Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5977

Chapter 5977: The Ruin That Spares!

<Lifthrasir>

Her sister said her name, and Lifthrasir’s body trembled as she went down off the ridge once more!

She walked. She could have flown, and she did not call Kir One or Kir Two after her. She walked across the starlit grass on her bare feet, through the ash of the Red Hour and the scattered light of broken phantoms, past Unfathomables who drew back from her without knowing why, until she came to the long dark furrow in the snow. There she stopped, and looked down at it, and then she stepped over it.

The soil was warm. It had always been warm. It came up through the soles of her feet just as it had the first time she crossed this field, the same warmth that had reached into nothing and found her, and for one moment, she let herself feel it all the way through.

Then she closed that part of herself, very carefully, and walked on toward the man in the snow.

It was an utterly dreadful situation. She did not want to do it. But alas. Her dream. Her existence. Her...family.

Her family. She truly, truly hoped she had made the right choice.

Was there even a right choice here? Her mother had said to destroy anything that stood in the face of her dreams. Her mother had not said what to do when the thing standing there was the one who had given her the dream in the first place.

He saw her coming. He was standing again, with the Hoe in his hands, the blood dried dark on his face and his coat black at the sleeves, and the white holes hung around him in their slow broken ring. He watched her cross the whole field without moving. When she stopped, a little distance from him, he did not raise the Hoe.

"Lifthrasir," he said.

"Dreamer." She lifted her hand. White lightning ran across her knuckles, and inside her, the small dark storm of her Calamity turned toward him as she bit her lips. "I... am sorry."

"I know," he said.

That was almost worse. She had prepared herself for anger. For him to be enraged!

But he was just...disappointed.

"THE Ruin That Spares," Lifthrasir said, and let it fall. She let things fall as they would fall!

HUUM!

|Vein called: THE Ruin That Spares (Calamity, Rare).|

|Spared: chosen.|

|Not spared: the Dreamer.|

Existence had a way of putting things plainly.

Calamity came down on everything around him. It did not strike one wall and then the next. It fell on all of them at once, and every wall around him began to break in the same instant, their obsidian-gold light splitting and fraying and falling apart. The air around him broke. The snow broke!

The light of the Fallow broke, and the Narratives of the Unfathomables still pressing in on him broke too, and they cried out and fell back, because her calamity did not choose sides. It chose only what to keep.

And she chose. In truth, she had known what she would choose since the first time she saw this farm from the silver path. She spared the soil behind the Farm Wall, and the three rivers, and the coop full of stellar chickens, and the little shell house with the fire of Dreams on its floor. She spared the gold curve of the Farm Wall itself. And she spared Lygara, small and gold and silver, standing beside the fence post with her hands pressed together with sorrow.

Inside the ruin, everything she spared was renewed. The soil grew darker and richer. The rivers ran brighter. The chickens’ feathers shone. Lygara’s wings, for a moment, blazed with a light they had not held since before the Maze cracked. All of it rose up whole and stronger than before, while everything around it came apart!

But...

She did not spare him.

And this alone caused her heart tremendous pain, as she felt she was betraying everything. But...her dream! Her family!

"You’re spending the dream I gave you to break me for a promise someone else made you. Your father’s going to end cruelty, and he’s starting with her, and with me, and with you. You wish to end cruelty, and yet...you are starting with such a grand cruelty and ungratefulness at this moment."