Read Novel Full Chapter 5839: First One Down!
Chapter 5839: First One Down!
By the time Noah stopped, his Dream had already spread across the whole region.
It hung over the outer city like a low, soft cloud, blue and gold, drifting through the frozen streets and down into the dark windows and out across the white plains beyond. Everything under it went on, unaware. And everything the cloud touched, Noah knew.
His Risen Dreams moved around him on a frozen plain, fourteen giants sitting in the snow, the golden shadow of the panda lying at the back of them with its great head on its paws.
The prompts came quietly.
|Your Dream has settled over this region.|
|Observed: the Draining. Lines of the weakest dead, chained in their thousands. Their last warm memories drawn out of them by the Regent’s wardens, and carried away in jars.|
|The warmth flows inward, street by street, hall by hall towards a powerful Immense One- toward the throne of THE Gaunt Regent at the city’s heart.|
|From the Regent, it flows further inward still. Toward the center of the Evergrave.|
|Toward the Shard potential shard you have been feeling the pull of.|
...!
Noah eyes pulsed as he obtained more information about this place and its workings, but he would not be given any rest as he sensed a heavy brilliance coming straight at him!
It came from the north, from beyond the edge of his Dream, and it came fast as a sea of its Immensity barreled down!
The cold arrived before the thing that carried it. It fell across the plain in one long sweep, and where it passed, his Risen Dreams ended. Three giants, standing in the snow, simply stopped. Their bodies went grey from the inside, their blue-gold light going out like lamps at the end of their oil, and they crumbled into frozen dust where they sat.
Then the hunter came over the horizon!
|THE Flayed Huntsman- Newly Risen Immense One|
It was skinless, its whole body bare frozen muscle, red-black and glistning, larger than a mountain range, riding a horse of white bones that was larger still. Its head was a flayed skull with two cold blue lights burning deep in the sockets. And rolling ahead of it across the plain like a storm front came its Immensity.
An Immensity of Ending!
Noah had eaten a Provenance of Ending once, torn out of the Judgment that came for his evolution. He knew its taste. This was that same taste grown wild and vast and ancient, held by a hunter who had spent Ages learning to aim it. Snow ended where it passed. Ice ended. Air ended, leaving holes of nothing that the Evergrave rushed in to fill.
The Huntsman rode as its Immensity crashed through his army, and his Risen Dreams went grey and crumbled one after another. His scion, his first, roared and threw itself in the hunter’s path, and ended in the middle of its roar. At the back of the plain, the golden shadow of the panda stood up, looked at the hunter, and faded slowly into the snow.
All fourteen. In the space of a few breaths!
|Your Risen Dreams have been ended.|
|They are kept. What you have raised once, your Provenance remembers.|
|Whenever you wish, you may dream them risen again as they should be stronger to not die to the same thing again.|
...!
Noah stood up, alone on the plain, and looked at the hunter.
An Immense One who had frost and Immensity raging down from it as it looked ancient and aged, its voice echoing out.
|"Those that don’t belong always make the biggest messes. Things that have lived since before The First Sundering, enjoying the long night, now ended by you...must you all always be so cruel? You...don’t even know what Ending truly is."|
HUUM!
The Huntsman came down off its horse, and the Evergrave began to end!
It aimed at everything around Noah first. Its Immensity poured out of it in a tide of cold so vast that the plain vanished under it in an instant, and then the frozen hills beyond the plain, and then the city’s outer streets, and then the sky over all of it. The tide rolled outward for light years!
Whole regions of the Evergrave simply stopped being. Mountains ended at their roots and toppled into nothing. Frozen rivers ended mid-flow. Towers of the dead ended with the dead still in them, their faces at the windows going grey and bloing away like ash.
It was clearing a hunting ground. Making a place where nothing existed but the hunter and its prey!
Was this the same fucker just admonishing Noah for Ending Night Lifeforms?!
Noah’s Dream moved!
It spread out of him behind the Ending, soft and patient, and wherever the hunter’s cold had erased something, his Dream found the shape of what had been there and laid it back down. Hills rose back out of the nothing, the snow settling on them as if it had been there all along. Streets ran back into place, house by house. The frozen rivers took up their flow again mid-ripple. It happened quietly, almost gently, as new skin closes over a cut, the whole broken region stitching itself back together light year by light year as fast as the Huntsman could tear it open.
The Huntsman saw it, and stopped!
Its cold blue lights fixed on him.
"I can sense your existence looking for something. There are...no answers for you here. No recompense. Nothing that will satisfy you. Only...ENDINGS!"
HUUM!
It came for him!
All of its Immensity, all at once, turned onto one small warm thing standing in the snow.
Ending fell on Noah like a sky collapsing!
And he was expectant to see how a Newly Risen Immensity would now fare against his Order II power!
It came from every direction, from above and below and from inside the air itself, and it was looking for a way in. It pressed against his skin, against his constellations, against the Tree in his chest, against the Dream that made him what he was, searching for any crack, any gap, any single place where it could get inside him and stop him as it had stopped everything else.
And it found layers!
Dream after dream after dream, wrapped around his body like the rings of a tree, every one of them deeper than the last. The Ending tore through the first layer, and found a second. It ended the second, and found a third already dreamed back over it.
It clawed at him with the full weight of Ages, and every layer it ended was dreamed whole again before it could reach the next, and underneath all of them, untouched, at the center of an ocean of dreams, stood Noah.
The way in stayed hidden from it.
Even the door stayed hidden!
Noah watched it search for a long moment. Then he took a step forward into it, and another, and he was through its storm and standing inches from its Immensity!
Oh!
It felt like standing before a cold furnace, but he was doing it! How unthinkable was it to even stand before a glimmer of Immensity days ago, but he was now standing unfettered with a full raging Immensity inches away?!
He looked up at it.
He hit it!
His fist went into the Huntsman’s shin, and the bare frozen muscle burst around his knuckles. Black-red blood sprayed out in a frozen fan that hung in the air and went on falling for miles. The hunter roared and brought a hand down on him with enough force to end Dimensions, and Noah caught it, and tore two of its fingers away, and climbed.
He went up its body with his hands. Into the muscle of its thigh. Into the cage of its ribs. Every handhold he took, he poured his Dream into it, straight from his palms into the hunter’s flesh, and every place his Dream went in, the hunter’s body began to change.
He was altering its Immensity!
Frozen muscle went soft and dreaming. Blood that had been ice for Ages thawed and ran. The hunter clawed at him, tore at him, ended layer after layer of the dreams around him, and he kept climbing, and kept pouring.
He reached its chest, drove both hands in to the wrist, and let everything go!
His Dream went into THE Flayed Huntsman like a flood into a cracked dam.
And he saw it!
All of it, at once, as he had seen the whole Legacy from a lonely mountain. The hunter’s Immensity of Ending lay open in front of him, every part of it, and he could see exactly what it was made of.
He saw the first thing it ever chased, Ages ago: a small warm creature running across the snow in some cycle long since gone, and the moment it caught it, and the moment that warmth went out under its hand. That was the root of it. Every Ending since had grown from that one.
He saw the Ages layered on top of that first kill like rings in a frozen trunk. Every hunt it had ever run, every Lineage brother it had hung in its antler trees, every fleeing thing it had stopped. Each one had added a layer of cold, and each layer had made the Ending sharper, and narrower, and hungrier.
He saw the shape of the Immensity itself. A long, thin thread of stopping, wound around and around a single wish, so tight that the hunter had forgotten the wish was there.
The wish was simple.
It wanted things to hold still. It wanted, more than anything, for the running to stop.
Noah understood it then, completely, from the inside, as only someone who has eaten Ending could. And understanding it, he knew exactly where to press.
He saw the Keystone of its Dream.
He closed his hands!
His Dream closed with them, around that one thin thread of stopping, around Ages of cold and the first kill at the bottom of it all, and he crushed it.
HUUUM!
The Ending broke!
It broke from the center outward. The Huntsman’s Immensity, Ages deep, came apart in Noah’s hands like ice under a hammer, and the cold went out of it all at once. The storm across the plain stopped, and blue-gold light filled the holes it had torn in the air.
Far away, across light years, the last regions it had ended stitched themselves back together under Noah’s Dream, and the dead in their towers blinked, and found themselves back at their windows.
|"OOOOOH!"|
The Huntsman screamed one last time. It came out of it as a long, thin, broken sound, and it went on for a long time, and then it stopped.
Noah pulled his hands free.
The hunter swayed, its skinless chest torn open, its blue lights flickering. It looked down at him one last time.
Then it fell!
It came down across the plain like a mountain range collapsing. Its vast body struck the ice so hard the whole region shook, and black-red blood spread out from it across the snow in a frozen sea. Snow went up in a wall that hid the dead sun. The ground cracked for miles in every direction, and the sound of it rolled out across the Evergrave and kept on rolling, down every street of the city of the dead, until every dead thing in every dark window had heard it.
Then, slowly, the snow came down.
Noah stood on the hunter’s chest!
He stood there in the falling snow, small and warm and untouched, the hunter’s frozen blood drying on his hands and arms to the shoulder. His gold eyes burned.
His Dream rolled off him in slow blue-gold tides across the broken plain, stitching the last of the cracks closed behind it. Under his feet, the head of the Night Provenance Lineage of the Chase lay still, its Immensity crushed, its blue lights out.
Across the plain, from the edges of the city, the dead had come to their windows. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Grey faces pressed to frozen glass, staring at the warm thing standing on the body of an Immense One.
Every one of them stayed silent!
Noah looked out over the plain at all of them.
His first Immense One in the Evergrave.
He found he wanted more! More, more, more!