Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5980

Chapter 5980: The Dream Returned

Lifthrasir stood alone at the far edge of the furrow, cracked from head to foot now, fine white lines running across her face and her throat and her bare arms, one for every calamity she had let fall, and the deepest of them were still bleeding. Behind her, on the western ridge, her sisters hung in the air with their silver wings spread.

At her shoulders, vast and dark and swaying, stood Kir One and Kir Two, and though the Harvest had left them thinner and slower, their great obsidian faces turning this way and that with none of their old certainty, they still stood there. They had been made to protect her a hundred years, and while she lived, they would not stop.

Noah walked toward them across the black-gold soil with the Hoe in his hands and blood dried on his face, and stopped a few paces from the furrow. He...knew Kir One well, and that was the hard part.

In the long quiet stretches in THE Chrysalis, he had sparred with the giant more than once, slow heavy bouts where neither of them was trying to win, and after every one, Kir One had bent its vast head down to him and asked the same question in its deep, careful voice. Not so very long ago, Kir One had stood beside him and helped him!

Now Kir One looked down at him from beside Lifthrasir, every face on its great head turned toward him, and many were grand, but even more were...sad. "Kir One," Noah said quietly. "Step away from her." The giant did not step away. It opened its mouths!

Kir One came at him, and Kir Two came with it, thinner and slower than they had been and still the Faces That Devour Glory, every face they turned toward him pulling at his walls and his Dreams and the farm behind him. A single word would have sent the Abominations climbing out of both of them to tear every swallowed Narrative out in gold. He kept the word. Some endings should be done by hand.

He struck! He brought the flat of Elpis’s blade across Kir One’s chest, once, and the Bleeding Nightmare seed inside the giant bloomed all at once, and the Return pulled, and everything Kir One had devoured began to pour out of it in long dark streams. Kir Two lurched in on his other side, and he turned and struck it the same way, and it staggered and went down onto one vast knee. Kir One stood a moment longer, and then it fell, slowly, the whole great obsidian height of it coming down into the snow at the edge of the furrow with a sound that shook the coop behind the Farm Wall. What a fall that was!

|Kir One has fallen. What it devoured has returned to existence, and to you.|

It lay in the snow with its faces turned up toward him, going dark one by one, until the nearest one, the one that had always bent down to him after their bouts, moved its great mouth very slowly. "Are you...alive?" Kir One asked.

Noah stood over it for a long moment, and something moved in his face that he did not let all the way out, and his hands tightened on the Hoe before he nodded, slowly, the same as he had after every bout.

"I am alive," he said, very quietly. "You, sadly, are not." Kir One looked at him a moment longer, and then the last of the light went out of its faces, and beside it, Kir Two lowered its great head onto the snow next to its brother and did not raise it again.

|Kir Two...has fallen.|

"..."

Alas.

Alas!

Lifthrasir had watched all of it. She stood above the two fallen giants who would have guarded her a hundred years, and her cracked face stayed still while her hands began to shake. She lifted one of them, and white lightning crawled across her knuckles, weaker than before and flickering, as the small dark storm of her Calamity turned inside her one last time. She aimed it past him, at the warm gold curve of the Farm Wall and everything beneath it, the soil and the rivers and the coop and the little shell house, Henry and Thalia and all the rest of them behind the line, and she chose, deliberately and carefully, to spare Lygara and nothing else again. "THE Ruin That Spares," Lifthrasir said, and her voice broke on it as endless shame flooded her, and her Shinjitsu...began breaking apart!

The calamity began to fall toward the Farm Wall, and Noah felt it coming down over everything he had planted. He could break it by breaking her, all of her, her Narrative and her story and everything she was, until nothing of her was left to fall, or he could take back what he had given. He looked across the countless possibilities in front of him and went toward the one where his dream still lived.

He stepped over the furrow! It was the first time in the whole war that he had truly crossed his own line, and every lifeform on that field saw him do it. He walked through the falling edge of her calamity, and it broke three of his walls on the way, and he kept walking until he stood in front of her, close enough to touch.

She looked up at him with her cracked face wet with tears and shame. How? How could everything have gone so wrong? "I am sorry," she said.

"You don’t have anything to be sorry for," Noah said gently, holding her eyes. "You chose. So did I."

She held his gaze and he held hers, and for a moment, in the middle of the falling calamity, it was very quiet between them. Then he laid his hand gently on her chest, over the place where, a little while ago, she had set a small dream of growing old that he had found lying in the dark where she had been erased, and he took it back.

It came to him warm and small, the same as when he first found it, and the calamity stopped falling everywhere at once, and the white lightning went out across her knuckles. Lifthrasir looked at him a moment longer with something in her eyes that might have been relief.

Then she sat down in the snow, and then she lay down in it, beside the two fallen giants who had guarded her, and she was gone as her entire body...dimmed tremendously.

|A Dream you gave has returned to you.|

...!

He had faced THE Primordial Gu of Provenance for her! A Body of his had died for her, and Lygara had died for her too, and Lifthrasir may never even have known it. He stood over her in the snow and let that be the whole of the moment, and existence, which had answered every gift he had ever given, gave him nothing back for this one.

Inside the Farm Wall, Lygara stood by the fence post with her small hands pressed together, unprecedented pain flushing across her existence. She had felt the calamity pass over her and leave her whole, the last thing her oldest friend had ever chosen to spare, and she had watched the giants fall, and the farmer cross his own line, and lay his hand on her friend’s chest, and take back the dream. She stayed where she was, because she understood that Lifthrasir had made a choice with her eyes open, knowing exactly what it would cost, and no one had the right to take that from her, not even at the end.

She stood with her hands pressed together until they shook, and then until they ached, but she could not stop the tears, and an odd howl of sorrow left her mouth!

Noah heard the cry behind him and rose to his feet with nothing at all showing in his face. He looked down at the small cracked figure lying in the snow between the two dark giants for one long moment, and then he stepped back over the furrow onto his own field, turned back toward the war, lifted the Hoe, and went on. In his hands, Elpis hummed a little louder, because she had felt how heavy he had become all at once, the whole weight of it settling into him and staying, and she wanted him to know she was there. He knew!

On the western side, Phaedra stared down at her youngest sister’s body in the snow. Her face was white, and her silver wings had gone completely still with shock and rage! "Father and our mothers..." she said, very quietly, "will remember this!"

...!

The snow began to fall again.

|THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: bloomed in Thessaly.|

|Status: [Rooted] (Bleeding Nightmare, holding). She cannot rise.|