Chapter 5736: A Terrifying Narrative II
Chapter 5736: A Terrifying Narrative II
The first hunter reached THE Writer of Mythos before Noah had even finished looking around!
THE INFINITY EATER came across the underworld with an infinite sea of Dimensionality heaving at his back, and that sea was all of what he was, density without end, weight without a bottom, a tide that had been grinding against existence since before most of the Train had even been laid down!
Noah knew this one. This was the farmer whose fields had been drunk to their roots by him!
But he...he was not here for Noah. He had come for the woman with the book, and he came for her like a flood comes for a house!
Yet she did not lift her eyes from the page.
Noah looked down upon her with Sonder, and he saw at once what the gallery hungry for prey had not troubled itself to see!
She was a Descendant. Bred, spoken, a sentence with a bloodline, the way all of them were. That much they all knew. What some had not looked at was the rest of her!
She brimmed with her own Provenance! Not borrowed and not inherited, but hers, generated from within, precisely as Noah’s was his own!
And around her turned seas of Existential Narrative, slow and wide and immense, the single most guarded thing an Immense One possessed, and she wore it openly in the middle of a hunt like a grand coat she had simply decided never to remove! Someone up in that sky had handed her their very Narrative to wear, and Noah did not need to guess which gaze it was.
He looked past all of it, down to her dream, and it was the strangest dream he had yet read!
She...wanted a story she could not control!
That was it. Not power. Not survival. Not even the Shard they said she held within her. She had written every ending she had ever seen coming, an eternity of endings, and she had grown so weary of knowing them all that she had walked into a Cabin where Immense Ones fully intended to kill her, and she had done it on purpose, because here, at long last, she might actually lose!
So she wrote.
Her pen moved once across the page, the words rising off it heavy with weight, and a figure stepped up out of the book and onto the dead ground!
THE ONE WHO RETURNS!
A person! A shape every story had always carried somewhere within it, the one who was lost and came back again, given now a body and a stride and a purpose, and it walked straight into the Infinity Eater’s endless tide and met it head-on with seas of illusory Dimensionality and Provenance.
HUUUM!
The sea crashed down, and it did not go through!
She began writing tropes and archetypes on her books as shockingly...they manifested in existence.
She wrote again, unhurried and serene. THE FALLEN CHAMPION rose off the page, broken once and standing regardless, and struck at the Eater’s side! She wrote a third time, and Noah watched the Eater’s whole infinite weight lurch to a halt in confusion, because THE TRAITOR AT THE GATE had appeared behind him!
Behind him! The Eater swung his enormous head to stare at a thing that had no business standing there, and he did not understand, could not understand, how it had come to be!
But Noah understood exactly how it had!
He knew this. He had done this himself as he was writing tropes into scenes as absolute law and letting probability itself bend to keep the story true. She... was doing the very same thing! She was doing it with the pen held out in the open, where the whole gallery of monsters could watch, and the archetypes she wrote did not merely tilt a fight as they stood up and fought it themselves!
The gallery stirred at last. THE CACKLING BUTCHER was delighted, and said as much! THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR was bored, and said that too! THE SLEEPLESS FIEND said nothing at all!
And in the very middle of it, in the middle of holding back an infinite sea with three stories and a pen, Calliope stopped.
She looked up.
Not at the gallery but well...past it! To the far edge of the sky, where a weak watcher hung and had hung since the moment he opened his eye, small and masked and beneath the notice of anyone!
She blinked once with surprise.
Then she looked back down to her book, and she wrote a single line.
And grandly, in the next moment, Noah felt his weavings buzz as words arrived on a unique frequency of his existence!
They arrived directly within his Provenance, the way only one writer could ever place them into another...
|Oh my. Are you another existence with the capability to steer and write the narratives of existence? And for you to be so bold as to write yourself as though you were an Immense One, and even stand among them! Wow! Hello. I am Calliope. Who are you?|
...!
At her shocking words, Noah was silent.
He gauged this unique lifeform from the far edge of the gallery, this being who could bend the narratives of existence and was somehow not one of the Immense Ones watching her, and he was entirely, dangerously curious! So he gazed upon her fully, and the weavings of existence answered his gaze with her measure!
|CALLIOPE, THE WRITER OF MYTHOS - DESCENDANT OF THE MATRIARCH OF INK|
|VERITAS: 330|
|PROVENANCE: 299|
|POTENTIA: 207|
|PONDUS: 204|
...!
Noah’s eye went wide!
Her POTENTIA and PONDUS sat in the low two hundreds, respectable! But her VERITAS blazed at three hundred and thirty, and her PROVENANCE at two hundred and ninety-nine, towering over the rest of her like a cathedral built over a cottage! Such Trueness! Such Provenance! She held an existence more true and more self-generated than almost anything he had ever measured, and she wore it under a mask of serene boredom while an infinite sea tried to drown her!
And even as he drank in the numbers...
|Are you trying to quantify my power? That is an invasion of privacy. And you didn’t even answer me.|
The words arrived in his Provenance, delighted and pointed, and then they sharpened.
|Should I start screaming very loudly to the Immense Ones watching, that the other gaze they are ignoring is not who they think it is? Shall I drag you into this mess, fellow Writer?|
...!