Chapter 5709: Sonder I
Chapter 5709: Sonder I
Noah looked at the devastation, and the devastation looked back through a hundred grieving faces.
Aurelius sat on the moss-stone arc with his wife’s arms around him and his daughter’s forehead against his shoulder, and his blood had dried on all three of them, and his Vanguard was gone in a manner that Noah suspected would not return in a lifetime.
He lifted his head. He found Noah across the wreckage of his own city, and then he gave one heavy nod.
"I did not know you had the pull that you showed," Aurelius said. His voice had lost the steadiness it wore in the sky, and he did not try to put it back. "Thank you. For spending a favor of an Immense One to end this."
Noah said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not sound like taking credit for a rescue that had cost this man half his lineage.
"It was I who made the deal, ages ago, to give my daughter away." Aurelius looked down at Thalia’s radiant hair under his hand. "So I cannot lay this at your feet. Your intrusion took a choice out of my hands. The choice of cowardice, which I could never make myself take, because I was afraid of exactly this, the extermination of everything that carries my name. You forced us to the place I had spent an Age avoiding. A price was paid for it. But I..."
His voice trailed. He looked out at the pale places in the air where his Elders had been.
"But I..."
The words did not finish.
And Noah’s eyes flashed with the brilliant light of infinity, and everything went grey and still.
He had not frozen them. He could not have frozen most of them; a great many of the Provenance Lifeforms in this ruined city were his betters in every number that could be measured.
He had only stretched his own perception toward infinity, so that a single instant opened out and out, an instant with no far wall, and he stood inside it alone with a failure that was not going anywhere.
His eyes pulsed.
He entered the reverie, that unique state where boundless epiphanies bloomed in every direction at once and a thought could be turned over ten thousand times before the next instant arrived.
And his eyes, which existence had learned to read as tyranny, held something else in the grey stillness.
Sadness.
It was only human.
Because in the stretched instant he was thinking of Eon. Of how he had taken her as his woman, and how her home and her people had been destroyed, and how that had become one more weaving in the great wake he dragged behind himself. And now Thalia. He had taken her too, this woman who had crossed time itself to reach him, who had torn her own Provenance to arrive, who had sat in his spring and named every danger ahead of them in careful order.
She had warned him. She had done nothing but warn him and help him and love him, and here was her home, and here were her people, thinning into the air while she knelt in the blood of her father.
He could argue that he had made no promises. It would even be true. He had promised the Vasiliou nothing except an errand and a bargain.
He still felt he had broken something. He still felt he had let them down. The technicality did not reach the feeling.
He rarely felt this way. His whole identity was pitched at one weaving, and the weaving was tyranny. Majesty!
He spoke the same to Provenance Lifeforms who could unmake him as he spoke to the frightened and the small. He had stood before Immense Ones and not bent a word of himself.
He was fearful, and he was fearless, both at once, and he had built an entire existence on the certainty that this was enough.
None of it had done a single thing today. In the end he had been reduced to hammering on a book and begging another to do what he could not.
He looked at the faces. Thalia’s, hollowed out. Rosalia’s, turned on him with a hatred that had earned every degree of itself. Aurelius’s, solemn and unfinished. And his existence buzzed, and a realization came up out of the grey stillness and would not go back down.
He was the protagonist.
He had named himself that. He had spoken the Letter and taken the Aura and built an edge over existence out of the claim that the story bent toward him. And it was true, and it had served him, and it had also let him believe, in a place beneath thought, that the other figures in his eras were figures. Extras. Supporting shapes. Weight and texture in his story.
They were not!
Every one of them was the protagonist of a story that had been running long before Noah Osmont arrived in it.
Aurelius carried an Age of history in which Noah was one recent Chapter, and not the first hard one. The people going out like lamps around him had each held a whole existence, vivid and detailed and entirely their own, in which they were the center and he was the stranger who arrived one afternoon and changed everything and would leave.
He wanted to be grand. He wanted to be immense. He had never once questioned thr cost!
But it should not be built on the ruin of existences that had done nothing to him. He had his life, and the ones he had chosen to protect. They had theirs. Every form of existence was exactly as complex as his own, as full, as central to itself, and he had been walking through all of it as scenery.
HUUM!
The light in his eyes grew, and it did not lose the sorrow, and deep in his existence THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer cried out with a solemnity he had never heard from it and surged like a vast sea rising past its shore.
Existence was vast and complex.
And every single lifeform within it was equally vast, and equally complex, and equally the center of its own turning.
|A fundamental change has occurred within THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer.|
|You have long dreamed. You believed you were the one who dreams. Today you have understood that you dream among decillions who dream as vividly as you.|
|THE DREAM STATE OF SONDER has been attained.|
|SONDER: the sudden realization that every stranger you pass is living a life as vivid, complex, and detailed as your own. It is the moment you understand that you may not be the main character of existence, but a background figure in decillions of other stories unfolding around you.|