Chapter 5876: True! II
Chapter 5876: True! II
He said it looking straight at Noah!
On the Giant’s shoulder, Lifthrasir turned her head and looked at Noah too, and her dark eyes shone with sudden, delighted interest.
THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral’s gaze grew heavy.
He turned it on the Fiend, slowly, and the weight of it pressed down on the white-hot threads like a hand on a restless dog’s neck. A clear admonishment, without a word spoken. The Fiend’s smile stayed, but his threads went still.
Then the Sovereign stepped forward, past the front of the crescent, his endless horns coiling into the dark, making it plain to everyone in the Ossuary who led here.
|"Naturally, we have many things to offer,"| he said evenly. |"Our Legacy is filled with them."|
He looked up at the small figure on the Giant’s shoulder.
|"Does Ma’am already know what she wants? Since you seem to be... entwined with Destiny."|
Lifthrasir smiled.
"I’ll give you the information about THE Dissolved Progenitor myself," she said. "In exchange for a spar. One with each of you."
She reached down and patted the obsidian shoulder beneath her, fondly, as someone pats a large and well-behaved dog.
"The little ones here. Little Kir One." She pointed down at the second Giant beside them. "And Little Kir Two."
Then she looked back at the crescent of Ancients.
"Choose two from among you to fight them. If yours win both spars, that is the whole price. The information is yours. How about it?"
...!
Noah watched with shining eyes.
What exactly was this monster he had woken up doing?
Her Kirtimukha devoured Narratives, legends and titles and the weight a story gains by being believed. And the beings standing in front of her were Ancient Immense Ones, every one of them wrapped in a Narrative Ages deep.
A spar.
Was she quietly trying to feed the Narratives of Ancient Immense Ones to her Kirtimukha, right here, in front of everyone, and call it a bargain?
He had thought that with only a hundred years of life, she might simply retreat somewhere quiet and live them out. A small home, grey hair, and someone beside her in the evenings.
It seemed he had been wrong.
She meant to live every one of those years to the fullest. She was voracious!
THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral considered her offer for a long moment.
Then he waved his hand.
|"Agreed."|
He turned to the crescent behind him.
THE SLEEPLESS FIEND was already leaning forward, his threads blazing white-hot, ready to go. The Sovereign’s eyes passed over him without stopping.
|"Verdant Regard. Gaoler."|
The Fiend stayed where he was. His smile held. If anything, it grew brighter, as if being passed over amused him more than anything that could have happened.
THE Verdant Regard drifted forward, her green light blooming around her, the single plum branch still turning slowly in her hand. Beside her came THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages, his cage of grey light humming, the frozen sunrise inside it flickering as he moved.
Noah looked at THE Verdant Regard.
And before he could think better of it, he spoke, there among beings far more powerful than he was.
|"Be careful of that one,"| he said mildly, to no one in particular. |"She betrayed her old Legacy like a cheap thing. Who knows how quickly she’ll betray her new one."|
HUUM!
The air around the Ossuary buzzed.
THE Verdant Regard stopped. Her head turned, slowly, and her eyes found Noah, and they were very cold. Her green light flared. The plum branch in her hand went still. Her power rose around her like a tide climbing a cliff, vast and green and furious, and pressed toward him across the sea of stars.
But it stopped short of him.
Because the Ossuary itself rose up first!
Illusory waves of obsidian and gold light swept up out of the sea of stars on every side, curling over the heads of every Immense One present. They passed through the falling silk, through the crescent of Ancients, through the green tide of the Verdant Regard’s fury, and wherever they touched, every thread of destiny in the Ossuary went taut.
|THE First Gu of Destiny warns.|
Her voice boomed out across the Ossuary, a dozen voices speaking as one.
|"Follow the established rules of the exchange."|
The waves of obsidian and gold hung over them all.
|"Or some of you may begin dropping dead."|
...!
Her power spread out over the Ossuary like a sky closing.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then THE Verdant Regard’s green light sank back down around her. She turned away from Noah, deliberately, and faced the first obsidian Giant instead.
Noah smiled lightly.
His existence was buzzing. Because, fuck.
Ancient Immensity was still so far away!
He could feel it now, standing among them, more clearly than ever before. The Verdant Regard’s fury had pressed against him for only a heartbeat, and it had been grand. Overwhelming. He was at Order III, and these Ancient Immense Ones felt almost like Order IV.
Almost.
He couldn’t be entirely sure. His Orders and the ladder of Immensities measured different things. He could do things at Order III that even Ancient Immense Ones couldn’t: reach across Cycles for an erased dream, hide from Judgment inside the flow of the Long Night, rewrite existence quietly with his Dream until it forgot it had ever been anything else.
And yet, in pure, raw power, they still hit harder than he did.
He was still turning that over when Lifthrasir clapped her hands.
"Alright, alright," she said brightly. "Let’s get started. Little Kir One, against the green woman whose existence is stained by betrayal."
...!
THE Verdant Regard’s light flickered.
Waves of Immensity surged outward across the sea of stars, pushing the falling silk aside, clearing a vast, empty arena of dark between the first Kirtimukha and the green woman. The rest of the Ancients drew back to its edges. The second Kirtimukha stood silent beside THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages, waiting its turn.
Lifthrasir floated down from the Giant’s shoulder.
She drifted through the snowless air, light and easy, and came to rest beside Noah, close, at his shoulder, as if they were two friends settling in to watch a show.
And then her voice spoke inside him!
It came through the link between them, the one he had been unable to find before, so thin and faint that it barely existed at all. A whisper running along a single thread of his Dream.
"I am a grateful creature," Lifthrasir said, inside his mind. "I know my Narrative will embolden yours as it unfolds. But I still want to thank you, properly, for the spark you gave me. So I will do something substantial."
Her dark eyes stayed on the arena.
"Something my father taught me, before he left. We’ll be able to watch it soon, through Little Kir One. Because it reaches into Trueness. Being true to oneself, relative to the vast and apathetic existence all around us."
She smiled faintly.
"He called it Shinjitsu."
WAA!
The word went through Noah’s existence like a bell.
"It comes from an ancient language my father used," Lifthrasir went on quietly. "Older than many Tongues maybe. It means truth, and sincerity, and verisimilitude, the quality of seeming wholly real, and reality itself, all four at once. Shinjitsu is all of them."
In the arena, the first Kirtimukha turned its serene face toward the Verdant Regard.
"Weaker lifeforms reach for their own trueness through smaller weavings on a smaller scale," Lifthrasir said. "They have names for them: Way Access, Existential Access, and Civilizational Access, each one measured as a percentage. How much of their trueness they can reach, relative to the existence they live in."
Her voice softened.
"Shinjitsu is a weaving of existence, a skill above such small measures. Only lifeforms at the level of Ancient Immensity and above can even begin to resonate with it. And even among them, very few ever learn how. It cannot be granted, or inherited, or stolen. It has to be found, slowly, in oneself, like finding your own face in a dark room with only your hands. Most Ancients live and die without ever raising it a single step."
She looked at him sidelong.
"Its measure is called the Assimilation Rate."
Noah held perfectly still, listening.
"Every Immense One wears a great deal that isn’t theirs," Lifthrasir said. "Titles others gave them. Legends others told about them. The rules of their Legacy. The expectations of existence. The narratives of everyone who came before them. All of that sits on top of what they truly are, like layers of borrowed robes."
In the arena, the Verdant Regard raised her plum branch, and green light gathered around it.
"The Assimilation Rate is how much of a being is truly its own. How completely what it is has been assimilated into the truth of itself, and how little is left borrowed. At zero, a being is nothing but borrowed robes, with nothing of its own beneath them. At one hundred..."
She paused.
"At one hundred, there is nothing borrowed left at all. Every part of that being is itself, wholly true and wholly sincere and wholly real. And existence, deaf and blind as it is, cannot help but treat it as real."
The first Kirtimukha lifted one obsidian fist.
"A being with a high Assimilation Rate weighs more than its power alone. When it presses on you, its truth presses with it, and anything in you that is borrowed buckles beneath it. When you strike it, you strike its whole truth, not just its body, and a blow with less truth behind it breaks against one with more. When it looks at you, it sees past your robes, to how much of you is really there."
She smiled.
"Two Ancient Immense Ones with the same power can meet, and the one with the higher Assimilation Rate will win, every time. And a being whose Shinjitsu runs very high can do things that have no place in any system. Its own Narrative begins to come out of it, unique, unrepeatable, because there is finally nothing standing between its truth and existence."
Her eyes returned to the arena.
"My father’s was very high. Higher than anyone’s, and even he is not anywhere near 100%."
...!
The first Kirtimukha’s serene obsidian face turned fully toward the Verdant Regard.
And for the first time since it had stepped out of the tear in space, its eyes began to open!
"Watch," Lifthrasir whispered inside Noah’s mind. "Little Kir One was born from a Narrative that swallows the borrowed robes of others. Let’s see how much of the green woman is truly her own."
Brillaince began to unfold across the region!