The seventh increment settled onto his back, and Noah began!
In theory, he understood it pletely. Cast out everything that did not generate from him, empty the house of every borrowed beam, and see what was left. In theory it was clean. It was even elegant!
In practice, he was about to reach into his own existence and tear out everything he had ever been and had been building, and his hands were shaking before he started, and not from the stone.
He started with the one that frightened him least.
The Primordial Source. He had grasped it later, integrated it partially. It was dense and patient inside him and it was not his, had never been his, was older than every framework and belonged to all of existence and none of it.
’Cast out.’
He took hold of it with his will and pulled, and it tore free of his foundations like a root ing out of deep soil, and he sent it away from himself, down through the one channel this place had not sealed, into the living Observable Existence he carried, and THE Infiniverse received it in silence and held it, and a piece of what Noah Osmont was became a thing Noah Osmont was storing.
The absence hit him like cold water!
He breathed through it, and the stone pressed down, and he went again.
The Causes!
This one cost him. He had wanted, even in the theory, even while the idea was still glorious and abstract, to keep his nine. His Osmontian Causes, carved from his own identity, Existence and Paradox and Tyranny and the rest. Surely those were his. Surely those counted!
They did not, and he knew it!
They were carved in the shape of a thing called a Cause. And Causes linked to Civilizations and concepts and frameworks that were standing in existence long before he arrived, designed or grown by hands that were not his, and he had made his own versions of somebody else’s idea, which made them his work and not his origination!
So...
’Cast out!’
HUUM!
The nine tore free, and with them the nine First Causes of Hvitrmarr, and as that mixture unwound he felt the bond to a distant queen strain and cry out somewhere far above this place, a single pulse of alarm through a connection stretched thin by the trial’s walls, and he could not stop to answer it.
The Collision of Causes stuttered and went silent inside him for the first time since he had lit it. The drums stopped.
Eighteen anchors sank into THE Infiniverse, and the quiet where they had been was enormous.
And then he stood at the edge of the one that terrified him.
Infinity.
He knelt under the stone with his blood in the sand and looked at it, the deep blue-gold sea of his Osmontian Source Infinity, the thing that had been with him since before the crown, before the Letters, before any of it!
Infinite Mana!
It was THE first gift, the oldest panion, the floor under every floor. He had been the man with infinite mana before he had been anything else at all!
It was all he had begun with.
And it was not his. Infinity was a route, a variety, a framework walked by lifeforms across all of existence for ages before one human picked it up, and the fact that his was the grandest ocean of it anywhere did not change one drop of where the idea had e from.
Noah’s whole existence recoiled from the act!
Oh!
Fear, actual fear, the thing he never showed and rarely felt, moved through him at the prospect of being a man without it!
What was he without Mana?!
But...
He gripped the ocean.
’Even this.’
’CAST IT OUT!’
BOOM!
The sea tore out of him.
It went in one enormous wrenching motion, blue-gold light hemorrhaging out of every layer of his existence at once, pouring away down the channel into THE Infiniverse, and she took it, his ocean, into herself, and Noah knelt in the black sand and felt what it was to be empty of the thing his own name had been built on.
He did not stop!
He could not stop, because stopping now would leave him half-emptied and holding nothing, so he went through the rest of the borrowed house room by room and threw it all out.
Mana itself, the concept beneath the ocean. Cast out. The Pantheon-frame, the ancient inherited idea of housing realms within an existence. Cast out, and THE Infiniverse herself remained his and beloved and safe, but the framework by which he held her was severed, and she drifted from appendage to panion in a single tearing moment.
The Intent-ladder, Egoic and Ananke, two rungs climbed on a structure other beings had raised. Cast out, and his Ananke Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian went silent and sank away, and the pressure he had carried was simply gone!
The Foundations he kept. The nine Foundations were fusions he had pioneered, his design from the first. Those were his!
The Tongue he kept, since the Tongue was the definition of his, the language of his own existence, and it was the one thing he had chosen from the start, and now he finally understood why!
Then...
The Scales.
He paused on that one, kneeling, bleeding, nearly hollow, because THE First and Second Infinite Scales of Existence was his framework, built by his hands, named in his Tongue, and every instinct said keep it.
And it was built as a Scale. In answer to Vakochev’s Scales, in the shape of Vakochev’s idea, a better ladder leaned against the same wall. An idea based on another’s idea.
’Cast out.’
The Infinite Scale of Existence unhooked from him and sank into THE Infiniverse with everything else, and Noah knelt in the sand as a being without a framework of any kind.
One thing remained.
THE Amaranthine Heart.
It beat in his chest where his own heart had made room for it, warm and steady and alive, the heart of THE Felt Eternity, given with the words I give you my Everything. It was not a framework. It was not a concept. It was a gift from a being who loved him, and it had carried him through the HUMAN Letter.
It was also not his generation. It was hers.
’I’m sorry,’ he thought, to Emotive, who could not hear him.
He cast it out.
THE Amaranthine Heart left his chest gently, the only gentle departure in the whole terrible inventory, and settled into THE Infiniverse beside the ocean and the Causes and the Scale, safe, kept...for a potential future that may never be!
And then it was done.
Noah knelt on the dark obsidian sands beneath the weight of a sky, and he was nothing!
Not weakened. Nothing. His body carried no authority whatsoever. No Infinity, no Source, no Intent, no Causes, no Pantheon, no Scale, no heart that was not his own.
"...!"
He felt the change the way one feels silence after a lifetime in a loud room, and what he felt was, of all things, familiar. This was a human body. This was what it had felt like to be a man in world before the first prompt ever bloomed. He was, freely and truly and pletely, a normal human being.
Who was holding up a stone that had crushed Primeval Ones.
It did not mean he was as strong as a Primeval. He was not. It meant only that the weight had never once been measuring strength, and that what it measured, he was finally expressing with nothing borrowed in the way.
Just himself. Whatever that turned out to be!
The stone came down for the eighth time.
Noah’s arms buckled. His whole body shook, the plain human muscle of it burning past every limit muscle has, and he closed his eyes and bowed his head beneath the load, and every fissure in his existence groaned at once, and there was nothing left to reinforce with, no Letter he had the breath to speak, no ocean, no drums, nothing between him and the collapse except whatever he was.
And his body, being a body, did what bodies do at the very end.
It understood, in the wordless way flesh understands, that it was about to be crushed. That no help was ing from anywhere, because everywhere had been cast out. That if anything was going to preserve this existence, the existence would have to produce it, now, itself, from nothing, because nothing was all that remained.
And so, deep within him, in the emptied dark where an ocean used to be...
HUUUM!
A singularity bloomed.
It was blue. Dazzling, incandescent blue, a single point of light igniting in the hollow of him, and it was small and it was inexhaustible and it was unfathomably beautiful, and it had no upstream, no framework, no name in any Tongue but his.
It was his light. It stemmed from Noah Osmont, and from nothing else in all of existence!
His body remained free of any authority. Nothing pressed outward from him. Nothing announced. To every instrument ever built for weighing power, the kneeling figure in the bloody sand read exactly as it had a moment before, a normal human at the end of his strength.
And yet!
He had stopped straining!
He had stopped shaking!
HE HAD STOPPED SHAKING!
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