Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5867

Chapter 5867: Threads II

Noah went alone.

Part of his existence stayed behind on the white throne at the bottom of the Descent, with Emotive at his knee and the Nova Dream Sector still spreading silently across existence. Another part of him, a single body woven of night-sky skin and blue-gold constellations, stepped out of his Dream and into the dark between things. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

There were still too many unknowns to bring anyone else.

He followed the weavings of Destiny.

THE First Gu of Destiny had left them behind like a trail of thread through a labyrinth. Fine, gleaming strands of obsidian and gold, stretching out across the dark, past the edges of his charge, past the Long Night’s flow here, past the place where time itself grew thin and loose. Noah walked along them, and the strands hummed under his feet, and every step carried him further than a step should.

Then the dark ahead of him split open like a cocoon, and he stepped through.

|Arrived: THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering.|

|In a region that among other things, lives outside the weavings of time, from the age when Immense Ones first rose. Its nature is loose, fluid, and hallucinatory.|

|Region: THE Ossuary of Unspun Fates.|

|Here, destinies that never came to pass are laid to rest.|

|You have been invited.|

...!

Noah looked up, and went very still!

Regions of The Chrysalis was as strange as always. Multicolored silk fell endlessly from somewhere far above, strands drifting down through the air, each one carrying a mood or a memory from a life that stayed unlived. Nebulas hung in layers so thin he could see through one into the next and the next. The whole place shimmered, half-real, as if existence here were still deciding what it wanted to be.

And even here, the snow fell!

Heavy, white, and steady, drifting down through the falling silk, settling on everything. The Long Night had reached even this place, outside of time.

But it was what lay below that held his eyes.

A sea stretched out beneath him to every horizon, and it was made of stars. Obsidian and gold, glitering, slow, its surface rolling in long heavy swells like the breathing of something asleep. And it was something stranger than water. Here and there, its surface parted, and long gleaming shapes rose out of it and sank back down. Tentacles. Thick as mountain ranges, ringed with gold, their undersides lined with pale suckers that opened and closed slowly in the snow.

Above the sea hung the threads.

Countless millions of them, gleaming faintly gold, dangling from the dark above like the strings of an enormous puppet theater with no puppets left. They swayed slowly in a wind beyond his feeling.

Each one ended in a small, clean cut. Each one was a life that had been meant to happen, and stayed unborn. At the end of some of them, small white shapes hung like knots. Bones. Thin and smooth, shaped into spindles, still wound with the last few turns of thread they had carried before the thread was cut.

The silence of it was very old.

And at the center of the sea stood a citadel!

It rose out of the obsidian-gold waves in impossible towers, and it was alive. Its walls were plated in curved, overlapping chitin, gold and black, gleaming like the shell of some vast beetle; its towers ended in long jointed points like the legs of an insect bent upward toward the sky; and its windows were compound eyes, thousands of glittering facets in clusters, every one of them turned toward him. Tentacles wound around its foundations and up its spires like ivy, pulsing slowly, and from its highest gate, a pair of enormous mandibles opened and closed, slowly, in time with the rolling of the sea.

Noah’s breath came out as snow.

He looked at all of it with deep, delighted interest.

And then something spilled out of the citadel!

It poured out of the mandible gate like a tide breaking over a dam.

Tentacles came first, dozens of them, gold and obsidian, unfurling down the citadel’s walls and into the sea in long gleaming coils. Then a body, vast and segmented, the long armored abdomen of an insect larger than any Dimension he had walked through, ringed in gold chitin, its many legs bending and unbending as it flowed down the walls. Behind it, two great wings unfolded, thin and veined like a cicada’s, glittering with patterns that looked like maps of every road anyone had ever walked.

And at the front of it all, rising up out of the coils and chitin, was a woman.

She was beautiful!

|THE First Gu of Destiny.|

|Name: ?????|

|Immensity: ?????|

|Dimensionality: ?????|