Noah’s Dream pulsed as he looked up at the baleful aurora, and he knew that things were not over.
A moment later, the aurora began to move. Its haze pulled together from every corner of the sky and gathered over the Legacy into a single point of dark light, and the point split into a long, radiant rift of obsidian that hummed with a note so deep that every Dimension below shivered!
Something was coming through!
A tusk came first, white as milk and longer than a river, then three more. A head followed, then a body, and it was an elephant, so vast that the rift stretched around it like a mouth around a pearl. Its hide looked carved from white obsidian, pale and glossy at once, with dark veins glittering under the surface. Two huge wings unfolded from its back, black and shining, and when they beat, clouds rolled out across the sky. It floated on a bed of soft cloud, and rain fell from its trunk in thin silver threads.
On its back stood a pavilion with slender pale pillars, a curved roof, and dark silk curtains tied back, and three figures sat inside it!
|THE Airavata of the Churned Heavens.|
|Ancient Immensity: Immensity of Bearing.|
|It carries whatever it is told to carry, and nothing it carries can be made to fall.|
|Its four tusks each call a different kind of rain. Its wings make clouds of their own filled with Immensity|
Noah barely read it, because something behind the elephant had made his Dream flinch.
|Your Dream senses an Immensity past Ancient.|
Past Ancient!
He looked at the pavilion, and the three figures looked back.
A woman sat at the front, and boundless Immensity swirled around her like a slow storm of Dimensions. She wore a white wool gown pinned at both shoulders with gold brooches, its hem edged with a gold pattern of squares, and a deep blue cloak draped from one shoulder and stitched with tiny constellations. Gold cords laced her sandals up to her knees, and a thin gold crown sat in her dark hair. She leaned back in her seat as if the whole sky were her sitting room, and she was terrifyingly great!
Two men sat behind her. One was tall and pale-haired, with a face like a closed door. The other was lean and dark-haired, with eyes like polished coins. Both gazed down with a cold, grand stillness, and both felt lesser than the woman, yet when Noah looked at them, he felt as if he were looking at something too big to put a name on.
He was looking at...
|Unfathomable Immensity.|
|Profundity: Unfathomable.|
|True Keystone Sight cannot find a keystone.|
|Your Dream cannot read how deep it goes. ?????|
|The woman at the front is greater than the other two. ?????|
...!
Below him, the Council of Lucy’s Legacy rose!
Moriarty and the Thinker led them, and more than a hundred Immensities followed in one long rush, Established and Ancient together, their power gatherd into a storm that rolled up into the sky. They stopped above Noah and between him and the elephant, and they gazed up at the newcomers while the great winged elephant floated over them all and looked down.
One of the men stood!
It was the tall one. He rose from the pavilion into the air, and the sky seemed to lean toward him. He looked at everyone below as if they were dust on a table, and he spoke in a thick, rolling accent.
|"All of you stand before the grace of THE Followers of Infinite Existence, of THE King of Countless Expanses, and of THE Legacy Maker. You are honored by our presence alone, as..."|
The woman waved a hand, her eyes still on the sky.
"Alright, alright. None of that."
The Unfathomable Immensity gathering behind her stopped as if someone had laid a hand on its chest, and the tall man closed his mouth.
"Sorry," she said to the sky, with a small shrug. "He loves speeches. Its been a while..."
She rose and stepped to the edge of the pavilion with one hand on a pillar. Her cloak stirred, the storm of Dimensions around her bowed, and she grinned down at a hundred Immense Ones as if they were old friends who had arrived early.
|"Hello to those below. I am Vilenova, and I come from big and high place...yada yada yada...out of the kindness of THE King of Countless Expanses, he chose not to destroy the talent who is spreading across existence and trying to replace existence itself."|
|"He understands lifeforms. He knows you might feel stifled. You might feel defiant. You might even disobey, and it would be a shame when you do, because then he must collapse everything after."|
|"So we were sent to make an introduction. To let it be known that this Legacy, and other regions of existence, even when the Narrative of THE Long Night falls over them, can also fall under the rule of THE King of Countless Expanses."|
Her eyes passed over the Council and found Noah as if she had known where he was from the start.
|"So. The talented one who made our King make a move... you wanna show yourself?"|
...!
She said it lightly. Noah looked up at her calmly!
Moriarty floated forward, grim, and spoke before anyone else could!
"There is nobody like that here," he said. "You must be mistaken..."
While he spoke, Noah rose.
He went up slowly through the Council, and they parted for him in silence. Golden-blue brilliance burned around his body, with the thin film of Shinjitsu glimmering close against his skin, and every eye in the sky turned his way! Moriarty and the others watched him with somber eyes. The two men behind Vilenova looked on coldly. Vilenova only smiled, calm and patient, like someone watching a thing she had expected to see.
Noah came to a stop in the air, opposite the winged elephant, and met her gaze.
Vilenova nodded, and her smile turned thin and amused.
"The would-be king, setting his sights on things too grand," she said. "Come. We need to have a talk, to make sure our King’s favor is not a wasted one."

|You have entered a Parallel Quantum Dimensionality of Existence.|
|Here, every outcome that could happen sits beside every other, and each one looks like glass.|
|You are standing in one probability. It has not happened yet, and it could.|
|Beings of enough Profundity can pull others into this place and show them what could be.|
|You cannot be harmed by what you see here. You can only be shown.|
...!


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