Chapter 5735: A Terrifying Narrative I
Chapter 5735: A Terrifying Narrative I
As his people began to dream endless dreams of their own, noah returned to explore the immensity of his own terrifying dream!
Eckert was still talking when Noah set his gaze after...THE Creature.
He could sit on a blue-gold throne across from an old friend and listen to him explain how he had turned laziness into a system, and at the same time, with the same attention, reach out and follow a different thread somewhere else.
So he reached. He found THE Creature’s weavings inside THE Dimensional Provenance Train and threads of dreams pulled him along!
He meant only to look in on a friend he had not seen in a while.
Truly, this was all he meant to do!
Waves of blue-gold light pulsed and pulsed all around for a short while as his consciousness moved alongside his grand Provenance.
The dream carried him into a Cabin, and he opened his eye in a sky full of eyes.
The weavings of existence that communicated exactly what was around him told him a great deal of many things in the first nanosecond as...
He went still.
He had come in over the Tragic Heroes with one gaze above him, and that had been enough to make him careful. This...was not one!
’Fucking hell...’
His Provenance pulsed as he became extremely careful!
The prompts came before he could count them.
|You have entered a Narrative of Existence observed by several of Those Who Remain.|
|Observing: THE OVERSEEING ONE. THE UNPAID COLLECTOR. THE GLOATING JAILER. THE CACKLING BUTCHER. THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR. THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.|
|One further gaze is present and is not observing the Narrative.|
WAA!
THE OVERSEEING ONE, sour with a humiliation he had not finished digesting, the same gaze that had staged the Tragic Heroes and walked away from it!
THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, who had burned half a lineage over a stolen lifeform and promised to come back for the rest!
Noah had stood under both of those. He recognized their brilliance!
And THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.
Oh, this fucker.
He let his gaze go to that name now and barely dared to hold it there. What hung in that part of the sky was not a shape so much as a brightness that never rested, woven, restless, the light of something that had not closed its eyes in countless ages and did not intend to.
He looked at it for the space of a breath and looked away, because even masked, even beneath notice, looking at the Fiend felt like standing too close to a thing that would eventually notice it was being looked at.
Information began to flow to him as his dream pulled and pulled!
|NARRATIVE OF EXISTENCE: The Weaving of IT.|
|Two lifeforms within this Cluster carry Shards of Existence. Within the Shards are weavings of IT.|
|Collapse the bearers. Expose the Shards. What slipped the hands of the Immense may be glimpsed by whoever holds them.|
|The prey holding The Shards: THE CREATURE. THE WRITER OF MYTHOS.|
|The hunters: THE INFINITY EATER. THE CHAMPION. THE USURPER. And THE ZENITH OF SUBJUGATION.|
The Sealed One, or really one of his Vessels, was also here! It was packed!
Noah did not move his eye as he did not let the mask so much as flicker. He hung at the far edge of the gallery, a small weak watcher come to spectate, and the gathered high seats did exactly what he had bet his existence they would do.
They took him for a newcomer. Something lesser drifting in to see a story it could never have staged. Only THE OVERSEEING ONE glanced over as he still seemed embarrassed and did not look for long!
He let himself breathe, if a dream can breathe. Then he looked down.
Below the gallery spread a cluster of Dimensions coupled together into one great wound in the side of the Train!
Rivers ran through it, and the rivers were the dead. Cities stood in it, and the cities had been raised by the unburied out of whatever they had left behind. Gates opened in it, and every gate opened only downward.
The sky over one Dimension was the underside of another Dimension’s floor. Every region was a different death, and they went on, region beyond region beyond region, further than even his gaze could chase!
A cluster of underworlds!
And in one of them, upon the bank of a river that ran grey and slow, a Descendant ferryman stood in a flat boat with a pole in his hands.
He was taking coins. Coins that pulsed faintly with Existential Narrative!
A thing that looked less a Descendant than a collapsed, half-illusory lifeform came up out of the water, pressed something into his palm, and stepped down into the boat, and the ferryman pushed off and poled across the grey.
By the wear on the pole and the coins heaped at his feet, he had been doing this for a very long while, and all around the boat, beneath the slow grey surface, obscene collapsed Descendants swirled and drifted like ghosts.
Noah looked at that for longer than he had meant to.
Then the hidden-gaze spoke, tbe gaze that was not listed among other Immense Ones, and the words carried her fury across the whole of the sky!
|THE MATRIARCH OF INK objects. My Descendant is not a game piece.|
The other gazes did not stir. THE OVERSEEING ONE answered her the way a lord answers another...or maybe even a servant who has spoken out of turn at his own table.
|Every single lifeform apart from us is a piece that we may play with however we wish. Have you grown so attached to something so feeble, and so lesser? You would not do something so detrimental to your own existence... would you?|
The ink went darker. It did not reply!
And far below in the Cluster, upon a stretch of dead ground beneath a sky that was some other Dimension’s floor, a woman with silver-white hair calmly opened a book.
The Glorious Writer of Mythos!