Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5743

Chapter 5743: Change The Narrative! III

And in the middle of it, bleeding ink from beneath her nails, her hair a silver storm, Calliope looked up.

She looked past the gallery, past the balcony, to the far hidden edge of the sky where a mobius-pupiled eye had hung masked and silent since the beginning.

She opened their private conduit, and this time her voice carried none of its earlier playful detachment. It was serious, and it was fast, and it was still, somehow, delighted!

|My ink is running a bit dry, Osmont.|

Her pen shook over the page.

|Before my Matriarch has to interfere and ruin the fun, and she will, if this keeps going the way it is going... why don’t the two of us do something grand? Let us change the narrative. Or are you going to sit up there and simply watch, when the two of us together could ruin their entire theater?|

...!

Noah’s masked eye held over the burning Cluster.

And then he moved!

He did not answer with words. He reached out with the whole quiet weight of his Provenance and his Infinite Dream, found the writer’s consciousness in the middle of her bleeding, and PULLED!

—

Calliope’s perception of the collapsing Cluster froze.

The screaming sea, the falling arrows, the pale chains, the buzzing sky, all of it stopped between one instant and the next, held in a stretched and silent moment, as Noah drew her consciousness up and out and into the inner sanctuary of his Infinite Dream.

An instant, stretched out towards infinity.

Time. Once more, time!

They stood together in a domain of blue-gold clouds.

Endless soft light rolled around them in slow drifts, quiet and boundless and entirely his, a place between spaces where no gaze of any Immense One could reach and no ink ran dry. The war outside did not exist here. Only the two authors, and the stillness he had wrapped around them both.

Calliope looked around at the blue-gold clouds, and her bleeding stopped, and her storm-tossed hair settled, and a slow smile spread across her face.

She waved her hand at Noah, and then, grandly, delighted, she gave a little bow!

"Oh, this is lovely," she said, aloud now, her voice her own again in the quiet. "You pulled me right out of the story and into your own private one. Very unique. This is...narrative infused with Infinity itself?"

She looked around, and then she straightened, and the delight sharpened into something more serious, because she had been offered a stage and she intended to use it.

"Alright, so let me tell you the truth of what I do," she said, "since we are about to do it together, and you should know the wall before you run at it with me!"

She lifted a hand, and ink gathered at her fingertip.

"I cannot write a falsehood into existence. That is the first law of my craft and it has never once bent for me! An archetype cannot be conjured from a vacuum, out of nothing, out of a lie. It must have an anchor. An authentic historical thing that has already cut its mark into the bedrock of reality, a truth that actually happened, that existence still remembers. I write the Mythos, yes, but the Mythos must have somewhere true to stand, or it does not stand at all!"

Her eyes glittered. "I have found ways around the edges of that law, here and there. But they are costly. Very costly."

She smiled again, and this time there was something almost reverent in it.

"But here. Since we are being grand. Let me show you the truest thing I own."

She tapped her own wrist, once, and grandly, from the clouds of Noah’s own sanctuary, something began to emerge.

It rose slowly out of the blue-gold light as something vast and dark and ancient, and it was a....HIEROGLYPH RUNESTONE.

A massive obsidian cube, its faces wider than an Observable Existence, black shading toward grey, and across every face crawled the oldest carvings Noah had ever seen, marks that would not sit still, rearranging themselves whenever the eye tried to hold them, the true history of Existence written in a tongue older than agreement itself!

"Osmont? What do you see? Hey, what do you see...?!"

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify