The Hypercone Trunk

[Ptah]

The base of the Hypercone tree, where the thick plates of bronze agates that make up the tree's bark give way to the glittering adamas of the Diamond, is a place of silence and serenity. Leaves of the thinnest diamond form a veneer of shining beauty, and, far above, the home of the Norns soars up, taller than can be seen, disappearing into the ocean of endless possibility above.

I walk up to this massive living pillar looking morose. I stand, looking up at the Hypercone Tree. I look at my paper crow, Lester. Then:

"Norns, I wish to speak with you. I have traveled far and wide, and I have lived many lifetimes. I have watched and listened and tried to ignore the world falling apart around me. I have seen suffering, and I have seen pain. And I don't care about any of it.

"I drift about. I observe, just as I have done for my entire life. I rarely interfere, I even more rarely make friends. I stand and watch from the sides as others put their very existences in danger just so they can help. But I don't understand. This is the question I ask you: What is the point of helping? Why should I put myself in danger, when all it will do is prolong life? All ages end; nothing endures. So why try? If everything just gets stripped away, what's left?

"To be brief, I need a purpose. How do I find it?"

@the Steep Norns

[the Steep Norns]

"To be brief, I need a purpose. How do I find it?"

To speak of need is to show you already gots a purpose, dearie.

I look at my paper crow, Lester.

Ptah, dearie, you've already done something every other deity could not.
Yes, we said COULD NOT. Were literally incapable of. No one else was CAPABLE, we say, we yell, of reaching out to the Tawny Trickster the way you did.

Almighty omnipresent gods were rendered incapable by your calm out of the box thinking. They weren't physically capable, because they didn't think of it.

This is a universe where to sit and think and come up with something new is more important and powerful than any amount of energy.

Points of origin. Naming things, Ptah. Create and catalog. Or, as some would have it, rearrange the world to match a creation, a catalog, a scratching needle measuring ripples, or riding ripples to screech out an interpreted song.

We're sorry there's no short answer, long-lived one.

"Norns, I wish to speak with you. I have traveled far and wide, and I have lived many lifetimes. I have watched and listened and tried to ignore the world falling apart around me. I have seen suffering, and I have seen pain. And I don't care about any of it.

"I drift about. I observe, just as I have done for my entire life. I rarely interfere, I even more rarely make friends. I stand and watch from the sides as others put their very existences in danger just so they can help. But I don't understand.

This is not to say that you have thought too little, or thought too much. The best sort of thought is one that creates, and thus passes power onward. It's a world of ripples, dearie, ripples in invulnerable adamas. Ripples are nice and orderly, yet full of energy.

Variety. A beautiful, colorful pattern, a pinnacle tapestry, that one day, one day if everything is not "stripped away", Norns and Ptah will not be ashamed to see fluttering from an ancient moss-hung hypercone tree with too many rippled rings for the gods to count its age.

And if everything is stripped away, that tapestry will still be left, for it is above even memory.

[Great Thrash]

What makes a goal worthy rather than merely a goal?

-Intertwinedness, where at the end you gasp at how it all came together
-Passion
-Complexity
-Modularity, where you can join pieces together, switch them out (I love slots)

What else? Agree or disagree?

[Ptah]

I think for a long, long time.

"Ripples, tapestries, energy... you speak in riddles, but in these I hear truth. Waves of light... of sound... of storms... of thought... of music.

"I am struggling to understand, and I think that I am finally beginning to. You say that when all of this is gone, when this existence ceases, the only thing left of us will be our legacies. Our tapestries; the imprint of the ripples that our lives caused, like the afterimage of a bright light on the underside of an eyelid.

"If everything we do is just going to become a tapestry or a memory or a half-sung piece of music, then I was right all along. There is no point. No point in trying to make the tapestry a beautiful one, because how could I possibly see what my actions will produce? There is only what I can do from here, from inside of it. I'm not the weaver, but a thread. I follow a single, narrow line in the tapestry we will leave behind, and where I touch others we create ripples. Ripples in the adamas, ripples in the facets, ripples in each other. All that I can do is keep weaving my way through, do what I can, and make things right.

"So, because I have no hope of seeing the big picture, I cannot see how anything I do matters. It is the same as having no purpose at all, but with one key difference:

"In the end, if nothing matters, everything matters.

"Every gesture, every word. Every dropped cone of ice cream and skinned knee, every laugh and handwritten letter. If there's no grand plan in sight, no big finale, then all we have left is what's going on now. The little things, like a crocus pushing up through concrete, or an old woman who sits in her rocking chair and sees a child walk by in the rain and says, 'I'm going to get that boy a nice cup of tea.' Or finishing the half-sung piece of music. Or making snow angels. Or stopping to look at the veins in a leaf.

"So here I am. Rippling. Do you hear the music? I hear it. It's the sound of a needle scraping along my thread in the tapestry of existence, making music as it skates along the bumps and twists and turns. Life music."

I smile brightly, place a handwritten note at the base of the Hypercone Tree, and walk away into the Gardens. I whistle the jaunty tune of my life as I go. The note reads:

"To the Steepest Norns.
Thank you.
From Ptah."

There is a tiny drawing of a crow.

[Steepest Durin]

An unendin' age is theoretically possible. When one Facet collapses, there's a symmetrically-relevant response in another part of th' Diamond. I've seen this I's self.

As for th' tapestry with no one left ta see it. In I's craftin' I've probed th' most detailed parts of th' Diamond. Its interestin', th' effect a man in th' past ken have on th' future just by havin' kept his eyes open, long long after he's passed through th' Hyperplane of th' Present into th' Past an' been confirmed dead ta th' Tapestry.

You're a time master, an' I'd bet if you went back an' meddled with time ta remove someone from th' tapestry, they'd still matter ta it, just as you say.