Chapter 5955: Foul Things
Chapter 5955: Foul Things
<Unknown>
It had felt freer since the fifth piece joined it. The new seam still ached, but the ache was smaller under THE Farmer’s warm authority, and with five pieces humming together it could feel farther and move more easily than it ever had. So when THE Farmer reached for it across all of existence and sent it shooting up out of the soil in that burning place, it went eagerly, expecting to carve the great four-armed lifeform open from side to side.
It left a scratch. One thin, shallow line across grey skin, barely enough to draw blood, and that was all. Even simple lifeforms could be sturdy, it thought, a little offended, but that was not the thing that stayed with it afterward.
What stayed with it was the taste. Every weaving in that burning place, every Narrative and every scrap of authority it had brushed against on its way through, had tasted foul, sour and rotten and wrong, and the great four-armed one had tasted worst of all. THE Farmer’s authority never tasted that way, because it was always warm and it always smelled faintly of soil after rain, and it wondered why that was. Was it because his authority came only from himself, borrowed from no one, or because it was so true? It could not say for certain.
---
Then THE Farmer pulled something across existence. It came up through every piece of ground he had ever given himself to, out of the soil of that distant burning place and across the long dark, until it burst up into the snowing sky above the farm and hung there, small and broken and bleeding. It was the white feline thing, torn and dark with blood, still wrapped in the snapped ends of its chains.
THE Farmer stood beneath it with the hoe in his hands, breathing hard, two of his walls still empty and his Dreaming Human Origin still aching from the blow he had taken. He looked up at the small white shape for a long moment without saying anything at all.
The feline thing lifted its head and smiled at him, wide and warm and grateful. "Friend," it said, in a voice full of sweetness, "for saving me, you will get a lot!"
The hoe looked at it with whatever it used for eyes, and it did not like what it saw. Under the sweetness there was animosity, and under the animosity there was greed, more greed than it had ever felt in any lifeform, a hunger that wanted everything and would never once be full. The weavings of the thing made every one of its seams ache at once, and it hoped very much that THE Farmer would not listen to it.
THE Farmer did not even answer. The moment the feline thing finished speaking, the farm moved, and roots erupted up out of the black-gold soil, blue-gold and glass, dozens of them, and drove straight through its small broken body from every side. It was pinned there in the air, and the roots began to drink, pulling its Narrative out of it in long dark threads and drawing them down into the ground.
Oh, good, the mighty hoe thought, and something in it relaxed. THE Farmer had enough sense to know a foul thing when he saw one.
The feline thing shook in the grip of the roots, and its eyes changed, all the sweetness gone from them in an instant and something cruel and ancient looking out in its place. "You fucker," it hissed, its small white face twisting. "You will pay for that."
Then the farm closed over it. The black-gold soil rose up around its body and covered it completely, and the roots pulled it down into the ground, and in a moment there was nothing above the field but falling snow.
The mighty hoe hummed in THE Farmer’s hands, a small and approving note. When it looked up at the swirling barriers around his body, it saw them changing quickly, the two empty ones filling with light, then new barriers forming beyond them, one after another, all of them turning faster around the obsidian-gold river at their center. At the middle of the farm, the small blue-gold sapling stretched a little taller in the snow, its Branches lengthening and its flowers brightening.
It turned its attention down into the ground to see why, and what it saw there was quiet and very deep. THE Farmer’s authority did not push into existence, and it did not command it, it simply flowed into it and mixed there, until it was hard to tell where his authority ended and existence began. Together, the two of them took hold of everything buried in the farm, the foul feline thing and the Gu and the dead of the King’s army, and they did not fight any of it.
They only held it, and waited, and let it soften in the soil, and as the putrid Narratives broke down, existence and THE Farmer together drew out of them everything that was rotten and let it fall away. What was left was clean. It rose up through the ground in thin bright threads, pure and pristine, a Narrative with nothing foul left in it at all, and it flowed toward the sapling at the center of the farm and into its roots.
The roots of the sapling ran down through all of it now, and the hoe could barely see where they stopped. They had grown into the existence beneath the farm so completely that they no longer seemed to be roots sunk into existence at all, but something existence itself had grown, and the hoe watched them drink in the clean Narrative and thought that this was what it had always believed a farm should be. Nothing forced, nothing wasted, and what was foul given back to the ground until the ground could make it good.
---
<THE Dreaming Human Origin>
Noah had not hesitated for a moment, and standing in the snow afterward with the hoe in his hands, he knew exactly why!
Astarothael had eaten his soil in the Ashfall Reaches and grown stronger from it, and she had smiled at him and called him friend with a hunger behind her eyes that wanted everything he had, the farm and the Tree and him most of all. If he had let her heal, she would have turned on him the moment she could stand, so he had pulled her across existence while she was broken and given her no chance to stand at all.
So the roots had taken her, and he had done more than let them drink. While she hissed and shook in their grip, he had reached into her with his Dreaming Human Origin and planted a Nightmare inside her, built from her own oldest fear, of being nailed to stone forever and never being allowed to eat. It took root at once, and her Narrative began to bleed toward him in a long dark stream, on top of everything the roots were already pulling out of her.
|THE Bleeding Nightmare has taken root.|
|Target: Astarothael, a shred of a fallen Overcomer.|
|Her Narrative is bleeding. What it bleeds flows to you.|
|Her authority is being siphoned through your farm.|
...!
What came out of her was enormous. Even a shred of something that had tried to climb to the top of the Mountain held more Narrative than every corpse on the farm together, and once the farm and existence had refined it, it poured into him and into the sapling in a flood. Noah felt the Tree shake under his hand as it drank.
|Narrative absorbed: Astarothael.|
|Branch of Dreams: Level 4 to Level 6.|
|Branch of Nightmares: Level 4 to Level 6.|
|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 4 to Level 6.|
|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 4 to Level 6.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 1 to Level 9.|
|Regeneration: nine hundredths of a Narrative Wall per second.|
|Narrative Walls built from your own Narrative: up to 6.|
|Narrative Walls: 8 of 8. All standing.|
|Your Dreaming Human Origin and PROVENANCE, MOIRAI, VERITAS, and PONDUS rise steadily.|
...!