Published at 2nd of October 2026 10:32 am

Chapter 5798: The Convocation of Roots! III

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

After Ling, the Convocation found its rhythm, and the bouts came fast.

The water-woman stepped onto the Plain against a Progeny wreathed in white fire, and for a moment the fire seemed to have the better of it, roaring over her in sheets.

Then she simply went deeper. Her Dimensionality sank beneath the fire’s, a whole ocean opening under the Plain where no ocean should fit, and a tide rose out of it lit from within by swimming fish of light. It closed over the flames from below, where they could not reach, and drowned them!

Batiatus went next, and talked the entire time.

"Your left foot is slipping," he said, and it slipped. "You are tired," he said, and his opponent staggered. "That blow will miss," and it missed, by an inch, every sentence true for three breaths within a few paces of him, his Dimensionality pressing each word into the ground around him like a stamp.

He was gloriously, unbearably annoying. He was also winning, right up until he challenged the stag-headed one!

The stag lowered its antlers, and every small bell hung on them rang once.

The sound did not travel outward. It sank inward, down into the Dimensionality of the space around it, and where it reached, speech stopped existing. Batiatus opened his mouth, and nothing true came out.

Nothing at all came out! He mimed a very rude sentence in silence, and the stag struck him off the Plain.

Then the figure in the grey cloak of mist stood, and its opponent attacked, and every blow passed straight through where it seemed to be. It sat at a depth of existence its opponent could not reach, so every strike landed on a shadow a layer above it. It did not move once. The opponent exhausted itself on nothing and yielded!

And Favors fell from the thrones like coins tossed onto a stage. A glint of light from the Salt-Crowned Matron. A murmur from the Hollow Choir. A slip of green from the throne in leaf.

Noah watched all of it, and learned.

Not by copying. He had no interest in carrying someone else’s water or wearing someone else’s silence. But every bout was a different answer to the same question: what is existence, and how does one stand in it? What were their dreams?

The water-woman believed depth was power. Batiatus believed words were. The mist believed it was enough simply to be where no one else could reach. Each of them was a way of looking, and each one struck a small spark somewhere in his own Dream. He let the sparks land, and kept them.

Then Achilles stood.

The king stepped off his cloud onto the snow!

Achilles walked to the center and looked across the plain.

"You," he said to the stag.

...!

It was a strange choice. Noah read Achilles’s panel as he walked and found his attributes barely reaching four hundred. The stag stood near eight. Half the Plain seemed to think the same thing at once as they could also measure relative Dimensionality, and a murmur ran around the golden clouds!

The stag’s bells rang as it stepped onto the arena as if it had been offended!

The silence came down on Achilles like a falling wall, and the stag came with it, antlers lowered, and he took the first blow full on. He flew. He hit the snow and rolled and came up bleeding, and the stag was already on him agian.

The first exchanges were ugly. The stag was twice his weight in every measure, and every time its antlers came down, the silence came with them, pressing into the Dimensionality around Achilles until even his breath seemed to stop existing. He was losing, badly.

But he was very, very hard to catch.

Noah saw it before anyone else. Achilles was not dodging through space. He was dodging through time, stepping a fraction of a moment out of where the antlers came down, sliding half a heartbeat sideways so a blow meant for him landed on the place he had been.

He was slippery as an eel in a river of hours. And while he slipped, he was reaching.

The bell-silence closed on him again.

And this time he did not dodge it. He let it in.

"Assimilate," he said, and nothing came out of his mouth, because the silence took the word. It did not matter. The silence went into him anyway, and became him, as everything he touched became him!

The next time the stag’s bells rang, Achilles rang with them, and the silence broke against a king who was now made partly of silence himself!

A gasp went up from the whole plain!

On his throne of instruments, Moriarty set down his quill and leaned forward.

Then the time came out even more!

Achilles’s body flickered. Young. Old, suddenly, lined and white-haired and thin. Young again. His fist met the stag’s shoulder before his arm had moved, and his foot was already planted where the stag was going to step. All of him shone faintly purple with the signature of the rivers of time Noah had watched him swallow, and for a long moment, the smaller king held the larger stag to a standstill!

And then the cold came!

Frost spread from his feet. It ran out across the plain in fine white lines, spidering over the snow, and the falling snow above him bent in its fall, all of it curving toward him as though he were drawing it in. His breath went pale in the air. It was not a man’s breath. It was a winter’s breath, long and slow and old.

Noah went utterly still!

He knew that cold. He had knelt in it in a frozen underworld, and drunk rivers of it. It was packed into his quarks, compressed alongside his Provenance, and he would know it anywhere in existence.

Had this monster... begun assimilating THE Long Night itself?

The stag slowed. Its bells rang, muffled. Its hooves dragged in the frost. The cold was on it now, in it, pulling every movement down toward stillness, and Achilles slipped around it through the edges of time, striking, striking!

HUUUM!

But not wounding.

Achilles could slow the stag and evade it forever, stepping between moments and dragging winter behind him. He simply did not have the power to break it. Every blow he landed skated off a being twice his weight and left nothing but frost.

A Keeper stepped between them as nobody wanted to watch an endlessly boring fight, so it was called!

A draw.

The stag stood utterly furious at having a draw by something so weak, rimed to the tips of its antlers. Achilles stood across from it, breathing slow, and around him the snow was still falling. It neither melted on him nor froze him. It simply settled into him and was gone, as it settled into Noah.

Above the plain, several thrones stirred, and not warmly.

|THE SALT-CROWNED MATRON watches in silence. The rain around her throne has turned to sleet.|

|A hazy throne dims.|

|THE ASHEN CANTOR’s embers fall very slowly.|

None of them said a word. They did not need to. The Plain of Accord felt the chill all the same!

Achilles walked back to his cloud and sat. He looked across at Noah with solemn eyes, frost still clinging to his lashes, and gave a slight nod.

What was this monster thinking? And...had he been brought into the folds of The Caretaker as well?

Noah tapped his knee thoughtfully!

Behind him, Rose finally moved. She reached out and brushed the frost off his shoulder.

It did not come off.

And at this moment, across the ring, Minerva rose!

She leaped!

She came down in the middle of it, and as she landed, seeds spilled from the hem of her green robe. Small, green, glowing, dozens of them scattering across the snow, and wherever one fell, a Dimension bloomed. Tiny ones, pocket realities opening like flowers, each one green and full of leaves and gone again in a breath.

She lifted a hand and pointed.

"Osmont."

...!

The plain went silent. Every Provenance Lifeform and every Progeny on the golden clouds turned to look at him at once!

Above, THE Verdant Regard’s green gaze sharpened until it was almost painful to be under. Poona leaned forward on her throne, eyes shining. Moriarty set down his quill again, laced his tentacles in his lap, and arranged his face into something very carefully neutral.

Was it finally his time to make a move?

Noah stretched and stepped down off his cloud, and walked out onto the snow to face her as he wasn’t fearful even though she was grand!

Her voice came into his mind.

"There’s been a lot of talk, in case you didn’t know. Some of the Immense Ones think you’re one of them. The three. There’s a prophecy of the Long Night, and I don’t even know if you know it, but Mother and some of the others have been whispering it since the hour you were brought here."

Her green eyes held his.

"I don’t believe it. I reject it. Why should existence listen to a rhyme? Why should everything that is be bound to three supposed beings?"

"...I’m sorry. For the animosity it seems I have. It isn’t you, really. I just want to prove them wrong. Existence is too grand to be steered by three beings. It has to be. Or what are the rest of us for? Just background? Just nothing?"

Her crooked crown caught the snowlight.

"The moment anything is born, it has a role to play. Some love to think the man in the gilded chair matters more than the farmer pulling weeds in the dirt. They convince themselves existence is a grand play, where a few loud names run the stage while everyone else is scenery filling up the dark. It doesn’t work like that. Not one role is grander than the next. No one is a background character, made just to watch someone else live. The king, the beggar, and the stray dog. Every single life carries its own weight."

...!

Noah almost smiled.

Him? One of the three, in some random prophecy? He could say with a fair amount of certainty that that was not the case. For a long while now, he had been reining in the weavings of THE PROTAGONIST, precisely so that they would not drag him into the center of anything grand and ridiculous without his say!

He could be mistaken for some grand figure, certainly. But he was not going to fit neatly into any role that others had designed for him in advance!

"I don’t know whether I’m one of three," he answered, calm, in his mind to hers. "I don’t much care. I don’t live by prophecy either. I live by my Dream. We agree on more than you think so...let’s find out who’s right anyway."

They had just been eye fucking each other intently this whole time as from above, a booming command came!

"Begin," said Moriarty.

Minerva looked at him.

That was all she did at first, and it was enough. Where her gaze landed, existence was judged, and what was judged began to grow. The snow at Noah’s feet sprouted. Green shoots burst up through it, budded, bloomed into pale flowers, rotted, and returned as fresh shoots, all in the span of a single glance!

Roots of green authority tore up out of the Plain and out of the empty air itself, thick as tree trunks, wrapping around him, growing into whatever they held and through it, meaning to take root in him and grow him into something else.

They found nothing to grow into.

Noah stood still and let them try. The roots wrapped his crystalline body and pressed, searching for a seam, a borrowed thread, anything at all that was not his own, and his compressed existence gave them nothing. There was no soil in him that was not already him. The roots slid, and scraped, and could not sprout.

But the pressure behind them was immense. Nine hundred and ninety-nine in everything, all of it bearing down at once, and for the first time since the frozen underworld, his crystalline skin buzzed!

A thin line of light opened along his forarm, and another across his ribs!

Minerva’s voice rang out loud this time, for the whole plain to hear.

"You’re holding back? Everyone here is watching you! Why won’t you confirm or deny what they think? Let’s make everything clear right here! Let them all know there are no chosen ones!"

Noah looked at the green roots wrapped around his arms, at the flowers blooming and dying at his feet, and then up at her.

"I’m... learning at this moment," he said. "Your weavings. Your Provenance. Your Dreams. I am trying to understand, before anything else."

Minerva’s eyes flared, green, then white with anger.

"Then understand this!"

The whole Plain of Accord erupted into a forest of Dimensions!

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