Chapter 5452: Whats The Point? II

"Listen to me," Noah said. "We don’t try because trying always works."

He drew back enough to look at her wet face.

"We try because the alternative is going along with the monsters. That thing, that monster responsible, believes existence is just a meal that hasn’t been eaten yet. Every time we heal something, protect something, love something, we are telling him no. Sometimes he wins anyway. But if we stop trying, he doesn’t have to win anymore, because we’ll have already handed him everything. And I don’t hand my things to anyone."

Seo-yeon hiccupped against him, listening.

"And you’re wrong about one thing," he continued, softer now. "You said you have nothing. You have me. You’ve had me since that pinky promise not long ago. But I think it’s time it became bigger than a promise." He held her small shoulders.

"So I want to ask you something, and you can say no, and nothing between us changes if you do. I would like... to take you as my daughter, Seo-yeon. In name, in Lineage, in everything, before all of existence, so that no matter what gets eaten and no matter what dies, you will never, ever be alone again. Would that be okay with you?"

...!

WAA!

Seo-yeon went completely still in his arms.

She pulled back and stared up at him, her tear-streaked face working through everything, and when her voice finally came out it was tiny and shaking and afraid to believe itself.

"Everything around me dies. Everyone around me dies. I don’t...want you to die too...You’re okay with being my... my Aba?" she whispered. "My father? Even...with all that? "

HUUM!

Noah nodded.

"Things around you do not die. I will not die, okay?"

...!

Seo-yeon melted in the best way a child can melt, throwing herself against him and hugging him with all the desperate strength in her small body, crying harder than before.

"Aba! Father! I have a father!" she sobbed into his chest. "I’m not alone! I’m not alone! I’m not alone!"

Amelia and Henry stood a little apart, watching Noah hold Seo-yeon as her crying slowly wore itself down into the hiccupping quiet of an exhausted child.

Henry watched his father with something complicated moving behind his blue-gold eyes, a young man seeing the strongest person he knew kneel in the dark with a weeping girl, and finding that the kneeling made him look grander rather than smaller.

But it was Amelia who watched the longest, and Amelia who saw the most.

Seconds past as Seo-yeon calmed down and Noah laid her against his shoulder, and Amelia came and floated beside her son in the quiet dark.

For a while she said nothing at all. She was the Origin of THE Infinite Cause, the wellspring from which his entire foundation had bloomed, and she had just sensed two Observable Existences get eaten. She sensed the loss of Causes and what happened around them as through her son’s Infinite Cause, she saw THE Sealed One and the devastation after.

There was no crisis pressing on them now. There was only the after.

Amelia said finally, gently.

"Back there, in the Gaps, you were looking at your hands. When it was over, and everyone was safe, and you opened your hands and just looked at them." She smiled, small and sad. "You used to do that when you were little, you know. When something broke that you couldn’t fix. You’d hold your hands open like you were checking whether they’d failed you or you’d failed them."

Noah said nothing, and his mother continued, unhurried.

"I held you when you were small and powerless the first time," she said. "In the beginning, before any of this, when you were just my boy with nothing in those hands at all."

She turned to face him fully.

"You were never precious to me because of what those hands could do. Not then, when they could do nothing, and not now, when they can do almost anything. Grieve the Observable Existences. Grieve them properly. But don’t ever believe you that you’re empty-handed."

Noah looked at his mother for a long moment, and he nodded. He had been asking himself whether he should have been anticipating this. Could he have anticipated this?

Then he looked out into the endless black of the Undefined Gaps, toward everything out there that was vast and patient and hungry, and when he spoke, it came out quiet and level and absolutely without doubt.

"Existence is vast, and full of terrors," Noah said. "Everyone keeps telling me that, all the old ones, like it’s the final word on everything. Fine. I’ve seen the terrors now. I’ve watched one eat my Observable Existence in front of me." His eyes began to burn, deep cerulean rising through them.

"But Osmontian Source Infinity will reign supreme. I will do everything I can, become everything I have to, to make that true. I am going to become something more terrifying than any of existence’s terrors. And when I am, they can all say the old words about me instead."

HUUUM!

---

Away from THE Undefined Gaps.

In THE Source Lands, atop a vast ancient tree in THE Strand of Broken Scales, Noah pulled gently away from Ubergulden Adelheid.

They had been cuddled together along one of the great high branches, her golden head against his shoulder, the enormous old leaves whispering around them in a wind that smelled of sap and distant rain. It should have been one of the quiet moments. But Eon had felt the change in the instant it arrived.

"Something’s wrong," she said. It was not a question. " Something is horribly wrong..."

He held her gaze, and he said it plainly.

"I made you a promise," Noah said. "I told you I’d give you Everything and help you change your people, that things might get bloody, but that we’d remake what the Gilded Ones were together. I...am not going to be able to keep that promise. I am sorry." His voice stayed steady.

"THE Braneworld Observable Existence is gone. All of it. THE Sealed One came, and he devoured it whole and the Lower Observable Existence beneath it, and every Gilded One still on it was either eaten or taken. There is no home to change anymore. There’s... no people left to remake."

BOOM!

Eon went very still against the ancient bark.

Her mouth opened and closed as she...couldn’t find any words!

Noah went forward and simply pulled her back into him and held her, silently, one hand in her golden hair while she shook against his chest, high in an ancient tree, and over her shoulder his eyes stared out into the green distance and burned.

They burned with a terrifying light!

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