Chapter 5918: Dominion V
Chapter 5918: Dominion V
Gates bloomed!
Everywhere, all at once, across the whole region, gates. Iron gates, white-lit, thousands upon thousands of them, opening out of nothing in the sandy cloud and the snow and the torn sky and the air around Noah’s face, and every one of them swung shut in the instant it appeared. They closed on the cloud. They closed on the plasma. They closed on the scene of the woman at her table, and the scene froze in the middle of her laugh and went grey.
Noah’s obsidian-gold brilliance stopped.
It simply stopped, every glittering grain pinned in the air where it hung, and around him, his Nightmare buzzed, a low thick hum, pressing forward against the gates and going nowhere.
Noah looked at the grain of light frozen an inch from his eye, and for the first time since he had stepped onto the terrace, something in him paid close attention.
Brunhild floated down through the frozen fog, slowly, until she hung just above him. Her eyes were shining, white and cold and very calm.
"That," she said, "is not Immensity."
She studied him as one studies an unknown creature suspected of mattering.
"Everyone has Immensity. Every being worth noticing, every being that has climbed out of the dust and become something, carries Immensity. It is how existence measures us. It is how my King measures us. It is how these Totems measure us."
She tilted her head. "You have none. And yet you are here, and my gates had to close on you." Her voice dropped. "What are you?"
Noah looked up at her through the frozen light.
"Existence is so vast," he said. "So grand. A being could walk in one direction for a hundred Ages and never find its edge. Would it not be terribly boring if Immensity were all there was?" He let the words hang.
"A single measuring stick for all of that. You do not believe it either. You have only never had a reason to doubt it."
His gaze stayed on hers.
"But forget all that. You never answered my question."
The gold eye and the obsidian eye held her. "And the more time that passes, the more of what you are becomes a mere dream." A pause. "And a nightmare."
...!
HUUM!
Above them both, the sky split.
It split straight through the iron gates, through the torn veils, through the dark beyond, a single fissure running across all of it like a crack spreading across a frozen lake. And through the crack, slowly, something opened.
An eye.
It was obsidian, black from rim to rim, with no pupil at all, only a vast smooth dark that seemed to go back forever and then a little further. It was larger than the Legacy. Larger, even, than the region around the Legacy. Its edges were wet and glistening, and the skin around it was sky, creased and torn and stretched tight over something far too large to fit inside existence. Sandy light leaked from its corners in slow trickles, like tears, and ran down the air in glittering streams. Where its gaze fell, the snow stopped falling and simply hung, as if it had forgotten which way down was.
It stayed open, unblinking.
It looked down at the Legacy, at the iron army, at the nine at the corners, at everything, all at once, with an attention that had no warmth in it at all.
|You are laying down a grand Nightmare.|
|Those who fall into it will have their existences claimed by you.|
|To remain standing, they must answer one question: which of you is dreaming the other?|
|Warning: this Nightmare is unstable.|
|Too many powerful lifeforms are staring down at it at once.|
|It will not hold the Unfathomable. It may not hold the Ancient.|
...!
Noah felt it take hold.
He felt it everywhere at once. Through the great black eye, through the frozen and unfrozen fog, through every strand of his Nightmare spread across Gigaparsecs, he watched it work, and he let himself see all of it.
The nine stood firm, as he had known they would. They stood at their corners with their Immensities blazing and their eyes fixed on the eye, and his Nightmare slid off them like rain from a mountain.
The Ancients wavered. A few of them stumbled, swayed, and caught themselves.
But the weaker ones fell.
The Newly Risen of the Iron Psalm went first, and the Established Ones after them. In their neat iron ranks, one after another, they looked up into the black eye and something in them gave way. And as each one began to fall, Noah was there.
He was in front of a young Newly Risen on the edge of the eastern Totem, a broad-faced man with his halberd held in white knuckles. A shadow of Noah stood before him in the fog, dark and still, the obsidian crown turning slowly above its head.
"Which of us is dreaming the other?" the shadow asked.
"I am awake," the man said. "I am real. I am..."
"You believe that," the shadow said. "That is not the same thing."
The man’s eyes rolled back, and he fell.
He was in front of a tall grey Established woman in the western ranks, verses glowing on her breastplate.
"Which of us is dreaming the other?"
"You," she snarled. "You are the dream. You are nothing."
"Then a nothing has asked you a question you cannot answer," the shadow said.
She fell.
He was in front of a pair of Newly Risen twins at the northern Totem, holding hands. They answered at the same time, and they answered differently, and they looked at each other in horror, and they fell together.
He was in front of an old Established One with a scarred face, who stood very still and said nothing at all. The shadow waited. The old one’s lips moved.
"I knelt when I was nine," he whispered. "I have been asleep ever since."
"Yes," said the shadow.
The old one fell, slowly, almost gratefully.
Everywhere. Dozens of places at once. Dozens of shadows, every one of them Noah, every one of them asking the same quiet question, and every Iron Psalm Immense One answering it wrongly, or not at all, and falling. He felt every one of them go.
These were hardly his enemies. They were soldiers. Some had chosen the gate. Many had been forced under it. Many had knelt as that old one had, at nine years old, to keep a grandmother warm or a village standing. They had come here because they were told to.
He was taking them anyway.
The iron gate over each of them dissolved as they fell, and he could feel their old chains break, and he could feel, in the same moment, his own threads slide into the space where the chain had been.
One master leaving, another arriving. Mercy was the wrong word for it. So was cruelty. It was simply what was happening, and he was the one making it happen, and he watched it with open eyes.
|A Newly Risen Immense One of THE Iron Psalm has fallen into your Nightmare.|
|Its existence is being claimed.|
|The iron gate locked over its existence is dissolving into dream.|
|Its unwalked roads are opening.|
|It is dreaming every life it did not live, all at once, inside the black of your eye.|
|When it wakes, it will not wake as what it was.|
|It may be raised as a Risen Nightmare. It will answer to you.|
|Fallen: 47 Newly Risen. 12 Established.|
|Fallen: 23 Newly Risen. 19 Established.|
|Fallen: 18 Newly Risen. 7 Established.|
...!
In the iron sky, the Immense Ones of the Psalm were dropping out of their neat ranks and drifting down toward the Legacy like leaves in a still wood. Their eyes were open and black. Their faces were slack. The glowing verses on their armor went dark, one line at a time, as if someone were slowly blowing out a long row of candles.
Some of them were weeping in their sleep.
Some of them were smiling.
Above it all, the great black eye stared down, its sandy tears running slowly down the face of the sky.
And Brunhild Varr, hanging just above Noah with her gates still shut around him, turned her head and watched her army fall in cold anger!