Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5951

Chapter 5951: Broken Things

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It had felt THE Farmer’s Dream collapse. It had been lying on the black-gold soil of the farm in the snow, far away from the Maze, but the authority that ran through its handle every time he held it ran through it all the time now, thin and constant, and when the great hand closed over him in that other place, it had felt that authority go cold and tear.

For a moment it had believed the simple lifeform was gone, and it had not known what to do with that belief, and then he had opened his eyes on the farm, whole, and it had felt something in its own seams loosen with relief.

Afterward, it had felt him hurt. It had felt the hour he spent kneeling in the snow, the Nightmares rising out of him one after another, and the grey place where his fire had gone dim, and it had understood that he was in pain. That surprised it, because it knew pain very well, the jagged ache along the edges where its own pieces had been broken apart, and it had always believed that pain belonged only to broken things, and the simple lifeform had not seemed broken at all.

So perhaps he was broken too, in some way it could not see, or perhaps every living thing in existence carried some pain somewhere. It turned that thought over for a long time, and it found that it did not mind the thought as much as it expected. There was something almost comforting in not being the only thing that hurt.

It had watched him feed the farm. He had put fifteen lifeforms into the ground, and then eighteen Gu, and now he was planting dozens more, the broken dead of a King’s army that he had gathered somewhere far away, and every one of them went back to existence through the soil. Existence did not keep them, though, because it was not a thing that kept, and it gave them back to the farmer refined, their Narratives grown into fruit and their stories turned into something he could eat.

It liked that, because it was the kind of thing a hoe should be part of, breaking ground so that something could be given back. When he ate the fruit from the Gu, it felt the Narrative go into him, and it felt something new happen inside him that it had not felt before. He began to build walls.

They rose around his body where no one else could see them, but it could see them, because it saw with something other than eyes. They were barriers, circular and swirling, one turning around another, invisible to everyone but itself, and at the center of all of them, running through them and holding them together, was a river of obsidian and gold shaped into the symbol of infinity, looping through the barriers and around his body without ever stopping.

Every time he filled another wall, the river ran stronger, and the barriers turned a little faster around him. Three had risen out of his own story, and a fourth out of the eaten Gu, and it could tell from the shape of them that he meant to keep building. They were walls meant to keep a hand from closing on him a second time.

Now he was planting the dead, walking up and down the long new rows with the blade in his hands, and every time he pressed a body into the soil and closed the earth over it, something happened that he could not see. A soft light flowed up out of the ground where the body lay, white and green and very bright, and it did not go to him at all. It went outward, into existence, into the soil and the rivers and the snowing air and the long dark currents of the Carcosa, and everywhere it went, existence grew a little richer than it had been a moment before.

It watched the light spred across the farm with every body he planted, and it wondered whether he would ever know he was doing this. He thought he was only farming, gathering Narrative for his walls, and he was, but he was also giving back more than he took, and existence around him was growing fuller and greener with every stroke of the blade. It decided not to tell him, because he would only have made something complicated out of it.

While he worked, it thought about the other pieces. It could feel them out there across existence, scattered and far apart, each one dense and humming in the same chord it had once been, and around every one of them it could feel Narrative, thick layers of it, the storys of everything that had held them or fought over them or died for them across countless Cycles. It had pulled on one of them, gently, while he was busy with the Shepherd’s people, and it had felt that one begin to pull back, and by now it should be close.