Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5953

Chapter 5953: Immensity and Cults I

Noah let a portion of his consciousness slip loose from the farm and follow the thread. It ran out of the snowing corner of THE Infinite Carcosa and away across existence, thin and bright and very old, one of the strands of his first Infinity that he had once left inside an old friend, and his attention went racing along it through the dark faster than any Conduit.

Behind him, his body stayed where it was, leaning on the hoe in the snow while Lygara’s strands of destiny worked slowly at the great beetle shell overhead.

As he went, he watched the map that only he could see. His own small lights fell away behind him, the farm and the grassland and the scattered sparks of his Dream, and the vast dark shape of THE Undefined Gaps opened up ahead, enormous and hazy and almost entirely unlit. Deep in the middle of that darkness, far from any of the places his authority had ever touched, a single small dot was blinking, and the faint letters beside it read Eckert.

Around the dot, the darkness carried a name of its own, written across a wide stretch of the map in letters the color of old ash. THE Ashfall Reaches, it said, a part of the Gaps that Noah had never heard of and never seen, and his thread ran straight down into the middle of it. He followed it down, and the dot grew larger, and then everything around him changed.

---

He arrived inside a mind. It was small and cramped and smelled faintly of incense and fear, the mentalscape of a Newly Risen Immense One, and most of it had been pushed aside and filled with something else, wide rolling clouds of purple and blue that went on and on in every direction. In the middle of those clouds sat Eckert, lounging back on nothing at all in long blue robes, a handsome dark-haired king with his legs crossed and his eyes changing color every instant, and when he saw Noah arrive, he grinned and nodded.

"Come into my humble abode," Eckert said, spreading his arms at the clouds, "a Newly Risen Immensity that I managed to infect with my unity and domination. There are a lot of things I’d tell you first, but things are a bit sensitive outside this body I’ve taken over."

He leaned forward, still smiling, and tapped the side of his head. "So I’ll share my senses with you. Check this out."

...!

The clouds rolled aside, and Noah felt a body settle around him. It was not his body, but for the moment it moved when he wanted it to move and saw what he wanted it to see, and he understood that Eckert had opened its senses to him completely. He was standing in the air inside the body of a female Immense One, slim and young by the standards of Immensity, and she was not alone.

All around her, hundreds of other Immense Ones floated in a great circular formation, every one of them wrapped in long robes of dark crimson. On the chest of every robe, stitched in black thread, was the same symbol, a mountain turned upside down, its peak pointing downward into nothing. They hung in silence, ring upon ring, all of them facing inward toward the thing at the center of their circle, which was a mountain of its own.

It was an Elsedimension, a whole mountain set apart from the rest of existence and placed here in the dark, and it was burning. Its slopes were red and black and running with something that looked molten, its peak was wrapped in a haze of scorching heat that bent the air for a great distance around it, and every so often a low sound rolled out of its depths that Noah felt in the borrowed bones of the body he was wearing. It smelled of hot volcanic ash and old blood.

---

Back in the clouds of the mentalscape, Eckert was still talking, and Noah listened while he watched. "I got lucky with this one," Eckert said. "She belongs to THE Primevals of Old, which is a pretty average Legacy, nothing special, so I thought I’d nabbed myself a small fish. Then I found out, ridiculously, that she’d been quietly recruited into an even bigger Legacy, a secret one belonging to some unfathomable bigwig, and I got excited, because I thought I’d struck it rich."

He sighed and scratched his chin. "But this secretive Legacy seems a bit cultish, and I’ve been following along for a while now, and after a lot of Narratives have come down from on high, they finally seem ready to carry out whatever ridiculous, nefarious plans they’ve been sitting on. This branch of the cult is doing a summoning ritual, right here, and it’s all crazy, ridiculous stuff, because what the fuck could Immense Ones even be summoning?"

His grin faded a little, and for a moment his changing eyes went still. "It all seemed crazy enough, but then the process started inside that Elsedimension Mountain, and that place began leaking an aura that is shaking even my innocent, kind heart right now."

He waved a hand toward the burning mountain. "So I called you, big guy."

...!

Noah turned the borrowed head slowly and took in the whole of it. The rings around the mountain were enormous, and when he counted them, the numbers were worse than they had looked at first glance. The outermost ring held five hundred Newly Risen Immense Ones, the next held two hundred Established, the next one hundred Ancients, and in the innermost ring, closest to the burning mountain, twenty-five Half-Unfathomables and Unfathomables floated mixed together, their pressure so heavy that the body he was wearing could barely look at them directly.

They were not ordinary beings, any of them. Many had four arms, two tucked into their crimson sleeves and two held open at their sides, and their skin ran in deep colors, blue and black and ash-grey, with gold armlets heavy on their wrists and elaborate crowns set on their heads.

As grsnd as his second Narrative was, he didn’t need to be involved in everything occuring across existence!

|You have come upon a ritual of extreme age.|

|Ritual: THE Rite of Scorched Return.|