Chapter 5743: Change The Narrative! III
Chapter 5743: Change The Narrative! III
And in the middle of it, bleeding ink from beneath her nails, her hair a silver storm, Calliope looked up.
She looked past the gallery, past the balcony, to the far hidden edge of the sky where a mobius-pupiled eye had hung masked and silent since the beginning.
She opened their private conduit, and this time her voice carried none of its earlier playful detachment. It was serious, and it was fast, and it was still, somehow, delighted!
|My ink is running a bit dry, Osmont.|
Her pen shook over the page.
|Before my Matriarch has to interfere and ruin the fun, and she will, if this keeps going the way it is going... why don’t the two of us do something grand? Let us change the narrative. Or are you going to sit up there and simply watch, when the two of us together could ruin their entire theater?|
...!
Noah’s masked eye held over the burning Cluster.
And then he moved!
He did not answer with words. He reached out with the whole quiet weight of his Provenance and his Infinite Dream, found the writer’s consciousness in the middle of her bleeding, and PULLED!
—
Calliope’s perception of the collapsing Cluster froze.
The screaming sea, the falling arrows, the pale chains, the buzzing sky, all of it stopped between one instant and the next, held in a stretched and silent moment, as Noah drew her consciousness up and out and into the inner sanctuary of his Infinite Dream.
An instant, stretched out towards infinity.
Time. Once more, time!
They stood together in a domain of blue-gold clouds.
Endless soft light rolled around them in slow drifts, quiet and boundless and entirely his, a place between spaces where no gaze of any Immense One could reach and no ink ran dry. The war outside did not exist here. Only the two authors, and the stillness he had wrapped around them both.
Calliope looked around at the blue-gold clouds, and her bleeding stopped, and her storm-tossed hair settled, and a slow smile spread across her face.
She waved her hand at Noah, and then, grandly, delighted, she gave a little bow!
"Oh, this is lovely," she said, aloud now, her voice her own again in the quiet. "You pulled me right out of the story and into your own private one. Very unique. This is...narrative infused with Infinity itself?"
She looked around, and then she straightened, and the delight sharpened into something more serious, because she had been offered a stage and she intended to use it.
"Alright, so let me tell you the truth of what I do," she said, "since we are about to do it together, and you should know the wall before you run at it with me!"
She lifted a hand, and ink gathered at her fingertip.
"I cannot write a falsehood into existence. That is the first law of my craft and it has never once bent for me! An archetype cannot be conjured from a vacuum, out of nothing, out of a lie. It must have an anchor. An authentic historical thing that has already cut its mark into the bedrock of reality, a truth that actually happened, that existence still remembers. I write the Mythos, yes, but the Mythos must have somewhere true to stand, or it does not stand at all!"
Her eyes glittered. "I have found ways around the edges of that law, here and there. But they are costly. Very costly."
She smiled again, and this time there was something almost reverent in it.
"But here. Since we are being grand. Let me show you the truest thing I own."
She tapped her own wrist, once, and grandly, from the clouds of Noah’s own sanctuary, something began to emerge.
It rose slowly out of the blue-gold light as something vast and dark and ancient, and it was a....HIEROGLYPH RUNESTONE.
A massive obsidian cube, its faces wider than an Observable Existence, black shading toward grey, and across every face crawled the oldest carvings Noah had ever seen, marks that would not sit still, rearranging themselves whenever the eye tried to hold them, the true history of Existence written in a tongue older than agreement itself!
The moment Noah laid his eyes upon it...
HUUM!
His existence BUZZED!
Something deep in him, deeper than thought, deeper than Provenance, answered the stone.
Noah walked forward as if in a trance, his masked awareness narrowing to the cube and the cube alone, his hand rising of its own accord, reaching, reaching, until his fingers pressed against a glowing obsidian face!
And the Runestone LIT!
Obsidian light blazed up out of it, and obsidian lightning flowed up the whole of Noah’s body in a single crackling surge, racing through his existence, and from Noah’s eyes there erupted beams of pure obisidian light!
Calliope blinked!
Her delight moved into shock, and then into a frown, because this was not what she had expected.
"Osmont? What do you see? Hey, what do you see...?!"
But Noah did not hear her.
For him, everything froze!
The blue-gold clouds, the writer, the cube, the obsidian lightning, all of it locked into a single suspended instant, because Noah’s mind had already been seized and carried away, wrenched somewhere unfathomably far...
---
Noah’s consciousness woke, and he was looking down upon the beginning of...Existence.
Well, not really, but it felt like it!
He hung, bodiless, over a forest, and it was a forest such as had never grown anywhere he had walked in all his long climb! Ancient beyond ancient, Primordial in the truest sense, a forest from the earliest era of existence when existence had barely learned to be, and it stretched below him further than sight, further than thought, an endless green that was somehow older than green itself.
And the trees were budding with fruit.
But the fruit were not fruit!
Noah stared, his existence gone still with wonder, because upon the boughs of every ancient tree hung Dimensions and Observable Existences, ripening! Each one a swirling jewel of wonder, each one heavy with the lifeforce of of Causes, and each one held within a shape he knew, a faceted crystalline structure of deep blue-white, something almost exactly like a Genesis Tesseract.
Whole domains hung from the branches like how apples hang from an orchard, and the trees that bore them burned with the raw and endless life of the Causes budding inside them!
This was a garden where realities grew like fruit.
And through that garden, a lifeform walked.
Noah’s gaze fell to it, and it surprised him, because for all the impossible grandeur of the forest, the being walking through it was small, and rough, and simple! A caveman-like thing, hunched and unhurried, thick-limbed and unadorned, picking its way between the trees of worlds with the calm of a creature that had been walking here since before walking had a name.
Then a voice boomed out, and it boomed for Noah alone.
It was the voice of the Hieroglyph Runestone, and it did not speak into his ears but into the very core of him, and its words unfolded as prompts across the whole of his frozen sight!
|In the earliest era of existence, no lifeform truly understood Infinity.|
|Not one. They lived within it, they reached for it, they built the first crude frameworks upon its assumption, and yet not a single existence among them could hold it, or see it, or say what it truly was.|
|One of the first ever to begin to understand it... was known as Lucy.|
...!