Published at 6th of November 2026 7:38 am

Chapter 5953: Immensity and Cults I

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Noah let a portion of his consciousness slip loose from the farm and follow the thread. It ran out of the snowing corner of THE Infinite Carcosa and away across existence, thin and bright and very old, one of the strands of his first Infinity that he had once left inside an old friend, and his attention went racing along it through the dark faster than any Conduit.

Behind him, his body stayed where it was, leaning on the hoe in the snow while Lygara’s strands of destiny worked slowly at the great beetle shell overhead.

As he went, he watched the map that only he could see. His own small lights fell away behind him, the farm and the grassland and the scattered sparks of his Dream, and the vast dark shape of THE Undefined Gaps opened up ahead, enormous and hazy and almost entirely unlit. Deep in the middle of that darkness, far from any of the places his authority had ever touched, a single small dot was blinking, and the faint letters beside it read Eckert.

Around the dot, the darkness carried a name of its own, written across a wide stretch of the map in letters the color of old ash. THE Ashfall Reaches, it said, a part of the Gaps that Noah had never heard of and never seen, and his thread ran straight down into the middle of it. He followed it down, and the dot grew larger, and then everything around him changed.

---

He arrived inside a mind. It was small and cramped and smelled faintly of incense and fear, the mentalscape of a Newly Risen Immense One, and most of it had been pushed aside and filled with something else, wide rolling clouds of purple and blue that went on and on in every direction. In the middle of those clouds sat Eckert, lounging back on nothing at all in long blue robes, a handsome dark-haired king with his legs crossed and his eyes changing color every instant, and when he saw Noah arrive, he grinned and nodded.

"Come into my humble abode," Eckert said, spreading his arms at the clouds, "a Newly Risen Immensity that I managed to infect with my unity and domination. There are a lot of things I’d tell you first, but things are a bit sensitive outside this body I’ve taken over."

He leaned forward, still smiling, and tapped the side of his head. "So I’ll share my senses with you. Check this out."

...!

The clouds rolled aside, and Noah felt a body settle around him. It was not his body, but for the moment it moved when he wanted it to move and saw what he wanted it to see, and he understood that Eckert had opened its senses to him completely. He was standing in the air inside the body of a female Immense One, slim and young by the standards of Immensity, and she was not alone.

All around her, hundreds of other Immense Ones floated in a great circular formation, every one of them wrapped in long robes of dark crimson. On the chest of every robe, stitched in black thread, was the same symbol, a mountain turned upside down, its peak pointing downward into nothing. They hung in silence, ring upon ring, all of them facing inward toward the thing at the center of their circle, which was a mountain of its own.

It was an Elsedimension, a whole mountain set apart from the rest of existence and placed here in the dark, and it was burning. Its slopes were red and black and running with something that looked molten, its peak was wrapped in a haze of scorching heat that bent the air for a great distance around it, and every so often a low sound rolled out of its depths that Noah felt in the borrowed bones of the body he was wearing. It smelled of hot volcanic ash and old blood.

---

Back in the clouds of the mentalscape, Eckert was still talking, and Noah listened while he watched. "I got lucky with this one," Eckert said. "She belongs to THE Primevals of Old, which is a pretty average Legacy, nothing special, so I thought I’d nabbed myself a small fish. Then I found out, ridiculously, that she’d been quietly recruited into an even bigger Legacy, a secret one belonging to some unfathomable bigwig, and I got excited, because I thought I’d struck it rich."

He sighed and scratched his chin. "But this secretive Legacy seems a bit cultish, and I’ve been following along for a while now, and after a lot of Narratives have come down from on high, they finally seem ready to carry out whatever ridiculous, nefarious plans they’ve been sitting on. This branch of the cult is doing a summoning ritual, right here, and it’s all crazy, ridiculous stuff, because what the fuck could Immense Ones even be summoning?"

His grin faded a little, and for a moment his changing eyes went still. "It all seemed crazy enough, but then the process started inside that Elsedimension Mountain, and that place began leaking an aura that is shaking even my innocent, kind heart right now."

He waved a hand toward the burning mountain. "So I called you, big guy."

...!

Noah turned the borrowed head slowly and took in the whole of it. The rings around the mountain were enormous, and when he counted them, the numbers were worse than they had looked at first glance. The outermost ring held five hundred Newly Risen Immense Ones, the next held two hundred Established, the next one hundred Ancients, and in the innermost ring, closest to the burning mountain, twenty-five Half-Unfathomables and Unfathomables floated mixed together, their pressure so heavy that the body he was wearing could barely look at them directly.

They were not ordinary beings, any of them. Many had four arms, two tucked into their crimson sleeves and two held open at their sides, and their skin ran in deep colors, blue and black and ash-grey, with gold armlets heavy on their wrists and elaborate crowns set on their heads.

Some had serpent bodies below the waist, coiled in slow loops on the air, with hoods of scaled skin flared behind their heads, and others carried great closed wings of red and gold at their backs, and some among the Ancients had third eyes open in the middle of their foreheads, burning with a steady light. Their faces were painted with ash, and their eyes were half closd, and every one of them hummed the same low note together, a chant with no words in it, under their breath.

Above all of them, alone over the peak of the burning mountain, stood the one who held the whole circle together. He had a vast and powerful human body wrapped in dark crimson robes, heavier and richer than the others, with black iron rings on every one of his four arms and ash smeared across his broad chest. And where a human head should have been, he had the head of an elephant, enormous and grey and ancient, crowned in black iron, with four long tusks that curved downward and gleamed bone-white in the light of the fire below.

His eyes were small and dark and perfectly calm, and when Noah looked up at him through the borrowed eyes, the body he was wearing began to tremble on its own. The pressure coming off him was beyond anything else in the circle, beyond the Unfathomables, and Noah knew what that meant even before he looked. This was an Excedere Unfathomable Immensity, standing over the ritual as its keeper, majestic and silent and terrible!

At the very center of the mountain, cradled in its burning peak, there was a lake. It was perfectly round and filled with a thick, red, glowing liquid that was not lava at all but raw Immensity, and it was bubbling hard, great slow bubbles rising and bursting across its surface while the whole lake shook. Every time it shook, the rings of Immense Ones swayed with it, and the chanting grew a little louder.

Then the elephant-headed figure raised one of his four hands, and the chanting stopped. In perfect silence, every Immense One in every ring reached up with a blade, some of iron and some of bone and some made of nothing but their own light of immensity, and drew it across their own chest. The body Noah was wearing did the same, and he felt the cut open in borrowed flesh, a hot sharp line of pain across the ribs, while Eckert swore softly somewhere in the clouds behind him.

Blood came out of every one of them at once, crimson and gold, thick with the Immensity inside it, and it did not fall. It flowed, all of it, inward through the air from eight hundred and twenty-five open chests, long glowing streams curving down through the rings toward the burning mountain and pouring into the bubbling lake at its heart. The lake drank it, and rose, and the shaking grew worse, until the whole Elsedimension Mountain groaned and the heat coming off it bent the dark itself.

Noah stood in a stranger’s body with blood running down its chest and watched the whole thing, and he slowly shook the borrowed head. He had come here from a quiet farm in the snow, where he had been building a house with a Gu of Destiny, and now he was in a cult’s blood circle around a burning mountain with an Excedere Unfathomable standing over it. What the fuck had Eckert pulled him into?

As grsnd as his second Narrative was, he didn’t need to be involved in everything occuring across existence!

As he wondered it, his Dreaming Human Origin pulsed, far away in his true existence, and his Shinjitsu pulsed with it. Together they reached out through the thread and looked at what he was looking at, and they began to run possibilities, thousands of them and then countless more. Then the information came, blooming in front of him in waves.

|You have come upon a ritual of extreme age.|

|Ritual: THE Rite of Scorched Return.|

|It is being carried out by THE Covenant of the Inverted Peak, a secret Legacy that has hidden inside other Legacies for Ages.|

|THE Covenant worships the far side of THE Mountain at the Center of Everything.|

|Presiding: ?????. Immensity currently here: Excedere Unfathomable Immensity.|

|Offering: the Immensity and Narrative of 825 Immense Ones, given through their own blood.|

|They are not trying to summon any of Those Who Remain like them.|

|They are most likely trying to summon something out of Unstable Quantum Existence, or the threads of one of Those Who Overcame, who died and whose weavings were scorched into THE Mountain at the Center of Everything.|

|What answers: ?????|

...!

Noah’s eyes went wide, or rather, since he did not have any eyes here, being only a guest in the body of an Immense One that Eckert had taken over, that lifeform’s eyes went wide for him. He stared at the bubbling lake of blood and Immensity at the heart of the burning mountain, and at the elephant-headed figure standing silent above it, and at the last line of the prompts hanging in front of him. And...

What the fuck?

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