Chapter 5916: Dominion III
Chapter 5916: Dominion III
Moriarty’s gaze flickered. Behind him, a hundred faces did the same, a hundred old minds weighing a hundred old things all at once.
And while they weighed, the occupation began.
Root Bearers of the Iron Psalm walked through the Legacy’s great halls in neat pairs, and wherever Lucy’s sigil hung over a doorway, they lifted it down carefully, rolled it with care, and set it aside, and hung the shut gate in its place. They broke nothing and raised no voices. They simply replaced.
In the Legacy’s archive, an Established One of the Psalm stood at the entrance with an iron register, ready to ask every lifeform that passed for their name, their Lineage, and their power!
At the Legacy’s oldest shrine, where a tall statue of Lucy had stood for Ages, two Ancients unrolled a long sheet of grey iron cloth and drew it gently over her face.
And at the edge of a garden, an Established Immense One of the Legacy, a woman who had served the Acharya’s halls for six Ages, knelt in the snow where no one else could see her, and whispered something very quietly.
Light flared around her.
Her strength came back, all of it, in a single rush, and Noah watched her face fill with relief and then, a heartbeat later, with something much worse. Over her existence, faint and small, a tiny iron gate had appeared, and swung shut.
She stayed kneeling in the snow a long time after that.
Above the Legacy, Brunhild spoke again.
"All of you need only pledge allegiance to THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate," she said. "That is all. Nothing more. Your Immensity stays yours. Your power stays yours. Your Lineages, your halls, your names, all of it stays exactly where it is. We have no wish to take from you. The only thing that changes is who you follow, and you would follow THE Iron Psalm. Think of how little that is. You already follow someone who is gone. Lucy left. Your Acharya’s Legacy has been weakening for Ages, and every one of you has felt it, in your Roots and your Immensity and your halls going quiet one by one."
"We are offering you a King who is here, who is strong, who will stand in front of you while existence is carved apart. And it costs you nothing but a few words. Say them with me, and the Totems will open to you, and you will feel your full strength come home. I close my gate to all but the Last. What is mine remains mine. Where the Psalm sings, I answer. Where the Gate shuts, I stand. I give my following to THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate, now and until the last door closes. That is all. Say it, and be whole again."
...!
Moriarty’s gaze changed.
So did the gazes of the others behind him, some hardening, some wavering, some going very still and very far away. Brunhild watched them, and smiled, and floated down.
"I close my gate to all but the Last. What is mine remains mine. Where the Psalm sings, I answer. Where the Gate shuts, I stand. I give my following to THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate, now and until the last door closes."
She came down slowly until she hung just inches away from the group of Immense Ones, close enough that Moriarty could see the white verses glowing on her iron-grey armor, close enough to touch.
"We are all old and wise," she said softly. "None of us wishes to break down everything we have built, just for the sake of values or attachments to old establishments. Existence is fluid. Existence changes. Look at all the Narratives rising everywhere. Will you all be fluid, and change alongside existence?"
She smiled a little wider. "A great man once said, be like water, my friend. If water flows into a lake, it becomes the lake. If it flows into a mountain, it becomes the mountain." Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. "Be... like water."
...!
Moriarty and the others held very heavy gazes.
And on the snowy peak, Noah’s own gaze turned inward, because his existence had just told him something.
|Your dominion is under threat.|
|THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity lies within your dominion.|
|Its people are bound to you as the Legacy’s Son.|
|If enough time passes with those under you turning to another kingship, your position on THE Narrative of Kings will loosen.|
|Then it will fall.|
...!
None of them said a thing.
The silence went on, long and heavy, the new iron sky hanging over all of it, a hundred old Immense Ones weighing Ages of pride against the snow and the gates and the quiet relief on one kneeling woman’s face.
And then a voice rose up.
It was calm. It was also very small, and it shook a little at the edges.
"Forgive me," it said. "But the Acharya once left us a lesson."
Every head turned.
It came from below, from a narrow terace on the side of an Elsedimension, where a lone figure stood among the snow. Even Noah, who had been content to watch, looked over at him.
He was far below Immensity.
He was a Root Bearer, slender and plain, dressed in simple grey robes with ink stains on one sleeve, his dark hair cut short, a pair of small round spectacels pushed up on his nose. He looked like what he was: a scholar, the kind who spends his life in archives and lecture halls, copying old texts and arguing about footnotes. His hands were clasped in front of him.
Noah could see them trembling.
|Theon Aletheides.|
|Root Bearer.|
|Provenance Lifeform of THE Lineage of Aletheia.|
|THE Lineage of Aletheia has given THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity eleven Immense Ones across the Ages.|
|Its first root may trace back to Lucy herself. ?????|
|He is afraid.|
He was weak.
He was terrified.
And he still spoke!
"Before any child of this Legacy is taught to hold a Root," Theon said, his voice carrying thin and clear across the snow, "the Acharya gave us one lesson first. Every one of us learned it. Some of you up there may have forgotten. So I will say it again."
He swallowed. "Power can be given, and taken away. Halls can be built, and burned. Names can be written in iron and stored on a shelf. But there is one thing no one in existence can take from you, unless you hand it over yourself. The name you answer to when you are afraid."
He lifted his chin, and his hands shook harder, and his voice held. "So answer with your own."
He took a breath.
"I am afraid," Theon said. "My name is Theon Aletheides, of the Lineage of Aletheia, of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity. That is the name I answer to."
...!
Above him, Moriarty’s eyes began to shine.
So did the eyes of the Immense Ones behind him, one after another, like lamps being lit in a long dark hall. Something old had woken in all of them at once, something a scholar in grey robes had just reached down and picked up off the floor where they had let it fall.
Above them all, Brunhild Varr’s gaze turned cold.
Her smile stayed on her face. The warmth left it entirely. And around her, slowly, her Immensity began to billow out, vast and heavy and iron-grey, rolling down from the gate-sky toward the narrow terrace where one small Root Bearer stood in the snow!
OOOH!
One did not need to see the future to know what came next.
On the peak, Noah watched, and nodded slowly, and sighed.
In the face of overwhelming power, when oppression hung that heavily over you, what could anyone do?
The least painful way was to roll over and submit.
He knew that better than most. He had stood in front of countless lifeforms in his short, enormous life and offered them exactly the same choice.
Kneel, or die. Pledge fealty, or be erased. He had said it to things weaker than Immense Ones and Root Bearers and things that had no name, and he had meant it every time. He had said it to an entire Legacy a little ago, through the mouth of a dead man, and called their hopes corrupted.
Was he just like Brunhild, in those moments?
He looked at the question honestly, as his Shinjitsu made him look at everything now.
Yes, sometimes, in the shape of it, in the words, in the weight he had let fall on others.
And no. The difference, if there was one, lived in what came after. Brunhild’s gate shut, and stayed shut. His Dreams, at their best, had been doors. Restoring a severed Root. Waking his people into power. Letting a mother’s dream be lived.
Swearing his Dreams were always at their best would be a lie.
Both faces were his. He had worn the warm one with his son on the shore, and he had worn the iron one over the Keepers’ gardens. Both were true.
The only question was which one this moment needed.
He rolled his shoulders, and stretched his arms over his head, slowly, and took one step toward the terrace where Theon stood.
Across the Legacy, Moriarty and the others pulsed all at once.
’Stop!’ Moriarty’s voice roared into his mind, and a hundred other voices with it. ’Legacy’s Son, STOP! Do not!’
Noah went anyway.
He could see countless possibilities. They opened around him with every step, branch on branch, and he looked down all of them calmly. His Dreams were grand. He knew that. But he had only just discovered what Nightmares were, and how powerful they could be.
They could not be fought with power alone. They held their own conditions, their own locks, their own ways of being cleared, and a being ignorant of the lock could beat on them forever and only make them stronger.
He was THE Dreaming.
The dreaming could be many things.
Maybe, this time, the face he needed was not a Dreamer.
Maybe it was a Nightmare.
HUUM!
|An unexpected action has been taken.|
|You are letting your existence change the nature of its dreaming, fully and for a moment, into the weavings of a Nightmare.|
|The Nightmare side of your Dreaming will now take over.|
|The Totems of Dominion read no Immensity in you. They do not know what to read.|
...!
BOOM!
His step finished.
He was standing on the narrow terrace in front of Theon Aletheides, with the small scholar trembling at his back, at the exact instant the full pressure of an Unfathomable Immensity came crashing down on them both.
It broke over him and went nowhere.
Stellar light rose around him, obsidian and gold together, and ash with it, swirling up from the snow at his feet in a slow and endless storm. A robe settled over his shoulders, long and moving, woven out of pure dreams and pure nightmares at once, gold threads and black threads running through each other like day and night poured into the same cloth.
It stirred around him as though in a wind no one else could feel. And above his head, turning slowly in the falling ash, hung a crown of obsidian, black and sharp and silent, floating a hand’s breadth above his hair.
One of his eyes shone endless pupilless gold. The other shone endless pupilless obsidian.
He stood there easily, almost lazily, his weight on one hip, as if he had just wandered out to see what all the noise was about.
Then he tilted his head back, and looked up at Brunhild Varr in her iron sky, and a slow, pleasant smile spread across his face.
"Tell me," Noah said. "Which of us is dreaming the other?"
...!
WAA!
An air of tyranny, quintessence, and arrogance suddenly blazed!