<THE True Human Emperor>
Aurelius Vasiliou looked at his son-in-law with a hardened gaze.
The scorching steam of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring rolled between them, and for a long moment the Patriarch simply stared at the smiling tyrant soaking in his lineage’s most sacred waters, the tyrant who had just asked to take one of their ancestors home the way a guest asks to take home leftovers!
Then Aurelius waved his hand.
From the golden depths below, one of the pristine skeletons stirred! It was a particularly dim one, its bones holding only the faintest ghost of the radiance its brothers still carried, an ancestor whose fade had been long and whose generation had been nearly all given away, and it floated up through the bubbling lava-waters slowly and grandly until it hovered between the two men, dripping liquid gold.
"Existence is give and take," Aurelius said.
"So far, you have taken my daughter, my patience, and now this."
The dim golden skeleton drifted toward Noah!
"This does not need to be said... but you do know I could crush your current self with a smack, right?"
The Patriarch’s burning eyes did not waver.
"Others will not easily put up with how you talk to them. In existence, many can be arrogant. Many can act tyrannical. But the showy and boisterous ones are those who die the quickest. Be careful."
It was a warning, and it was advice, and underneath both of those things it was a father-in-law trying to understand what exactly his daughter had dragged home!
Noah nodded and accepted the skeleton, and it disappeared into his existence with a flicker of light.
"I appreciate the advice, and the ancestor," Noah replied pleasantly. "But I should explain something, since we are family now. I simply act true to myself. I do not look at someone so much more powerful than me and become docile because of it. Somewhere along the way, I began to look at... Potential."
He leaned back against the rocky edge, golden lava sheeting off his stellar body.
"I ask myself, if given time, could I get to where this being has attained, or exceed him? Where would our potentials lie? And every time, no matter who I stand before, I believe my potential... always comes out on top."
"I do not think myself higher than anyone in standing. At one point, even a peasant was grander than me. At one point, an Ant was alive and had taken more steps in this existence than me. Standing is temporary. Standing is a snapshot. But potential... potential is the whole picture, and in the whole picture, I am... I am... I am...."
HUUM!
His own words turned strange in his mouth as he spoke them!
His voice trailed, and his endlessly blue eyes unfocused, and his mind slid sideways into a state of epiphany and reverie that he had not planned and could not name, the three repeated words humming through his two hundred Decillion quarks like a struck bell that refused to finish ringing!
I am. The first Letter. The oldest declaration. It turned over inside him, heavy with something unarrived, and he sighed deeply and sank back into the scorching waters without finishing the sentence, letting the feeling settle into the depths of him where grand things germinated!
Aurelius Vasiliou watched all of this, and slowly shook his head.
"My daughter’s Provenance chose a weird lifeform," the Patriarch declared to no one in particular. "Okay. You seem to be enjoying yourself, so take some time here. I also need to go talk to my daughter and get things ready."
With these words, the muscular figure of Aurelius rose!
Drops of scorching golden lava-like waters fell off his towering, scarred body in glowing streams, and his ornate robes swept out of the steam and wrapped around him on their own as a golden gateway bloomed open at the spring’s edge!
The Patriarch stepped toward it, paused, and glanced back at Noah one last time, at the stellar blue-gold anomaly soaking in his ancestors’ spring and humming to himself about ants and potential.
He shook his head again.
Then he disappeared!
—
Noah leaned back, alone with the steam and the bones.
His eyes became endlessly blue, brighter and brighter, twin depths kindling in the golden mist, and he raised his hand up toward the rocky ceiling as if he wanted to grasp something he could not see.
There was so much out there!
Immense Ones who collected Provenance Lifeforms as interest. A Sealed One wearing its way through vessels toward something called IT. Atlas Elseworlds filled with leashed sovereigns and locked rooms. A Train of chained Dimensions rushing through the dark toward a design nobody would explain.
His power was growing, faster than any framework said it should, tier by tier and essence by essence, but he had understood something long ago.
He was not mainly limited by power.
He was limited by information. Knowledge!
Power told you how hard you could swing. Knowledge told you where to stand, when to swing, and whether swinging was even the correct art!
Every disaster that had ever nearly claimed him had walked in through a gap in what he knew, and every triumph had walked in through a gap in what his enemies knew about HIM!
He waved his hand, and the crystal left behind by Vakochev appeared above his palm.
The obsidian shard rotated slowly in the steam, dense and dark and silent, the parting gift of a being who had laid his Scales across all existence and then folded them up and retreated.
Noah looked at it the way he had looked at it a hundred times now, and his Regard answered the way it had answered a hundred times.
Question marks. Columns of them.
"Everyone in existence is so damn fond of their secrets..." Noah remarked to the bones below.
He had many things to utilize! Many tools under his belt! His Mantle was grand. THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign was grand. The collar, the crystal, the Marks, the Teloi, the Tesseracts, an arsenal that dynasties of old would have built entire dynasties around!
But out of all of it, THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer was the grandest!
Because every other tool did what it did. Only one tool did whatever he needed it to do next. And if what he needed was information and direction...
"I can always dream."
HUUM!
Noah smiled, and put the crystal away, and began to close his eyes in the spring!
The scorching golden waters bubbled around his body. The faded ancestors slept below. Somewhere above this pocket of density, his wife was arguing with her mother, his father-in-law was preparing a Lineage for war, and across the continuum his other body walked a higher Cabin
He settled his breathing, and reached inward, toward the doorway of his Provenance, toward the landscape where all his moments lived!
But it had to be something special!
No small dreams tonight. No cheap errands into yesterday. If knowledge was his true frontier, then he would aim his Dream at the largest gap in it, at the beings who sat above every framework, behind every curse, at the end of every warning anyone had ever given him!
"I want to dream of Immense Ones," Noah declared into the steam, and the spring itself seemed to still at the words!
"I want to know more about these things that remain an unfathomable threat that can squash me so damn easily. Let me dream... of Immense Ones."
HUUM!
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