Read Novel Full Chapter 5805: I Dream Your End!
Chapter 5805: I Dream Your End!
Noah felt like an engine!
THE Osmontian Inscription of THE Dreaming Hour churned inside him, pressing a day into every second. His Root spun at the center of his chest, faster and faster, the mobius turning like a wheel that had finally been given a road. And through all of it, through every packed quark and every current of Provenance, the idea of Infinity was spreading. Seeping in. Soaking into his Dream until he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
He raised his hands.
The crow roared!
It was a maddened sound, stripped of any grace it had carried before, and with it came a wave. A glacial wave of cold rolled out of its body in every direction, white and total, and everything it touched froze. Drifting islands, torn Dimensions, the white-blue sea below and the frozen air above, gigaparsecs of it in every direction, all of it locked solid in a single instant, as though this region had become a gem with the three of them sealed inside it!
Ling froze mid-leap.
Noah froze mid-reach.
For one breath, nothing moved at all.
Then, around Ling, the ice began to melt. It ran off her in streams and sheeted away from her skin, because there was nothing in her for it to hold. And around Noah, the ice began to dream. It softened. It blurred at its edges into drifting golden haze, slow and drowsy, until he was simply moving through it as though it had never frozen at all.
He lowered his hands, and spoke.
"My Tongue is young," Noah said. "Undeveloped. I dream of it growing, and it will. I have Letters. I have Words. All of them built on my own Root and my own foundations."
His eyes held the crow.
"So I will make a sentence. One built for nothing but destruction."
He breathed in.
"I DREAM OF YOUR END."
HUUM!
|THE OSMONTIAN TONGUE: A SENTENCE has been composed.|
|I DREAM OF YOUR END.|
|Your Root, your foundations, and your Provenance are gathered to a single purpose: to dream, simply and purely, the end of what you behold.|
|While you hold the target in your gaze, its existence is dreamed toward its conclusion. What is dreamed away does not vanish. It returns to the dreamer.|
|The more certain the Dream, the faster the ending.|
...!
The edges of the crow began to glow!
A thin line of gold ran along the rims of its great wings, along the tips of its talons, along the cracked edge of its beak. It shone for a moment, soft and warm and wrong against all that black ice. Then the glowing edges began to flake away. Tiny golden flakes, drifting loose from the crow like ash from a burning page, and they did not fall. They flowed. Across the frozen sky in slow shining streams, all of them drifting toward Noah, sinking into his skin, and he felt each one arrive as a small warm weight in his chest!
The crow screamed and lookd at its own wing.
Then its crown rang.
It was a terrible sound as around the crown, shapes began to form. Rendered shapes, many-faced and vast, turning slowly in the frozen air. A colossal orange one, facet upon facet, so intricate Noah’s eyes pulsed trying to follow it. And inside that, a violet one, and inside that, another orange. Shrink. Push. Shrink again. The three of them spun together around the crown and then drove at Noah as one, a single rendered weapon built to crush everything it touched down into a point smaller than a quark and then scatter the point across existence!
Noah looked at it coming.
He composed another sentence.
"I DREAM OF HEALING INFINITELY."
HUUM!
|A second SENTENCE has been composed.|
|I DREAM OF HEALING INFINITELY.|
|While it holds, whatever of you is broken is dreamed whole again before your existence can come apart.|
|It does not prevent the blow. It refuses the wound.|
The rendered weapon hit him.
BOOM!
It crushed his left arm down to nothing, pushed his ribs out through his back, and condensed half his skull into a point and flung the point away. And golden clouds bloomed on every wound in the same instant, and his arm was there again, and his ribs, and his skull, whole, whole, whole, each broken part dreamed back into place before the rest of him could even notice it was gone!
He walked through the rendered weapon as it tore him apart and remade him, over and over, and came out the other side untouched.
Then he landed on the crow’s back!
He stood there among the black-ice feathers and the frosted ribs, naked and gleaming, heavy with muscle, and raised both hands over his head, and brought them down like hammers!
WAA!
The crow cried out!
Its back buckled under the blow. Golden light ran out from the point of impact in cracks, and more of it flaked away, and the flakes streamed up into him. He brought his hands down again. And again. Every strike, more of the crow came loose into dreams and drifted home to him.
"When a dream is small, it dies with the morning," Noah said, and his voice rolled out across the whole frozen region.
He struck.
"But when a dream has enough weight, when it has enough teeth, it stops being a dream. It becomes existence."
He struck again.
"My dream is not an invitation. It is an unyielding decree, moving with absolute certainty. Struggling against it is an ant cursing an avalanche. It changes nothing at all."
His hands came down, and the crow’s spine groaned.
"Sit down. Stop thrashing against it. Do not fucking resist! The dream will happen, and your permission was never asked!"
...!
ROOOAR!
The crow reared under him, screaming, thrashing, the whole mountain-range bulk of it bucking in the frozen air.
And Ling moved.
She hung in the air beside its head, and her thighs flexed. They swelled, visibly, the great muscles expanding as though something inside her had just been given room to breathe, and she began to spin. A hazy light wrapped around her, golden-violet, the same light that had burned around her father’s mountain, and her eyes changed. The pupils went out of them. They were pale and blank and white, exactly like her father’s, and she turned in the air in a slow, flowing circle, and then another.
The Kindled Circle. A piece of it. Three turnings, four, drawing her closer and closer to the Root that was her whole existence, until Noah could not tell, watching, where the girl ended and the Root began.
On the last turning, she kicked the crow’s beak.
BOOM!
It shattered in half!
The whole great cracked tower split down its length with a sound like a glacier breaking off a mountain, and the two halves tumbled away into the dark, and from the ruin of the crow’s face, gold poured out. Flakes and flakes of it, a river of them, streaming across the sky and into Noah!
Noah roared!
He threw his hands up, and the blue-gold clouds all around him gathered into them, and took shape. Spears. Long and bright and made of his own Provenance, humming with his Dream. He drove the first one down into the crow’s back. Then the second. Then a third.
The crow flipped. It rolled over in the air, trying to throw him, and its feathers came off it in a freezing storm, and they cut him open. Across the chest, the thighs, the throat. Heavy wounds, deep and cold, the kind that should have ended him. Every one of them was dreamed shut before his existence could so much as start to break apart.
He kept throwing spears.
Four. Ten. Twenty. He drove them in faster than the crow could thrash, one after another after another, until its whole back was a forest of blue-gold shafts, skewered from the base of its broken crown down to its tail.
And from behind, Ling kicked it.
She came up under its tail and drove her foot straight into its ass, with every ounce of her Root behind it, and the sound the crow made then was not a scream. It was a sound no creature should ever have to make!
The kick drove the whole beast upward onto the spears. Every one of them sank in to the haft. And the crow split.
Down the middle, spine to breast, the two halves of it tearing away from each other in the frozen dark!
Noah’s sentence grew grander.
Now he could see it. Truly see it, the end of this thing, as clearly as he could see his own hands, and the more certain he was of it, the faster the Dream moved. The crow’s halves glared at him with every eye they had left, furious, hating. Golden clouds closed around them. And all at once, the whole of its body turned to dream!
BOOM!
The explosion was frozen. It burst outward in a sphere of white and gold and blue, ice and dream together, and for one moment the whole region was lit by it, and then it was gone.
Noah steadied himself in the air where the crow had been.
He looked grand. Naked and gleaming, packed with muscle, gold still drifting into him from the dust of the thing he had just ended.
|Your Infinity has permeated your weavings.|
|THE PROTAGONIST and THE Tide That Owes Nothing have become interlinked, for results most geared to you.|
|Loot shall once more flow from your enemies.|
|For granting death to an extremely powerful enemy, you have obtained: LESSER KRYOS EXISTENTIAL CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN x5, and one GLACIAL RECORD OF A CRUEL CROW.|
...!
Five slivers of pale blue crystal drifted out of the settling dust, each one a snowflake grown down into itself, pulsing cold and slow. They circled him, bright against the frozen dark.
And behind them came something else. A shard of ice, thin and clear, with light moving inside it. It floated up to him on its own, touched his brow, and sank in!
He saw the Basal Floor through the crow’s eyes.
Scattered scenes, dozens of them, flickering past. Frozen islands. Torn Dimensions. Other Empowered Hollow Night Lifeforms, huge and cold, prowling the dark. And then one scene held, and would not let him go.
THE Caretaker, bound in chains!
Her pages were gone. Her frost dress was torn. Great chains of pale light were wound around her arms and her waist, and she was being led. Before her walked a figure, long and slender and humanoid, far taller than she was, and it had no face at all. Only smooth, pale blankness where a face should have been. It led her across the Basal Floor, toward a massive crack in the ice, a vast blue rift splitting the frozen dark from top to bottom.
In the memory, the faceless thing stopped.
It turned around.
It had no eyes, and it looked at him anyway. Noah felt its invisible gaze land on him, through the crow’s dead memory, across however much distance lay between them.
And...
BOOM!
His upper body exploded!
It was erased, shoulders and chest and head wiped out of existence as cleanly as a word scraped off a page. And in the same instant, the golden clouds came roaring in, and his sentence held, and he was dreamed back together, whole, gasping.
The memory was gone. Ripped out of him!
But he hung there in the frozen air, grand and heavy-eyed and whole, having just defeated something far grander than himself.
Ling floated over. She was bleedng from a dozen cuts, her ribbons long gone, her pupils back again and bright with something that looked very much like approval. She looked him up and down.
Mostly down.
She whistled.
"Be decent and cover up when you fight, Big Boy," she said, still looking at his lower half. "You don’t want to be distracting."
Noah glanced down. A pair of blue-gold trousers wove themselves out of his Provenance and settled over his hips.
Then he turned his calm gaze back to the Lesser Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins, and waved his hand. Three more slid out of his keeping, the ones the Caretaker had given him, and joined the five in the air. Eight of them now, circling him in the dark.
They began to spin around each other, faster and faster.
And four of them began to fuse into one!