Read Novel Full Chapter 5838: THE Evergrave! II
Chapter 5838: THE Evergrave! II
They caught him on a frozen plain!
Noah let them as he had seen the pack turn toward him down the long black street, so he walked out to meet them, past the last frozen houses and onto a white plain so wide it could have held an Observable Existence, and he waited there with his hands at his sides while the pack poured in from every direction at once.
There were twelve of them.
Night Lifeforms. Each one was a monstrosity the size of a mountain range, built like a man stretched and starved and frozen until it was more bone than flesh. They moved on all fours across the ice, their spines rising in long ridges, their ribs open down their fronts like the doors of empty barns.
Their faces were long and eyeless. Their mouths opened from chin to chest. Where they ran, the frozen space of the Evergrave split around them and closed again behind, and the Dimensionality pouring off their bodies came down on the plain like a storm of black hail.
They were fucking ugly!
Each one held a Root, cold and huge, burning in its open chest like a dying Dimension.
They spread out around him in a ring that reached the horizon, and stopped, and lowered their long faces toward the small warm thing standing alone in the middle of them, and breathed him in.
Their leader came last.
It was larger than the rest by half. It walked upright, its head scraping the frozen sky, wrapped in a cloak stitched from the skins of dead Dimensions, their stars still frozen into the hide. Around its neck hung a chain of hearts. Warm things it had caught and eaten, frozen solid, each one the size of a city. Some of them were very small.
Its Root was stronger than theirs. A scion of its Lineage, then. Close to Immense, and very proud of it. Its face was a long grey blade of bone, and its eyes were two cold points of blue, each one wider than a sea.
It looked Noah up and down.
Then it laughed!
The sound of it rolled across the plain like an avalanche. "Look at this," it said. "A warm thing in the endless cold..."
It walked a slow circle around him, each step cracking the ice for miles.
"No Lineage. No lord. No banner. Walking our home like it owns them."
Its cold blue eyes narrowed. "They told me a warm thing came through the gate. I laughed at them. Warm things don’t come to the Evergrave."
It bent down, and its long face filled the sky over him, its mouth opening to show teeth like frozen towers. "And the ones that do don’t last."
The pack laughed with it, a dozen dry roars that shook the frozen sun.
The scion lowered its face further.
"I haven’t tasted anything warm in Ages," it said softly. "I’m going to take my time with you."
Noah looked at it.
He looked at the frozen hearts on their chain. Then at the twelve Night Lifeforms in their ring, their Roots stirring with hunger.
THE THINKER had tried to delve into the source of THE Long Night and was almost killed when he came down to THE Undersnow. It showed that anyone with Immensity who didn’t belong got an extremely heavy reaction.
Noah so far...everything had been mild for him as he may just be able to uncover and understand more! He stretched his neck as his voice boomed out.
"Leave," Noah said. "Find something else to hunt, and leave me alone."
The plain went quiet!
Then the scion laughed again, louder, and the pack laughed with it, and the scion lifted one vast hand, and the cold of its Root began to gather.
Fine!
Noah looked at the twelve for but an instant.
An Instant!
And...
They stopped!
All of them, at once, in the middle of their laughter. Their mouths stayed open. Their teeth stayed bared. Their Roots, those huge cold stars burning in their open chests, simply went out, like twelve candles pinched between finger and thumb.
And the twelve monstrosities, one by one, sank down onto the ice and lay still, each one landing with a sound like a mountain falling, until the whole plain shook with it.
It took less than a breath!
The scion’s laugh died in its throat!
It stood over him with its hand still raised, staring at the twelve fallen giants around it, and for the first time, its cold blue eyes showed fear instead of hunger.
Then it struck!
Its Root blazed. The cold of the Chase came out of it, the hunting cold of its whole Lineage, a cold that had run down and frozen prey across a hundred Dimensions. It came down on Noah from every side at once in a storm of frozen Dimensionality, spears of black ice each long enough to pin a Dimension to the sky, the space around him clenching shut like a fist to hold him still for the killing.
Noah stood in the middle of it, and dreamed.
The storm reached him, and turned into a dream.
Every spear of black ice softened as it came, blurring at the edges, and passed through him like a memory of rain, and was gone. The fist of frozen space closed around him and closed on empty air. The cold of the Chase, the cold that had hunted down a hundred Dimensions, touched his night-dark skin, and his skin stayed exactly as warm as it had been.
He stood exactly where he had been. Every constellation under his skin burned steady.
"What... are you?" the scion hissed.
It struck again, and again, backing away across the plain, each blow vaster than the last, tearing the frozen land open around them in canyons that ran to the horizon. Noah walked through all of it. The canyons healed behind him as he passed, the ice dreaming itself whole again under his feet.
Then he was in front of it!
"Get back!" It brought both of its enormous hands down on him at once, with the whole weight of its body and its Root behind them, enough force to crack a Dimension in half.
Noah looked up at the hands, and dreamed them still.
They stopped in the air above him, frozen in place, trembling. The scion strained against its own arms with everything it had, and they stayed exactly where he had dreamed them.
"You should have left," Noah said.
He closed his hand.
The scion came apart!
It happened from the inside. Every joint of its huge frozen body opened at once, every limb tearing loose along every seam, its ribs splitting outward, its long bone face cracking from the crown down. Its Root guttered, flared once like a star about to go out, and went dark. What was left of it came down across the plain in pieces the size of mountains, and the chain of frozen hearts broke and scattered across the ice.
The plain was silent!
Thirteen giants lay broken across the frozen plain under a dead sun, and Noah stood among them, small and warm, without a single mark on him, breathing slowly.
It should have been over.
He looked at them for a long moment.
Twelve hunters and their scion. Kept awake in the cold for Ages, hunting the weak for scraps of warmth, wearing the hearts of children as trophies. He had ended them without a second thought, and he would do it again.
And yet...
Something about how they lay on the ice made him think of a great white panda, sitting on a frozen ring at the bottom of the Basal Floor for Ages, holding the door shut, wishing with every part of itself that it could stand up and walk away.
THE Vigil That Wished to Rise.
He had taken that dream from the Warden when he killed him. He had kept it. It had sat inside him ever since, quiet and patient, a dream that only ever wanted one thing.
Here, in a place full of dead stuck forever in place, he could feel it stirring.
Noah closed his gold eyes and reached for it.
The dream came up out of him slow and heavy, blue and gold and very old, and as it came, it spread out across the whole frozen plain and settled over the thirteen fallen giants like a blanket of light. He could feel each of them under it. Their Roots were out. Their bodies were broken. But somewhere far down in each of them, under the cold and the hunger and the long, long Ages of being kept, there was something left. A wish. The oldest wish any of the dead in this place had. A Dream!
To move again. To get up.
To rise!
Noah opened his eyes.
"Dream," he said.
HUUM!
The bodies shuddered!
One by one, across the frozen plain, the giants moved. A hand the size of a city flexed. A long bone face lifted from the ice. They pushed themselves up on shaking arms, slowly, as a man gets up after a very long sickness, and the whole plain trembled as they stood. Twelve monstrosities, their ribs open, the cold stars in their chests turned to faint lights of blue and gold. And their scion, whole again, rising last and largest, the chain of hearts gone from its neck.
Their eyes had changed. In place of the cold blue points burned the color of Noah’s own dreaming.
They turned, all thirteen of them, to face him.
And they knelt!
The plain cracked under their knees for miles in every direction.
|THE Vigil That Wished to Rise has woken in the Evergrave.|
|Here, among the dead who cannot move on, the dream of the one who wished to stand becomes yours to give.|
|Those you kill, you may raise. They rise bound to your Dream, and loyal to it.|
|The Risen Dreams keep their skills and their memories, and a part of their strength. Never all of it. A risen thing is less than it was, but it can dream to be grander under you. Due to this being the first time, the corpses of these Risen Dreams and weavings were sacrificed for their emergence.|
|Each risen thing rests on your Dream. The more you raise, the heavier it grows.|
|Risen Dreams: 14.|
...!
Noah read the prompts, then looked up at the thirteen giants kneeling around him, and the massive shadow of the golden fat panda behind them!
The scion lowered its great face until it hung in the air just above him.
"I can move," it said slowly. It looked at its own enormous hands. "I... can move."
It flexed its fingers, one by one, each one a mountain.
Then, very quietly: "Thank you."
Noah looked at them and nodded. Down here, nothing short of an Immensity could even touch him.
"Get up," Noah told them.
They got up!
He looked toward the city’s heart, where a king of frost sat on a throne of bone, and beyond it, toward the center of everything, where the Shard of IT pulsed against his chest.
"We’re going that way," he said. "Follow me."
Fourteen giants fell in behind him, the ice shaking under every step!
Far away, beyond a hundred frozen streets, in a stronghold of ice the size of an Observable Existence, hung with banners stitched from the skins of dead Dimensions, The Night Provenance Lineage of The Chase felt its hunting party go silent.
Every hunter. All at once!
In the stronghold’s high hall, something that had been sitting very still for a long time rose from a seat of antlers. Skinless and vast, its muscles bare and frozen and gleeming, its body taller than the hall that held it, it rose until its flayed head broke through the roof and the cold of its Immensity spilled out over the Evergrave like a winter storm.
It walked out to where a horse of bare bones the size of a mountain range stood waiting in the snow.
The head of The Lineage of the Chase, a Newly Risen Immense One, swung up into its saddle, lifted its flayed face to the wind, and rode out to see what had killed its Hunters!