Chapter 5746: A Grand Mythos! I
Chapter 5746: A Grand Mythos! I
Noah looked at Calliope who was calm and expectant in the blue-gold clouds, and he answered her at last.
"I learned about Lucy," he said. "And infinity."
...!
Calliope’s eyes went wide!
"Huh! Really?" She leaned in delighted.
"Little Lucy showed me the impossibilities of stories. The walls I could never write past, the doors that only open one way. But you saw something else entirely! I suppose each of us sees a different thing in the same old stone. Isn’t that just the loveliest proof that a story is never truly finished?"
She clapped her ink-stained hands together once. "Okay! I have given you something now, so it is your turn. It is time for you to reciprocate!"
She waved a hand, and the massive obsidian Hieroglyph Runestone sank slowly back down into the blue-gold clouds of Noah’s sanctuary, folding away into wherever the Writer of Mythos kept the truest thing she owned, until only the two authors remained in the endless soft light.
And then she made her proposal!
"I want to write the ultimate subversion, Dreamer," she said, and her voice dropped into something reverent and mad all at once. "The one Mythos the rule has always forbidden me. I want to write THE Vestige of THE Fallen Hero."
Noah’s masked existence pulsed!
"But you understand a thing like that does not come cheap," Calliope went on, pacing now through the clouds. "For the myth I have in mind, it takes more than ink! It takes an ocean of sovereign vitality. And it takes a hammer of pure Provenance to drive the whole sentence down through the weavings of this Train until existence has no choice but to agree!"
She turned, and she looked directly at Noah’s blue-gold manifestation, and her eyes glittered!
"I have the syntax. I have an unalterable page, a truth that cannot be edited. But my blood belongs to the Matriarch, and the Matriarch is bound to their frameworks, chained to the very authorities we would be defying! My ink can shape the story. It cannot pay the debt." Her voice sharpened to a point.
"But you? You carry blood that owes nothing to anyone, do you not? Blood generated from your own origin, answering to no one in all of existence!"
She held out her hand across the space between them. "So lend me your power. Give me your red ink."
Noah calculated the trade in a single stretched instant.
To do this was to unleash his foundation in the open, and unleashing his foundation in the open risked drawing the gazes of Immense Ones down onto his masked position at last! It was the great danger, the one he had spent this whole dream avoiding!
And yet...
His Dream was Infinite now.
Even if the seven turned their full gazes upon him, even if their combined weight shredded his existence to nothing in an instant, it would not end him, because he had learned to dream a dream with no far wall, and even death within that dream was not death.
He had paid to open it. He could return from a collapse inside it!
His Tyranny rose in him and Sonder tempered it into something quieter and more certain, and the two together weighed the challenge and found it entirely... acceptable.
Prompts bloomed across his sight.
|COLLABORATIVE SOVEREIGN AUTHORSHIP PROPOSED.|
|Syntactic Architect: CALLIOPE, THE WRITER OF MYTHOS.|
|Sovereign Fuel and Anchor: NOAH OSMONT, THE HUMAN DREAMER.|
|Target Inscription: THE VESTIGE OF THE FALLEN HERO.|
|Required Medium: A SHARD OF VAKOCHEV.|
....!
A Shard of Vakochev?
And then Calliope reached into her existence and produced a thing, and Noah’s masked eye locked onto it in pure astonishment, because he recognized it!
It was a Shard, jagged and cold and old, and it carried a weaving Noah knew intimately, because it was the earliest version of his own Shard that he himself held! This woman, this bored and bleeding Descendant of ink, held in her hand a fragment of Vakochev that was left behind after his proclamation to those...like him.
And she wrapped it in ink, and she began to write!
"Your weavings," Calliope breathed, her concentration absolute. "Give them to me!"
Noah breathed out and unleashed his foundation as he was now...entirely curious. What exactly could she accomplish?
From his blue-gold manifestation a sea of Infinite Sanguine Mana cascaded downward, crimson and gold and boundless, an ocean of self-generated vitality that had no bottom and no end, pouring out of him in a flood that lit the whole sanctuary!
The crimson-gold tide flooded into Calliope’s open codex.
It saturated the pages, soaked into the paper, ran along every line and coatted her black ink until it glistened, ink and Sanguine Mana and Provenance fusing into a single writing-fluid that shone like blood held up to a fire. Every stroke she would make now carried the weight of an existence that owed nothing to anyone.
Calliope laughed!
Her eyes flared with a mad, ecstatic focus as the boundless vitality of Noah’s origin surged through her fingers, filling a well that had been running dry, and she bent to the page, and she wrote, her strokes driven now by the unyielding hammer of Noah’s Provenance behind every letter!
"THE Vestige of THE Fallen Hero," she wrote, and spoke the words as she carved them, "does not ask the sky for permission to stand!"
And Noah watched brilliantly as he activated THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist Mantle.
He forced his narrative dominance down into the glistening ink, into the sentence taking shape upon the page, and he declared it, declared the written words to be an absolute, un-deletable fact of the immediate domain, a truth that existence was not permitted to argue with!
The whole sanctuary buzzed with the collision of two authorships and an un-editable page, and Noah felt the enormity of what they were writing, and he knew, with magisterial certainty, that he could not hold this.
The stretched instant was already fraying at its edges, the frozen moment beginning to thaw, the dream unable to contain a working this vast for more than a breath.
The instant broke!
BOOM!
And externally, across the whole Cluster of Dimensions, everything went dead silent!