Chapter 5850: Glorious Script! II

Ul’moreth’s voice reached him instantly. It came through the Mana rather than the air, every word a precise pattern of pulses that arrived inside Noah’s mind already understood.

|"Little Anomaly...well, not Little. You’ve worked hard to get where you are so I’ll call you what you are. Human Dreamer, it has been a while..."| it said, and there was something warm and dry and terribly old in it.

|"It has, and it hasn’t. I should’ve helped out my old teacher a while ago."| Noah sent back.

The great head of hair tilted, considering the four corners of the square: the Drowned Margrave, the Warden of the Heart, the thing wearing Noah’s face, and the cathedral-woman in the east, her ribs open, her choir still singing its long, low apology.

|"Ah,"| Ul’moreth said. |"I can see...so much more. I can see a song..."|

He listened for a moment. Only a moment.

|"Her song is a sentence,"| he said. |"A long one. Old. Badly made, but very, very deep. Penance, written over and over for Ages, until it became a weight that could crush whatever it touched."|

The eighteen Phonemes around his head slowed in their orbits.

|"Allow me, Human Dreamer. Consider it my tuition, paid back."|

And Ul’moreth began to speak.

He spoke in whole paragraphs, far past any single word or sentence. And as he spoke, the words came out of him and stayed.

Script appeared in the air!

Golden-blue lines of writing, bright and sharp, unspooling out of the Mana around him in long flowing rows. Sentences wrote themselves across the falling snow. Paragraphs hung over the black water. Whole passages of THE First Tongue wrapped around the cavern in rings, line after line after line, every letter of them a precise pattern of the eighteen Phonemes, so bright that the record’s grey walls glowed blue and gold where they fell.

And they went toward the Choir-Mother.

Noah watched them reach her and begin to work. Wherever a line of Ul’moreth’s script touched her, a line of her own came loose. He could see it now: she was written too. Her frozen ribs, her arches, her choir, her Penance, all of it was made of sentences, ancient grey writing wound so tight that it had become a body.

And Ul’moreth was reading them. Unpicking them. Pulling them out of her one line at a time, as someone pulls a thread out of a hem, and holding each one up in the light before he let it fall apart.

He poured everything into it.

Noah felt it happen. The boundless sea of blue Mana that had come with his teacher began to drain, pouring out of him into the script, faster and faster. His obsidian-gold hair blazed, every strand of it lit from within. The eighteen Phonemes spun around his head so fast they blurred into a single ring of color. Nearly every ounce of the Dream Immensity he had woken with went into the words.

Then the Choir-Mother fought back!

"Who is this fucker?!"

HUUM!

Her song came back. A scream of it now, in place of the long, low apology, a wall of grey Penance rising out of her broken ribs and crashing down toward Ul’moreth, and inside it, Noah could see her own script, grey and jagged, writing itself over his teacher’s lines.

Kneel, it wrote. Be sorry. Be sorry. Be sorry. Wherever her grey script touched his golden-blue lines, it scraped them out, erased them, and Ul’moreth’s great body shuddered as whole paragraphs of his work were wiped away.

Ruination moved.

She stepped in front of the old teacher, crimson and silver, and her Dream opened wide. Every line Ul’moreth had written, every sentence, every word, she had already seen. And nothing she had seen could be erased from her. As the Choir-Mother’s grey script scraped his paragraphs away, Ruination called them back, exactly as they had been, line for line, faster than the Penance could erase them.

THE Infiniverse moved too.

She spread her coat of dreaming realms out behind Ul’moreth like a wall, and when the second wave of Penance came screaming across the water, it hit her realms instead of him. It sank into them. Dimension after Dimension swallowed the grey wave, each one dreaming its own small dream, and inside her, the Penance found nothing that wanted to kneel.

"Keep going!" Ruination said quietly over her shoulder.

|"I intend to,"| Ul’moreth said.

The other two Established Immense Ones roared as Noah’s dream unfurled to keep them at bay.

It was heavy! So, so heavy! But so what!?

The script surged!

Line after line tore loose from the Choir-Mother’s body. Her song broke into pieces, then into words, then into scraps of sound with no meaning left in them at all. Her choir fell silent one row at a time. And then Ul’moreth wrote a final paragraph across the sky, Space and Unity at the start of it, Division and Ending in the middle, and at the close, the first sound again, heavier, carrying everything that had come before.

Space buckled.

She was torn across it. The great cathedral-woman came out of the east corner of the square and across the black water in a single heartbeat, ribs cracking, arches falling in, her choir thrown from their rows like dolls. She came to rest directly in front of Noah, half-torn, her vast frozen body broken open from the crown down.

Heavily injured. Right in front of him.

Noah looked at her.

He opened his mouth!

The event horizons along his arms flared all at once, and inside his mouth, they turned. He breathed in, and the Choir-Mother came apart into him. Her broken arches, her frozen ribs, her choir still mouthing in silence, her Immensity of Penance down to its last strand: all of it, swallowed whole, sliding down into him like a cathedral falling into a well.

It hit the base of his Tree.

His whole existence bukled!

She was Established. She was Ages deep. And even swallowed, she was still fighting. Her Penance pressed against the inside of him, trying to make his own Tree kneel, and the gold seam down his body flared white.

Then Ul’moreth was beside him!

He arrived without crossing the distance, simply there, at Noah’s right shoulder, his vast form of obsidian-gold hair settling around them both like a cloak. He laid one enormous hand on Noah’s back.

|"Breathe. Let me read her to you."|

The script came with him.

Golden-blue sentences poured off Ul’moreth’s hand and into Noah, and inside him, around the swallowed Choir-Mother, they began to work again. And now Noah could see what his teacher saw.

Her Immensity was made of Causes. Countless of them, as the Regent’s had been. Purposes, wound together for Ages. But with Ul’moreth’s script running through them, they looked different now. Every Cause was a sentence. Every purpose had a grammar.

The Penance that had felt like one vast, unreadable weight was suddenly something he could read, line by line: a purpose to be sorry, a purpose to kneel, a purpose to make others kneel, a purpose to sing until there was nothing left but the song.

He could read them.

And if he could read them, he could rewrite them.

Noah reached into her with his own tongue.

The Osmontian Tongue rose up from the deepest part of him, the Letters he had built himself, one by one, across a life of becoming. I AM. OSMONT. QUINTESSENTIAL. HUMAN. PROTAGONIST. And his Words with them, THE MORTAL COIL and THE UNBOUND LINEAGE. He set them against her sentences. Wherever one of his Letters touched one of her lines, her grammar broke, and his took its place.

A purpose to be sorry met I AM, and came apart; a purpose to kneel met PROTAGONIST, and came apart; a purpose to make others kneel met HUMAN, and came apart faster than any of the others.

Ul’moreth read. Noah rewrote. Between them, the Choir-Mother began to come apart at a speed that would have been impossible for either of them alone!

The two of them were ganging up on THE Choir-Mother, blasting her on all sides!

And as he worked, Noah watched his teacher.

He watched how Ul’moreth held a sentence before he broke it. How he found the one Phoneme that held the rest in place. How he forced no line, only read it so precisely that it gave way on its own. Noah had stood in a doorway once as he knew the First Tongue intimately. Now he stood inside the dream made real, and he understood more with every line.

His Dreaming Human Origin drank it in.

And his own tongue began to change.

He felt a new Word forming, out of the Letters he already had. QUINTESSENTIAL and PROTAGONIST, leaning together, joined by something he had only just learned: the sight of a teacher reading an Immensity as if it were a page. It formed slowly, and then all at once, and he spoke it into the swallowed Choir-Mother without thinking.

THE DREAMING GRAMMAR.

Her remaining sentences broke apart like ice in spring.

|Within your existence: THE Orator Who Dreamed the First Word is reading an Established Immensity aloud.|

|Your Dreaming Human Origin has witnessed the high attainment of THE First Tongue. It is taking that sight into itself.|

|You are learning from your teacher once more.|

...!

|Her Immensity is made of Causes. Within your Dream, each Cause reads as a sentence.|

|What can be read can be rewritten.|

|Your Osmontian Tongue has formed a new Word: THE DREAMING GRAMMAR.|

|Born of QUINTESSENTIAL and PROTAGONIST, and of what your teacher showed you. Within your Dream, every sentence must answer to your grammar. Every Cause there may be read, and every Cause there may be unwritten.|

...!

|Predation: THE Choir-Mother, an Established Immense One, swallowed whole. A shame she can’t be gifted to get more from THE Tide.|

|Her Causes are being read, and rewritten, and broken.|

|Digestion: accelerating.|

...!

Ul’moreth’s hand stayed on Noah’s back until the last of the grey script inside him had come apart.

Then he took it away, slowly, and straightened.

He looked smaller. Only a little. The blaze had gone out of his obsidian-gold hair, and the strands of it hung dimmer now, dull gold instead of bright. The boundless sea of blue Mana that had poured out of the crack with him had sunk low, a shallow tide around his feet instead of an ocean, and the eighteen Phonemes turned around his head slowly, some of them flickering.

But he was standing.

|"Hmm,"| Ul’moreth said, looking down at his own dimmed hands. |"I may have overspent."|

He glanced sideways at Noah.

|"Still. That wasn’t bad as my first action since waking up from that long dream, yes?"|

...!

The silence in the record was total!

Two of the four corners of the square stood empty now. Grey threads floated on the black water where the Gaunt Regent had stood. Broken arches drifted where the Choir-Mother had sung.

The north and the east stood empty.

In the west, THE Drowned Margrave hung in the snow, its hundred dead mouths frozen open, its orbit of drowned bones gone completely still. In the south, THE Warden of the Heart stood with its armored hand lowered at last, the white light at its center pulsing faster. At the edges of the record, fourteen Lineage heads had drawn so far back into the dark that they were barely visible.

And across the square, the thing wearing Noah’s face stood perfectly still, its gold eyes fixed on him, its own obsidian-white dream-light flickering around its feet as if it were torn between two directions.

Noah stood in the center of it all.

The seas of blue-gold cloud turned around him, and the event horizons along his arms watched everything at once.

At his left, Ruination, crimson and silver, her circlet blazing.

At his right, Ul’moreth, his hair dimmed to dull gold and his Mana sea sunk low around his feet, the eighteen Phonemes still turning slowly around his head, standing as tall as he ever had.

Emotive in front of him, her hair burning every color, somber like a blade.

THE Infiniverse behind him, her brilliance of dreaming realms spread out across the record.

And over all of them, THE Amalgamation of Dreams, its crowned skull lifted, its rings of dreams turning.

Six of them, and the dreams of everyone under him.

Noah lifted his gold eyes, with nothing in them and everything in them, and looked at what remained arrogantly, humanly, and tyrannically!

As if he was silently saying...fuck all your impossibilities!