Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5871

Chapter 5871: Pralaya! I

Noah watched the two of them, and something about it felt odd.

He had pulled that dream out of the weave of existence with his own hands. He had reached back across Cycles for it, strained his whole existence to grasp it, and given it form from his own blue-gold seas. By every rule he knew, it should have been his.

Poona was his. He could feel her even now, far away in another region of THE Chrysalis, a warm thread running straight into the center of him. The Risen Dreams had been his, every one of them, bound to his will the moment he spoke the word. Aurvald knelt in the ruined Heart because the bond between them ran deeper than any order. Everything that rose out of his Dream carried that bond. It had always simply been there.

He looked for it now.

And he found nothing.

Where a thread should have run between him and the Halfling, there was only empty air. The pull, the answer, the quiet sense of something that belonged to him: all of it was absent. She stood there in the snow as if she had always been there, her own existence, whole and separate, as untethered from him as Lygara herself.

A dream he had conjured, that he could not control?

Noah’s eyes narrowed with interest.

Ahead of him, the vast First Gu of Destiny had lowered herself. Her great insect body coiled tight in the sea of stars, her wings drawn close, and the beautiful woman at her front had bent down, and down, until her face hung just above the small Halfling’s head. Golden light still ran from her faceted eyes.

And Lifthrasir reached up and patted her on the head.

Gently. Twice. The way an older sister pats a younger one who has scraped her knee.

It was the strangest thing Noah had seen in a long time. A First Gu that had existed since before the Sundering, that could crush Moriarty and the Thinker without trying, bowing her head like a child. And a small barefoot figure in a grey shift, patting her, smiling softly.

"You have had it hard," Lifthrasir said. "Living all these eons, and all these cycles."

Lygara made a small sound.

"I almost wish you had been like me," Lifthrasir went on, "and wished to grow old after you had seen enough of existence. Instead of all these endless cycles."

Her hand rested on the golden threads of Lygara’s hair.

"Alas. Each of our weavings has its own flow. In existence, no two beings are alike."

Then she let her hand fall, and turned.

Her large dark eyes found Noah across the snow. She looked at him for a long moment, calm and quiet, and nodded to him, once, as one equal nods to another.

"I have to thank you," Lifthrasir said.

Her eyes seemed to look at a great many things at once. At him. Past him. Through him, into places beyond his sight.

"You gave my weavings of existence a spark. Being born again through your dreams, I was reminded of what my existence once dreamed with its whole heart."

She smiled.

"And this time around, I want to achieve it."

As she spoke, her existence began to pulse.

Rays of light seeped out of her small body. They were obsidian, black and glossy and eerie, and wherever they touched, the surroundings flickered. The snow flickered, and the swaying threads above, and the sea of stars, as if existence itself were a candle and something had breathed too close to its flame.

Noah’s eyes shone.

"My weavings told me I had brought back the dream of the daughter of THE First Gu of Calamity," he said. "A child of disaster."

He tilted his head.

"Who...was your other parent?"

Lifthrasir smiled at the question.

Beside her, Lygara went very still. Her faceted eyes moved to the small figure, and her tentacles stopped drifting through the snow. She was listening too.

Lifthrasir raised one palm.

Something rose out of it.

Obsidian tendrils. Thick and heavy and glistening, curling up out of the center of her small hand and climbing into the air, then shooting outward, up and all around, coiling through the falling snow like the roots of some enormous tree growing in reverse.

They were heavy!

Noah felt their weight press against his existence, and it was old. An Immensity so ancient and so strange that nothing in all his reading of existence had prepared him to recognize it.

But he could dream it.

His Dream reached out and touched the tendrils, and read them, slowly, line by line.

|Immensity read: Pralaya.|

|THE Breath That Unmakes.|

|Pralaya is a calamity that comes at the end of every Cycle, when existence exhales and everything within it dissolves back into stillness.|

|It is also the breath that follows: the inhale from which existence remakes itself out of the ash.|

|Half of this Immensity is ruin. Half of it is existence returning.|

|Neither half can be held apart from the other.|

|Its age: ?????|

|Its lineage: Calamity, and ?????| 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

...!

Noah’s existence pulsed!

"So. With every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

"Let all narratives get murky."

HUUM!