Chapter 5842: Existence Wants You Dead! I
Chapter 5842: Existence Wants You Dead! I
Noah felt a grand change before he understood it!
Something changed, far from the chamber and the Ember-Keeper and the six hundred dying dead on their beds of bone. Somewhere far above them, in existence itself, something turned over, and the turning went through him like a cold hand passing through his chest.
He had felt many things since he came into this winter: Judgments, Immensities, the pull of the rift. This was something else.
He looked up!
The ceiling of the chamber was peeling!
The great skull-lined bones overhead were coming apart, lifting away rather than breaking, curling back in long white strips. Above them, the ice of the city peeled back too. Then the streets. Then the frozen towers. The whole underground, the First Lifeform’s vast skeleton and everything carved inside it, was being opened up, layer by layer, from the top down, until the Lanterns’ hidden home lay bare under the sky like the inside of a cut fruit.
The Lanterns screamed!
And above them, the sky was gone.
In its place was a storm.
It filled everything!
A blizzard, black and white and screaming, turning in a vast circle around the Rim-City. It reached from the ice to the dead sun and higher, a wall of wind and frozen fury so thick that the sun was only a pale smear behind it. It blew in a circle, around and around and every turn of it pressed the anger of existence down on the city a little harder.
Noah rose slowly to his feet in the open ruin of the chamber!
Around the edge of the storm, at every point of the circle, light years apart and close enough to touch, Immense Ones were floating.
He let his Dream go up to meet them, and it came back to him full.
|You have been surrounded.|
|Within the storm: nineteen Immense Ones.|
...!
Fourteen of them hung in the outer ring!
Lineage heads, every one of them. Night Lifeforms who had risen to Immensity in the cold, each one the size of a mountain range or larger, each one wrapped in the cold of its own Immensity.
One was a giant made of glowing cracked cinders, an iron brand for a head and a black flame for a face, standing sideways in the air as if the storm were a wall. Another wore a gown of mirrors that reflected nothing warm, and her face was a mirror too. A third was veiled in frost from head to foot, a bride’s veil that trailed for miles behind her in the wind, and under it, her arms were scored with old whip marks. The rest were worse.
|Eleven of them are heads of Night Provenance Lineages: Newly Risen Immense Ones.|
|Approximate measure: the second Order. Their strongest attributes reach between Order II.3 and Order II.9.|
|Three more are Newly Risen, on the cusp of Established. Their strongest attributes press against the barrier of Order III like you.|
...!
Then he looked higher!
Four shapes hung above the outer ring, at the four quarters of the storm, and each of them was larger than the whole ring below.
To the north, THE Gaunt Regent. A king of frost, thin as a starved man and tall enough that the storm parted around its shoulders, its long fingers clasped on nothing, a crown of fused finger-bones on its head. It had left its throne for this. Its pale eyes looked down at Noah with something that was almost polite.
To the east, a cathedral shaped like a woman. Her body was built from the frozen ribs of something that had died long before the First Sundering, arch upon arch, and inside her ribs, a choir of thousands of dead stood in rows and sang. The song was low and endless and it sounded like an apology. Where it reached the ice of the Rim-City, the dead in the streets fell to their knees.
To the west, rising out of the storm as if out of water, a giant drowned noble. Its fine coat hung on it in frozen rags, its mouth stretched wide in a scream that had frozen solid Ages ago, and around it hung the bones of everything that had drowned with it, a slow orbit of skulls and ribs and frozen hnads. When it moved, it spoke through them, a hundred dead mouths moving at once.
And to the south, something armored, standing completely still in the middle of the storm. Its armor was made of ice so old and clear that Noah could see light inside it, a white glow at its center that hummed faintly against the grain of IT in his chest. It had stayed still for Ages. It had moved now.
|Four of them are Night Lords: Established Immense Ones.|
|THE Gaunt Regent. THE Choir-Mother. THE Drowned Margrave. THE Warden of the Heart.|
|Approximate measure: the third Order. Their Profundity lies below your sight.|
...!
Noah stood very still.
Eighteen.
The prompt had said nineteen!
He looked for the last one, and his Dream slid off it!
It was at the very center of the storm, directly above him, where the blizzard turned around an eye of perfect stillness.
It was tall and slender, so tall that the four Night Lords seemed small beside it, so slender that it seemed impossible it could stand. Its skin was pale as cooled glass, and long arms hung at its sides, ending in fingers too many and too thin. The head was smooth and round, its face empty.
Behind it, trailing down through the eye of the storm like long pale ribbons, hung chains of light.
Noah knew those chains. He had seen them in the dreams of the kept, closing around a tall figure with a lantern.
Where its blank head turned, things went missing. A tower at the edge of the city, there, and then not there. A stretch of frozen street, there, and then not there. Simply erased, rather than ended or destroyed, as if it had been absent all along.
His Dream reached for it, and found nothing to hold.
|THE Faceless Immense One.|
|An Established Immense One??? Older than the Night Lords. Stranger than anything your Dream has touched.|
|Its Immensity: ?????|
|Its measure: ?????|
|It is looking at you.|
...!
Noah’s face went heavy!
For the first time since he had come into the Evergrave, the smile left it entirely. His gold eyes narrowed. The constellations under his skin slowed and dimmed, drawing in close, and around his body the layers of his Dream thickened, one over another over another, as if they knew.
Nineteen Immense Ones. Fourteen Newly Risen, three of them pressing against Established. Four Night Lords. And the thing above him, whose edges his Dream was unable to find.
All the power of this floor of THE Undersnow, gathered in one circle, for him.
Fuck.
Behind him, the Ember-Keeper’s flame had sunk so low it was barely a spark. Around the open ruin of the chamber, the Lanterns lay flat on the bones with their glass beads clutched to their chests. Far off, at the edge of the city, Noah could feel his sixteen Risen Dreams standing in a tight ring around the golden shadow of the panda, the Huntsman at their front, every one of them looking up.
The storm turned.
And the Faceless Immense One spoke!
Its voice came from no mouth. It leaked out of Existence.
|"Existence showed me the future."|
The storm went quiet. Even the Choir-Mother’s song stopped.
|"A thing moving across this domain."| The blank head tilted, very slightly, toward Noah. |"Killing one Night Immense One after another. Growing from the power of a Newly Risen Immensity... to an Established Immensity. Then taking down all my little soldiers."|
The Gaunt Regent stayed perfectly still, and so did the other three. But in the outer ring, the Lineage heads shifted, uneasy, and the Cinder-Brand’s black flame flickered.
|"Then crossing further down,"| the Faceless Immense One went on, softly. |"And freeing THE Caretaker. And making things... a bit more complicated for me."|
Behind it, the chains of light swayed.
|"So I said... no."|
|"None of that."|
A seam on its face widened, just a little, as if whatever was behind it were smiling.
|"Before that future... why don’t things end here?"|
The anger of existence came down on Noah harder than it ever had. It pressed on his shoulders, on his chest, on the back of his neck, until the bones under his feet cracked.
|"There is too much happening that little things like you don’t understand,"| the Faceless Immense One said. |"So... don’t try to mess things up."|
Its blank head lowered.
|"Noah Osmont."|
His name, in that voice!
|"I have searched existence for your weavings. I plan to make this... your grave."|
The blizzard roared back into motion, faster now, tighter, the whole circle of Immense Ones drawing inward with it. The Choir-Mother’s song began again, louder; the Drowned Margrave’s hundred dead mouths opened at once; the Warden of the Heart lifted one armored hand. And the Gaunt Regent, the Caretaker’s betrayer, smiled!
|"It is not just me deciding this,"| the Faceless Immense One said. |"But existence itself. Existence wants you dead. Just like those little missions The Caretaker gave you...I have your name written on a very cold paper."|
The chains of light swung toward him.
|"Let’s get started, shall we?"|
HUUM!