Read Novel Full Chapter 5898: Let It Snow! II
Chapter 5898: Let It Snow! II
The Infinite Quantum Dreams were strange things.
They were possibilities, nothing more. Roads that might be walked, shown to him in blue-gold glass before he ever set foot on them. Every one of them was only a maybe. A single different step, a single different breath, and the whole road could bend somewhere else.
But if he followed everything exactly as he had dreamed it, step by step and breath by breath…
HUUM!
Then he would stand exactly where he stood now.
The Undersnow was real around him. The upward snow hung still in the cold air, the pale roots of the Keepers’ Legacy dangled overhead, and the Hollow Night Immense Ones lay scattered across the frozen floor where they had dropped. Behind him, Kir One stood like a black mountain, still eating, its many faces chewing slowly on the strands of the Long Night that had guarded this place.
And Noah’s hand was buried in THE Curator’s chest!
He had done all of it exactly as the dream had shown him. He had turned his seat inward and followed the flow down. His other body had asked Lifthrasir for Kir One, and she had smiled and said it was always hungry. He had opened the pathway, let Kir One through, and waited in hiding while it ate the Curator’s home and his army and his title one after another. And the moment the Curator staggered, he had stepped out and plunged his hand in, right on time.
The Curator stared at him.
Its blank paper face held no expression, but Noah felt the shock pouring off it all the same, shock and disbelief and a terrible, frantic question.
“Do you want to know how?” Noah said softly.
He tilted his head, studying the blank face a hand’s breadth from his own.
“Your face is screaming for the hows and the whys. Even without a face.” He smiled a little. “Don’t worry too much about that. If you had never crossed paths with me, you might have lived a good deal longer. That is all you need to know.”
The Curator’s long fingers tightened around the Shard of IT.
“Ah, I won’t say too much,” Noah went on. “I always disliked the ones who gave long victory speeches and gloated over their enemies. So I will do my best not to. But I do see the appeal now. When you are standing exactly where you meant to stand, holding exactly what you meant to hold…” He sighed. “One’s tyranny just can’t help but ring a little. Ah…”
BOOM!
His hand drove deeper!
It went down past the Curator’s flesh and robes and cold, into the very center of what the Curator was, and his Shinjitsu went with it. The still gold-blue film around him poured down his arm and into the Curator, and wherever it touched, it began to eat.
It ate the Curator’s existence first, thread by thread, the old Provenance it had been born from and the strange, cold thing it had become. Then it reached the Curator’s authority, the right to rule this stretch of the Long Night, and it began to strip that away too, peeling it loose and turning it over and making it Noah’s own. The Curator’s seat shuddered in his grip. The snow overhead trembled. Every strand of the Long Night still left in this domain bent slowly toward Noah!
The Curator shook around his arm, and as it began to fade into him, it spoke one last time.
“I was a Provenance once,” it said, its voice thin as torn paper. “One of the first. I was killed for nothing, and I came back hungry and cold and very sure that I would never be the weak one again. I was not wicked at the start, Dreamer. I was only careful. So I took. A seat, a Shard, the weak of a Legacy that paid me to look away. Every step felt like the only step a sensible thing could take. That is how it goes, Dreamer. Nobody chooses to become what I became. You simply keep taking the next reasonable step, and one day you look down and you are feeding children’s Roots to blank-faced things in the dark. You will end up where I am. Just give it time. You are hungry too. Something just like you will rise one day to take you down as well.”
Then the blank face dissolved, and the Curator was gone!
Noah’s Shinjitsu swallowed the last of it whole!
The cold of the whole domain rushed into him at once, the seat, the authority, the Curator’s long, bitter existence, all of it pouring into the gold-blue stillness at his center and being sorted there, borrowed pieces set down, everything else made his.
A wave of power rolled out from him across the Undersnow. The upward snow scattered like startled birds. The dangling roots overhead swayed, and somewhere far above, in the Keepers’ eternal spring, every plum tree shivered at once.
Noah straightened slowly and stood.
He rolled his shoulders, flexed one hand, and let the new weight settle into his existence, his Shinjitsu glinting still and glassy around him, the cold of a second seat humming through his bones.
“In existence,” he said quietly, “I doubt there is another thing quite like me…”
Behind him, something crunched.
Noah turned around.
Kir One was still eating! Its one face had become many faces and had spread out across the domain, and every one of them was chewing on a strand of the Long Night, pulling the snow-narrative out of the cold air in long grey threads and swallowing it like noodles.
“Kir One,” Noah said. “Leave the rest.”
The faces paused.
“I still need it,” Noah said. “I have to devour it and change it. You cannot eat every part of the Narrative here.”
Kir One looked at him with all its faces at once. Then, slowly, one face closed its mouth.
The others kept chewing.
“All of them,” Noah said.
Another face closed its mouth. Then another, very slowly, as if it were being asked to give up something precius. One face at the very bottom kept going, chewing a single grey strand with great care and looking at nothing.
Noah waited.
The last face swallowed, and closed.
The vast obsidian creature turned its open eyes toward him, and was quiet for a long moment.
“Are you alive?” it asked.
“Very,” said Noah.
Kir One considered this.
“Unfortunate,” it said.
Noah looked at it. It looked back at him. Somewhere behind its head, one of its faces opened its mouth again, very slightly, and quietly took one more strand.
Noah decided to ignore that!
|You have claimed THE Curator’s Epitropos seat.|
|You have devoured THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|
|Your Shinjitsu has remade this seat. It is your own.|
|You now hold two Epitropos seats, both your own.|
|Your jurisdiction over THE Narrative of THE Long Night now extends past the Legacy of THE Keepers of Existence.|
|THE Unwritten Contingency: its author is gone.|
|The Shard of IT that once belonged to THE Caretaker: Grasped|
Noah breathed in.
The new authority filled his chest like cold air on a winter morning. He could feel the whole stretch of the Long Night that had answered to the Curator now answering to him: the flow of snow and debt across this region, the cold that touched every Legacy here, every one of them except one.
Above him, through the ceiling of roots, the Keepers’ Legacy glowed in its endless spring, warm and pink and white, its plum blossoms falling, its sky clear of any snow at all. The Long Night had stopped politely at its borders, because the Keepers had paid for that with their weakest.
That deal had been made with the Curator.
And the Curator was gone.
Noah looked up at the warm, bright Legacy for a long moment, and smiled.
“Why don’t we let it snow here as well?” he said grandly. “Let us all feel the cold equally!”
Noah sat down on THE Curator’s throne.
It was a tall, narrow thing carved from frozen grey light, made for a being with no face, and the cold of it rose up through him the moment he settled into it. For a heartbeat it stayed frosty blue, pale and bitter, the color of the Curator’s long rule.
Then his Shinjitsu touched it!
Blue-gold veins spread through the frost like light running through cracks in ice. They climbed the arms, crossed the seat, and rose up the tall back in branching lines, and the frosty blue gave way to gold and deep blue until the whole throne glowed with Noah’s own colors.
He looked up at the ceiling of roots, at the Keepers’ warm and snowless Legacy hanging above him, and slowly clenched his fist!
The cold answered.
Snow gathered from every corner of the Undersnow, from the stilled air, from the frozen floor, from the long flow of the Long Night that now answered to him. It swirled around his throne in a rising wind, faster and thicker, until a great blizzard roared in a circle around him with Noah sitting calm at its center. Then it turned, all of it at once, and poured upward through the roots, toward THE Keepers of Existence!
The Keepers’ Legacy had lived in an endless spring.
Plum trees bloomed there and kept their petals forever. Warm light fell on gardens that had only ever known warmth. The Long Night had stopped politely at the borders.
Now the snowflakes drifted down out of a clear sky and landed on a plum blossom!
Then a thousand more came after it, and then the blizzard arrived!
Across the Keepers’ Legacy, the cold came down hard and heavy. In the great garden of THE Verdant Regard, frost crept along every branch of her orchard. She stood among her trees with one hand pressed to the scar Kir One had opened in her chest, watching her spring end, and said nothing at all.
In the halls of THE Gaoler, snow drifted in through the bars of his cages of unfinished Dimensions and piled up in the corners. He looked at it for a long time, his half-cracked face unreadable, and left it where it lay.
THE Mother of Closed Doors shut every door in her house against the cold, one after another, faster and faster, and the snow simply came in through the keyholes.
THE Unweighed stood out in an open field and let the snow settle on its shoulders. For the first time in its long existence, it felt something press down on it against its will, and it looked down at its own feet as if surprised to find them there.
And at the very top of the Legacy, in the spiral palace of THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral, the horned purple figure on its throne slowly rose and looked out at the falling white, and every spiral in the palace began, very quietly, to turn.
In a quieter place, on a long open terrace overlooking the frozen gardens, two figures stood together.
The first was THE SLEEPLESS FIEND. His eyes had stayed open through all of his existence, and a shroud of Causes hung around him like a long dark coat, shifting and murmering with every vigil he had ever kept. He was smiling, as he always seemed to be.
The second was THE Sealed One.
He was slender and dressed in plain grey robes, his figure plain beyond all measure
The snow began to fall on the terrace, and the Fiend watched it land on the Sealed One’s shoulders.
“In all my long watch,” the Fiend said softly, “I have never come across anyone handed so much, so freely, as you. Roots, given. Immensity, given. And now even a sliver of THE Dissolved Progenitor, who it turns out is very much still with us, and not nearly as dissolved as everyone believed. Most of us clawed for every scrap we hold. You simply held out your hands, and existence kept filling them. I have watched Causes for longer than most Legacies have stood, and I know the shape of a gift. Gifts are hooks.”
His grin widened slightly. “So I keep asking myself where this ends for you. Will you pass me soon? Will you climb past every one of us, gift by gift, until there is nothing left to give you? Or will you choke on it all one day, as the greedy always do, with your hands still open and your mouth still full?”
THE Sealed One watched the snow fall onto the frozen garden below, and his voice was calm.
“Existence is very, very old,” he said. “Older than any of us think, even the ones who think it most often. IT, and of THE Dissolved Progenitor, and of Lucy, and of all the astonishing beings whose names make Legacies kneel. They are grand. But measured against existence itself, every one of them is young. Children, nearly, playing in the last few moments of a very long day. Even IT, which you all speak of as if it were the beginning, came after something. Everything does. I have simply been around for more of the day than most.”
A snowflake landed on his hand, and he looked at it with mild interest. “I do not count my gifts, Fiend. I count my years, and I find I have more of them than I appear to. Would it surprise you if I told you that a piece of history I am connected to is older than every one of those I just named?”
…!
The Fiend turned his sleepless eyes toward him, and for once, he said nothing.
Then existence buzzed around them!
The snow thickened all at once, billowing across the terrace in great white waves, the cold of the Long Night rolling over the Keepers’ Legacy from end to end, heavy and deliberate and impossible to bargain with. It was falling on purpose. Something below had decided it should fall, and it was falling exactly as that something wished.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND raised one hand and let the snow pile on his palm.
“Now this,” he said, “is interesting.”
Both of them raised their heads.
Above them, the sky of the Keepers’ Legacy was full of falling white, the blizzard pouring down out of a sky. And above even the snow, stretched across the heavens, hung the white and gold banner of THE Narrative of Kings, its names blazing through the storm.
The Fiend’s eyes ran down the list, searching.
THE Sealed One’s name was nowhere on it!
The Fiend searched the twenties, the thirties, the fifties, and every place further down. He looked twice, and then a third time, and found no sign of it at all.
THE Sealed One had said nothing about that.
He only looked up at the banner, and his gaze settled on a certain name somewhere on that list, and stayed there. And slowly, very slightly, the corner of his mouth lifted into a smile.
Even if he was not there, he was there.
After all, he had a great many different identities!
4/4 Onwards!