Published at 29th of September 2026 8:57 am

Chapter 5790: The Death of Time! II

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The two Rare Time Gu lay bound at Noah’s feet in THE Infiniverse’s many-colored chains, their violet wings dimmed, their long lures trembling, and he reached down to take them.

And yet...

He never touched them!

A moment before anything happened, Ruination went rigid!

Her crimson beams had been drifting lazily across the purple clouds, reading the spin of the time-disks and the slow currents between them, and all at once they locked in place. The script at her collar and wrists flared bright. The endless text scrolling through her eyes stopped scrolling, and held on a single thin line that had just appeared at the far edge of everything she could see.

"Master," she said.

Her voice was as level as ever, but it came quickly, and Ruination never spoke quickly.

"There is a branch. Point zero zero zero three percent. It should not be possible for it to..."

It should not be possible, but...it happened anyway.

The Provenance of Time came down on them like a falling sea!

It poured out of the purple sky in heavy, turbulent sheets of violet and gold, and every current of it was thick with more ages than the whole murky domain had held a breath before. The time-disks spinning through the clouds stopped dead mid-turn, frozen in place like coins dropped into ice!

The towering clouds stopped drifting. Even the light changed. It began arriving late, reaching Noah’s eyes a long, strange instant after it should have, so that everything he looked at seemed to be happening a little in the past.

At his feet, very quietly, the two bound Rare Gu began to weep.

Noah moved on instinct. He reached for his Provenance, for his Root, for the rivers of dream that had kept every danger in this domain curving harmlessly around him and his companions like wind around a standing stone.

Nothing came!

That was the first strange thing. His Provenance had not gone anywhere. He could feel all of it, vast and blue and gold, filling him exactly as it always did. It simply would not move.

His Root was there too, turning at the center of him, except that it was not turning. It had been caught mid-beat, like a heart that had been told its next beat was not permitted.

Beside him, THE Infiniverse had frozen with one hand half-raised! The domains she had grown hanging motionless in their orbits around her. Ruination’s beams were still lit and still fixed on that impossible branch, and she could not turn them away from it.

So Noah reached for the one thing on him that had never needed his permission.

THE Enduring Gu Elsedimension Ring sat on his finger, and at its heart was an Existential Narrative Displacement, woven there for exactly this. The moment any authority grander than his own closed around him, it would tear him out of that place and throw him somewhere safer, whether he willed it or not.

And yet...

It did not fire!

He understood why a heartbeat later.

The ring’s displacement worked by carrying him into the next moment, somewhere else. To do anything at all, a being needed a next moment to do it in.

And there was no next moment anymore!

Something had reached across time and taken it away. The clock had not been stopped. The next moment had simply been removed from existence around them, so that every authority and every Root the three of them owned stood pinned inside one single instant, whole and grand and completely useless, with nowhere at all to go.

It was a very simple thing. That was what made it so terrifying.

Far above, something began to show itself!

At first there was only an absence. A place in the purple sky where the light did not arrive at all, a shape made out of lateness. Then the lateness gained edges, and the edges gained weight, and Noah began to see, or almost see, or see in pieces his sight could not quite hold together.

A limb came first, jointed and impossibly long, reaching down through the clouds like the hand of a clock that counted Ages instead of hours. Then another. Then a body, segmented and vast, each segment a great slab of something like amber, deep gold and translucent, and inside each slab, perfectly preserved, lay an entire Age!

He could see them! Oceans and cities and burning stars, and the tiny frozen figures of beings who had lived and died long befor anything he knew had begun, all of it sealed segment upon segment down the length of a body that ran on past the edge of his sight.

Wings spread above it! They were not made of any substance at all. They were made of stopped moments, thousands upon thousands of frozen instants gathered from every corner of existence and laid edge to edge like scales.

Then the head came down through the clouds!

It had no face. Where a face should have been there was only a smooth dark hollow, and around that hollow, set like a crown, were eyes. A great many eyes, and in each one a different Age was still happening. Noah looked into one and saw a Dimension being born. In the one beside it, the same Dimension dying. In the next, a war, and in the one after, the same war won by the other side.

|THE FIRST GU OF TIME.|

The prompt gave him nothing else. Beneath the name lay only a smear of question marks that his sight slid off of, as though the rest of what she was had quietly declined to be read.

"You have come a very long way to take something that was never yours," THE First Gu of Time said.

Her voice did not come from the hollow where her face should have been. It came from the stopped moments in her wings, all of them at once, cool and clear and perfectly composed.

"I have watched your kind come. Across more Ages than you could count if I gave you every moment I hold to count them in." The crown of eyes turned, unhurried, toward the two bound Rare Gu, and the Ages burning in them softened very slightly. "Tell me. What did these small ones do to you, that you should hunt them?"

The Rare Gu whimpered in their chains.

"I have seen lifeforms like you move through my children as reapers move through a field. You take them. You grind them down. You bind them into rings, render them into engines, and pour their small lives into vessels to keep yourselves warm, and then you call it craft, as though the word makes it clean. What gave you the right?"

Noah could not answer. The instant held his mouth as firmly as it held everything else.

"Consider it turned around," THE First Gu of Time went on, quietly. "Consider my children moving through your Dimensions and your Observable Existences. Through your proud Lineages. Taking your Descendants from their cradles and your Provenance Lifeforms from their halls, and grinding their bodies into material for our own warmth."

Every eye in her crown held him. "How would it feel, to be the harvest? I have asked this of a great many of your kind. Not one has ever answered me well. Why is there such cruelty in all of you?"

WAA!

And Noah thought...of the Common Dream Gu sealed at the heart of the ring on his finger. It had dreamed only of warmth, and of being left alone. He thought of the Common Gu that had died screaming in his first failed inscription, cracked apart by a Letter too heavy for it to carry, and of how he had come to this domain today to take a Rare Gu and forge it into a tool, and had never once, not for a single breath, cared.

It was kill or be killed right? Natural selection?

He had looked at them as material!

And the Collector, not so very long ago, had looked at the Vasilious in a similar manner.

He did not like how close those two thoughts sat to each other. He did not like it at all.

"You are silent? Nobody truly ever has a devent answer as at least...you are silent." THE First Gu of Time said.

Her crown of eyes turned away from him, slowly, and came to rest on THE Infiniverse and Ruination.

"These two are dear to you," she said. It was not a question. "I have seen every moment you have ever spent looking at them. They are very dear."

...!

Something in Noah’s pinned existence strained against the instant so hard that the frozen moment around him creaked.

But...

It did not break!

"Then they will learn what my children learn," THE First Gu of Time said. "I take no pleasure in it. But you have made it clear that you learn nothing from words. Perhaps you will learn from this."

She never touched them. There was no need!

THE Infiniverse’s domains began to age and die!

The small new Dimensions orbiting her, the ones she had grown only moments ago from her Root of Genesis and been so quietly proud of, went grey. Their seas dried to craked beds. Their continents crumbled. Whole spans of time were forced through each of them at once, and one after another they withered to dust and drifted away from her like ash from a dead fire.

THE Infiniverse could neither move nor cry out, but her starlit eyes were open, and Noah saw in them exactly what she felt: every one of those domains dying as she was made to feel their death amplified by many times!

And Ruination kept recording as her Root was the Root of the Record. Everything she observed, she kept, perfectly and forever, beyond the reach of any hand that might try to edit it. Pinned in place, unable to look away, she could not stop THE First Gu of Time from pouring the grinding deaths into her. The sinilar long, slow experience of a Gu being taken apart for material, again and again and again, and every instant of it written into her unchangeable record.

Noah watched the two of them forced to experience and record boundless deaths in amplified time, pinned and powerless, his Root frozen mid-beat and his Provenance sitting vast and useless inside him, and he knew what defeat was!

He had tasted it before, and it always sucked. But he had never tasted it like this.

Then, very slightly, the instant loosened around his mouth.

The First Gu of Time wanted him to speak!

Noah did not beg as he did not know how, and he would not have done it here even if he had. But he did not lie either. He had been honest with himself when a caretaker of the cold asked him what he would do differently and he found he had no answer. He could at least be honest now.

"I am human," Noah said.

His voice came out low and steady.

"And humans make mistakes. I will take this as one of mine. I came here to take your children the way I have taken others, and I never once asked what that meant to them. That is on me."

He held the crown of burning eyes with his own. "But you and I are not enemies past forgiving. We have a disagreement. So...what price needs to be paid for you to stop here?"

The eyes did not blink. The Ages inside them went on happening.

"I do not have the power right now to steer this where I want it to go. I know that. You have made very certain I know it. But I will have that power, in the future. Above everything else I am, I am determined. So determined that if I had to, I could make it the one absolute aim of my existence to ruin Time itself."

The frozen disks hung in the air around them. The dust of THE Infiniverse’s domains drifted slowly past. Ruination’s eyes kept writing.

"I would rather not," Noah said. "So. What price needs to be paid for us to go our separate ways?"

...!

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