Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5918

Chapter 5918: Dominion V

Gates bloomed!

Everywhere, all at once, across the whole region, gates. Iron gates, white-lit, thousands upon thousands of them, opening out of nothing in the sandy cloud and the snow and the torn sky and the air around Noah’s face, and every one of them swung shut in the instant it appeared. They closed on the cloud. They closed on the plasma. They closed on the scene of the woman at her table, and the scene froze in the middle of her laugh and went grey.

Noah’s obsidian-gold brilliance stopped.

It simply stopped, every glittering grain pinned in the air where it hung, and around him, his Nightmare buzzed, a low thick hum, pressing forward against the gates and going nowhere.

Noah looked at the grain of light frozen an inch from his eye, and for the first time since he had stepped onto the terrace, something in him paid close attention.

Brunhild floated down through the frozen fog, slowly, until she hung just above him. Her eyes were shining, white and cold and very calm.

"That," she said, "is not Immensity."

She studied him as one studies an unknown creature suspected of mattering.

"Everyone has Immensity. Every being worth noticing, every being that has climbed out of the dust and become something, carries Immensity. It is how existence measures us. It is how my King measures us. It is how these Totems measure us."

She tilted her head. "You have none. And yet you are here, and my gates had to close on you." Her voice dropped. "What are you?"

Noah looked up at her through the frozen light.

"Existence is so vast," he said. "So grand. A being could walk in one direction for a hundred Ages and never find its edge. Would it not be terribly boring if Immensity were all there was?" He let the words hang.

"A single measuring stick for all of that. You do not believe it either. You have only never had a reason to doubt it."

His gaze stayed on hers.

"But forget all that. You never answered my question."

The gold eye and the obsidian eye held her. "And the more time that passes, the more of what you are becomes a mere dream." A pause. "And a nightmare."

...!

HUUM!

Above them both, the sky split.

It split straight through the iron gates, through the torn veils, through the dark beyond, a single fissure running across all of it like a crack spreading across a frozen lake. And through the crack, slowly, something opened.

An eye.

It was obsidian, black from rim to rim, with no pupil at all, only a vast smooth dark that seemed to go back forever and then a little further. It was larger than the Legacy. Larger, even, than the region around the Legacy. Its edges were wet and glistening, and the skin around it was sky, creased and torn and stretched tight over something far too large to fit inside existence. Sandy light leaked from its corners in slow trickles, like tears, and ran down the air in glittering streams. Where its gaze fell, the snow stopped falling and simply hung, as if it had forgotten which way down was.

It stayed open, unblinking.

It looked down at the Legacy, at the iron army, at the nine at the corners, at everything, all at once, with an attention that had no warmth in it at all.

|You are laying down a grand Nightmare.|

|Those who fall into it will have their existences claimed by you.|

|To remain standing, they must answer one question: which of you is dreaming the other?|

|Warning: this Nightmare is unstable.|

|Too many powerful lifeforms are staring down at it at once.|

|It will not hold the Unfathomable. It may not hold the Ancient.|

...!

Noah felt it take hold.

He felt it everywhere at once. Through the great black eye, through the frozen and unfrozen fog, through every strand of his Nightmare spread across Gigaparsecs, he watched it work, and he let himself see all of it.

The nine stood firm, as he had known they would. They stood at their corners with their Immensities blazing and their eyes fixed on the eye, and his Nightmare slid off them like rain from a mountain.

The Ancients wavered. A few of them stumbled, swayed, and caught themselves.

But the weaker ones fell.