Chapter 5998: Evolution? III
Chapter 5998: Evolution? III
The heat in his chest climbed until it filled him, and then, quietly, it opened.
It came without pain. The small brown-gold seed that had sat near the center of him since the Carcosa had grown a second root, and the root had gone down into the same place the first one had, into the beat under everything. Around him, the gold dust stopped in the air. Inside the black-glass trunks, every constellation brightened by a shade and held.
Then the words arrived!
|Quintessara of Existence: the second Vein has opened.|
|Vein 2: THE Debt of All Things Given.|
|Powers of Existence within this Vein: 3.|
...!
Three. The first Vein had held three as well, the Return and the Abominations and DOOM, every one of them built to send taken things home. But he had just spent a whole fight learning how little they could do against a thing that had taken nothing. So what had existence handed him this time?
|Power of Existence: Cessation Rejection: Infinite Dream.|
|Trigger: the moment your Dream is about to end or the moment you decide your dream is ending|
|Effect: the ending is crossed and refused. You return as a Higher Dream Form.|
|Higher Dream Form: a higher version of yourself drawn from your own future, or a higher version of the Unique Lifeform most similar to you that exists across Existence and that you have never been able to dream.|
|Duration: limited. When it runs out, the Higher Dream Form is saved. Saved forms can be selected again.|
|Each ending crossed returns a higher form than the last.|
|Saved forms: 0.|
Noah stood very still. An ending that was crossed and refused. So if this body fell here, under a whale or before anything else, the fall would probably be a door, and something higher would walk back through it wearing his name. A higher version of himself from his own future!
The second kind held him longer. Somewhere across Existence there were Unique Lifeforms near enough to what he was that existence counted them as his kind, and far enough above him that his Dreams had never managed to hold their shape. What were they? Farmers? Tyrants? Both at once? He found that he very much wanted to meet one, even if the only way to do it was to wear it.
And the forms were kept. Every ending he crossed would leave him one more thing he could become again, and each would stand higher than the last!
|Power of Existence: THE Dream of the Borrowed.|
|Effect: you dream a mark onto any lifeform you can perceive. While it is marked, everything it holds is treated as borrowed from existence, even what it grew itself.|
|THE Return, THE Doom Abominations of Existence and DOOM act on a marked lifeform in full.|
|The mark spreads on its own to every lifeform that stands beside the marked.|
|A marked lifeform is drawn to strike at you before anything else.|
|The mark lasts for as long as you keep dreaming it.|
...!
This...was the exact thing he had lacked! The pig had bled a thin thread and stopped, the Return had found a trickle, and the Abominations had come away with a few flakes of gold, all because the pig owed nothing to anyone.
Was the mark true, though, or only useful? The pig had taken nothing from any other being. But its gold had been grown out of this ground, and the ground was existence, and when the pig fell, every bit of that gold had gone straight back down into the seas. So perhaps nothing here was ever only its own. Perhaps the mark simply said aloud what the Mountain already practiced.
|Power of Existence: THE Dream Called Due.|
|Every lifeform dreams itself, and its Narrative is that dream. On your word, you call the dream of one lifeform you can perceive due, in four parts.|
|The Husking: every dream it holds of itself is stripped away. It sees what it is with nothing in between, and its Narrative loses its hold for as long as the Husking lasts.|
|The Flood: your Dreams and Nightmares pour into it without end, carried by your infinity. While it is flooded, it cannot think, choose, or shape its Narrative.|
|The Drought: the flood is drawn back out, and its own dreaming goes with it. It can no longer dream. It cannot shape Narrative, grow, or evolve.|
|The Rot: emptied, it rots from the place its dreams were, Narrative and body together. The Rot begins inside the dreamer, so walls, armor and Immensity stand outside it.|
|When it ends, a bloom rises from what is left and carries all four parts to every lifeform within reach that bears the mark of THE Dream of the Borrowed.|
|Works against: any lifeform that dreams itself.|
|Resisted by: a lifeform whose dream of itself is already true, since the Husking finds little to strip and every later part is weakened. A lifeform that stands far, far above you on Dimensionality, since each step between you shortens every part.|
|No effect: on what does not dream. Frameworks, soil, and existence itself.|
|Limit: one lifeform at a time. The bloom is the only way it spreads.|
...!
Noah breathed out slowly, and the dust in the beams began to fall again.
This one waited for nothing. A look was enough, and a word!
The first part was the quiet one, and probably the worst. Every lifeform he had ever met carried a dream of itself, and for most of them the dream was kinder than the truth.
The limits were clear too. It took one lifeform at a time. Things that did not dream were beyond it, which meant THE Schema could never be touched, and neither could the ground.
But the last line was the one that made it a harvest. The bloom carried all four parts to everything that bore his mark, and his mark spread on its own. Mark one beast at the edge of a herd, wait a few breaths, call one dream due, and the herd would follow it down in the time the first one took to rot!
So the three of them made one road. Mark the beast, and the mark runs through its herd while it comes for him. The Return and the Abominations and DOOM now have a whole lifeform to work on. Then he calls a dream due, and the bloom carries the same ending to everything marked. And if every part of that fails and his Dream ends anyway, the ending is refused, and something higher finishes the hunt.
Could it bring down an Essara 2? Maybe, given time. An Essara 3? He looked up at the closed canopy, where the whale had passed. Perhaps one day soon. But every part of the road was untested, and this forest likely punished guesses.
He was still turning the road over when he noticed the fullness. It had been building under the heat the whole time, and now that the Vein had settled, there was nothing left to hide it. His existence felt almost full, as if he had eaten a heavy meal!
|THE Dreaming Human Origin has reached the ceiling of what it can hold.|
|The next Evolution of your Existence will soon be available.|
|Additional fuel from your Existence is required for one final push.|
|This Evolution will be shaped by what your Existence is made of, and by everything you have done since becoming THE Dreaming Human Origin: your farming, your giving, your choices, and the actions you have taken.|
...!
Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly. An Evolution of his whole existence, and it would be built out of what he had done! Every body he had planted and every Narrative he had poured back into the soil. The dream he had given a cracked girl, and the hand he had used to take it back. His own name, lifted off the banner of Kings in the snow of the Carcosa. All of it had been counted somewhere, and all of it was about to become what he was!
And it needed fuel from his own existence, one final push. What kind? Essence? Xerion? Something he had yet to give? He was still thinking when Gular spoke.
"I did not know..." Gular said.
Noah turned. THE Primordial Gu of Provenance stood at the edge of the crater with his crystal in his fingers, and the eyes along his knuckles were half closed, the look of a being working through a long sum.
"I did not know that more of us moving together lessened what could be gained. Three times I came here alone, so the place never had cause to tell me." He turned the crystal over once. "Another Xerion, and all of this information. Your inclusion here has already been worth it. As for now..."
He left the rest unsaid, and Noah knew exactly what sat in that silence. Gular was weighing whether to split up, here, in a forest where a pig could throw him through a trunk and whales swam over the canopy. He wanted the larger returns, but he also wanted a wall between himself and whatever had taken his first bodies, and the place had just told him he could not have both.
Noah smiled, and it was a tyrant’s smile!
He took a step. The blue-gold wave went out from his foot across the moss, through the roots and the rings of the trunks and the small quick ripples in the dark, and he felt every one of them answer.
"We should part here," Noah said.
...!
"The place counts what a being does with its own power. When two of us bring down one beast, it pays each of us less and asks each of us for more. And then there is the Weeding. In a month, this forest is thinned, and whatever has stayed at the bottom goes back to the Mountain. A slow climb is the one thing neither of us can afford."
Gular said nothing. Above them, the gold dust had stopped falling again.
"You opened this door for me long before I would have found it myself. I do not leave a thing of that size unpaid. So if you come across a danger this weak body of yours here cannot overcome..."
He crouched and scooped a handful of the black soil from the edge of the crater. It was cool and fine, and it smelled of first rain. He closed his fingers around it and let his Dream run down his arm into his palm, blue-gold and warm, until the soil drew together and hardened and took a shape. When he opened his hand, a single seed lay in it, small and smooth, with a faint light turning under its skin.
He held it out. "Call me through this should you feel like this body of yours is facing unprecedented danger."
Gular looked at the seed for a long moment before he took it. He held it up between two of his many-jointed fingers and studied it with every eye he had, and something in his carved face shifted, very slightly.
He closed his fingers over it. "Very well, Dreamer. We part."
He turned toward the dark between the trunks, and then stopped, and looked back once.
"This place may be the key, and it may hold something that even Lucy, Diogenes, and many of Those Who Overcame missed. I don’t know how IT is connected to this place, or even if it holds any relevance...but we will see." His pale gold eyes rested on Noah. "Good luck. Stay alive."
Noah nodded, and Gular threw the Small Xerion Crystal into his mouth and swallowed it whole.
Noah watched it happen through the Pulse. A many-colored light went down through the bright flickers that made up Gular’s waves, and the flickers steadied. They stopped lighting and fading and held, one beginning after another, until they ran together into a single unbroken ring of pale gold that was wider than anything Gular had given off before.
For one breath, behind the body, Noah saw the thing itself. A hand, vast and pale gold, with too many joints in every finger and thousands of small eyes along its knuckles, opening slowly in the dark. THE Hand That Holds Beginnings. Then it folded back into the being that carried it.
Gular walked into the forest. Each step left a print of small lit beginnings in the moss behind him, and each print faded a breath after his foot had left it. The rings of the trunks leaned toward him as he passed.
Noah followed the pale gold ring until it reached the edge of his Pulse, a flicker among the slow breathing of the trunks, and then it was gone. The beams of light seemed thinner without him. The forest was very large, and for the first time since the curtain, Noah was alone in it.
It suited him.
He looked down at himself, at his own two hands, and at the crystal resting in one of them with its faint colors turning. He breathed in the clean, sweet air of a place that had never been asked for anything, and he smiled.
His mind had already left Gular and the whales and the eighteen returns behind. It was fixed on one thing only. His existence was full to its edges, an Evolution was waiting on the other side, and he was one push away from it.
What final burst, what fuel, did he need before a grand transformation could begin?