Chapter 5909: Nightmare III
Chapter 5909: Nightmare III
Noah lay on the blue-gold water of his domain and looked up at nothing in particular.
Far above, beyond the walls of his Domain, the banner of THE Narrative of Kings hung in the skies of existence. Forty-nine. A small number on a long list, held by a being who, a few years ago, had barely existed at all.
He let his thoughts go wide.
He saw the Keepers under their new snow, a Legacy that had bought its spring with its weakest, now shivering. He saw the Fiend on his terrace with his ever-open eyes, and Moriarty and many others in Lucy’s Legacy, all of them looking up at the same banner and seeing different things in it.
There was the hand that had reached up from beneath the Keepers and closed on empty light. There was a kingship made of returns drifting somewhere through the dark.
From far enough away, it all looked very simple. Pieces moved, threads bent, and every strike was answered, one by one, at its own pace.
From close up, every piece had a face.
He looked at both views calmly, and he found that neither one frightened him.
THE Steward of Returning Ages. The boy’s smile. Are you sure about that?
He could chase that question all through existence and arrive nowhere. Whatever the answer was, it would come to him in time. Most answers did, if one stood still long enough.
For now, there was work to do.
Noah closed his eyes, and moved forward.
He reached for the Shard first.
The cool white-gold stone drifted into his palm, and he swallowed it plainly. It went down into him and flew to the center of his existence, where the other three waited, and the four of them met and pressed together.
They began to hum!
It was different this time. With two, there had been pressure. With three, weight. Now, with four, there was something like a chord, four notes of the same deep sound, ringing together in a way that made the whole of his existence feel, for a moment, like the inside of a bell.
|You have consumed a fourth Shard of IT.|
|It has joined the others within you.|
|Their center cannot be broken down.|
|Everything around them that can be broken down has been made your own.|
|The four Shards are resonating.|
|What they may become together: ?????|
Noah sat very still and listened to that resonance, and wondered.
Four pieces of something unimaginably larger, singing to each other inside him. Whether they would ever become more than pieces, he had no idea. But something in that chord felt like the beginning of a sentence.
He set the thought down, and reached for the knot.
The black thread came to him and coiled in his palm, loosening and tightening, loosening and tightening, patiant as a heartbeat. He swallowed it too, and turned his Shinjitsu loose on it.
It fought in its own quiet way, with no striking and no burning. It simply refused. Every time his truth pulled one strand of it apart, the strand began, slowly and stubbornly, to reach for its neighbor and tie itself back on. It had been doing this for Ages. It knew no other way to be.
But Shinjitsu was patient too.
|Your Shinjitsu is breaking down the anomaly.|
|It reties itself.|
|Your Shinjitsu breaks it again.|
|It reties itself, more slowly.|
|Your Shinjitsu sets down what is borrowed in it, and keeps what can be true.|
|It tries to retie itself one last time, and finds nothing left to hold.|
|The anomaly has been entirely broken down.|
The knot went still.
Then it was simply gone, unraveled to its very end, and Noah felt the whole of his existence settle a little deeper into itself, as if a door somewhere in him had finally finished closing.
|Assimilation Rate: 2.1% to 2.5%.|
|Attributes: unchanged.|
He opened his eyes.
The thin film of his Shinjitsu lay around him, still as glass, a little denser than before. He flexed one hand slowly and watched the light move across his knuckles. It felt the same and not the same, as a familiar room feels after someone has quietly rearranged one chair.
Then he turned his gaze to the last thing floating before him.
The Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor hung in the air, small and grey-blue and impossibly heavy, the air around it hushed.
Swallowing that blindly was out of the question.
So, as always, he would simply dream first, and see how things unfolded.
He lay back on the water and began his next Infinite Quantum Dream.
|Quantum Dream 8 begins.|
|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 2.5%. True Order III.4.|
|Goal: the safe devouring and breaking down of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|
|Minute 1: You reach for the Regret.|
The glass rose around him, blue and gold and endless, the familiar halls of possibility unfolding in every direction like a city of windows.
But...
HUUUM!
Out nowhere....darkness bloomed!
It came in flashes, all at once and everywhere, black blossoms opening in the glass like ink dropped in water. One window went dark, then ten, then a thousand. And from beneath the glass floor, obsidian rivers erupted upward, black and glossy and silent, pouring through the halls of the Quantum Dream as if they had been waiting under it all along!
|Warning.|
|Something unknown has been triggered.|
|Your Infinite Quantum Dream has been affected.|
|Source: ?????|
...!
Noah held still and focused.
Around him, the blue-gold brilliance was fading. It drained slowly, as light drains from a winter sky, until the endless glass halls of possibility were gone and there was only dark. He could see a few meters ahead of himself and no farther. The air grew thick, heavy, close, pressing on his chest. Breathing felt like work.
This was his Infinite Quantum Dream. His. Until now, it had only ever done what he asked of it!
So...
His gaze grew heavy.
What could possibly have caused this?
His existence began to buzz, a low warning hum through every part of him, and his Dreaming Human Origin did what it always did when the road was hidden from him. It carried him forward.
He walked into the dark.
After a while, something began to fall around him. Snow, at first, soft and grey. Then ash, mixed into it, dry and bitter on his tongue, drifting down together out of an invisible sky. The ground under his feet turned white and crunching. The cold seeped up through him.
Then he saw...a piece of something.
It lay in the snow at the edge of his sight. A severed hand. Only a hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled, as if it had been reaching for something when it was cut away.
He kept walking, and there were more....severed limbs.
Arms, laid in a long careful curve. Legs, set end to end, following the same curve. Torsos, placed and severed with terrible neatness. They had all been arranged, every piece of them, into a vast spiral in the snow, winding inward, ring after ring, and the closer he came to its center, the more the shape of it hurt to look at. The angles were wrong. The curve bent in a direction his eyes had no name for.
Here and there, between the pieces, black obsidian symbols had been pressed into the snow, and they seemed to shift whenever his gaze slid away from them, like eyes in an old portrait following a visitor.
And he knew the faces.
He knew them! Barbatos, Adelaide, Seo-yeon, THE Emperor Penguin, Kazuhiko, and more!
Faces he had seen laughing, arguing, eating, sleeping. Faces he had promised, in his own quiet way, to keep safe. They lay in the snow with their eyes open and snow settling on their lashes, arranged like parts of a design, and none of them blinked.
At the center of the spiral stood a single black tree, its branches bare and twisted, its bark slick.
Hanging from it was Henry!
His arms were spread wide and bound to the branches. His skin had been flayed open and pinned back from his chest and his arms like the wings of a moth, and his head hung low, and snow and ash were settling gently in his hair.
Noah stopped.
His gaze, already heavy, became heavier still. The air pressed in. The hum through his existence became a kind of roar, and underneath it, something very old and very human in him went cold and quiet and still.
At that moment, a voice whispered in the dark.
It came from nowhere and from everywhere, very soft, very close, as if someone were standing just behind his ear.
"How can you dream of probabilities so often," it said, "and never once worry about their nightmares?"
HUUM!
The dark swallowed the spiral.
For one long moment, Noah could see nothing at all. The tree, Henry, the faces in the snow, all of it was gone into the black, leaving only the falling ash and the weight on his chest.
Then the light came back.
The spiral was gone! The tree was gone. Henry was gone. Where every body had been, there were only shapes pressed into the snow, indentatons, a hand here, an arm there, the long careful curve of the spiral still traced in hollows across the white, slowly filling with falling ash.
|You have been encroached upon by unknown weavings of probability.|
|You have been pulled into a Nightmare.|
|Every possible path is closed.|
|Every probability is obscured.|
|They will remain so until this Nightmare is cleared.|
...!
Noah read it, and while he was still reading, he heard footsteps.
Slow ones. Bare feet on snow, crunching softly, coming toward him out of the dark.
He turned.
They were Henry’s feet. He knew them. But the skin on them was torn in long ragged lines, and from the tears leaked a fine, sandy light, black and glittering, like obsidian ground to dust and set glowing from within. With each step, the feet bled obsidian, thick and dark, leaving black prints in the white behind them.
The figure came closer, step by step, until it stood just at the edge of what Noah could see.
It was Henry, and it was something else wearing him.
His body stood straight now, the flayed skin closed over in ragged seams that leaked that same black-sand light. His face was Henry’s face, every line of it. But his eyes were gone, and in their place, two slow streams of sandy obsidian light leaked down his cheeks like tears, glittering as they fell into the snow.
The Nightmare looked at Noah.
When it spoke, the voice that came out of Henry’s mouth was ancient, and deep, and patient, like something speaking from the bottom of a very old well.
It tilted Henry’s head, slowly.
"Every road you have ever dreamed and thrown away still had to end somewhere. They all end here, with me. In more branches than you have ever bothered to count, this one died, and you looked away, and chose a kinder road. I kept him. I kept all of them. I keep everything you do not want."
Snow and ash fell together. Somewhere in the dark, very faintly, something like a bell was ringing.
"So dream with me," the Nightmare said, "through every road you threw away. Count them. Learn their names. And when we reach the end of the snow, you will tell me which of us is the dream...and which of us the Nightmare."
...!
BOOM!