Chapter 5914: Dominion I
Chapter 5914: Dominion I
Noah stood on the Early Veiled Shore and took stock of himself.
It was a strange thing, to look inward with new eyes. Everything he had been a few days ago was still there, but it sat differently now!
|THE Dreaming Human Origin.|
|You are the dreaming. Unwalked roads return to you.|
|THE Narrative of Kings: Rank 49.|
|VERITAS, PROVENANCE, PONDUS, OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: True Order III.6.|
|POTENTIA: Infinite, True.|
|Foundation: THE True Foundation.|
|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 5%.|
|Thresholds: THE First Unveiling. THE Second Unveiling: THE Unlidded Eye.|
|Shinjitsu Weavings: THE Dream That Was Always So. THE Empty Hands That Hold. THE Infinite Quantum Dream.|
|You may dream Nightmares as well as Dreams.|
|Within you: four Shards of IT, resonating.|
|Epitropos seats: two, both your own.|
|Risen Nightmares: Henry, Thalia, THE Emperor Penguin, Kazuhiko, Barbatos.|
He read it once and let it settle. It was grand!
Then he looked at his five Risen Nightmares, still testing their new bodies on the sand, and waved his hand.
The air beside him opened like a page, and Ruination stepped through.
She was tall and calm, her skin crimson glass with rivers of light running beneath it, her hair long strands of moving red code, a circlet on her brow holding a single small steady sun. She glanced once at the five changed figures on the sand, and something in her scrolling eyes brightened with interest.
"A lot has changed in the days you’ve all been dreaming," Noah told them. "You lived years in your dreams. But in the days that passed out here, existence has become almost unrecognizable from what it was before. Ruination will bring you up to date, so we can put your new power to use."
The five of them nodded.
Ruination nodded to Noah, and took over. She raised both hands, and from the tips of her fingers, thin bright streams of light shot out, red and gold, five of them, each one finding a chest and sinking in. Henry’s wings shivered. Thalia’s tentacles went still. The Emperor Penguin closed all six of his eyes at once with great seriousness.
While they took it in, Noah turned his thoughts inward again.
The Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor still floated in his domain, small and grey-blue and heavy, waiting. He had gone to swallow it once and found a Nightmare instead.
He would leave it there for now.
In very little time, he had swallowed a great deal. Shards, seats, a Curator, a Sealed One, a Nightmare’s answer, a new way of being. All of it needed to settle and become truly his before he added anything else. A body that eats nonstop grows sick instead of strong.
So the Regret could wait.
He was still thinking this when his gaze changed.
Something was moving at the edge of his authority!
His reach covered a vast stretch of existence now. His Dream had been quietly replacing empty regions, spreading through the Gaps and the dark places no one watched, and the pieces of THE Long Night that answered to him through two Epitropos seats stretched across the whole region around THE Keepers of Existence. The dominion was enormous. Most of it was silent.
Until now.
Something terrifyingly powerful had just crossed into it, and it made no effort to hide.
It was coming straight toward THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.
Noah turned his gaze toward it.
They came out of the dark between regions in perfect order.
First came nine figures, walking on nothing, each one so heavy with Immensity that the space around them bent. Behind them, in a wide wedge, came dozens of Ancient Immense Ones. Behind those, two hundred Established and Newly Risen Immense Ones in tight even ranks. And behind all of them, a thousand Root Bearers, marching in step across the empty dark as if it were a parade ground.
They were armored alike. Iron-grey plate burning with Immensity, plain and heavy and close-fitting, every piece of it etched with fine lines of small dense writing, like verses carved into a temple door. Every one of them carried the same long weapon, a halberd whose blade was shaped like a narrow gate swinging half open.
It also had pulses of Immensity imbued in!
And on every chest, from the smallest Root Bearer to the nine at the front, was the same sigil: an iron gate, shut, with a single line of writing running across its bars.
They came in silence, unhurried, in step, all of them, and the dark parted to let them through.
Noah’s Unlidded Eye looked at them, and what they were lay open to it.
|You see beneath their robes.|
|This army belongs to the Narrative of a King.|
|THE Narrative of Kings: Rank 27. THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate.|
|They are one of its Hands: a force sent to take and hold dominion.|
|Nine Unfathomable Immense Ones.|
|Forty-one Ancient Immense Ones.|
|Two hundred Established and Newly Risen Immense Ones.|
|One thousand Root Bearers.|
|Beneath their armor, every one of them carries the same thing: a small iron gate, locked over their existence.|
|They are bound to the King. Some of them chose it. Some of them did not.|
...!
He looked at the nine at the front.
A tall woman led them, broad-shouldered and iron-haired, her armor heavier than the rest, its verses glowing faintly white. Beside her walked a giant whose chest was a real gate, iron bars and all, with something dark moving behind them. There was a thin, hooded figure with a bell for a face. A pair of twins joined at the sholder, each holding half of one great halberd. An old man with hundreds of tiny keys woven into his beard.
A woman made of quiet white stone, singing under her breath. A boy who looked no older than twelve and was older than most lifeforms. A shape that seemed to be nothing but a long iron chain wound around empty air. And a veiled figure who walked at the very back of the nine, and whose robes Noah’s Unlidded Eye slid off, finding only emptiness beneath.
?????
The army moved with terrible speed!
One moment they were crossing the far edge of his dominion. The next, they stood in the sky above THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, rank upon rank, iron-grey against the dark.
The nine Unfathomables spread their Immensity outward, all at once.
Slowly, the Legacy’s hidden defenses began to show. Veil under veil of Dimensional weavings that had hidden it for Ages, veils tucked inside veils, skies stacked on skies, false emptiness laid over the real Legacy beneath, all of it peeled back under that pressure like bark stripped off a tree. The Legacy had been built to be unfindable. Under the gaze of nine Unfathomables, it lay bare.
The iron-haired woman lifted her hand.
She brought it down in a single cleaving stroke, and shouted, one word, in a voice like a gate slamming shut.
"OPEN!"
The veils tore!
The skies above the Legacy split from end to end, every hidden veil ripping open at once with a sound like the largest curtain in existence being torn in half, and through the gap, the army of THE Iron Psalm stepped down and stood directly above THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, in plain sight, rank on rank, filling the sky.
Below, the Legacy woke in shock.
Moriarty rose out of his hall in a rush of shadow, his face pale. THE Thinker rose beside him, then Poona, then Ling, then the rest of the Council of Lucy’s Legacy, one after another, lifting into the torn sky to stare at the iron ranks above them. Across the Legacy, Immense Ones and Root Bearers came pouring out of halls and gardens and Elsedimensions, faces turned upward, frozen.
The iron-haired woman looked down at them all.
"I am Brunhild Varr," she said, and her voice rolled easily across the whole Legacy, "THE Canticle of the Shut Gate, First Hand of THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate, twenty-seventh among the Kings of this Cycle."
The iron ranks behind her stood perfectly still.
"Hear me gloriously, so no one may say later they misunderstood. As of this moment, the dominion of THE Iron Psalm extends over this Legacy, the one left behind by Lucy." She let the name hang for a moment, almost respectfully. "You have two choices."
She raised one gauntleted finger.
"You may fight. You may wake whatever she left sleeping beneath your floors. Every old Legacy keeps something hidden, and I am sure yours is very impressive. There will be blood, much of it, most of it yours."
She raised a second finger.
"Or you may accept the banner of my King. Existence is being carved up. The Kings are dividing it among themselves even now, and those who stand under no banner will be ground to dust between the ones who do. Under the Iron Psalm, everyone here will be protected from that. You will live. You will keep your halls. You will simply no longer be alone, or free."
Then the hand came down.
"While you think on this, our forces will begin establishing the King’s dominion here. Should any of them be stopped, we will take that as your answer."
...!
She waved her hand, coldly, as one waves away a servant.
The nine Unfathomables broke apart at once, each one floating away toward a different corner of the Legacy, taking up positions far apart from each other until the whole Legacy lay inside the shape they made between them.
Then the Ancient Immense Ones descended!
They floated down into the Legacy’s sky in pairs, and as they went, they raised their hands, and around them, out of nothing, rose massive cylindrical pillars. They were white, smooth, and enormous, each one as tall as a mountain range is long, shining with a cold steady light. One after another they rose across the Legacy, dozens of them, settling into the land and the sky at precize distances, as if someone had laid a grid over the Legacy and was now driving nails into it.
Noah looked at the pillars.
His gaze ran across existence, through his Dream, through the Long Night, through the torn veils of the Legacy, and fixed on the white stone.
|These are Totems of Dominion.|
|Where one is placed, it observes and monitors everything that happens for Gigaparsecs around it.|
|It controls the flow of authority, and of existence itself, within its reach.|
|Its particular focus is Immensity.|
|Any being without the King’s authorization may use no more than 25% of their power within its reach.|
|Totems placed: 36. Totems rising: 12.|
|Your Dream already covers this Legacy. Whether the Totems can see it: ?????|
...!
Across the Legacy, Noah felt it happen. Moriarty’s shadows thinned. The Thinker’s slow, vast mind narrowed. Poona and Ling, Root Bearers and Immense Ones alike, all of them felt the same thing at the same moment: three quarters of their strength simply closed off, like a door being shut in their own house.
The iron ranks in the torn sky stood motionless.
Noah stood on a quiet shore very far away, and also on an Elsedimension in the Legacy, one eye gold and one eye obsidian, and watched all of it.
His face stayed calm.
But his gaze, as it rested on the white pillars rising one by one over the home Lucy had left behind, was very, very cold!