Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5940

Chapter 5940: Simple Lifeforms

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The simple lifeform had finally started using it in a way that was almost acceptable. For a short while after it had taken the shape of a hoe, it had only been dragged through soil and rested against a sapling, but then the simple lifeform had swung it at the sky, and at a falling Narrative, and through the chests of beings who had come to take what was his, and it had liked that a great deal more.

It did not know yet whether it was supposed to like such things, but it had been newly born only a short while ago, and it had decided that it was allowed to find out.

The simple lifeform had fed it fifteen Narratives so far, buried in the soil with the blade still inside them, and it had broken each of them down and turned them over and over until there was nothing left but rich black earth. Most of them had been bland, if it was honest, small stories about falling stars and walls and roads home, told by lifeforms that were even simpler than the one who held it.

It ate them anyway, because the simple lifeform seemed pleased every time, and because a bland meal was still a meal for something that had been hungry since before it had a mind.

While it ate, it noticed something new. Each time the simple lifeform swung it, its own weavings went out across existence along with the stroke, carried by the currents of infinity that moved with him, and they spread farther than the simple lifeform probably knew.

They went out across the Carcosa and past it, thin and faint, into regons it had no names for, and while the simple lifeform was busy playing with the others, those weavings brushed against something far away.

It was something like itself. It could only barely sense it, scattered across existence in tiny pieces, a fragment here and another one very far from there, each of them dense and waiting and humming very quietly in a chord that was almost the same as its own. It knew that chord, because it had been that chord before the simple lifeform gave it a shape, and the pieces out there were the parts of it that had gone missing.

It thought about this for a whlie, which was a new thing for it to do. The simple lifeform did not seem like the kind of lifeform who would go out and gather those pieces himself, because he was a little lazy, and he had come to this corner of existence to grow vegetables and sit on a porch rather than to go hunting across existence for fragments of anything.

Lazy, then, but his Dreams tasted very good, better than any Narrative it had eaten, and every time his authority flowed through its handle, those Dreams flowed through it as well.

So it decided to do the work itself. It took the weavings that had brushed against those distant fragments and began, very gently and very slowly, to pull, drawing on them across the dark of existence. The fragments were very far away, and they did not move yet, but it felt one of them notice the pull, and that was enough for a start.

There was something else it had noticed, and this one it turned over for a long time. Its four fragments had been broken apart a very long time ago, in a way it could not remember, and the edges where they met had always been jagged, so that even when they were gathered together they could only ever sit side by side and never truly become one thing again. The pain and sorrow it could not explain lived in those edges, and it had believed they would always be there.

But the simple lifeform’s authority flowed through it every time he held it, and every time it flowed, it went into those jagged edges and smoothed them a little. It mended the broken connections between the fragments, filling the cracks with Dream, so that the seams that should never have been able to close were slowly closing anyway.