Chapter 5522: Fear and Doubt! II

The storm parted.

It did not part the way storms part for power, shoved aside and resentful! It parted the way crowds part for royalty, currents of raging Infinity and Primordial Source drawing back upon themselves in long reverent curtains, and through the opened sky, descending before the golden island in a slow fall of white light...

Came a dragon.

A pure-white dragon!

Noah and all the others watched her descent, and even here, even wounded and sealed and surrounded, every gaze present was pulled upward and held! She was colossal, her pearl-white scales layered like plates of living moonlight, faint rivers of silver shimmering through them with each beat of her vast wings! Twin horns of translucent ivory spiraled back from her skull, and between them drifted a mane of soft white flame that burned without fuel and without end! Around her titanic limbs, the scars of shattered chains still smoked faintly, crimson burn-lines wrapped like the ghosts of shackles!

And her body radiated pain.

The curse was plain upon her. Terminal weavings guttered through her frame in slow dying threads, the same collapse that hollowed the gray colossus behind the war-host, ages deep and unhealed, and every beat of her wings carried the weight of something that had been hurting for thousands of years.

And yet...she carried tremendous regality.

The pain did not bow her. The curse did not diminish her! She descended like a queen returning to a throne room that had wronged her, her golden eyes sweeping the sealed space with cold command, and the dying light within her burned somehow prouder than the living light of everything arrayed against her!

Noah looked at her with shining eyes.

Was this it? Was this the hopeful dying cluster of Causes he had been waiting for, the one rushing toward them like someone running to a long-awaited door?!

|A conflicting field has appeared. The newcomer’s ambient weavings carry the same architecture of dimensional sovereignty as the Steed of Oblivion, and the two sovereignties do not stack. They contest. Her field has rejected the imposition of the Steed of Oblivion across this region. The suppression is breaking.|

...!

And Noah felt it.

The terrifying strain that had been grinding down on THE Infiniverse eased all at once, the gray pressure peeling back off her realms like a hand releasing a throat, and beside him, THE Infiniverse’s manifestation exhaled as her compressed weavings finally unfurled! The ambient Biomass tick stuttered, and resumed. Noah could breathe easier, his Pantheon flexing against his backbone once more, and the mechanic he had only theorized bloomed proven across the battlefield.

Two Steed-fields...cancelled each other!

His eyes locked onto her, and hers came down to meet him.

And Noah felt a variety of emotions moving in those vast golden pupils! Pain, ancient and banked. Wariness, sharp and counting! Exhaustion deeper than eras, and beneath all of it, running through every ring of those ring-in-ring pupils, one thing pulsed stronger than all the rest.

Profound immensity, and majesty!

It was like looking at something sacred. This was older than power, the gravity of an unbroken line, of something seated by hands that predated every framework he had ever climbed, and those eyes pulsed with immensity and with pure, terrible hope as she looked down at him coldly and asked...

"Are you the one...to fulfill the promise?"

...!

Noah blinked at these words.

What the hell promise?

He had not the faintest idea what this magnificent dying wonder was talking about! But he was wounds deep into the greatest bluff of his existence, and stopping now was not among his options, so he had to continue bullshitting, and at this moment, behind his calm face, his gaze quietly drank her in.

THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard activated.

|Character Sheet: Hvitrmarr, The White Steed. Danger to you: immense in capability, none in disposition. She descends, unbroken, from one of the FIRST Steeds, the original brood whose First Causes were seated PERSONALLY by Those Who Remain. Her architecture is truer than every Steed of the later broods, which is why her Cause fails slower, and why her ambient sovereignty just overruled a creature many times her size. Notable thread: she carries inherited ancestral memories, carvings at the bottom of her Cause that she did not live. Notable thread: her lineage transmits a promise, and its surviving shape reads: what living hands seat, living hands can seat again. Notable thread: ?????|

...!

Noah’s eyes shined brilliantly as the Sheet settled through him.

First lineage! Seated personally by Those Who Remain! And the promise, there it was, what living hands seat, living hands can seat again, a sentence carried across years of chains. He had no idea what fulfilling it truly required.

But he would do whatever it took to survive!

And so, at this time, Noah gathered himself! He reached down into the deepest architecture of everything he was, into the brilliant light of his Infinite Cause, the first Cause, the one woven inseparably through THE Infiniverse herself! And then he emulated further, drawing up the resonance of his own nine Causes that permeated across THE Infiniverse’s endless realms, and even the gathered light of the Causes of the nested Observable Existences within her, generations of living hearts beating inside a living home, all of it channeled upward through his bleeding frame and released through a glorious and calm...

"I AM."

BOOM!

His words released a burst of life very few in all of existence could understand.

It was not power! It was not Intent! It was a burst of living Causes, layered and harmonized and vast, first light upon first light upon first light, unblemished! Uncursed! The radiance of Causes that had been seated by living hands and had never once known terminal weavings, blooming outward through a Dimension where every native Cause had been dying for ages, and it washed across the sealed space like dawn crossing a graveyard!

Hvitrmarr’s golden eyes shined brilliantly!

And behind Lissana...the hateful, bored Steed of Oblivion trembled!

Its great gray head, hung low in chained agony for ages beyond counting, shot up! Its guttering eyes fixed across the distance at the source of that impossible light, and through its mountainous frame, the dying Causes that had forgotten everything but pain...listened!

Noah captured all of this movement!

"I am the one that can fulfill that promise. And yet...these insects behind me are standing in the way."

...!

Lissana’s expression finally changed!

It was slight, a tightening at the eyes, a fractional stillness in a being made of function, but on that cold face it rang like a bell! And behind her, the Serpent’s crimson eyes had gone fully ashen, alongside every other True Lifeform in the formation.

And yet, even as Noah said this, Hvitrmarr’s eyes flashed with cold regality!

There was no gratitude in the look she gave him, and no awe.

Her ring pupils passed over his bleeding, glowing, grandstanding figure as if she could see through everything here, through the bluff and the blood-regalia and the borrowed certainty, and her gaze actually moved from him...to THE Infiniverse, resting on the manifestation beside him with an intensity that made her straighten! And then the White Steed spoke.

"There is no time for this. Let’s go."

...!

White light erupted from her!

It burst outward in a single silent bloom, a sovereignty of pearl and flame folding over the golden island, over Noah and THE Infiniverse, over the sandy platform, over Anaximander and THE Creature, wrapping all of them in white.

And they all disappeared!

—

The sealed space stood suddenly, ringingly empty.

Lissana floated before the vacancy where her task had been, her raised hand still holding an unswung stroke, and her crimson gaze was heavy! Around her, twenty True Lifeforms stared at absence, ashen and silent.

And Ormarr Grimtunge howled!

"NO! No no no NO!" His coils thrashed through the storm as the follower’s every nightmare arrived at once! "GET THEM BACK! SOMEBODY GET THEM BA-"

But behind them all, his howling was drowned out.

For the Steed of Oblivion was still trembling! The gray colossus strained against its screaming chains, its head thrown high for the first time in ages, its guttering eyes fixed on the point in the dark where the impossible light had vanished, and from its mountainous chest, in an ancient voice that had not spoken across ages of walking agony, it began to bellow out!

"Living! Living, and not Cursed! A Steed, not Cursed!"

...!

BOOM!

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