Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5933

The dust in the Maze had nearly settled when Noah turned to Lygara, who was still coiled on top of the golden wall with her long insect body wrapped loosely around a turret. Her beautiful face was turned toward the place in the sky where the silver light had gone, and her tentacles moved slowly while she thought about something far away.

“Lygara,” he said, and when her face turned toward him, he asked, “What else do you know about THE Sumeru Elysium?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then uncoiled and came down the wall in one long, slow pour until her face hung level with his. “Less than I would like, and more than most. Very well. Sit, Dreamer.”

Noah sat down cross-legged on the floor of the corridor with his robe pooling around him, while far down the corridor the Verdant Regard’s body watched them both with blank green eyes. Lygara settled across from him and asked, “Tell me first. When you think of existence, what do you see?”

He thought about it before answering, “Dimensions and Observable Existences, with Legacies built on top of them or around them, and the Gaps in between where nothing used to grow. Then THE Chrysalis, where we are, THE Source Lands, THE Infinite Carcosa, and now THE Fallow, all big regions and all far apart.”

“Far apart,” Lygara repeated. “Yes, that is how most see it, as islands in a dark sea with countless empty miles between them.”

Her tentacles drew a scattering of small circles in the gold dust on the floor, and she added, “But that is only what it looks like from the surface.”

Then she drew a line up through the middle of the circles, then another from beneath them, and then dozens more, all rising from one point at the center and branching out until they reached every circle.

“There is a mountain at the center of everything!” she said, and Noah looked down at the drawing as she went on. “THE Mountain at the Center of Everything does not sit in any Dimension or any region, because it sits underneath all of them, above all of them, and in the middle of all of them at once. Some say existence grew outward from it, and some say existence is still growing outward from it and always will.”

She touched the center point and said, “Out of its roots and its slopes and its peak run the Existential Conduits, the deep roads of existence, and every great region you named sits at the end of one or more of them, while every Dimension is fed by one.”

“So if someone could find the Mountain,” Noah said slowly, “they could reach anywhere.”

“If someone could find it, or even perceive it,” Lygara said, “though most cannot, and most live their whole existence without once sensing that it is there, the same as a fish lives its whole life without once wondering about the riverbed.” Her eyes rested on him as she continued, “But those who can perceive the Mountain, even faintly, can follow the Conduits and cross the dark between regions in a breath. They can step from THE Sumeru Elysium to the Chrysalis without passing through anything in between, and back again.”

“Those two,” Noah said, “the twins.”

Lygara tilted her head and answered, “Yes, their road of light may have come down a Conduit, because their father has walked the Mountain, and so have they.”

“And THE Sumeru Elysium?” he asked, and Lygara’s face softened slightly. “It is what grows on the Mountain’s lower slopes, around its feet, where the Conduits first leave it,” she said.

“There are endless feilds there, gold and green, under a sky that never quite sets, with rivers of pure Narrative running through them and Immensity so thick in the air that you breathe it and it breathes you.” She paused and added, “I have been there once, a long time ago.”

He asked what it had been like.