Chapter 5912: Encroachment! I
Chapter 5912: Encroachment! I
As quickly as it had appeared, the visage of THE Grey Mother disappeared as Noah looked away!
Around him, everything buzzed!
The moth bowed at this time.
It was a slow, enormus motion, the great wings lowering until the two vast eyes on them were level with Noah’s face, and in both of them now, there was only one figure: Noah, whole, looking back, neither sleeper nor man in the snow, simply himself.
"You will be seen again, Dreamer," it said softly. "By her. By others. Walk carefully."
Then it came apart.
It simply loosened, quietly, every strand of black fur and glittering sand drifting away from every other, and fell upward into the dark like snow returning to the sky. The ash and the snow stopped together, and the obsidian rivers sank back down beneath a floor that slowly, piece by piece, turned to glass again.
The blue-gold came back!
It came back slowly, first a faint glow at the edges, then lines of light running through the floor, then the endless halls of the Infinite Quantum Dream rising around him once more, window after window, bright and familiar and his.
|THE Butterfly That Wakes has withdrawn.|
|The Nightmare has been cleared.|
|All paths reopen. All probabilities clear.|
...!
Noah stood alone in the glass and let himself breathe.
He looked at his hands. The same hands. But something under them had moved, as the ground shifts a little after a long earthquake has passed, settling into a new shape it would keep from now on.
He had said it out loud. I am the dreaming!
And existence had listened.
He understood now what that meant, slowly, as one understands the size of a mountain by walking around it. For his whole life, even after the apocalypse, even after Dreams and Kin and Kings, he had lived as one road. One Noah, choosing, and leaving everything else behind. Every Quantum Dream had been a way of looking down the other roads before he picked one and walked away from the rest.
But there was no away.
Every road he had ever left behind was still him. Every Noah who had died in his glass had been him too. He had only been pretending, as everyone pretends, that the roads he left unwalked belonged to no one.
They belonged to him.
And now, so did every road to come.
|Your answer has changed you.|
|THE Dreaming Human Origin: you are no longer only the dreamer. You are the dreaming.|
|Every path you do not take, every dream you leave behind, now returns to your Dream.|
|Every probability you use feeds back into you.|
|Nothing you leave behind is lost.|
|Your Shinjitsu has learned to hold the unchosen as true. Your Assimilation Rate has reached 5%.|
|It no longer splits your roads into real and discarded. All of them are yours.|
He felt it as the prompts appeared. Somewhere at the base of his existence, a door had opened that had always been there and always been shut, and through it, softly, came everything. Every branch of every Quantum Dream he had ever run came with it: the road where Rose collapsed, the road where Emotive was torn apart, the road where the Curator wrote him out of existence with one line, the road where the Fiend crushed a girl in his hand.
They flowed into him like rivers into a sea, and the sea grew deeper for it instead of heavier.
From now on, every road of his own would stay with him, safe from the Fallow.
But those were only his own roads.
|Possibilities belonging to others that you dream can still fall away from you.|
|Nightmares may still find you through them.|
|Estimated chance of a Nightmare finding you when you use THE Infinite Quantum Dream: 10%.|
...!
Ten percent.
He looked at that number for a while, calmly. One time in ten, something from beneath might notice the lantern and come looking. That was a real cost. It was also, he thought, far better than what he had been doing before, when every single Dream had lit a lantern for the Grey Mother while he stayed blind to it.
He could live with ten percent!
He was about to let the Dream end when the glass around him flickered.
Just once. A small dimming, like a cloud passing over a lamp.
|Warning.|
|For one instant, THE Grey Mother of Unwalked Roads gazed upon you.|
|Under that gaze, the weavings of Nightmares have encroached upon aspects of your Dream.|
|Important Dreams within THE Dream Engine have been affected.|
|Affected Dreams: ?????|
...!
Noah’s expression changed.
The calm stayed, but it sank somewhere deeper, behind his eyes, and what came up in its place was heavy and cold. The Dream Engine, the Early Veiled Shore, his mother and his son and his daughter and all the others he had laid down to sleep for centuries in dreams while days passed outside, so that nothing in existence could reach them while he grew strong enough to keep them safe, while they also grew stronger!
Something had reached them!
He moved before the Dream could end. He tore himself out of it and into his Origin in a single motion, and from his domain he reached straight through every bond he had, down to the shore where the Engine stood.
In an instant, he was there.
The Early Veiled Shore lay quiet beneath its soft veiled sky of THE Infiniverse, the sea washing in and out in long slow breaths, the Dream Engine standing at the edge of the water exactly where he had left it, vast and humming, its countless sleeping chambers glowing faintly in rows along the sand.
At first, everything looked the same.
Then he saw the dust!
It lay on the sand around the Engine, very fine and very grey, like ash after a fire that had burned somewhere else entirely. Drifts of it had piled against the base of the great machine in small soft heaps, and more clung to the glass of the nearest chambers. And here and there, along the rows of sleepers, the steady glow of a dream inside a chamber was flikering, dimming and brightening and dimming again, like a candle in a draft.
A few cocoons were affected!
On top of the Engine, perfectly still, sat a single small grey moth.
Noah looked at it.
It looked back at him, with two tiny eyes on its wings.
Then it opened them!
The small grey moth opened its eyes, and the prompts bloomed.
|The gaze of THE Grey Mother of Unwalked Roads has left its mark.|
|Nightmare weavings have entered five Dreams within THE Dream Engine.|
|Henry: influenced.|
|Thalia: influenced.|
|THE Emperor Penguin: influenced.|
|Kazuhiko: influenced.|
|Barbatos: influenced.|
|They are waking.|
...!
The moth on top of the Engine closed its tiny eyes again, and crumbled into a little pinch of grey dust, and was gone!