Chapter 5738: A Terrifying Narrative IV
Chapter 5738: A Terrifying Narrative IV
While Noah was looking at the changes of THE Creature...
|You’re going to ignore me again?|
Calliope’s voice slid back into his Provenance, and Noah’s gaze split its attention without effort, half of it on the friend below and half on the writer across the Cluster!
"You say odd things," Noah said, "that do not fit the context of the terrifying things happening right now."
|I say what I say when I want to say it, regardless of the situation.| The words came easily, her pen still dancing across the page as she held back the infinite sea with the other hand.
|I am a Writer of existence. A Writer of Mythos. I know a great many niche facts about existence and I always, always want to learn more. The lifeforms called pigs and their strange little behaviors were new to me, and new things are the only things I love anymore.|
Then, coyly, she proceed to say...
|But hey. Do you want to know something else? If you actually listen, if you engage with me instead of staring at whatever is burning over there, I will tell you about these Shards the Immense Ones say I carry.|
Her illusory archetypes surged against the Eater’s tide as she wrote, buying herself the space to keep talking.
|It isn’t even a Shard, not really. It is one of the grand Hieroglyph Runestones. I came across it a very long time ago.|
...!
A Hieroglyph Runestone?
Now Noah was even more curious, and he listened in fully, both halves of his attention sharpening!
The Eater’s sea raged around her, and Calliope held it off with one hand and wrote with the other, and the two authors spoke across a channel no gaze in that sky could see.
It was a duel, though no blow was struck between them. She was bored and delighted at once, a being who had finally found a story with a hand in it she could not locate, and she circled Noah with her questions like a scholar circles a specimen she has waited an age to find.
He answered carefully, honestly where he could, because Sonder had shown him her dream and it was not a cruel one.
She wanted a story she could not control. There was no malice under that. There was only a terrible, ancient boredom, and a hunger to learn.
Her hunger was a unique one as it seemed to bud off of her like sparks of utter majesty. And every stroke she made, every movement of her pen looked like a masterpiece of...origin.
"Writing is a Provenance, then," Noah said. It was not a question so much as a thing he was confirming aloud.
|It is. One of the rarer ones.|
Her stories crashed against the sea and held. |Some of us are born with the pen already in the hand. Some of us steal one. And you... I think you stole yours. No offense, but you don’t seem like a natural talent. You have that flavor.|
She said it without accusation, almost approvingly. |My caretaker who is fuming up there is THE MATRIARCH OF INK. She birthed me with the pen in my grip. She did not agree to this...this game, and yet here we are. She is up there right now, furious, and there is nothing she can do about it, which is a story I would rather not be inside of. But how interesting is that? All that power as an Immense One, and one is still constrained. It makes you wonder about power...|
"What about the Shards this whole show is put around? The Runestones..."
|The Shard is real. But Shard is their word, a small ugly word.|
Her voice warmed, the way it only did when she reached the thing she actually loved.
|As I mentioned before, they are called Hieroglyph Runestone. Do you want to know what those are, Osmont? Truly? Because almost no one decent left in existence does.|
Noah’s gaze fixed on her fully!
|They are stones, old ones, older than some of the Immense Ones sitting above me right now, and upon them is carved the history of Existence itself. THE history. What happened before the Sundering. What the ones who left wrote down before they went. What IT was, before it slipped every hand that reached for it.|
Her pen slowed, and her words came slower with it, reverent now. |They were scattered across all of existence, hidden in the deepest and deadest places. But if you find them, Osmont...Ho Ho Ho... If you find enough of them, and you can read what is carved there, they point. Each stone points to the next, and the next, and the next. And the road they make...|
She let it hang for one perfect beat.
|The road they make leads to IT, well, or something even grander. Because even I want it to be a surprise. I want to be swept off my feet for grand Mythos of existence...otherwise if I find them inadequate, I will write my own.|
BOOM!
...!
The whole shape of the room rearranged itself in Noah’s mind at once!
He looked up, past the writer, up at the gallery of gathered gazes watching a game they had staged, and he began, coldly, to understand what he was actually looking at. And Calliope, still writing, still holding back an infinite sea with one lazy hand, said the thing that turned the entire Narrative on its head.
|They did not stage, this entire Train to find IT, or even these Runestones, you know.|
Her pen moved.
|They staged it to find out who can HOLD it. Someone who can find a Hieroglyph Runestone, and read it, and carry it in their existence without it tearing them apart, that someone has the potential to hold IT itself. And here is the funny part, the part they would gouge my eyes out for saying aloud.|
Her voice dropped into something wickedly delighted. |Even Immense Ones are not guaranteed to be able to hold, or grasp, or utilize the weavings of IT. Not one of them up there knows for certain that they could touch it and survive. So they are doing what they always do when they are afraid and pretending not to be.|
|They are basically fucking around right now.|
...!