Chapter 5943: Attunment II
Chapter 5943: Attunment II
Noah felt the change move through all of him at once. His Dreaming Human Origin swelled, growing fuller and grander and deeper than it had been a moment before, and it began to pour out of him on its own, endless waves of Dreams and Nightmares rolling out across his farm and into the Carcosa around it. Far away, countless distances from here, the piece of him that still stood where the Legacy of THE Acharya used to be felt the same surge, and it gave even more to the existence around it, and that existence gave back more than it ever had before.
He clenched his fist and felt the strength in it, a new and solid weight that had not been there a few minutes ago, and there was no doubt in him that he had grown stronger. He looked at the four Branches of his Tree and at the four flowers blooming on them, glowing softly in the snow, and he thought about how many more flowers could bloom there if he kept going. Every fruit had come from a buried Immense One, and every flower had come from the fruit!
He looked up and around at the sky over his farm, slowly, searching every direction, and there was a hunger in his eyes now that had not been there before. Were there any more enemies out there, he wondered, any more Immense Ones who might come down out of the snow to take what was his, who he could bury and plant and harvest? His smile, as he searched the empty sky, was a tyrant’s smile, patient and very hungry.
HUUM!
The authority he had been giving out to existence came flooding back to him all at once. Waves of Nascent Nightmare Essence poured back across the Carcosa from every direction and into him, more than he had ever received, and inside those waves there was something else, something he had never felt before, thin and bright and threaded through the essence.
He felt himself sink deeper into existence than he ever had, connected to it in a way that was closer and wider at the same time, until it seemed that the line between where he ended and where existence began had grown very thin.
|Your attunement with existence has reached a sufficient level.|
|Awareness of where you are in existence is now possible.|
...!
The information came into him in waves. His eyes flickered, and then they blazed, the gold eye pouring out a beam of gold light and the obsidian eye pouring out a beam of black, both of them stretching out into the falling snow, and in front of him, in the air above his farm, something began to draw itself. It was faint at first, only a few lines, but it grew clearer with every wave, and as it took shape, Noah understood that he was looking at a map.
At the very center of it, very small, one tiny place was lit up. It was his farm, a single bright spot in one small corner of THE Infinite Carcosa, so small that he had to look closely to find it, and all around it the map was dark and hazy in every place he had never been.
As the beams from his eyes reached further, the darkness around his farm grew larger and larger, stretching away in every direction until the whole of it was labeled in faint pale letters, THE Infinite Carcosa, a vast region of shadow with only one tiny point of light inside it.
The map kept growing, and Noah could no longer see any detail inside the Carcosa at all, only its dark shape getting smaller as the vision pulled back. Then, in a far corner of the map, another place lit up, a small bright area where he had first broken open the door to the Fallow, and beside it a wider stretch of faint light where his presence still covered THE Keepers of Existence. It sat inside a dark and enormous landscape labeled THE Undefined Gaps, and his light covered only a very, very small part of it.
The vision pulled back further, and in yet another corner, a third light appeared, very small and very far from the other two, where a piece of him still stood in the Maze of Destiny beside Lygara and the golden walls. Around it lay a vast dark region labeled THE Chrysalis, and here and there across the map, other faint lights flickered where small pieces of his Dream still reached, a scattering of tiny points across an enormous darkness. Everything else was hazy and unknown, a darkness so wide that he could not see its edges.
The map pulled back again, and again, and Noah watched the four or five small lights of his presence shrink until they were barely visible at all. Even with all of them added together, everything he had ever touched or walked or given to did not cover even a small fraction of a single percent of what was laid out in front of him!
And as the vision pulled back far enough to show the whole of it at last, all of those vast dark regions together, the Carcosa and the Gaps and the Chrysalis and Source Lands and countless others he had no names for, slowly settled into one great shape, and it was the shape of a mountain.
...!
Noah stared at it with his eyes still blazing, and his breath caught in his chest, because almost all of it was dark. THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rose in front of him, vast beyond anything he had ever imagined, and his whole existence, every place he had ever been and everything he had ever done, was a handful of tiny sparks scattered across its lowest slopes. The rest of it was hazy and unknown, waiting in the dark, and for the first time in a long while, Noah felt very, very small!
He was still staring at the vast dark shape of the Mountain on his map when something on it moved. He focused.
Near the small light that marked the Maze of Destiny in THE Chrysalis, a cluster of tiny dots had appeared, blinking on and off together, and they were drifting slowly but steadily toward the light where a piece of him still stood. He focused on them, narrowing his blazing eyes, and the map seemed to lean in closer to show him what they were.
|Detected: 19 Ancient Immense Gu.|
|Origin: THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|
|Purpose: to find and crush Lifthrasir, and the one who brought her weavings back.|
|They are following the trail of her restored Existence to THE Maze of Destiny.|
|Each carries the authority of Provenance. They trace where a thing began, judge whether that beginning is proper, and collapse whatever they find without one.|
|Distance to THE Maze of Destiny: close.|
...!
Noah’s eyes lit up. He knew these hunters as he had come across them in an Infinite Quantum Dream!
Lifthrasir was gone now, safe on her way to her mother with her sisters and her Kin, but the hunters did not know that, and they were still coming for the one who had brought her back, which meant they were coming for him. He looked at his flowering sapling and his four Branches and the soil where fifteen Immense Ones had become fruit, and he smiled a slow, hungry smile.
In the Maze of Destiny, the piece of him that stood beside Lygara raised its right hand. On the farm in THE Infinite Carcosa, the hoe vanished from his grip, and in the same instant it was resting in the palm of his other body, its white-gold blade gleaming in the light of the golden walls. Lygara’s long insect neck turned toward him, and her beautiful face tilted, because she had felt the hoe arrive, and its weavings caused her existence to pulse.
"Some pests are coming here," Noah told her pleasantly, resting the hoe on his shoulder. "Gu of Provenance, nineteen of them, looking for Lifthrasir and for me. I’ll go take care of them, so you don’t have to worry about it."
He paused, and then added with a small, satisfied smile, "Besides, I need them for something."
Lygara looked at the hoe, and then at his face, and then she coiled herself a little more comfortably as he disappeared!
---
Existence pulsed and opened wide for him to enter.
He felt little rejection as everything seemed much smoother as he moved gigaparsecs away towards the enemies searching for him!
He met them in the golden seas of THE Chrysalis, a long way out from the walls of the Maze, where they were crossing toward it in a wide formation that filled the sky. They were Ancient Immense Gu, every one of them, and each one was as large as a Dimension, their bodies hard and pale and covered in thin carvings that glowed with the colors of every beginning that had ever been.
There was a centipede of white bone so long that its tail was lost behind it, with legs that touched the air and read the origin of everything they brushed, and a great grey moth whose wings held the beginnings of countless lives painted on them, and a mantis with blades that could cut a thing away from its own start.
The largest of them was a beetle, broad and heavy and armored in plates of dark shell as thick as small Dimensions, and the Provenance carved into that shell burned so brightly that the golden sea beneath it boiled. Behind all nineteen of them, faint and enormous, rose the shape of a vast insect hand as large as a Dimension, its fingers made of every Provenance there had ever been, reaching forward over their heads.
They felt him arrive the moment he appeared in their path, and nineteen sets of eyes turned toward the man in the robe of dreams and nightmares floating alone above the golden sea with a hoe on his shoulder.
He did not say a single word to them. He simply took the hoe down from his shoulder, let his Dreams and Nightmares pour out of him into the Chrysalis around him, and waved his hands as if telling them...come!
The Gu struck first. The centipede reached out with a thousand legs at once, and every leg touched him and began to read him, tracing back his Provenance toward its beginning so that the others could judge it, and the moth beat its wings and sent a storm of other beginnings at him, trying to bury his own origin under countless false ones!
The mantis swung both blades through the air in front of him, cutting at the line that tied him to where he began, and the other Ancient Gu poured their Provenance over him from every side in a flood of pale burning light that would have collapsed any being whose start could not be proven.
Even something like THE Verdant Regard wouldn’t be able to withstand such attacks from all around!
None of it held. The thin film of Shinjitsu over Noah’s skin brightened, and everything the Gu sent at him came apart the instant it touched him, the centipede’s reading falling away into nothing, the moth’s false beginnings scattering into harmless light, and the mantis’s blades passing through the place where his origin should have been and finding only more of him.
His body was not stopping their attacks so much as dispersing them, letting each one break up and spread out and drain away into the Chrysalis around him, where the golden sea took the broken pieces and held them. He had a Provenance, and it was true, and there was nothing in what they carried that could argue with the truth of what he was.
Then he moved, and the Chrysalis slightly moved with him.
Only slightly as he was not entirely connected to this part of existence!
He went forward too fast to see, the golden sea rising behind him in a wave as tall as an Observable Existence, and the first thing he reached was the centipede. He swung the mighty hoe through it in one long low stroke, and every current in the Chrysalis pushed with the blade, and the stroke cut through the centipede’s long white body from one side to the other while the sea crashed down on the pieces and pressed them under!
HUUM!
The centipede’s legs stopped reading, and the Provenance carved along its body went dark one carving after another, all the way down to the end of its lost tail.
The moth tried to rise out of his reach, beating its painted wings, but the golden sky above it closed into a ceiling and held it down, and Noah turned the hoe in his hands and drove the blade straight through its body. He pulled, and the moth tore open along the furrow, and its wings full of borrowed beginnings fell away from it and dissolved into the golden sea, the painted lives on them fading gently into nothing. Its Narrative went with them, a long and patient story about keeping every beginning safe, broken in a single stroke.
The mantis came at him from behind with both blades swinging, and he did not turn around. He set the haft of the hoe back over his shoulder and caught both blades on it, and the force of the impact rolled out across the golden sea in a ring of white fire, and then he turned, slowly, letting the mantis’s own strength carry it past him, and as it went by he hooked the blade of the hoe behind its neck and pulled it down into the sea so hard that the seabed split. When it came back up, its blades were broken and its carvings were dark.
The rest of them broke formation and came at him together, all sixteen at once, their Provenance blazing, the vast insect hand above them closing its fingers to crush him. Noah breathed in, and his Dreams went out into the Chrysalis in a wide blue-gold tide, and his Nightmares went with them, dark and patient, and both of them sank into the golden sea and the golden sky and the long Conduit-lit dark around them.
This region answered him, the sea rising in walls on every side to slam into the Gu, the sky pressing down to pin them in place, the currents dragging their bodies into the path of his hoe one after another.
He worked through them steadily, one stroke at a time, moving down the line from one to the next. The hoe split shells and broke legs and tore through ancient carvings, and wherever it struck, the Provenance in that Gu went dark and its Narrative broke apart, while his Nightmares slipped into the cracks and turned what was left against itself.
The vast insect hand above them closed at last, fingers of every Provenance coming down on top of him, and he raised the hoe and turned it, and the whole hand came apart into pale light and drifted away across the golden sea.
The beetle was the last. It came at him slowly, heavy and stubborn, its armored shell burning with every beginning it had ever judged, and when it struck him, the blow drove him back across the sky and the golden sea split beneath them both. He let the force pass through him and into the Chrysalis, and then he stepped back in and brought the hoe down on top of the beetle’s head with his whole body and the whole region behind it. The beetle’s shell held for one moment, and then the Provenance carved into it went dark, and the great beetle sank down onto the boiling golden sea and did not rise again.
...!
"Hoo...."
He breathed out! That was...fucking fast and exhilarating!
The golden sea grew quiet. Nineteen Ancient Immense Gu drifted on its surface in broken pieces, their carvings dark, their Narratives shattered, their Immensity leaking slowly out of them into the water, and the sky of the Chrysalis was full of drifting pale light where the insect hand had been. Noah floated above them with the hoe on his shoulder and a little gold dust on his robe, and he was not even breathing too hard.
He reached into his Dream and drew out long blue-gold threads of it, the same threads he had used to stitch his hoe together, and he began to tie them, knotting them into a wide net that spread out across the golden sea. One by one, he gathered the broken Gu into it, the centipede and the moth and the mantis and all the rest, until all nineteen of them hung together in a single great bundle of Dream-thread. Then he took hold of the net, and through the long connection between this body and the other, he sent the whole of it across existence to his farm, and the hoe went with it.
HUUUUM!
|You have defeated 19 Ancient Immense Gu of THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|
|Their Provenance has been broken. Their Narratives have been shattered.|
|They have been gathered and sent to your farm.|
...!
|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance has sensed the Provenance of its hunters destroyed.|
|It has begun searching for the one responsible.|
|Its search: ?????|
...!
Noah read the last prompts and smiled, and then he ignored them. Whatever would come from it...it was all cause and effect. It would all be part of existence.
Lifthrasir was brought back by him, that being had then begun to hunt her and the one who brought her back, he had killed the hunters it sent...and now what would unfold from it? It...was all connected!
He left the piece of himself in the Chrysalis floating above the quiet golden sea and turned his attention back to the snowy corner of the Carcosa, where something was arriving.
---
Above his farm, the net of Dream-thread opened in the snowing sky, and the broken bodies of nineteen Ancient Immense Gu hung there, each one as large as a Dimension, shadowing the whole mile of black-gold soil beneath them. Noah’s other body caught the hoe as it arrived and reached up, and the bodies began to shrink, growing smaller and smaller as they sank toward the field until each one was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
He took them one at a time and planted them, a stroke of the hoe to open the soil and his boot to press each Gu in and another stroke to close it, working his way down a new row beside the first one.
He planted eighteen of them that way, the centipede and the moth and the mantis and fifteen more, until a second row of small mounds lay beside the first. Then he looked up at the last body still hanging over his field, the great armored beetle, and he did not shrink it at all. It hung there in the snow at its full size, as large as a Dimension, its dark shell plates as thick as small Dimensions and its long legs strong enough to hold up a sky.
Noah looked at that shell for a long time, at the thick curved plates and the heavy legs and the hard dark armor that had taken a blow from his hoe and held for a whole moment. He thought about walls, and a roof, and good strong beams, and a porch facing the rivers where he could sit in the evening and watch his field.
A house built from the body of an Ancient Immensity, he thought, and he smiled up at the beetle. It would do!