Read Novel Full Chapter 5873: Wow!
Chapter 5873: Wow!
Noah stood in the snowless dark of the Ossuary, and thought about his two Narratives.
The first had made his Dream stronger. That much had been plain from the moment he wrote it. A glorious mutation, a potential beyond anything that came before him, and existence had quietly rewritten its own records to agree. His Dreaming Human Origin had become more his. His Dream had surged across THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity twice as fast as before. It had been a good page. A strong one.
But the second?
The second was making things unfathomably grand!
He had thought of it as luck, at first. Chance leaning his way. Things he needed finding him a little faster. That was how he had written it, and that was how it had felt in his hand as the pen grew heavy.
He understood now that it was something else entirely!
THE One the Threads Bend Toward did far more than tilt the odds. It turned him into a place. A crossing. A point in existence where threads that would have taken Ages to meet were pulled together in a single afternoon.
Stories that had been waiting at the far ends of the continuum, patient and buried and forgotten, were being drawn in toward him, and they arrived tangled together, each one dragging the next behind it.
Lost things surfaced at his feet.
Old enemies took the wrong road and arrived at his door.
And the threads that had waited the longest pulled the hardest.
He had written that narrative and he had meant it. And he was only now beginning to understand what it actually meant.
Because look at what had happened!
THE First Gu of Destiny had felt his Narrative pull at the cloth, and invited him to her home out of nothing but curiosity. She had told him about Existence. About Diogenes, and Napoleon. And then her Destiny, brushing against his Narrative, had chosen the one memory she had kept buried for Ages, and laid it out in front of him like a gift.
A dead friend, a Halfling, a name, and a dream.
And now that dream stood before him in the snow, wrapped in a Narrative of her own, and her lineage ran straight back to THE Dissolved Progenitor.
Noah’s eyes narrowed.
If he was right about that name, if a Progenitor that had dissolved was what he thought it was, then Lifthrasir’s father was the first hand. The first being ever to hold IT. The one who stood at the edge of absolute authorship, looked at what it held once, and tore out its own trueness and origin and ended itself in the very moment it had won.
“He took the life of his own narrative,” she had said. “With his own hand.”
So first, father and daughter seemed to share a disposition.
The father had held everything, and chosen an ending. The daughter had been offered endless Cycles, and chosen an ending too. A hundred years. Wrinkles. Grey hair. A small home. Both of them, looking at forever, and turning it down.
And second…
Noah looked up at the two obsidian Giants standing silent behind her, at the faint black pulses still rolling out from the Ossuary into existence, carrying her Narrative further with every heartbeat.
Just how grand was the Narrative she had just unleashed?
Lifeforms that devoured Narratives, emerging across existence, born above common Ancients, and every legend they ate would make them stronger. The narratives of Immense Ones. The titles of Legacies. Prophecies whispered for Ages. All of it, food.
All of it, to protect one small Halfling’s hundred years.
He was still turning that over in his mind when…
HUUM!
Noah’s existence flickered!
At the edges of his Dream, something moved.
He had come to the Ossuary with work in mind. From the moment he stepped through the cocoon-split in the dark and arrived before THE First Gu of Destiny, his Dream had been spreading patiently. The same golden-blue bricks laid one by one over the existence of this region of THE Chrysalis as he had laid them over Lucy’s Legacy.
While Lygara spoke of Existence and Diogenes and Napoleon, while she wept, while Lifthrasir sat in the snow and wove her circle, his Dream had kept going. It had already covered the surrounding light years. Every strand of falling silk, every layered nebula, every swaying thread above the sea of stars, all of it had been quietly replaced by his Dream, looking and feeling exactly as it always had.
And now, at its far edges, he felt them coming.
Immensities. Several of them. Moving fast, toward the center of his Dream, toward the Ossuary.
Then, one after another, the auras bloomed!
They opened across the Chrysalis like great flowers of power, vast and old and heavy. Ancient Immense Ones. One. Three. Six. More. Each one enough to bend the silk around it. Each one enough to make a whole Legacy go quiet.
Noah’s eyes widened!
Because he knew one of them.
He knew it the moment it bloomed. A restless, buzzing, white-hot weight, threads twitching without pause, an existence that had forgotten how to rest. He had felt it press down on him once, long ago, like a finger the size of a mountain range. He had felt it again on a list of names written in debts at the edge of his charge.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND!
They came quickly. Faster than he had expected. Within moments, the dark beyond the citadel split apart, and their figures came through.
Titanic. Each of them vast enough that the Ossuary’s swaying threads parted around them like curtains. They came down out of the Chrysalis and stopped above the sea of stars, a loose crescent of towering Immense Ones hanging in the snowless air, and the sea itself heaved beneath their combined weight.
Lygara turned toward them slowly.
So did Lifthrasir. She lifted her head from her meditation, her frail face pale against her dark hair, and looked up at the newcomers with mild curiosity, as if a group of neighbors had come calling at an inconvenient hour.
Behind her, the two Kirtimukha stood perfectly still.
Noah looked at them.
And he could truly see them!
They were inside his Dream now. All of them. And within his Dream, at Order III, his perception went further than it ever had before. He could see things about them that the shield of their Ancient weight would once have hidden.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND hung at the left of the crescent, a hazy titan of white-hot threads, exactly as Noah remembered. But up close, inside his Dream, Noah could see what those threads truly were. Each one was a vigil of Causes.
A single sleepless night, stretched out into a burning line, and there were millions of them, wound together into the shape of a giant. Every night the Fiend had ever stayed awake, watching, waiting, hungry. That was what his body was made of. Countless vigils of Causes.
Beside him drifted a woman wrapped in green light, a single plum branch turning slowly in her hand. Noah’s Dream read her the moment she entered it.
|THE Verdant Regard.|
A name he had seen before, written beside a debt.
Further along, a tall column of dark wood and iron hinges, covered in doors. All of them shut.
|THE Mother of Closed Doors.|
A cage of grey light, things moving inside it that were forbidden to finish happening.
|THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages.|
And at the back, something whose size refused to hold still, larger one moment and smaller the next, as if existence were still making up its mind about it.
|THE Unweighed.|
Every one of them a name from that list. Every one of them a number.
And there were others. Dozens of Ancient Immense Ones whose names were new even to his Dream, vast and silent behind the front of the crescent, their auras washing over the sea of stars.
And at the center of them all, there was one more.
Purple. Hazy. His form rolled slowly across the dark like a stormfront, and from his head, horns rose. They twisted upward and outward, spiraling on and on past where sight could follow, coiling into the dark of the Chrysalis until they grew too faint to see, and kept going anyway.
Noah’s Dream reached for his name.
|?????|
Noah’s eyes narrowed as he put more effort.
|THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral|
The horned one’s gaze was elsewhere. His gaze had settled on Lygara, vast and coiled in her sea of stars. Then it moved to the small, frail Halfling sitting in the snow. Then it rose, slowly, to the two obsidian Giants standing behind her.
He looked at them for a long time.
His expression was somber. The look of a being who had arrived expecting one thing, and found another. And yet under the somberness, his power held perfectly steady. It sat on the Ossuary like the weight of a mountain, calm and certain and enormous.
Then THE SLEEPLESS FIEND noticed Noah!
Noah looked back at him, calmly.
The Fiend’s luminous eyes found him, standing small and bare-chested in the snowless dark beside the First Gu of Destiny, and for a moment, the Fiend simply stared.
He blinked.
His white-hot threads went still all at once, every sleepless vigil in his body freezing mid-twitch, as if the Fiend were struggling to believe what he was looking at.
Then he smiled!
It spread across his hazy face slowly, wide and sharp and full of teeth, a devilish, delighted grin. And he lifted one enormous hand of burning threads, and waved cheerfully. Like a man waving across a crowded street at an old friend, delighted by the surprise.
Noah only looked back.
But the gesture drew attention. The horned one’s eyes moved away from the Kirtimukha, and followed the Fiend’s wave, and found Noah.
One by one, the other Ancient Immense Ones turned too. The Verdant Regard, the Mother of Closed Doors, the Gaoler, the Unweighed: dozens of vast and ancient gazes, settling on a single young figure standing in the snow.
The horned one looked at Noah for a long moment.
Then he inclined his head, very slightly, a courtesy so small and so precise that it seemed to have been measured in advance.
|THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral speaks.|
His voice was calm, and very heavy.
|”Greetings and salutations, from those of us who stem from THE Legacy of THE Keepers of Existence.”|
His horns coiled slowly into the dark.
|”I am THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral. I have come to trade and bargain with THE First Gu of Destiny for information.”|
He turned his gaze back to Lygara.
|”THE Keepers have confirmed that you hold information relating to THE Dissolved Progenitor. We have come only to trade for it.”|
…!
BOOM!
Noah’s eyes opened wide!
Brilliance poured out of them, gold and blindning, and his whole existence buzzed with a wonder so sharp it blazed!
THE Dissolved Progenitor.
They had come for information about THE Dissolved Progenitor.
He stood there in the snow and let the whole weaving of it unfold in his mind, piece by piece, thread by thread, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He had written a Narrative. And he had sat with Lygara and traded, and her Destiny had chosen to show him the one memory she had buried deepest.
A dead friend as he had reached across Cycles and brought that friend back.
And that friend was the daughter of THE Dissolved Progenitor.
The very being the Keepers had crossed the Chrysalis to ask about, whose torn-out trueness they had hunted since before the Sundering.
His daughter was sitting right there in the snow!
And she had already unleashed a Narrative of her own that birthed lifeforms born only to devour other Narratives.
And the Keepers of Existence were made of Narratives through and through! Grand ones. Old ones. Every Ancient in that crescent was wrapped in a legend Ages deep.
Two of the Kirtimukha stood behind her right now, silent, serene, and hungry.
Old enemies, taking the wrong road, and arriving at his door.
Lost things, surfacing at his feet.
Threads that had waited a very long time to be pulled, pulled at last, all of them, all at once, into the same small snowless patch of the Ossuary, tangled together around him.
Noah stared at all of it, his golden eyes blazing.
Just…
Wow.
Wow!