Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5946

Chapter 5946: A Way Forward

Noah stood in the ruins of the Maze with the last thread of Lygara’s destiny closed in his hand, and he looked at it for a long moment while his own blood dried on his fingers. It was very thin, gold and silver twisted togther, and it was still faintly warm, and he could feel the shape of her inside it, small and quiet and far away. He opened his Dream and drew the thread down into it, carefully, passing it through the endless blue-gold places inside him where nothing could reach it, and he felt it settle there and rest.

From where he stood, everything looked very clear and very far away at the same time. He could see the hand above him and the crumbling Maze and the dark golden-veined sea, and he could also see, under all of it, the long slow pulse of existence moving as it always had, carrying every one of them on it, the hand and the Maze and Lygara’s thread and himself. The moment was terrible, and it was also only a moment, one small part of something so much larger that no single part of it could ever be the whole.

The Primordial Gu of Provenance looked down at him with all of its thousands of eyes, and its voice came from every segment of the hand at once.

"There will be nothing after this," it said. "No revenge, and no destruction of mine, because my Provenance decides what existence will do to me, and it has always decided in my favor. It already senses that I will find the child of calamity eventually, so I have no further need of you."

Its eyes narrowed, and the hand began to close. "You are most likely the thing that brought her back, and so you can face your judgment now. In your next life, not that you will have one, do not do things that you do not need to do."

HUUM!

The hand came down. All of its terrible might came down with it, every Provenance it had ever judged and every beginning it had ever erased, pressing down on the small figure standing in the ruins, and Noah felt his Dreaming Human Origin there begin to break. He did not raise his hands this time, and he did not try to stop it, because he knew what was happening and he knew there was nothing in him here that could stop it.

He was calm, and he found that this surprised him less than he would have expected. Existence was not always happy times with no worries, because existence held hard times as well, losses and griefs and moments where the strongest thing in the room simply decided to close its hand.

He had known that for a long time, and it was all part of existence, the same as the snow and the soil and the warm fruit on his farm.

His Dream collapsed. For the first time in a long time, the part of him that stood in THE Chrysalis came apart, his body and his Dreaming Human Origin breaking under the weight of the hand, and he felt himself go. But because he had given himself so completely to the existence around him, he did not simply end, and he felt his collapsing existence flow outward instead, dispersing into the golden seas and the Fallow-touched ground and the long currents of the Chrysalis, and even as the last of him came apart, he smiled.

---

He could still sense things after that, faintly, through the existence he had sunk into. He felt the Primordial Gu of Provenance hang over the ruins for a long moment after he was gone, and he felt its existence erupt, a vast white wave of Provenance rolling out across the region in every direction and destroying everything it touched. It broke the last walls of the Maze into dust, boiled the dark golden sea, tore the black-gold soil off the broken stone, and scattered the grey light of the Fallow across the sky, and then it turned and went back down its Conduit into the dark.

Noah felt all of it, and none of it troubled him as much as the Primordial Gu wanted it to. It could destroy everything here, but existence would simply take another shape, the same as it always did, and his Dreams were already flowing across this whole region of the Chrysalis, sunk into its ground and its seas and its currents, waiting quietly underneath the destruction. When he could, he would come back and restore it, and existence here would remember him and help him do it.

Waves of understanding moved through him as he drifted, one after another, quiet and very deep. Losing a body was not losing himself, and losing a fight was not losing the dream, and existence did not owe him victory any more than it owed the Primordial Gu anything at all.

Noah let all of it settle inside him, and he closed his eyes, content, and when he opened them again, he was sitting on his farm in the snow, with the hoe across his knees and the small blue-gold sapling beside him.

|Your existence in THE Chrysalis has been destroyed by THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|

|A significant part of your existence has been lost.|

|Your Dreaming Human Origin there has collapsed.|

|Your Dreams remain dispersed through that region of THE Chrysalis. You gave yourself completely, your very life.|

|THE Maze of Destiny has been destroyed.|

|THE First Gu of Destiny has been collapsed.|

|You hold the last thread of her destiny.|

...!

|THE Narrative of Kings has shifted.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin falls from Rank 48 to Rank 50.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin has lost a significant part of his existence to another King.|

|His prestige has fallen.|