Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5954

Chapter 5954: Immensity and Cults II

The lake at the heart of the burning mountain drank the last of the blood, and for a moment everything went still. The chanting had stopped, eight hundred and twenty-five Immense Ones hung in their rings with their chests cut open and their faces turned inward, and the elephant-headed Excedere stood motionless above the peak with all four of his hands lowered.

All of surrounding existence shook ominously!

Then the surface of the lake bulged upward, slowly, and something rose out of it!

HUUM!

It was small. It came up out of the bubbling red Immensity no larger than a house cat, and it shook itself once, scattering bright drops across the scorched stone, and then it sat down on the surface of the lake and looked around. Its fur was a shining stellar white, flecked through with obsidian, soft and thick and glittering faintly, and its eyes were large and round and very bright, and it tilted its head at the rings of crimson-robed figures above it with an expression of mild and innocent curiosity.

A sound went through the rings, a long low breath of reverence, and then, ring by ring, every Immense One in the circle bowed. The Newly Risen bowed first, then the Established and the Ancients, and finally the twenty-five in the innermost ring lowered their heads, while their blood still ran from the cuts across their chests. Noah, inside the borrowed body Eckert held, felt the cultist around him try to bow as well, and let it, because there was no reason yet not to.

Only the Excedere did not bow. He looked down at the small white creature sitting on the lake for a long time, his small dark eyes perfectly still, and then he frowned, and the whole mountain seemed to grow heavier under his gaze.

"You," he said, and his voice was deep and terrible, "are not her."

...!

The small creature looked up at him, and it smiled. It was not a cat’s smile, because cats did not smile, and it went too wide, stretching back across its soft white face past where any mouth should end.

"Huhuhu," it laughed, a light and pleasant sound that made every Immense One in the circle go cold at once. "No, I am not. But I do thank you, all of you, for being so kind as to let a shred of me pass through."

WUU!

Then it began to change! Its fur split open along its back, and something vast and dark pushed up out of the split, spreading and spreading until the little white creature was only a small soft face sitting at the front of a body that filled the whole sky above the lake. The body was feline in its shape, long and low and coiled for a leap, but it was the size of a small Dimension, and its fur was obsidian scattered with white wheels, and where its legs should have been there were dozens of long black tentacles, every one of them covered in fine, swirling script that moved across its surface and never stopped.

A script that caused the surrounding existence to shudder!

The face at the front of it stayed small and white and smiling. It had too many eyes now, opening one after another down the length of its body, round and bright and curious, and every one of them was looking at the cultists.

"Oh, how lovely," she said, and her voice came from all of those eyes at once, warm and amused and cruel. "So many little candles, all lit up for me."

...!

Then... she began to eat.

The first tentacle went through the ring of Newly Risen without slowing, and where its swirling script touched them, they simply ended. Their Immensity was pulled out of them in long bright threads that ran up the script and disappeared into the dark body, and what was left behind fell away as grey, empty husks, dozens of them, tumbling down into the burnng lake. The ring broke apart in screaming, and the cultists scattered, and then the ones who could fight began to fight.

The Ancients struck first, a hundred of them at once, and their Immensity filled the burning sky with Immensities and Narratives of light and storms of fire and great wheels of turning gold. The Half-Unfathomables and Unfathomables of the innermost ring rose behind them, and their Narratives poured out of them in full, whole thousands of Dimensions conjured in their palms and Observable Existences opened behind their backs.

Phantoms filled with Narrative as large as Dimensions rose at their shoulders: a many-armed lifeform of blue fire, a great serpent with seven hooded heads, a winged bird of red and gold with talons that could tear open Immense Ones.

All of it struck her at once, and the sky over the burning mountain turned white with the force of it. When the light faded, she was still there, a little scorched along one flank, smiling with her small white face, and she was already moving. A tentacle wrapped around the many-armed lifeform of blue fire and the Unfathomable who had conjured her, and the script on it brightened, and both of them went pale together.

Noah watched the Unfathomable die. It took a few seconds, and the being screamed through every one of them, her Narrative unspooling out of her in a long glowing thread that ran up into the dark body and was gone, her conjured Dimensions collapsing in her palm, her phantom lifeform fading into blue smoke. Then the tentacle let go, and what fell away was a husk, grey and dry and very light, drifting down toward the lake.

"Mmm," The summonef creature said happily. "That one had a nice story. A little short, but nice."

...!

---

Inside the mentalscape, Eckert had stopped lounging. He was sitting up straight in his purple-blue clouds with his color-changing eyes gone wide, and Noah could feel his unity moving, reaching out from the borrowed body in thin threads toward the wounded.

"I’m grabbing the half-dead ones while I can," Eckert said quickly, as his unity slid into an Established Immense One who had been torn half in two and took hold of him before he could fall.

"Free bodies, and nobody’s checking. But big guy, what do we do? That thing feels very, very ominous. If you arent able to do something, i fear even these bodies I’m grabbing will be wiped out."

Noah did not answer at once. He watched the dark body move across the sky, watched another Half-Unfathomable go grey in its grip, and he thought, quickly and clearly, about what he had in front of him. A great hungry thing that ate Narratives, a cult tearing itself apart around it, an Excedere who had not yet moved, and a whole region of the Undefined Gaps with nothing in it that belonged to him at all.

So he brought more of himself. He reached back along the thread, far back across existence to his farm and his Dream, and he drew more of his consciousness through it, more and more, until the borrowed body could barely hold him and the thread between him and Eckert’s host burned bright. Then, from inside a stranger’s body in the middle of the chaos, he began to open a door.

He wove his unwalked roads into a long dark thread and turned his Infinite Quantum Dream downward, toward the deep beneath every unchosen road, and a door to THE Fallow of Existence formed beneath the burning mountain!

WAA!

He did not let it stay a door, any more than he had in the Carcosa or the Chrysalis, and he broke it.

BOOM!

Grey light rose up through the Ashfall Reaches from below, slow and silent, spreading out under the rings and the mountain and the fighting, softening the scorched dark into something half-real. Noah gave himself into it at once, freely, his Dreams and his Nightmares and his authority pouring out through the thread and sinking into the Fallow-touched ground, and the existence around the mountain began, very slowly, to listen to him.

Black-gold soil spread outward across the dark under the feet of a cult that was too busy dying to notice it!

Above the burning peak, the Excedere finally moved. He stepped down off the mountain into the path of the great dark body with all four of his arms spread wide, and his Narrative came out of him, THE Tusk That Holds the Gate, and behind him rose a phantom, a grey elephant of stone and iron with four vast tusks lowered for a charge.

When the tentacles came for him, he caught two of them in his hands and held them, and the script on them burned against his palms and could not get in.

She laughed, delighted, and threw her whole body at him, and he did not move. The phantom elephant took the weight of her and its stone legs cracked, and the Excedere’s feet drove down into the slopes of the burning mountain, but he held her there, both of them locked together above the lake while the shockwaves of their straining rolled out across the Ashfall Reaches and threw cultists through the air.

For the first time since she had risen, the small white face stopped smiling and looked at him with real interest.

"Little tusk," she said, her many eyes narrowing. "Oh, you’re strong. You were always going to be the strong one, weren’t you?"

Then she twisted, and a third tentacle slid past his guard and wrapped around a Half-Unfathomable who had been trying to help him, and the being went grey and dry in the space of a breath. "But you can’t hold me and save them at the same time, can you?"

As the soil spread under the battle and Noah’s existence began to unfold across the Reaches, his Dreaming Human Origin and his Shinjitsu reached out together toward the great dark body in the sky, and this time, they could see far more of it. What they found bloomed in front of him in waves.

|Identified: a shred of a lifeform who tried to become one of Those Who Overcame, and failed.|

|Name: Astarothael.|

|When she fell, her weavings were scorched and branded into the crevices of THE Mountain at the Center of Everything, and there they remained.|

|What has passed through the Rite of Scorched Return is only a shred of her.|

|Her Narrative burned away when she fell. What remains of it is hunger.|

|The script on her tentacles drains and eats whatever it touches: Immensity, Narrative, existence.|

|Immensity of the shred: ?????. It rises with everything she eats.|

...!

Noah read the prompts once, and then he looked up at the vast dark feline body locked against the Excedere above the burning lake, at the small smiling white face at the front of it and the dozens of tentacles writhing out from beneath. A shred, the prompts said, only a shred of something that had tried to climb all the way up and had fallen, and been burned into the Mountain for Ages, and had been hungry the whole time. The cult had wanted to bring back someone else entirely, and instead it had opened a door for this!

"Oh," she breathed, and every cultist still alive in the Ashfall Reaches heard the hunger in it. "Oh, what is this? What sweet, strange thing is this!?"

...!

BOOM!

The Excedere stopped above it, and his deep voice was very tired. "Your sacrifice may actually bring back a shred of Her Esteemed Self," he said, "so perhaps this was not a loss at all."

He raised one heavy hand. "Get over here."