Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5958

Chapter 5958: Red II

Noah watched the last of his Nightmare die!

Her runes rang on through Diomande’s Narrative, finding every root Ammit’s hunger had grown and shaking each one to ash, and she did it slowly, one root at a time, so that Noah felt every single one of them go, and with each one he felt her note press a little further along the thread toward him.

Then she plucked the strings once more, and the low note went out through every ring of the crater at once. Inside every cultist the Nightmare had touched, a hidden Dimension uncurled and a crimson-gold rune bloomed in it, ringing, and the Nightmares there began to shake, in the Ancients first and then the Half-Unfathomables and then the Unfathomables of the inner ring, until all of them broke apart together and drifted up out of the cultists’ chests as thin grey ash, rising through the dark above the crater in a slow, silent cloud.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare in Diomande: destroyed.|

|THE Bleeding Nightmare in all infected cultists: burned out.|

|Narrative bleeding from the Covenant: ended.|

|What has already been taken remains yours.|

Fuckin hell.

Noah drew his attention back from the roots before they burned, quietly, one thread after another, and he let the soil of the Ashfall Reaches lie exactly as it had been lying, not a grain moving, not a blade of grass leaning toward the farm that had grown it.

The woman lifted her hands from Diomande’s back and plucked a single string. Around the Excedere and every living cultist in the rings, the ordinary dark uncurled into a hidden Dimension that had always been there, its edges lined with turning crimson-gold runes, and the battered Half-Unfathomables and the shaking Ancients went into it together without a sound, and it curled shut behind them. She did not take the husks. She left every one of them where it lay, grey and dry across the slopes, and she did not look at them again.

---

Only she remained. She stood at the bottom of the ruined crater in her crimson robe with her hands clasped in front of her, and she looked slowly around at the slopes and the soil and the faint grey light rising from the deep places. "Will you show yourself?" she asked, and her voice was soft and courteous, the voice of a host greeting a guest she had not invited.

Nothing answered her. The silence went on and on, and Noah held it, and she stood in the middle of it with her head tilted very slightly, listening, for a long time after anyone else would have stopped.

"No," she said at last, mildly. "Of course not. That would be rude of you, and you have been so careful with your manners until now."

She began to walk slowly across the crater, her robe moving without any wind. "Do you know what I have learned, in all my time walking through existence? The truly strong do not hide. They have no reason to, because nothing they meet is greater than they are, and so they stand where they are and let existence look at them for as long as it likes."

She stopped beside the drained red pool and looked down into it, and for a moment her serene face held something that might have been grief. "My colleagues bled here," she said. "Some of them were fools, and some of them were cruel, and some of them only joined us because their own Legacies had nothing left to offer them, and all of them bled the same color."

Then the moment was gone, and she lifted her red eyes to the slopes again. "You hid today. You reached into them from somewhere far away and you fed on them, and when I came, you went quiet in the dark."

"Perhaps you are already gone," she said, almost kindly. "Perhaps there is no one here at all, and I am speaking to soil."

She waited, and the soil did not stir, and something in the corner of her calm mouth tightened very slightly. "But I think you are listening. And because you hid today, you will hide again. Time will pass, and you will grow, and one day you will believe you are strong enough at last, and you will still hide, because hiding is what you have become."

"So be careful," she said, very gently. "Be very, very careful. Whatever you are planting, wherever you are planting it, plant it quietly."

She turned her serene face up toward the dark above the crater. "And whenever you close your eyes, hope that my face is not the thing waiting behind them."

...!

Then she was gone. Her runes went silent one string at a time, curling back down into spaces far too small to see, and the last of her note faded out of the stone and the ash until the black-gold soil showed through again. The crater was empty except for the husks she had left behind.

---

Noah sat very still on his farm for a long time with the hoe across his knees, going back over everything she had said and done. She had burned his Nightmare slowly, root by root, and she had left the dead lying where his soil could reach them, and she had grieved for her people out loud, and he did not know whether the grief was true.

She had not struck at the soil. Whether that was because she could not follow it home, or because she was content to let him grow until he was worth the harvesting, he could not tell. She was not a monster, he thought. She was a woman protecting what was hers from something that had been eating it, and that made her far more dangerous than any monster could be.

|Ordeal concluded.|

|Narrative taken in from the Covenant and Astarothael: significant.|

|Branch of Dreams: Level 6 to Level 7.|

|Branch of Nightmares: Level 6 to Level 8.|

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 6 to Level 7.|

|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 6 to Level 7.|

|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 5 to Level 6. Each wall is now worth 150.|

|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 9 to Level 12. Regeneration: 18 Narrative per second.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 5 to Level 7.|

|Sub-Branch of THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 1 to Level 4.|

|Narrative Walls: 21 of 21. Total Narrative: 3,150.|

|Bodies planted on your farm from this ordeal: 23.|

---

"Big guy," came Eckert’s voice along the thread, very quietly. "I’m still in some of the ones she took. She hasn’t noticed me yet, but even this much feels like whispering beside a sleeping fire, so I’m going silent." He paused. "And if she ever puts her hands on my back the way she put them on his, I’ll burn this thread myself before she can follow it to you."

"Mmm," Noah said quietly. He did not doubt it for a moment.

Eckert laughed, very softly. "Catastrophe and calamity, big guy. Same as always. Be careful."

"You be even more careful," Noah said. After that, the thread went still, and it stayed that way.

"I’ll be in the ground, growing," Noah said, and after a long and heavy harvest, he breathed.

"Little Cat who overcame...well, failed to overcome. Astarothael, why dont we have a little talk?"