Chapter 5483: Pantheon! I

Ryaenara’s eyes shone, and she nodded.

"For the next minute, my Dimension is open."

HUUM!

In the next moment, the air split. The Dora Shath’yar returned first, nine bronze Daughters landing in loose formation, spears in hand, black-hole eyes sweeping the ancient temples. With them came THE Creature, obsidian flames billowing out over the stellar lakes as he looked around the hidden Dimension the way he looked at everything. Slowly!

A moment later, behind Noah, three more figures appeared. THE Infiniverse in her cerulean-threaded dress. Amser Modred, wrapped in his purple light. And Emotive.

Emotive came close to Noah immediately, eyes shining with their manic light as she catalogued every terrifying existence present, and when her gaze landed on THE Creature she lit up entirely. She hugged Noah’s arm with both of hers and waved at THE Creature over it, enthusiastic as a girl greeting an old classmate.

THE Creature regarded her for a moment.

"Hm," he said.

Ryaenara, meanwhile, was studying Emotive and THE Infiniverse with narrowed, shining eyes, her gaze pressing at them like fingers testing fabric. Two True Lifeforms she had never inspected, standing in her own Dimension. Whatever she found, or failed to find, stayed off her face, though Noah noticed the inspection ran a beat longer on THE Infiniverse than on anyone else.

"It looks like you’ve gathered a decent amount of people," she said at last. "So, one thing I will tell you now, if it wasn’t already clear. Dimensions of Existence are mainly for the True, and the traversal reflects it. When you cross, all of you goes. Your bodies. Your clones. Your consciousness. Everything. There is no leaving a spare self behind to mind the store."

Her voice lost its looseness entirely.

"And traversing across Dimensions and time carries unintended consequences. If we enter a Dimension with very different weavings of time, then a few days for us could be a few weeks here. A few months. Or seconds. We will never know until we come back. So make whatever arrangements you need for anyone you are leaving behind. Make them now."

Her words changed things greatly, and Noah frowned.

All of him would go. Every body, every thread of consciousness, gone from this era for an unknowable span. He ran the consequences at once, and none of them were acceptable. Seo-yeon, newly his daughter, waking in a home whose Aba had vanished. His mother. Henry. Barbatos. And THE Sealed One loose in the present, with every protection Noah provided simply absent, for weeks, or months, or however long the dark decided.

If traversal took everything, then he would bring everything.

Not the manifestation standing behind him. All of her. THE Infiniverse, with the three newborn Observable Existences nested inside her, with Seo-yeon and Amelia and Henry and every last designated human under his crown. The whole home, carried along! Too many unpredictable things could happen in months of absence, and he did not leave his people in unpredictable places.

He communicated it to THE Infiniverse with a light nod. She smiled slightly.

Then Noah walked forward, past all of them, to the open ground before the temples.

Behind him, his wings blazed into visibility, hundreds of eyes turning as THE Pinion Vigil unfolded, and above him THE Estuary Eye opened, the Anchor woven through it humming with Amser’s purple threads. He rolled his neck once, an emperor limbering up for a cast.

"Then I will get started," Noah said, "in fishing for a Dimension of Existence."

Where would it lead? He didn’t know! He had his anchor, set with Amser across time itself. He had his purpose, sharp and settled in his mind. All that remained was the destination, waiting somewhere out in the dark between the seas, in some place even Ryaenara might know nothing about.

He drew back his Intent like a fisherman drawing back a line, and allowed himself one last honest thought before the cast.

He just hoped it wouldn’t be a place overflowing with horrifically powerful True and Primeval Lifeforms.

He floated before everyone on the open grounds, and for a while he said nothing at all.

Then he freely unleashed his Egoic Intent, and the silence changed its nature. The Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian rolled out of him in slow, widening rings, washing over the temples and the stellar lakes, and even the Dora Shath’yar, who had stood in the presence of THE Queen Regnant herself, shifted their footing slightly as it passed over them.

As it spread, Noah closed his eyes, and spoke where only one being could hear him.

"Are you ready?" he asked THE Infiniverse. "It seems the coming traversal will need it. Your True Appendage. If we are crossing Dimensions and Time itself, then the moment to implement it is now, not later."

Her True Appendage. In truth, she had not forged it all this while, and the delay had never been hesitation. The two of them had been talking, quietly and at length, about all the possibilities, and the biggest thing they had decided on was something most beings would never even think to consider.

Pantheon.

A Pantheon was required as a vessel of traversal. That was what Ryaenara had said. An Intent found the road, but a Pantheon carried the traveler down it, the dimension of one’s own records serving as the ship that survived the crossing.

And Noah, of course, had never established a Pantheon.

Whatever structure he could design for a Pantheon, whatever grand architecture of records he could raise, could it ever be as grand as her? Could a built thing compare to a grown one, to an Observable Existence with her own Egoic Intent, holding three First Causes and three newborn Observable Existences and every human under his crown?

The answer was wholly no. It had always been no.

So that was the idea the two of them had circled for all this time. THE Infiniverse herself, as his Pantheon. Not a dimension of dead records, but a living one. His home, his people, his whole grown world, serving as the vessel of his existence.

The idea was bold. The undertaking itself was terrifying, because how could such a thing even be accomplished? A Pantheon was raised from within a being. She was outside him, entire, sovereign, True in her own right. Every framework said the two things could not be joined, and after all their theorizing, the answer they had arrived at was her True Appendage. The anatomy she had delayed all this time, shaped now for exactly this purpose. It was time to put theory into practice, because Noah needed a vessel to steer down whatever road his Intent was about to find!

THE Infiniverse smiled.

She floated forward from among the others, unhurried, and came to rest behind Noah, placing her hand gently against his back. His Intent folded over her like a tide accepting a river, and in the next breath, the two of them disappeared entirely from every gaze present, swallowed inside a rising storm of blue.

The storm turned, and thickened, and told the watchers nothing!

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