Chapter 5364: Seal!

His vision returned in pieces that did not fit and then, all at once, did.

And when the pieces fit, Noah found that he was standing on a corpse!

He read the surroundings first, before he let himself feel anything about them. He stood inside a vast domain, and the domain swirled. Osmontian Absolute Infinity moved through it in great slow currents, his own Infinity, the identity-forged authority at the core of everything he was, filling the space from one unseen edge to another as he understood that inherently...his own Quintessence was directing it.

And the space was not empty otherwise. Shattered fragments of Observable Existence drifted through the currents, broken pieces of wonders that had been whole once.

Prime Causes hung suspended in the Infinity, some of them gray and dead, others still blazing and vibrant, and beneath all of it he could feel the heavy weight of a First Cause, present and intact and somehow wrong in a way he had not yet found the word for.

This was the inside of his own heart, and yet not. He understood that. This was the prison he had built in the last instant before everything went dark, the folded Infinity rendered into a place his awareness could stand inside and walk.

And he was standing on a corpse.

It was enormous past reckoning. He stood on its torn-open chest, and the chest stretched away beneath him like terrain, a landscape of ruined flesh that ran to the limits of what he could see. The corpse bled. Stellar gold blood welled up out of the wounds in slow shining rivers, ran across the body, and dripped away into the swirling Infinity far below.

And even dead, even torn open, even reduced to the ground under his feet, the thing pressed against him with an oppression he felt down in his foundations, a weight that no Fifth Scale being he had met came near.

Dame Seraphine had been a wall he could not see past. This dead thing was the mountain that wall would have been a pebble against, and it was a corpse, and it still loomed over his existence like a verdict!

A dead thing this grand meant that whatever had killed it was grander still.

Up ahead, on the very tip of the corpse’s nose, an entity stood looking down at him.

It wore a blue robe, and it regarded Noah with open arrogance, the lazy contempt of a thing considering something small and briefly interesting!

Noah looked back at it, and found, with no surprise, that the entity wore his face.

His own face, worn by something that was not him. Aged. Aged past anything a face should hold and somehow still recognizable, the same bones, the same jaw, the same set of the eyes, made archaic, made ancient.

It looked down at him from the corpse’s nose with his own features arranged into an expression he had never once worn, and in a domain full of unsettling things, that was the most unsettling of all.

THE Sealed One. This was the name he could inherently feel and knew when he looked at this being!

"I should have taken over everything by now," THE Sealed One said. The voice was his, aged into something else, something with too much patience in it. "The hand reached the heart. By every reckoning I have ever known, this body should be mine, and you should be a small leftover thing I keep around for a little while out of curiosity." It tilted its head, studying him.

"So what did you do, little thing?"

Noah looked up at the thing wearing his face and declined to look impressed by any of it.

He had already lost a great deal today! He could not lose anymore!

"Before that," he said, his voice flat and unhurried. "Who are you?"

THE Sealed One smiled with his stolen mouth, and the smile was almost fond.

"Ah. What a useless question..." It crouched down on the corpse’s nose, bringing the aged face nearer, resting its arms across its knees with the ease of a thing that had never once in its existence been in a hurry.

"I will save you the trouble. Even if I told you, you would not be able to hold it. You could not think it without your mind coming apart around the shape of it, and you could not speak it without your existence trying to follow the sound somewhere it cannot survive. So for the sake of your sanity, and I do mean that practically, just know me as THE Sealed One." It waved one hand, an idle gesture.

"Any other name, and you would need, ah, what is the framing you use now? Scales. Those flimsy little things you have all agreed to climb. You would need to stand at THE Sixth Scale of Existence just to put my real names in your mouth without dying of the attempt."

BOOOM!

The words landed with a weight that the dead domain itself seemed to register, and Noah stood in them calmly, turning them over.

THE Sixth Scale. He had only just understood the Fifth as the tier where beings became things the Fourth could not measure. And now...

He let none of it move his face.

"Then answer something easier," he said. "Why would a thing like you want a body at all? You’re powerful enough to leave a corpse like this one behind you. You’re powerful enough that your name would kill me to say. So why crawl into someone else’s existence and wear it? Are you...actually so weak that you need to borrow one?"

...!

HUUUM!

THE Sealed One laughed, delighted by the needle of it.

"I want a body, little thing, because they took mine. To return, truly return, I need to be housed. I need a foundation deep enough to grow back into, and I need a great deal of it, because there is a great deal of me to restore. Far too much. Far, far too much." Its eyes burned with something underneath the amusement.

"Which is exactly why I want yours. Your foundation is unique. It would increase the rate of my return more than any vessel. Gaining control is only a matter of time. When these last-ditch defenses you are putting up finally wear thin, and they will, that will be the end of it. That will be that."

...!

As it spoke, Noah looked around the domain again, at the endless swirling currents of his own Absolute Infinity, at the shattered Observable Existences and the dead and vibrant Causes, at the corpse bleeding stellar gold beneath his feet!

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