Chapter 5865: Narrative! III
Chapter 5865: Narrative! III
Noah’s eyes shone with a brilliance beyond measure!
Around him, the cloud-story of the faceless woman thinned and faded, her village and her hills and her monsters drifting apart into soft blue-gold mist and sinking back into his seas.
He rose from the throne.
He stood fully for the first time since he had takken it, tall and bare-chested, his constellations blazing, frost glittering along his left side, and Emotive slid back off his lap into the shallow seas.
Then he waved his left hand.
A page bloomed in the air before him. A single sheet of brilliant gold, wide and blank, shining softly in the dark of the Descent.
He opened his right hand, and a pen formed in it. Blue, long and slender, its nib sharp as a needle.
Then blue-gold flames erupted around him!
They poured up out of the shallow seas and wrapped around his body and his arm and the pen in his hand, roaring silently, burning without heat, so bright that the dead chains overhead lit up for the first time in Ages.
Emotive’s breath caught!
She moved, gathering her hair and settling onto her knees in the shallow seas before him, her hands clasped in her lap, her face tilted up. Her eyes were enormous, brilliant, shining with fascination and wonder, every color of her hair burning at once.
She watched him as a lifeform watches a sunrise.
Noah lifted the burning pen.
And he began to write.
The blue-gold flames followed the tip of the pen across the page, and the words formed in fire, and as he wrote, he spoke them aloud, his voice rolling out across the Heart.
"Across the unknown Cycles of existence, countless lifeforms arose."
The first line burned itself into the gold.
"Existence unfolded, and over the epochs, it produced many astonishing lifeforms."
Then the second.
"Until, at last, a deadbeat human man and a grand human woman came together. And from them, existence produced a glorious mutation."
His pen moved faster.
"A human who held a potential exceeding any lifeform across existence. A human who could weave his humanity, and Infinity, and his dreams, into something others could not even imagine."
The flames roared higher.
"A human whose potential exceeded everything that had come before him."
HUUM!
He lifted the pen.
Frankly, he was only trying things out. How it would unfold, or whether it would do anything at all, was anyone’s guess.
But in the next moment...
BOOM!
His existence shook!
It shook from the inside out, every part of him jolting at once, his Tree groaning, his Dream heaving like a sea in a storm. Cracks of white light ran across his chest. His knees nearly buckled.
|You have begun to write your own Narrative.|
|The opening of your Narrative is too grand for your existence to hold.|
|Your existence has begun to fracture.|
...!
|Your Infinite POTENTIA has answered.|
|It has become the nexus of your Narrative.|
|Through it, you may continue to dream your personal Narrative as grandly as you wish.|
|WARNING.|
|If the Narrative you write is greater than your existence can bear, your Dream will fracture. Your existence will fracture with it.|
|Write carefully. Write grandly. But write only what you can carry.|
|Existential Narrative Correction is being made to your existence.|
HUUM!
Noah felt it happen.
His Dream reached down into the very center of him, into the Dreaming Human Origin he had made himself into, and pulsed. Once. Twice. And with every pulse, it became more his. More completely, more permanently his, as if existence were quietly rewriting its own records to agree with what he had just written. A glorious mutation. A potential beyond anything that came before.
Existence was accepting it!
And in the next moment, he felt his Dream surge!
Far above the Evergrave, past THE Undersnow, the golden-blue bricks laying themselves over THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity suddenly moved faster. Twice as fast. More than twice. Mountain after mountain, river after river, Dimension after Dimension, rewoven in silence, in a rush so terrifying that even he felt it like a wind at his back.
|THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity: fully rewoven into your Dream.|
|Every mountain. Every river. Every Dimension and Observable Existence within it. Its existence is now your Dream.|
|Your Dream has passed beyond the Legacy’s borders.|
|It has begun transforming the Undefined Gaps beyond, and every Dimension and Observable Existence surrounding them.|
|All of it is being contained within your Dream.|
...!
Noah stood there, breathing hard, flames still burning around the pen in his hand.
And he smiled.
His eyes blazed. His whole body hummed. And underneath it all, for the first time in a very long time, he felt something he had nearly forgotten.
He felt tired!
Writing those few lines had taken work. Real work, as if he had carried something heavy up a long hill. His existence felt spent, stretched, as a man’s arms feel after a long day of building.
He felt more alive than ever!
On the page before him, the golden sheet rolled itself up, slowly, into a scroll. It closed. A seal of blue-gold flame bloomed accross it, and it hung there in the air, finished.
And beside it, another page bloomed. Blank.
Noah looked at the blank page, and thought.
He could write any Narrative he wanted!
It could be ridiculous. Outlandish. Fantastical. It could fly in the face of everything existence actually was at this moment. And then all he would have to do was wait, and see whether his Dream was powerful enough to make it true.
Well, and he had to ensure he didn’t collapse himself from a narrative too grand.
He thought about all the grand legends he had heard.
THE Creature, and the stories whispered about it in THE Earliest Folds. Vakochev, and the Scales existence had weighed itself upon. THE Sealed One. Lucy, and the Sundering, and the path that broke beneath her feet.
Every one of them was old. Ancient. Their legends had grown for Ages, layer on layer, until existence itself bent around them.
And compared to them, he was unfathomably young. A boy with empty hands, a heartbeat ago, as existence counted time. His legend was still unwritten.
So why not fabricate one?
The present was the most important dream. His future self had said so. And whatever narrative he wrote here, now, would begin flowing through existence at this very same moment.
He thought a little more.
Then his eyes flashed with something wild. Something crazed and bright and hungry.
Emotive, kneeling in the shallow seas before him, saw it, and her existence shuddered.
Noah lifted the burning pen to the blank page.
And he began to write!