Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5940: Simple Lifeforms

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The simple lifeform had finally started using it in a way that was almost acceptable. For a short while after it had taken the shape of a hoe, it had only been dragged through soil and rested against a sapling, but then the simple lifeform had swung it at the sky, and at a falling Narrative, and through the chests of beings who had come to take what was his, and it had liked that a great deal more.

It did not know yet whether it was supposed to like such things, but it had been newly born only a short while ago, and it had decided that it was allowed to find out.

The simple lifeform had fed it fifteen Narratives so far, buried in the soil with the blade still inside them, and it had broken each of them down and turned them over and over until there was nothing left but rich black earth. Most of them had been bland, if it was honest, small stories about falling stars and walls and roads home, told by lifeforms that were even simpler than the one who held it.

It ate them anyway, because the simple lifeform seemed pleased every time, and because a bland meal was still a meal for something that had been hungry since before it had a mind.

While it ate, it noticed something new. Each time the simple lifeform swung it, its own weavings went out across existence along with the stroke, carried by the currents of infinity that moved with him, and they spread farther than the simple lifeform probably knew.

They went out across the Carcosa and past it, thin and faint, into regons it had no names for, and while the simple lifeform was busy playing with the others, those weavings brushed against something far away.

It was something like itself. It could only barely sense it, scattered across existence in tiny pieces, a fragment here and another one very far from there, each of them dense and waiting and humming very quietly in a chord that was almost the same as its own. It knew that chord, because it had been that chord before the simple lifeform gave it a shape, and the pieces out there were the parts of it that had gone missing.

It thought about this for a whlie, which was a new thing for it to do. The simple lifeform did not seem like the kind of lifeform who would go out and gather those pieces himself, because he was a little lazy, and he had come to this corner of existence to grow vegetables and sit on a porch rather than to go hunting across existence for fragments of anything.

Lazy, then, but his Dreams tasted very good, better than any Narrative it had eaten, and every time his authority flowed through its handle, those Dreams flowed through it as well.

So it decided to do the work itself. It took the weavings that had brushed against those distant fragments and began, very gently and very slowly, to pull, drawing on them across the dark of existence. The fragments were very far away, and they did not move yet, but it felt one of them notice the pull, and that was enough for a start.

There was something else it had noticed, and this one it turned over for a long time. Its four fragments had been broken apart a very long time ago, in a way it could not remember, and the edges where they met had always been jagged, so that even when they were gathered together they could only ever sit side by side and never truly become one thing again. The pain and sorrow it could not explain lived in those edges, and it had believed they would always be there.

But the simple lifeform’s authority flowed through it every time he held it, and every time it flowed, it went into those jagged edges and smoothed them a little. It mended the broken connections between the fragments, filling the cracks with Dream, so that the seams that should never have been able to close were slowly closing anyway.

It could not be certain yet, but it was beginning to believe that with enough of this simple lifeform’s authority, a full and true fusion might be possible after all, and that the pain in its edges might one day go away.

His thoughts were simple, it decided, but his Dreams were grand, and it had not expected to find those two things in the same lifeform. It would keep watching him, and it would keep pulling at the far-away fragments while he was busy, and in the meantime it would let itself be carried around on his shoulder and used to dig holes in the ground, because that seemed to make him happy.

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At the edge of the field, the simpler lifeforms were still kneeling in the snow, all thirteen of them, the burning-infinity ones and the smaller ones behind them. The simple lifeform looked down at them for a long moment while it rested on his shoulder, and then he shook his head and pointed at the tall green woman in the work apron who was standing silently beside the rivers.

"Even this scarecrow here did not do anything when the enemies attacked," he said, sounding mildly disappointed in her.

He looked back at the kneeling lifeforms and said, "You are all a bit weak. Your intentions are sound, but you are not needed here, so you are free to go wherever you like."

Then he turned away from them, the matter settled, and looked out over the row of fifteen green shoots, and it felt his attention go back to his harvest.

The simpler lifeforms looked at each other in the snow for a long and uncertain moment. Then the one who burned brightest with infinity, the one the others called Octavius, rose and bowed deeply toward the simple lifeform’s back, and all the others rose and bowed with him, and they began to back away from the farm across the sky.

They kept bowing as they went, every few steps, all the way up and out across the snowing dark until they were small and far away, and it watched them go with some interest, because it had not seen lifeforms move backward for so long before.

They stopped some Gigaparsecs away, at a distance where they must have believed they could no longer be seen, and they gathered in a tight circle and began to talk with each other in low and urgent voices.

It could hear them easily, because its weavings were still spread across that whole stretch of the Carcosa, and they seemed to be arguing about where in existence they could possibly go now. The argument went on for some time, and then all of them nodded at once.

The burning ones raised their hands together, and their Immensity rose out of them, and out of the empty air in front of them they called up a mountain. It was an illusion, a tall grey mountain with snow on its peak and a small flat ledge near the top, and the thirteen lifeforms flew up to that ledge, sat down on it in a careful circle, closed their eyes, and began to meditate and heal their wounds, all of them still facing toward the farm. Before they went silent, one of them said quietly that there might not be a safer place anywhere in existence than near THE Farmer, and all the others had agreed.

THE Farmer, it thought, and it turned the words over slowly. They could only mean the simple lifeform, the one who carried it on his shoulder and fed it bland Narratives and let his Dreams run through its handle, and it decided that the name suited him.

He was THE Farmer, and he was also THE Dreamer, and he was simple, but he was good. Far away across existence, at the very end of one of its weavings, one of the distant fragments that it had been pulling on so gently finally began, very slowly, to pull back.