Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5917

Chapter 5917: Dominion IV

Noah stood on the narrow terace with the snow falling through him, and he noticed how little he felt.

Before, standing beneath something like Brunhild Varr, there would have been a hundred small pressures in him: gaps measured, branches counted, a man’s fear, quiet and constant, telling him how badly this could end.

That fear was still there. He could see it. It simply belonged to someone...smaller.

He looked up at the nine Unfathomables and saw nine very old beings, standing at the corners of a Legacy that belonged to someone else, beneath a sky they had covered over with their own gates. He saw the ranks behind them, the snow, the shape of what would happen next, and what would happen after that.

This was what the other side of the dream was like.

Sandy light began to leak from him!

It rose off his skin and his robe and the slow-turning crown above his head, obsidian and gold together, glitering like crushed glass. It came in clouds, then in long threads of plasma that crackled quietly through the clouds. It poured down the Elsedimension and across the snow and out into the torn sky, and it kept spreading.

In an instant, it covered Gigaparsecs.

Then the sky above him went dark.

Moriarty arrived first, in a rush of shadow, and then the others, more than a hundred Immense Ones of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, appearing around Noah in a ring so thick it blotted out the iron gates overhead. Their Immensities flared, held to a quarter of their strength and still enormous. They stood with their backs to him, shoulder to shoulder, facing the iron sky.

They were protecting him.

Noah looked at their backs.

It was a grand gesture. He could see that. A hundred old beings who had lived through Ages, putting themselves between an Unfathomable and the youngest thing in their Legacy.

He could also see what was underneath it.

They were doing it for themselves, looking at him and seeing a door, the Legacy’s Son, the one who might lead them somewhere past Those Who Remain. What they guarded was a way out they had been hoping for since before he was born.

That door existed only in their hoping. There was only him, and he was something else entirely.

Oh well. Such was existence!

Above them, Brunhild Varr tilted her head and looked down at the ring of Immense Ones, and then through them, at him.

"Is this the current leader of the Legacy?" she asked. Her voice was mild, almost curious. "A bit weak."

Her eyes narrowed. "You wouldn’t happen to be the Legacy’s Son, would you? For all of them to circle you like that?"

Noah took one step.

He was simply beyond the ring, standing on the air in front of Moriarty and the others with his back to them and his face to the iron sky. Eyes on the sky, he raised one hand and moved it once, sideways, as one brushes dust from a table.

The ring of Immense Ones was pushed gently back, every one of them, a dozen paces through the air!

"Does it matter?" Noah said.

His voice was quiet. It reached every corner of the Legacy.

"Names are small things. They are what we call each other so we do not have to look too closely. Leader. Son. First Hand. King. Strip the words away and there is only what stands here, and what stands there." He looked at her, and the gold eye and the obsidian eye were perfectly still. "What matters more is you."

The iron ranks stayed motionless. But some of the Ancients’ eyes flickered.

"You are strong. I can see exactly how strong. Your Immensity is older than most of the Dimensions beneath us. The eight behind you are the same. Any one of you could take a Legacy apart in a single morning and be home before night."

He paused. "And yet all nine of you kneel to someone else. All nine of you carry another’s gate over your existence. All nine of you came here to do another’s will, in another’s name, beneath another’s sky."

He let that settle over the snow.

"Did you never have dreams? Were you never small, once, looking up at something and deciding you would become it? Did you never have aspirations of your own?"

His voice stayed level. It only grew heavier. "No one is born a First Hand. No one is born kneeling. You were someone before the gate closed. I would like to know what became of her."

HUUM!

The sandy light around him exploded outward.

It burst from him in every direction at once, a great slow tide of obsidian and gold, rolling across the Legacy and past it. It wrapped over Elsedimensions and halls and frozen gardens. Over the white Totems and the shut gates in the sky it went. It poured out through the torn veils into the dark beyond, Gigaparsec after Gigaparsec, until the whole vast region around the Legacy drifted in it like a valley drowned in fog, and every grain of that fog was his.

Brunhild watched it come, and harrumphed.

"Dreams," she said. "Aspirations. Yes, I had them. I had them when I was small and foolish and believed existence would hold still long enough for me to reach them."

"You are nine years old," Noah said. His voice was calm and even, and it carried through the fog like a voice reading from a very old book. "It is the end of autumn. Your hands are blistered. Your grandmother is calling you in for supper, and you are pretending not to hear her, because the horseshoe is almost right."