Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5919

Chapter 5919: Infinite Nightmare I

More of them fell!

Noah let them fall, and then he raised them.

Threads came down out of the great black eye, thin and glittering, obsidian and gold, hundreds of them, each one finding a fallen Immense One of the Iron Psalm where it drifted in the fog. The threads left their bodies alone and went in through the eyes.

Gently, almost carefully, they lifted every fallen Immense One up off the snow and the air and the Elsedimensions where they had landed, and hung them in the sky.

They hung in rows beneath the eye, like moths pinned to a board. Their arms dangled. Their heads tipped back. Their open eyes were black and wet and full of the sandy light, and every one of them was still dreaming, dreaming the lives they had left behind, all of those lives at once, and their faces moved slowly through expressions none of them had worn in Ages.

A Newly Risen smiled at something only it could see. An Established One wept soundlessly. Two of them, hung side by side, reached toward each other very slowly, fingertips stopping a breath apart.

The Iron Psalm looked up at what was hanging over them, and for the first time since they had torn the Legacy’s sky, their ranks moved with hesitation.

Noah looked at the nine.

"Newly Risen and Established Immense Ones," he said. "Yours. Bound to you. Sworn to your King. Do you care for them?"

The eye above him stared, unblinking.

"If you do, pull back. Leave this Legacy as you found it. Take your Totems and your sky, and I will let them wake as what they were." He paused. "If you do not, they will close their gates forever."

The nine stayed silent.

So Noah reached up and tugged on one thread.

At its end hung an Established One, a broad, heavy woman with grey braids and verses still faintly glowing on her shoulders. When the thread moved, her body moved with it.

Her limbs began to turn, slowly, the wrong way, her arms curling back across her chest, her legs drawing up beneath her, every joint bending backward against its own shape, until she was curled in on herself like a dead spider. Her Immensity went with her. It collapsed inward, a great grey weight caving into a smaller and smaller space, twisting as it went, until it was a knot no bigger than a fist.

The thread drew her up.

Up past the rows of the hanging. Up through the fog. Up into the black of the eye, where she was swallowed in perfect silence, and was gone.

|An Established Immense One of THE Iron Psalm has been drawn into your Nightmare.|

|Her gate has closed forever.|

|She will dream inside it until it ends.|

...!

The silence across the Legacy was enormous.

Noah kept his eyes on the nine. He wanted them to see him watching.

It was cruel. He knew it was cruel. It was also a door, and he was holding it open, and he had told them exactly what it would cost to walk through.

At that moment, beside Brunhild, the veiled ninth Unfathomable stepped forward.

It moved slowly. It had walked at the back of the nine since the army first came out of the dark, and Noah’s Unlidded Eye had slid off its robes and found only emptiness beneath. Now it stood at Brunhild’s shoulder, and lifted its veiled head, and looked at him.

And it saw him!

Past the Nightmare face, past the crown and the fog and the eye in the sky, it saw him. Noah felt the look land on his existence as a hand lands on a shoulder in a crowd, precise and certain, finding exactly the place where he was.

Around the veiled figure, faint and still as glass, lay a thin film.

Shinjitsu.

|You see beneath its robes.|

|Aethon Pyrrhaeus, THE Ember That Sets Down Its Smoke.|

|Unfathomable Immense One. Ninth Hand of THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate.|

|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 4.7%.|

|Immensity: THE Immensity of Fire.|

...!

Noah looked at the prompt for a long moment.

Four point seven percent. Lower than his own five. And yet that small number sat on top of an Unfathomable Immensity, and the two together made something that turned his gaze very still.

Aethon lifted its veil.

There was no face beneath it. There was only fire.

It was a small fire. That was the first thing Noah understood, and the most frightening. It was the size of a hearth fire, a single pale flame where a head should be, steady and almost colorless, with no smoke at all. Quiet and still, it simply burned, and it burned so cleanly, so completely, that the air around it seemed thinner just for being near it.

It was fire, and only fire. Everything borrowed had been set down. Only the truth of burning remained.

Aethon raised one robed hand, and opened it toward the fog.

The flame spread!

It went out across the sandy cloud in a single quiet wave, pale and smokless, and wherever it touched, the Nightmare burned. It burned as paper burns in a clean hearth, with no crackle or roar: instantly, completely, curling into nothing. The obsidian-gold fog went up in sheets. The threads hanging from the eye caught and blazed and snapped. The plasma guttered out like candle wicks in a draft.

The fire came for Noah.

He felt it before it reached him. It was nothing like Brunhild’s Immensity, which had come down like a mountain and found nothing to grip. This fire needed no grip. Immensity or Root or nothing at all made no difference to it. It only asked one question of whatever it touched, the question every fire asks: will you burn?

His robe of dreams and nightmares caught at the hem.

Gold and black threads blackened and curled. Heat climbed his legs. The crown above his head cracked, a single bright line running across the obsidian, and his Shinjitsu, still and clear and glass-bright, came up hard against the pale flame, and held, barely, like a window holding against a fire on the other side of it.

For one instant, it all nearly burned.

The fog, the threads, the hanging rows, the Nightmare itself. Gigaparsecs of it, gone in a breath, and Noah standing in the middle of the ash with his robe smoking.

Then Aethon closed its hand, and the fire stopped.

What was left of the fog drifted, thin and ragged. Half the hanging Immense Ones had fallen free and lay in the snow below, waking slowly, groaning. The eye in the sky still stared, but its edges smoked.

"You are weak," it said. Its voice was quiet and dry, like coals settling. "Your weavings are strange, and they are thin, and they would not survive a second touch of my fire. You are also strong. You have Shinjitsu, more than mine. You have something that is not Immensity, and it took nine of us to stop it."

The veiled head tilted. "Our King would like you. Very much. He collects things that are true." It held out its hand, palm up, the small pale flame faintly visible through the cloth. "Join us."

His robe was still smoking at the hem. He ignored it. "I do not join. I do not kneel. Every being I have ever met who offered me a place under them is either under me now, or gone."

"I will bring down Infinite Nightmares of your existences," Noah said quietly. "Every one of you. Every Immense One under that gate, every Root Bearer, every one of you nine. I will find the roads you left behind and I will open them all at once over your heads. To take hold of this place, you will lose a great deal."

HUUM!

|The fallen of THE Iron Psalm have been drawn into your Nightmare.|

|Their gates have closed forever.|

|They will dream inside it until it ends.|

...!