Chapter 5907: Nightmare I
Chapter 5907: Nightmare I
The house was small and quiet, and smelled of bread and woodsmoke.
Noah sat on a low wooden bench beside a nine-year-old boy in a backwater Dimension no one had ever bothered to name. Through the open window, a mother was hanging washing in the yard, huming. The boy’s feet dangled well above the floor. He swung them gently back and forth, and his face, for one moment, was very old.
"Every death teaches," the boy said softly, in the Sealed One’s voice. "I wonder what this one will teach me."
"Nothing," Noah said. "This one is the last."
And everywhere at once, it happened!
He had already moved exactly as the dream had shown him! It was like knowing how a story unfolded and he simply had to follow his previous steps.
Nine vessels across existence collapsed together, and Noah’s Shinjitsu reached into every one of them and ate. The drops of blood went dark. The slivers of thought went quiet. And the slow, patient, certain return of a being who had refused to stay dead for Ages stopped, and stayed stopped.
|THE Sealed One’s existence has collapsed in all nine vessels at once.|
|Your Shinjitsu has broken it down.|
|You have grasped a Shard of IT.|
|You have grasped the sliver of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|
|You have grasped the anomaly that let THE Sealed One always return. ?????|
Beside him, the boy was already fading at the edges, his small hands going thin as paper.
He looked up at Noah, and smiled.
"Are you sure about that?" he asked.
HUUM!
And he was gone.
The bench was empty. Outside, the mother went on humming over her washing, unaware. Noah sat very still and frowned at the place where the boy had been.
Are you sure about that.
It was the kind of thing a dying lifeform said to have the last word. Probably it meant nothing. But this particular lifeform had died more times than anyone Noah had ever met, and had been right about a great many things, and Noah turned the words over carefully before he set them down and kept them.
This motherfucker. He couldn’t possibly have any more surprises, right? Every shred of him was gone!
Noah shook his head and closed his eyes.
Through his bonds and his Dream, he felt every other piece fall exactly where it should: the archivist’s pen lying still in a quiet library, the drowned prince and the black-sea sleeper gone into Ruination’s glowing halls, the golden palace hushed with its Luxuria Gilded Ones blinking like sleepers woken too early, the blank-faced walker gone down Kir One’s throat, the hermit fallen in the snow of his mountain, and the advisor slumped at the merchant-queen’s side.
All of it, exactly as dreamed.
Except for one body, which he had saved for last.
In THE Keepers of Existence, in a quiet stone tower at the edge of the frozen gardens, the body of THE Sealed One stood empty at the window, looking out at the snow.
Noah had taken everything worth taking from it. The Shard, the Regret, the strange stubborn thing that refused to die, all of it already his, exactly as the dream had promised. What remained was only a shell, a tall man in plain grey robes with nothing left inside but a little residual authority, the last echo of a being who had steered a Legacy from behind a polite smile.
Noah had filled that echo with his own words, and set it a few simple directions.
He could have let the body fall quietly. It would have taken the Keepers a little time to notice.
But right now, he wanted to make enemies.
They were already his enemies, of course. The Keepers had come for his head once and would come again. But some part of him, the tyrannical part, the part of his humanity that had always refused to sit quietly and be small, wanted to act out. He had written two Narratives into existence with his own hand, and he meant to live them.
The first had been about where he came from. Existence had produced lifeform after lifeform, Age after Age, until a deadbeat human man and a grand human woman came together, and from them came a glorious mutation, a potential exceeding everything that had come before him.
The second had been about what he would become. THE One the Threads Bend Toward. Chance and fate and long-waiting threads, allies and enemies alike, all of them bending toward him, gathering around him, moving because he was there.
Enemies were threads too.
If this were one of the games he used to play before the apocalypse, back in that cheap apartment, this would be the moment he pulled the aggro. Or when he dived into a Dungeon and drew every monster in it onto himself, all at once, on purpose. Because every one of them that came for him would come carrying something, and every wave that broke against him would leave the loot behind.
Noah smiled, and gave the shell its first direction.
In the tower, the body of THE Sealed One rose.
It lifted off the stone floor and drifted out through the open window, slow and upright, its grey robes stirring in the cold wind, and climbed into the skies above the Keepers’ Legacy. Snow fell past it. It rose higher, and higher, until it hung alone above the frozen gardens, the spiral palace, the snowed-in halls, a small grey figure against a sky full of falling white.
Then the last of its residual aura erupted!
It burst outward in a single great wave, the whole remaining weight of what the Sealed One had been, and rolled across the Keepers’ Legacy from end to end. It struck every hall and every garden and every hidden pocket, and every lifeform it touched felt it, the unmistakable presence of the one who had lived among them for so long, all at once, louder than it had ever allowed itself to be.
Across the Legacy, heads lifted!
In the snowed-in halls, the Gaoler looked up from his cages. In her house, the Mother of Closed Doors opened one door a crack. At the top of the spiral palace, THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral rose from its throne, and every spiral around it stopped turning. And on a long terrace above the frozen gardens, THE SLEEPLESS FIEND raised his head, and his ever-open eyes went very still.
They all saw it!
The body of THE Sealed One hung in the sky above them, and began to swell.
It ballooned outward, grey robes stretching and splitting, the calm ordinary face bloating and losing its shape, the whole figure swelling grotesquly larger and larger against the snow-filled sky, glowing from the inside like a lantern about to burst.
Then it exploded!
It came apart into a great cloud of drifting light, thousands upon thousands of small bright glimmers of Immensity scattering across the sky like sparks from a struck fire, falling slowly through the snow.
And at that same moment, a voice boomed out over the Keepers’ Legacy.
It came from everywhere at once, from the sky and the snow and the drifting glimmers, heavy and calm and utterly certain. It was Noah’s voice, spoken through the last residual authority of a dead man.
|"Hear me, Keepers of Existence."|
|"There will be no one now to lead you toward Immensity. No one to open the door for you, so that you may stop being Those Who Remain. No one to tell you that the road ahead is still open, if only you follow the right voice. That voice is gone. I have eaten it."|
|"Look at the snow falling on you. For Ages, you called yourselves keepers while you kept nothing but yourselves. You told yourselves that things could still change, that someone would come and lead you somewhere higher. He came. He was patient. He was clever. He had died more times than all of you together. And now he is light falling on your gardens."|
|"Things that have taken shape do not change. Those Who Remain will not change. You will stay exactly what you are, for exactly as long as I allow it."|
|"Let every one of you who still dreams of climbing over the heads of the weak look up at this light, and remember how it fell."|
|"Your dark, corrupted light of possibility is gone, and your aspirations have gone with it."|
...!
The words hung over the Legacy, heavy as the snow.
In the silence that followed, the whole Legacy held perfectly still, the Gaoler and the Mother of Closed Doors, the Sovereign on its spiral throne, even the Fiend on his terrace. Every lifeform in the Keepers’ Legacy stood frozen, looking up at the sky where the Sealed One had been, at the slow fall of his scattered light.
Then something moved below!
It came from far beneath the Legacy, from somewhere deep and hidden, a power so heavy and so terrible that the whole Legacy shuddered as it passed. It rose like a hand reaching up out of dark water, straight through gardens and halls and spiral palace, straight up into the sky, toward the dispersing glimmers of THE Sealed One, grasping for whatever was left.
Then it closed.
It caught nothing!
The glimmers slipped through it like snow through open fingers, already empty, already only light. Every piece of the Sealed One worth catching had been eaten long before the power below had even begun to rise, and it closed on drifting nothing, and held it, and for a long, terrible moment, it kept on holding!
Oh!