Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5948

Chapter 5948: Narrative Wall I

On a farm in a quiet corner of THE Infinite Carcosa, under a sky that would not stop snowing, Noah sat beside a small blue-gold sapling and drew the dreams of the First Gu of Destiny back into existence one slow thread at a time.

The faint gold and silver shape of her lay coiled around the sapling with her eyes still closed, and every few moments he gave her a little more of his Dream, and she grew a little more solid, a little more there. It was quiet, careful work, and he did it with his whole attention.

The sadness was still in him. Lygara had told him to say nothing, and he had said nothing, and she had paid for their silence with everything she had.

But something else had happened in that loss. His Shinjitsu had crossed a line it had never crossed before, and the thin film of still glass over his skin felt heavier than it ever had, not heavy on him, but heavy on everything around him.

The snow falling near him seemed to fall a little straighter, and the air around his body seemed a little more certain of itself, and when he looked at the faint shape of Lygara, he could see clearly, with no effort at all, exactly how much of her was really her and how much was only his Dream holding her up.

He felt himself become more real. That was the simplest way he could put it, that the parts of him that were his own had grown so many and so solid that existence could no longer treat him lightly, and that the things other beings had only borrowed would feel the difference when they came near him. It was a strange, quiet, enormus feeling, and he sat inside it for a while without moving, letting it settle.

|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 10%.|

|Threshold reached: THE Unborrowed Weight.|

|What is truly yours now has weight that existence must carry.|

|In your presence, the titles of others grow heavy. Their legends grow thin. Their certainty of who they are begins to slip.|

|What they have borrowed cannot stand comfortably near what you are.|

|Those who are true to themselves will feel it as respect. Those who are not will feel it as fear.|

...!

Noah read the prompts calmly. His hands never stopped moving over Lygara’s faint shape, giving and shaping and waiting, and his farm body went on with its quiet work in the snow. But far away, in another part of existence that was filled with his own existence, something needed his attention, and he turned a part of himself toward it.

---

In THE Undefined Gaps, where the Fallow had broken through and where Noah had given so much of himself, there was a grassland now. It stretched out across the dark for light years in every direction, tall obsidian-gold grass with stars caught in the tips of every blade, and the grass moved on its own, bending and turning and rippling in long slow waves although there was no wind there to move it.

A part of Noah rose up out of that grass, quietly, made of the same obsidian and gold as the stalks around him, and stood among them with the stars brushing his shoulders. He had been here since the battle began, watching the Third Legion of the Shepherd and the Stillness tear at each other across the dark, and he had watched all of it with a strange mix of interest and distance.

The Legion had fought bravely and well, and the Stillness had barely bothered to fight back, and in the end the thousands who died had died because two great things had collided in a place neither of them belonged.

When the battle ended and the Legion began to leave, he had begun to collect the dead. He did it silently, without being seen, reaching out through the grass and the soil and the Fallow-touched dark to the corpses of Immense Ones drifting through the Gaps, and drawing them one by one into small folds of existence that he kept hidden in his grassland. Ancients and Established and Newly Risen, some broken and some still frozen in grey glass, all of them full of Immensity and Narrative that would otherwise drift away into nothing, and all of them, to a farmer, very good fertilizer.

He was hard at work, pulling in a broken Established Immense One whose body still glowed faintly blue, when the retreating Legion stopped. Noah paused with his hand outstretched through the grass, and he watched the leading figure of the Legion, the woman with the cracked halo, raise her hand and wave it once through the dark.

A vast image rose up in front of her, burning and clear, and it was a man in a robe of dreams and nightmares, with an obsidian crown turning above his head and mismatched eyes of gold and obsidian looking out across the Gaps, and it was him!