Chapter 5913: Encroachment! II
Chapter 5913: Encroachment! II
Along the rows of sleepers, five chambers had stopped flickering. They glowed steadily now, but the glow had changed. The soft blue-gold of a Dream had darkened, threaded through with black, like light coming up through deep water.
Noah raised his hand!
Five cocoons rose out of the Engine and floated down onto the sand before him. They were long and pale and silken, each one taller than a man, and inside them, something moved. Dark lines ran across their surfaces like veins. The air around them hummed.
Then they split open!
Obsidan and gold poured out of them together, a brilliant black-and-gold light that washed across the Early Veiled Shore and lit the sea from beneath. The sand trembled. Murky dreams rose off the open cocoons like steam off hot stone, grey and slow and heavy, curling around the five figures stepping out of them.
Henry came first.
He looked like himself, the same face, the same young Noah features. But his hair, once blue-gold, had gone black as obsidian and fell loose past his shoulders. And from his back, slowly unfolding as if they had been tucked there his whole life, rose a pair of great moth wings, soft and dark and edged in gold, each one marked with a faint pale circle like a closed eye.
Thalia stepped out beside him, her hair gone dark as night. Where her arms had been, nine long golden tentacles now hung on each side of her, slender and shining, curling and uncurling slowly in the air as if tasting it.
THE Emperor Penguin waddled out of the third cocoon with enormous dignity.
He was still a penguin. He was also something much older. His feathers had turned into overlapping plates of black glass edged in gold, and they chimed faintly as he moved. A crown of thin obsidian spines rose from his head. His eyes had multiplied into a neat row of six, all gold, all calm.
Small dark stars drifted in a slow ring around his head like a halo, and his flippers ended in long feathers sharp enough to cut light. He stood very straight and looked around the shore as if he had always expected to be this impressive.
Majestic! Grand! Arrogant!
Kazuhiko came out silent. His arms ended in long blades now, curved and gleaming, and his feet were blades too, so that he stood on the sand on four edges of steel-dark obsidian. His eyes were pupilless, black from rim to rim, and in them, faint gold sparks drifted like embers.
Barbatos came last. She was as small and petite as she had always been, but her skin had turned into a field of stellar obsidian, dark and glittering with tiny points of light like a night sky. A pair of devilish wings spread from her shoulders, and a long thin tail curled lazily behind her.
The murky dreams hung around all five of them, and their power pressed down on the shore like a weight.
|Henry, Thalia, THE Emperor Penguin, Kazuhiko, and Barbatos have become Risen Nightmares.|
|Nightmare mutation, paired with Kin Evolution, has carried them far beyond what they were.|
|As Risen Dreams, their power would have reached Newly Risen Immense Ones.|
|As Risen Nightmares, their power now stands on the upper rungs of Established Immense Ones.|
|Each holds unique Nightmare abilities. ?????|
...!
The five of them looked down at themselves. Henry flexed his new wings and nearly tipped over. Thalia lifted all eighteen tentacles at once and stared at them. Barbatos swished her tail and grinned. The Emperor Penguin inspected his glass feathers with quiet approval. Kazuhiko turned one bladed hand slowly in the light.
Noah looked at his son, and at the rest of his people, and sighed.
"I’m sorry," he said quietly. "I accounted for many things. I didn’t foresee this. Even while calculating trillions of quantum possibilities, sometimes... one cannot see everything." He looked out at the grey dust drifting along the sand. "Existence is unpredictable."
...!
He felt bad. He truly did!
But as he looked at the five figures before him, Henry rose off the sand, his great dark wings beating once, and floated over to him, smiling.
"What are you talking about, Father?" Henry said. "You’ve done it again. You’ve given us power we couldn’t have imagined, and this time just from dreaming. My existence tells me I’m a...Nightmare now. I seem to have some very strange abilities I’m barely starting to understand."
He shrugged, and his wings shrugged with him. "But I’m still me."
Noah reached up and patted his son’s head, the obsidian hair cool and soft under his hand.
Thalia smiled at him over Henry’s shoulder, her golden tentacles curling gently.
"Existence is vast and filled with possibilities," she said. "This is just one of them."
HUUM!
Existence was vast.
Noah looked at them, his son and his women, his old friends and his strange loyal companions, all fundamentally changed and all, somehow, delighted about it. Barbatos was already testing things out. The Emperor Penguin was explaining to Kazuhiko, at length, why his crown was the most dignifed.
He sighed again, softer this time, and let his existence settle.
Then he closed his eyes, and let his Shinjitsu and his new way of seeing dreams sink fully into him.
|Your existence is settling.|
|Assimilation Rate: 5%.|
|You have crossed a threshold.|
|THE Second Unveiling: THE Unlidded Eye.|
|You see beings beneath their robes. Some look nothing like the shapes they wear.|
|Boons of THE Unlidded Eye:|
|1. You see true shapes. Disguises, borrowed faces, and possessed bodies show you what lies under them.|
|2. You see Nightmares hiding in dreams, your own and others’, before they can encroach.|
|3. Because you are the dreaming, your Dreaming Human Origin can now dream Nightmares as well as Dreams.|
|4. The unwalked roads that return to you can be woven into Nightmares of your own. They answer to you, not to the Fallow.|
|5. You may raise Risen Nightmares as well as Risen Dreams.|
|6. You may send a Nightmare into the dream of an enemy, built from the roads that enemy never walked.|
...!
Noah opened his eyes!
One eye shone gold, pupilless and endless, the bright gold of every Dream he had ever dreamed. The other shone obsidian, pupilless and endless, black and deep and glittering faintly at its edges like the dust of a moth’s wing.
The thin film of Shinjitsu around his skin had changed too. It was still clear, still glass-still, but now fine veins of obsidian ran through it alongside the gold, the two colors winding together over his skin like day and night meeting on the same pane of glass, neither one swallowing the other.
Around him, the murky dreams of his five Risen Nightmares turned slowly toward him and bowed, as grass bows when the wind changes.
He looked at the shore, the Engine, the five strange new figures of his people, the grey dust still drifting on the sand.
And for the first time, he saw all of them as they truly were!
His gaze was Unlidded!