Chapter 5750: The Long Night II
Chapter 5750: The Long Night II
Far beneath the war of titans, far beneath the dying architect and the cracking Train and the murky obsidian foam, in a small Universe folded inside a small Observable Existence, upon a small world that had never once heard the name of an Immense One or any glimpses of authority, there was a desert.
And in that desert, there was a fire!
Around the fire sat a tribe, men and women and children wrapped in the hides of desert beasts, their brown faces lit warm and orange by the flames, and they sat close together against the cool of the night and they listened.
For it was the hour of stories, and the Wisewoman had begun to speak.
She was old, older than anyone could remember being young, her hands like knotted roots and her eyes like two dark wells that had seen every star wheel across the sky a thousand times. She sat at the head of the fire, and her voice was low and worn and beautiful, and she told the story that had been told at this fire since before her grandmother’s grandmother had first heard it!
"Listen now," the Wisewoman said, "and remember, for a story remembered is a life saved. I will tell you of The Long Night."
The children leaned in.
"There will come a time," she said, "long foretold and long feared, when the world turns cold. When the warmth that has always been simply begins to leave, first from the edges of things, and then from the heart of them. When a coldness that no fire can answer permeates the desert and the sea and the high places and the low, creeping into the sand and the water and the very breath in your chest."
The fire crackled, and the shadows danced!
"And in that time," she went on, her old eyes moving across the ring of faces, "the night will grow long. Not one night, but a night that does not end, a darkness that stretches on and on past every dawn that should have come, until the sun itself seems to forget the way back. This is The Long Night. When the cold comes and the night will not lift. And the old stories say that when it comes, all the world must huddle close, and wrap itself in every warmth it has hoarded, and endure, and wait, and hope that the dawn remembers us at the end."
Then a child rose up!
He was a small boy, bold and bright-eyed, and he stood at the edge of the fire with his little chin lifted, and he pointed at the old woman as snot leaked from his nose.
"Wisewoman!" he said. "I know why you tell us this! You only tell it to make us afraid, so that we behave and stay close to the fire! But this story has never come true, not once, not for all the generations! My father heard it, and his father, and his father’s father, and the night has always ended and the sun has always come back! It is only a story to frighten little snotty children!"
Some of the adults chuckled softly, and a few frowned at the boy’s boldness, but the Wisewoman only smiled!
She smiled at him with all the patience of her long years, and she opened her mouth to answer him, to tell him gently that a story does not need to have come true to be worth the keeping...
And then she blinked!
For she had felt something!
Something small and cold and impossible had landed upon the withered skin of her cheek, a tiny pinprick of chill in the warm desert night, and she paused, her smile faltering, and she raised one old knotted hand and touched her face and drew it back and looked at it.
And there, melting upon the dark root of her fingertip, was a snowflake.
A snowflake!
The Wisewoman stared at it, and her ancient heart went still!
And a moment later, another fell! And another! And then more, and more, drifting down out of the black desert sky in their impossible countless numbers, white flakes descending upon a land that had never in all its histroy known a single one, settling on the sand, on the hides, on the upturned faces of the tribe as one by one they felt the cold touch and looked UP!
Snow!
Snow was falling in the desert!
A ripple of shock ran through the tribe, and then of fear, and then of a horror that had no words! The children cried out! The men surged to their feet! The women clutched their little ones close! They stared up at the falling white as it thickened, as the warm orange firelight caught the drifting flakes and turned them to sparks of gold falling out of the endless dark, beautiful and terrible, a thing that should not be, a thing that could not be, falling and falling upon a desert that had known only sun and heat since the world began.
And the bold boy who had stood to mock the story stood frozen now, his little face turned upward, a snowflake melting on his cheek, his eyes wide with a terror he could not name.
The Wisewoman trembled!
Her old body shook, and for a moment she was only an old and frightened woman under a sky that had broken its oldest promise. But then her eyes shone, because she was the Wisewoman, and she carried the story, and the story had a second half that was not for frightening children but for saving them.
For generations, they had prepared.
She rose from her place at the fire!
She moved through the tribe, through the crying and the shouting and the upturned faces, moving with a purpose that stilled them as she passed, and she went to one hut at the edge of the circle, an old hut, a hut the children had always been told never to open.
And she opened it!
Inside, stacked and waiting, were furs! Thick hides and heavy woven things, layers upon layers of warmth, gathered and cured and stored accross untold generations by keepers of the story who had never once seen them used.
Warmth hoarded for a night that had never come, waiting patient in the dark for the day the old woman’s smile would falter and a snowflake would land upon her cheek!
The Wisewoman turned back to her people!
She looked upon the men and the women and the frightened children beneath the falling snow, and she spoke, and her worn old voice carried across the whole trembling tribe with the weight of every generation that had kept the tale alive!
"Come," she said. "Come now, all of you, and wrap yourselves in layers of protection. Take the furs your fathers’ fathers saved for you and cover yourselves against the cold, and gather close, and do not let the fire die!"
She held the old hut open, and the snow fell past her into the warm firelight, and her shining eyes swept them all!
"The Long Night... has come."
...!
---
Deep within THE Infiniverse, in a Realm folded inside the Helios Elsedimension, the sun hung warm and golden over a beach of soft golden sand, and no one there had a single worry in all of existence.
For this was the safest place there was.
This was inside the very heart of THE True Human Emperor’s own empire, a domain sealed away from every gaze and every hunter and every architect, a paradise where the sheltered lived their sheltered lives and wanted for nothing.
Elizabeth reclined upon a beach chair near the shimmering water, and she was at ease.
She had been someone of power once, back in Noah’s homeworld, a figure of standing in the days before he had cleared away every threat that world held and departed for The Beast World and beyond. She had crossed paths with him in The Blessed Empire, and now she dwelled here, in comfort, in safety, one of the countless souls the Emperor had gathered under his boundless wing.
Above her, a great eagle wheeled slow and lazy across the golden sky, and up and down the beach, other humans went about their peaceful business, walking the sand, floating in the bright shallows, dozing in the sun, and every single one of them was wrapped in slow-flowing rivers of blue mana, saturated in it, swimming in an abundance of authority that made the harshness of the old worlds a distant and half-forgotten dream.
It was warm! It was golden! It was perfect!
And then, all at once, it was not.
Snow fell.
Out of the warm golden sky, out of the clear and cloudless blue over that sheltered beach, white flakes came drifting down, and with them came a coldness sweeping across the golden sand and the bright water and the lazy sunbathers in an instant!
Elizabeth’s eyes flew open, and she sat up sharply in her chair!
Cold?
She rose to her feet, staring up at the impossible snow, and her long experience took over before her confusion could! She raised one hand and called upon her mana, and the blue rivers that flowed around her answered instantly, gathering and weaveng at her gesture, forming into a thick and luxurious robe of fur that wrapped itself around her shoulders and settled warm against her skin.
And still she felt cold!
She frowned! The robe should have been more than enough, a working of pure mana, warmth conjured from abundance, and yet the chill sank straight through it as though it were nothing.
So she gathered her mana again, and wove a second layer over the first, thicker and heavier, and when that too was not enough she wove a third, piling authority upon authority, wrapping herself in layer after layer of conjured warmth!
Only then, beneath three thick robes of woven mana, did she feel some small measure of protection from the cold!
Some. Not all. The chill still pressed at the edges of her, patient and deep!
Elizabeth stood on the golden beach in her three heavy robes, her breath misting now in the air of a paradise that had never once been cold, and she looked around in growing bewilderment!
What was going on?
Why was it so cold, here, in THE Infiniverse?Cold did not come here! This place was sealed, protected, perfect, a haven where nothing bad had ever reched!
And more than that, more troubling than all the rest of it...
How could she feel cold at all?
She was saturated with mana! Every soul on this beach was! They were filled to overflowing with immense concentrations of authority, swimming in more power than the people of the old worlds had ever dreamed of, and mana was warmth, mana was life, mana was the very thing that held the cold and the dark at bay! A being so full of it should not be able to feel a chill any more than the sun could feel the night.
And yet the cold reached her!
And as she stood there shivering beneath three robes, Elizabeth noticed something that turned her bewilderment toward true unease.
Down the beach, some were faring worse than others. The strongest among them, the ones with the deepest and richest rivers of mana flowing about them, were the ones huddling lowest, wrapping themselves in the most layers, shivering the hardest.
And a child nearby, a small thing with only the faintest trickle of mana to its name, stood in the falling snow looking merely puzzled, barely troubled by the cold at all!
The more mana one held, the heavier the cold pressed.
The stronger you were, the colder you became!
Elizabeth pulled her robes tighter and stared up at the snow falling through the golden light of a broken paradise, and a single thought rose cold and clear in her mind, a thought that would soon rise in the minds of countless others across the whole of existence.
Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong!