Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5874

Chapter 5874: A Narrative Spreads!

In a far reach of THE Infinite Carcosa, the seas of Infinity lay still beneath the snow.

They stretched across the region for gigaparsecs, a vast and silent expanse caught somewhere between water and light. Their surface held every number at once. Small infinities lapped at the shores of greater ones, and the greater ones rolled out toward tides so large that no lifeform had ever measured where they ended. Snow fell onto them, heavy and endless, as it fell everywhere now, and sank beneath their surface without a sound.

The seas were old. They had a story, but that was for another time.

And on their eastern shore, something rose!

It climbed up out of a tear in the dark, an obsidian Giant!

A Kirtimukha!

One of THE Faces That Devour Glory!

It stood at the edge of the seas of Infinity, and lowered its head, and opened its jaws. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

They opened wide. Wider than a jaw should open. Wide enough to swallow an Observable Existence.

And it began to drink!

The seas of Infinity poured into its mouth in a long, steady current. The snow went with them, swirling down into that black throat in great white spirals. And with every swallow, something else went too. Something lighter than water and heavier than stone. The story of the seas. Every legend that had ever been told about them, every name they had been given, every belief that had settled into them over the Ages, all of it pulled loose from the waves and drawn down into the Giant’s jaws like silk drawn into a spindle.

The seas were part of a Narrative. So was the snow.

And THE Kirtimukha devoured Narratives!

It drank for a long time. The shoreline crept backward. Light years of Infinity drained away into it, and where the seas had been, the seabed lay bare and grey and strangely ordinary, as if it had forgotten it had ever been anything more.

Then someone came down from above.

She descended through the falling snow like a single white feather, slow and straight, and where she passed, the snow parted around her and left her robe untouched. It was a simple robe, white and unadorned, belted at the waist with a plain cord. Her hair was black and bound back tightly. Her face was young and grave, with the stillness of someone who had spent a very long time listening.

In her right hand, she carried a sword.

It was long and narrow and plain, its hilt wraped in worn grey leather, and when she drew near, existence itself began to hum around its edge. A low, steady note, like a bell struck once and left to ring.

Her name was Ilvana. She was THE White Edge of the Continuum, an Established Immense One of THE Legacy of THE Infinite Continuum.

She had crossed here first as a student eons ago, carrying her master’s sword. After her master died, she had stayed.

Ilvana stopped in the air a short distance from the Giant and looked at it, at the long black current of Infinity pouring down its throat, at the grey dead seabed spreading out behind it.

|THE White Edge of the Continuum speaks.|

|"What are you?"|

Her voice was quiet, and very clear.

|"And what are you doing in lands held by THE Legacy of THE Infinite Continuum?"|

The Kirtimukha kept its silence.

Its eyes stayed closed. Its head stayed lowered. It simply kept drinking.

Ilvana’s grip tightened on her sword.

Then the Giant moved!

WUU!

It moved faster than she could see. One moment it was hunched over the seas, jaws open, and the next its fist was already in front of her face, a mountain of black stone filling the whole sky.

She raised her sword as it burned with an Immensity of Infinity!

The fist struck the flat of the blade and the shock went through her like a breaking bridge. She was hurled back across the seas, tumbling through the snow, her robe torn, blood bright on her lips. She caught herself a hundred light years away and stood in the air, and her eyes, for the first time in three Ages, went cold.

Slowly, she lifted her sword in both hands.

And Infinity answered her even more!

It came up out of the seas around her, out of the snow, out of the very fabric of the region, and poured into her blade. Many Infinities, all at once. The small, countable ones that ran along the edges of things. The vast ones that sat beneath them, uncountable, impossible to list. And the ones beneath those, larger still, absolute, stacked layer upon layer down through every Dimensionality she had ever touched, each one so much greater than the last that the one above it vanished into nothing by comparison.

Every one of them flowed into her sword.

They compressed, pressing down into the narrow length of the blade until the blade became a single line of Immensity so dense that existence bent around it, the snow curving inward toward it like water toward a drain.

|THE White Edge of the Continuum roars!|

|"Cut!"|