Noah stepped back out through the glowing door of his Realm, and THE Infiniverse was waiting for him.
She floated beside the doorway in her endless blue sea, hands folded, eyes on the light. And she did not turn to him!
Because she could not see him.
He stood before her in the blue, close enough to count the strands of her hair, and her eyes rested on the doorway behind him, patient and unaware. THE Infiniverse. His panion, his home, the one existence so intricately connected to him that she felt his every immensity!
Her VERITAS and her PONDUS did not both stand at 10, and so, by a law his own existence had written, he was not in her reality at all.
Of course, he could make himself perceivable at any time. He felt the permission sitting in the Precept, his to grant with a thought. But he wanted to explore this state first.
So he raised his hand, and placed it on her cheek, the same way he had placed it not long ago when she had asked him for reassurance.
And...
Nothing. Her eyes did not move. Her breath did not change. His palm rested against her cheek and her existence reported an empty sea!
Was this...human?
To not be seen by others, once one reached enough of a height. Had that not always been the arrangement?
A father worked heights his children never perceived. A mother carried weights her whole house walked past daily. Every leader he had ever known became less visible the higher they rose, until their people saw the crown clearly and the man not at all!
Perhaps existence had not invented anything new for him. Perhaps it had only taken the oldest loneliness of the human condition and written it down formally, with clauses.
And yet.
She had asked him to reassure her, even though she logically knew.
Knowing a thing and feeling it were two different things. Was that not the answer sitting right in front of him? Humans climbed, and humans went unseen, and then humans came back down and put their hands on each other’s faces and made themselves perceivable again, over and over, every day.
He drew his hand back slowly, and left.
And behind him, THE Infiniverse blinked. Her hand rose, and touched her own cheek, and stayed there a moment, her brows drawing together over an empty sea.
—
Noah took a step, and crossed thousands of Realms.
He came out standing in the warm air of a farmland realm, gold fields running to the horizon under a kind afternoon sky, and he heard them before he saw them.
Laughter. A long table set outside a farmhouse, crowded with food and more crowded with people. Henry sat sprawled at one end, blue-gold hair catching the light.
Seo-yeon sat cross-legged on the bench beside Amelia, stealing food off her grandmother’s plate. Barbatos and Adelaide argued warmly over a pitcher. Naldine, Titano, Sigrid, and half a dozen others filled out the benches, and the whole table had the settled, unhurried noise of people enjoying themsleves!
Noah floated near them, unperceived, and watched his family eat.
Amelia was smiling as her hand was on her chest, no doubt sensing the newly revamped Causes that were now Telos, oh which she was an Originator of still.
And her eyes went, briefly, to the empty place that had been set at the head of the table.
Seo-yeon paused. Her head tilted a fraction, and for one breath her gaze drifted through the air near him, past him, through him, searching for something she could not name.
Noah stayed longer than he had planned to.
He did not make himself perceivable.
He had many thoughts crossing his mind as...he took another step.
—
He came out among endless volcanic mountains.
Crimson blue infinity churned through the ranges, rivers of burning power running down black slopes, the sky above lit from below. And near the peak of the nearest mountain, small against all of it, sat the crying figure of Emotive.
Her manic emotions buzzed around her in ragged loops, joy and grief and fury tangled past sorting, and she was doing something with her hands. Taking things out of herself!
Portions of her Everythings, drawn out one after another, glimmering pieces of what she was and what she owned, and she was throwing them into the burning lava below, one by one, and repeating the same words with each throw.
"You don’t deserve love. You have done too much... this is why he threw away your heart...!"
...!
Noah had not thought Emotive would take it this hard!
He made himself perceivable instantly.
Emotive blinked.
Her head came up, and she looked at him floating there in the burning light, and instead of stopping, she cried harder, her whole body shaking, and her voice came out manic and small at once!
"Am I...deserving of any love? Of anything at all?"
Noah came down.
He crossed the black slope and wrapped his arms around her, and she was rigid in them!
"I am sorry I didn’t municate in advance.I cast out many things from myself. The Source. My Infinity. The heart. But I did not cast them out because I did not want them. I cast them out because my existence had to generate everything truly from itself, and it could not do that in a space already full. What I set down is kept, and safe, and not one piece of it was thrown away." He drew back just far enough to look at her.
"You, and all the others, are deserving of all the love and happiness you could want. Okay?"
Emotive’s face crumpled entirely.
She crashed into his chest and hugged him and cried, loudly, gracelessly, her manic emotions collapsing one by one into plain ordinary weeping!
The lava churned below them. The crimson blue infinity rolled through the mountains.
And then his gaze suddenly changed.
His head came up, and his eyes went distant, because far away, something had just happened.
Above THE Golden Expanse within THE Ymnaros, his clone floated where it had floated since the pledge. And his clone had changed with him. It, too, had bee something that could not be perceived. It, too, could now perceive what Noah could not perceive before, the white rivers, the second geography, the layer of existence that had been running silently over everything all along.
And it had just looked up.
Because hanging above the endless skies of THE Ymnaros, in that layer no eye below the law could see, there was something terrifying!
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