Chapter 5402: THE Genesis Tesseract II
It landed in his fingers, the four-dimensional hypercube turning slowly against his palm, blue-white edges burning, and the sheer immensity within it made his own body tremble and vibrate. He contained himself by force, holding steady against the weight of a thing that held the potential of an entire Observable Existence, while far ahead THE Fifth Scale leviathan continued to radiate its drowning aura, the melancholy and guilt in its Intent pressing out across everything, truly overpowering in its depth!
And sensing all that endless self-pity and bottomless melancholy, Noah could not help himself.
"You know," he said, looking across the gigaparsecs to the grieving god-beast, "if you’re ever in the market for someone else to share the blame with, you’ve got options. You could always turn your attention to the Gilded Ones. The ones who found your paradise in the dark and wanted it. The ones whose approaching hunger forced you into the desperation that made you pull too hard in the first place." He let that sit.
"They’re enemies of mine too, as it happens. So here’s an offer. I could lead you to an Observable Existence absolutely full of Gilded Ones, and you could go let loose every bit of that melancholy and rage on the beings who actually deserve it. Put that Olympian Intent of grief to some use." He shrugged.
"Or you can stay here. Sit in the place you drowned, and pity yourself, and self-loathe in the dark for another few ages. Your choice."
He put away THE Genesis Tesseract, the folded immensity vanishing into his existence, and looked across the gigaparsecs at Thalassarch Nereon, THE Drowned Sovereign, the leviathan of crowned coral and trench-deep dark.
"So," Noah said. "What will it be?"
He asked the grand question, and waited.
And in his mind, behind the calm, there were a great many other questions, every one of them circling the same impossible folded treasure he had just put away. How exactly he would use it. Where. When. What a being could build, holding the seed of a First Cause in his hand?!
Because damn.
Damn, damn, damn. What a treasure. What a loot!
THE Genesis Tesseract was a thing so grand that holding it rearranged how Noah weighed everything around it.
Even a Mesozoic Scale anomaly, a Bounded Lifeform who had clawed his way up to the Fifth Scale entirely on his own, became something smaller in the shadow of the folded treasure in Noah’s existence. And that was saying something, because Thalassarch Nereon was genuinely remarkable. Inside an Observable Existence untouched by the Gilded Ones, unharvested, undirected by any external force, the Bounded Lifeforms had flourished in a way they almost never got to, and it seemed the sheer immensity of THE First Cause had flowed freely into the strongest of them. Into this Emperor most of all. He had risen on the unobstructed bounty of an Observable Existence that belonged to no one, climbing past every ceiling his kind was meant to have.
He had failed in the end. Spectacularly and catastrophically. And here his path came to its head, with Noah standing in the resuscitated ruin of his domain, holding something as Quintessential as THE Genesis Tesseract in his hand.
As Noah was turning all of that over, the leviathan spoke again.
"What... do you want in turn?"
HUUM!
The booming voice rolled across the gigaparsecs, and Noah raised his eyes toward the vast grieving thing.
"You came here and remade what I destroyed," Nereon said, and his voice carried the slow weight of a being who had spent ages with only his own guilt for company. "You did not ask my permission. You did not need it. And now you offer me a path to vengeance against the ones who pushed me here, as though it were a small thing, a courtesy. Beings do not do such things freely. I even wonder if you knew I was here so you could use me. So let us speak clearly, you and I, because I have lost everything I held dear precisely because someone, somewhere, was not speaking clearly about what they wanted."
The leviathan’s eyes, vast and ancient and drowning, fixed on Noah.
"Wanting," Nereon said, and the word came out of him like a curse he had examined from every angle across the long dark. "Wanting is the one thing that ruins existence. I have had a great deal of time to think on it, and I keep arriving at the same place. Every vile thing that has ever happened across all of existence happened because something wanted. The Gilded Ones wanted my Observable Existence. I wanted the power to keep it. And between their wanting and mine, an entire ocean of life drowned. Trace any catastrophe back far enough and you will find a want sitting at the root of it, patient and reasonable-sounding and absolutely lethal." His voice deepened.
"So let us get the wanting out into the open, where it can do less damage. I will tell you mine plainly. I do wish to no longer sit here doing nothing for ages more. I want vengeance, against the ones who forced me to this, and against myself most of all. I want to be made to pay. I want death. I want to die. I want to die!"
WAA!
"And you," Nereon finished, the grief in his Intent pressing outward. "You hold a treasure pulled from the corpse of my Observable Existence, and you offer me roads to walk. So what do you want from me? Speak it. Let us all speak clearly, for once, before more oceans drown."
...!
Noah’s eyes shone at that.
He had only meant, at first, to use this being as a weapon. Point a grief-mad Fifth Scale being at THE Braneworld and let it work. But Nereon asking the question plainly, demanding clarity, opened something up, because once a being offered to tell you exactly what it wanted, you could start getting creative about what you wanted from it. And there were many more uses for a Mesozoic Scale Emperor than as a single thrown spear, if one bothered to think past the obvious.
He breathed in, steadying his existence, holding himself back from sinking his attention into THE Genesis Tesseract just yet, because the treasure could wait and the leviathan could not. He thought for a second. Then he spoke.
"You going against the Gilded Ones," Noah said, "would feed nicely into a war I’m already running against them in another Observable Existence. So that part of your wanting and mine line up well enough. But that’s not the thing I want most from you."
He looked up at the vast warped face!
