Published at 6th of September 2026 6:20 am

Chapter 5699: Engineer! II

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Thalia unflinchingly...did not let him go.

The spring had returned to what it was, and the steam had come back, and the falls were running down the Elsemountain again as though nothing at all had happened here. Yet her arms stayed locked across his chest, tight, as if he would be gone if she let go.

Of course, she had reason. She had spent that entire conversation frozen, watching an architect stand over the man she had crossed time to reach, unable to move so much as a finger in his direction. There are worse things than danger. Being present for it and useless is one of them.

"That was... an Immense One," she said against his back. "How did they even..."

The question did not finish. In truth, it did not need to!

Then she asked the other one.

"And you. My Provenance, are you really fearful all the time? Do you truly live with fear constantly?"

Noah turned in her arms.

He took her by the shoulders and drew her in, and their noses brushed.

"Yes," he said. "Constantly."

Her eyes moved between his.

"For humans like us, fear was never the enemy. Fear is the oldest teacher our kind ever had. It is the thing that told the first of us to look up at a sky we did not understand and ask what lived in it. It is what built every wall and lit every fire and made a person check the dark before they slept, and every one of those was a small refusal to simply lie down and accept whatever came."

He held her gaze.

"Fear is a drive that makes sure a man does not remain still. It sharpens what love makes soft. It keeps me honest about what I actually am rather than what I would like to be. I thought I gave away my everything of fear and doubt before, but...it was always there."

He shrugged, and the shrug was small.

"Being afraid and moving anyway is what a true human has always been good at."

Thalia looked at him for a long moment.

Then the tears came, and she did not wipe them away or apologize for them or seem to notice them at all. She simply took his face in both hands and started kissing him, small pecks, everywhere, his cheek and his brow and the bridge of his nose and the corner of his mouth, over and over, as though she could cover every part of him that carried something heavy.

"Let me carry some of your fear," she said between them. "Some of your weight."

Another kiss, at his temple.

"In that possible future, I know you carry so much weight. I have seen what it makes of you. Let me carry even a percentage of it for you."

Noah stayed in the moment.

He was not, generally speaking, a man who stayed in moments. Yet here he was, standing in scorching golden water with an unfathomable woman holding his face in her hands, and he did nothing at all except look at her.

Then he shook his head.

"In existence, a man has his duties," he said. "I know you can carry any weight you want to carry. But my job is to bear everything, so that you and many others can live happily without needing to bend your backs."

He brushed a thumb under her eye and took the tear away.

"Do not worry about any weight I carry. I can handle it. I have a grand Provenance, and I have infinite musing to allow me to do so. For me, it is normal."

...!

Thalia looked at him.

And whatever she had been holding back since she came out of that pool, since the frozen instant, since the future she would not describe, she stopped holding it back.

Her clothing fell away, and the mist of the spring rose and covered her, and she pushed him down into the golden water.

Then the light came.

Golden brilliance flooded the whole of the spring, filling the basin and rising up the walls of this region of the Elsedimension until the steam itself burned gold. Nothing at all could be seen through it!

And nothing at all was seen.

—

<Aurelius Vasiliou>

Far from that spring, at the top of a golden tower that had stood since before the current arrangement of things, two Provenance Lifeforms watched their people move.

Vasileia Elsecity, among other names it had, spread out beneath them in tiers of pale stone and hanging light. Dozens of the lineage moved through it at this hour, going about the small business that even the grandest existences cannot escape.

Aurelius Vasiliou looked down at all of it with his hands behind his back.

Beside him, Rosalia Vasiliou watched the Provenance Lifeforms below.

"Is this really the right choice?" she asked. "For us to go to war against an Immense One?"

Compared to most questions asked in that tower, it was a simple one. She was not arguing. She had come to the same conclusions he had, most likely before he had, since she usually did. She was asking her husband to say it out loud so that she could hear how it sounded in the open air.

Aurelius took his time.

"Maybe our Provenance shines brighter in the end for it," he said. "I have thought about this more than I have thought about anything in my life, and I keep arriving at the same place. For years I woke with the same picture in my head. My daughter, promised away, handed up to a thing that would use her for whatever it needed and then set her down somewhere quiet when the use ran out. That was the safe road. That was the road where our lineage endured and our name stayed on the lists and nobody came for our Elsedimension. I would have walked it. I was walking it. And every year of it made me smaller."

"Then an existence appears who generates his own Provenance out of nothing anybody gave him, who stands a chance at anything touching Atlas. And I find that I would rather take that bet. Not because the odds are good. Because a bet at least has a second outcome."

Rosalia was quiet for a while.

"And him?" she said. "This Human Dreamer. This Osmont. You had your talk with him."

"It seems like he may treat our daughter well." Aurelius made a sound that was almost a laugh, which was rare enough that his wife turned her head.

"She is stronger than him at present, by a considerable margin. So at the very least, she will keep him in line."

Below them, complex weavings of Provenance Lifeforms unfolded.

The two Provenance Lifeforms stood above their city and talked about their daughter, and about the war that was coming, and about whether the choice they had made would be judged kindly by whatever came after them.

And neither of them had any idea that the power of an Immense One had flared in a certain spring not too long ago.

Well, and what was happening there now after an ordeal was passed!

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