiniverse filling half the chamber in her weaving of realms. At Ul’moreth, standing near the far wall where he had gone to study the Frost, now studying the thing that had come out of it instead.
"To truly place my dreams on existence itself, something that is like existence has to act alongside me."
"Until now, you’ve carried realms inside you by swallowing them. You take a Dimension in, and it lives inside you. I’m asking you to do the opposite. Instead of swallowing existence, stretch yourself out across my Dream. Become the Undefined Gaps. Become the Observable Existences and the Dimensions. Lay yourself over every place my Dream reaches, so that when my Dream settles onto existence, it settles onto something that already knows how to be existence."


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