Chapter 5531: Fledgling!

"I indeed owe you Everything."

Hvitrmarr’s manifestation straightened from her bow, and her ring-in-ring eyes had already hardened back into a queen’s.

"Which is why we have to go. Right now. So that I can ensure your safety, because...Jarl Skallagrim, a Cursed Descendant, is here, and even I cannot stand against him."

...!

They were already here?

"I could not leave this Dimension before. The Curse chained every Steed to THE Krazhor-Nul, a fence around the livestock, and running only ever meant running in circles inside it."

"But with the Curse gone...I am free to do so. I will be taking us away from THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension itself."

Away from the Dimension! Out past its walls, beyond the reach of Jarls and hosts and dying colossi, through the dark between Dimensions.

And Noah’s gaze became heavy.

"Not yet."

...!

The word landed in the vault with the full weight of his immensity, an Emperor’s refusal spoken to a Steed offering salvation, and he continued before it could be argued!

"Make sure to take THE Creature and Anaximander outside...as well as Ryaenara!" His hands were already moving, waving through the white-flame dark as his newly risen Intent poured outward.

"This is her, and what I can emulate of her weavings of existence. Can you locate her before leaving?"

Light bloomed between his palms.

An image of Ryaenara unfurled across the vault, vibrant and loose-grinned and profane even in still light, and around the image, Noah emulated everything he held of her! The texture of her Antiquity, older than the Scales! The signature of her weavings as his Estuary and every record of every shared battlefield reconstructed her presense thread by thread, an existence sketched from memory by an authority over endings.

He had made a choice, and the choice was simple.

He was not leaving Ryaenara behind.

Not in a Dimension with Cursed Descendants and other monstrosities!

Hvitrmarr looked at the image for a long moment, somber, and the Causes inside her pulsed. Nine reborn suns turning faster, Fealty’s new heart drumming through the vault, and when she spoke, there was something old and careful in it.

"To locate one thread across a Dimension this vast, while outrunning what hunts us...I will need to express my full power." Her golden eyes rose to his. "And to express my full power, I will need...someone to ride me."

...!

What?

Noah blinked once.

Right! She was a Steed.

A living Observable Existence built, at the level of her deepest architecture, around carrying! Nine Organs that tilted towards virtue, Fealty and Obedience and Devotion, an entire anatomy of virtues that all pointed at a saddle, and for three thousand cursed years, that architecture had been chained to thrones and whips, and never once completed by a willing seat!

Noah looked at her with shining eyes, and spoke grandly.

"I will ride you. Let’s go."

...!

The manifestation of Hvitrmarr nodded once, and everything moved.

The vault folded. Noah saw THE Creature and Anaximander pulled into this space in streaks of obsidian and white, the golden island he had left outside drawn in whole alongside them, sands and forges and all, swallowed into the sovereign interior of the White Steed for safekeeping. And his own body was pulled the opposite way, drawn up across the inner vaults of her chest, past the drumming new Heart of Fealty, up through parting scales as he found himself pulled toward the back of this grand Steed.

Ivory plates unsealed above him. Cold sweet air poured in.

And Noah emerged into the open sky of the ancient ice.

The snowy landscape stretched below in every direction, glacial plains glowing faintly blue with the residue of the war just won, snow still falling in slow silver veils, and his body rose through it all in her grip of white light before settling, gently, deliberately, upon the back of The White Steed.

The moment he did...

HUUUM!

The entire Dimension seemed to bear witness.

The ambient storms of THE Krazhor-Nul stilled across the horizon. The falling snow hung! The strings of Infinity and Primordial Source and even THE Lingering Word itself all seemed to turn, in one vast attending hush, toward the ancient ice where, for the first time since the makers walked, a Steed of the First lineage was mounted by a willing, chosen, uncursed rider, and even Noah, crowned and reborn, was astonished.

For the instant he settled upon her scales, he felt it!

An immense, unfathomable strengthening of his existence!

|You are the first non-Descendant of Nhaglfarr-Ythok, THE Sleepless Fiend of Those Who Remain, to ride one of the Steeds born of his ingenuity. The Steeds were his design. His craft and his cruelty both. Their saddles were cut for his bloodline alone, and for ages beyond counting, only Cursed Descendants have ever sat where you are sitting. The architecture of the First lineage has weighed you, and it has chosen to recognize your seat as sworn, not stolen.|

|Designation gained: THE Fledgling Liege of the First Lineage. This is the beginner’s distinction of a rider of these Steeds. The word Fledgling is doing heavy work in that title. What sits above it returns only ?????.|

|Starter boons of THE Fledgling Liege, cataloged:|

|THE Bond of Seat and Sworn. A permanent channel now runs between rider and Steed. Thought passes without words across any distance. Senses may be borrowed: her sight that reads weavings within weavings, her sovereignty-sense that tastes Dimensional law. And the reservoirs of both existences now stand open to one another: you may draw upon the power of her eighteen Causes, and she upon your seas. Two existences, one account.|

|THE Anchored Seat. Nothing unseats you. No velocity, no force, no authority tears you from her back while the bond stands: your position is now a fact of existence rather than a matter of grip. Her element cannot harm you, her white flame recognizing you as its own, and within the reach of her sovereignty, hostile environments, void, pressure, and essence are refused on your behalf.|

|THE Regal Mantle. You passively radiate the presence of the First lineage while seated. Lesser existences will find that their instincts developed opinions about you before their minds were consulted.|

|THE Boundless Crossing. The First Steeds were built for one purpose above all others: to carry riders across the dark between Dimensions. It is what her ancestor did with the maker whose weight bent the crossing. It is what her blood has remembered through every cursed generation. While you ride her, Dimensional Traversal is no longer an ordeal. Walls between Dimensions become doors. Doors become a stride. The roads between many Dimensions are mapped in her inherited memories, Master...and you now hold the map.|

|Deeper functions of the bond remain sealed behind the Fledgling distinction. They return ?????, and they are many.|

...!

Prompts of majesty upon majesty bloomed.

But the prompts were only words, and what Noah FELT beneath them was beyond any cataloging!

For the bond was open, and existence was flowing both ways.

His Osmontian Source Infinity poured down through his seat into her, oceans of newly-risen A-Rank sea rolling through her vast frame, and he felt her drink it the way parched roots drink rain, felt his Infinity spread through eighteen Causes and set every one of them blazing brighter! His Intent flowed with it, THE Ananke Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian sinking into her weavings, and her whole colossal existence answered his identity, aligning to it, the way a blade aligns to the hand it was forged for!

And back up through the bond...she flowed into him.

Her Causes came first, eighteen of them, First and Prime, their mingled truths washing up through his seat and into his own nine, feeding the slow grand evolution already underway! He felt Fealty’s permanence and Valor’s drawn breath, Endurance’s tirelessness and Devotion’s lift, virtues older than the Scales pouring through a Human body.

And then her Intent arrived.

And Noah’s existence pulsed.

For her Intent, the Intent seated in her First-lineage architecture by the living hands of Those Who Remain, flowed into him, and it did not taste of Ananke.

It sat above Ananke!

Autarkis!

Above inevitability! Above "I must be obeyed"! A third texture, vast and quiet and prior, the very thing he had felt once as a door beyond a door when his own Intent crowned itself, and here it was, flowing through his seat in living rivers, and through the bond he felt her feel his shock, and felt something almost like an ancient, tired smile move through the mountain beneath him!

’Later,’ her thought came, the first words ever spoken through their bond. ’Ride now. Learn later.’

And Hvitrmarr stretched her wings.

The great white sails of Devotion-and-Harvest spread across the snowing sky, wider than horizons, and as they reached their full glorious span, a pillar of white and blue light shot up all around them.

Sovereignty and Infinity braided into a single rising column, rider and Steed announced together to nearby corners of an ancient Dimension, and the frozen plains below turned to a sea of glittering light!

And at this time...

In the far distance, a throne stopped dead in the sky.

Jarl Skallagrim and his eight Steeds stared ahead at the rising pillar with utter incredulity, and their bodies trembled!

Every one of them! The eight dying colossi in their harness shook in their chains, ancient eyes stretched wide, terminal frames quaking, because their senses were all reporting the same impossible absence! From the white queen at the heart of that distant light, there was no sign of the Curse!

None! Not a thread! Not a whisper of the gnawing that had defined every Steed’s every nanosecond since the sentence was first spoken.

She found a solution.

She actually found a SOLUTION!

Three thousand years of watching, a millennium of Skallagrim’s patient study, ages of an entire Dimension’s certainty, all of it detonated in a single sensing, and then, slowly, terribly, eight pairs of dying eyes and one pair of lucid rotting ones moved from the queen...

To the man atop her.

To the rider!

And all their eyes blazed with immense greed! The eight Steeds’ hope-rejuvenated gazes locked onto the small crowned figure seated upon the uncursed Steed with the ravenous focus of the drowning sighting shore, and Jarl Skallagrim’s terribly sane eyes fixed upon Noah with the weavings of a man with a few years left staring at the being who dispensed more.

The possibility-weavings in his palm churned into a blur.

And Jarl Skallagrim bellowed out madly, lucidity and desperation fused into one Dimension-shaking roar, as for countless gigaparsecs in every direction...

All skies turned black!

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