Chapter 5852: Rest I

|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency waves both hands, and speaks.|

|"Lifeforms look out at the snow and think it is just a grand disaster. They think THE Long Night is only a bad cycle of existence. Very few understand what has actually settled over their heads."|

|"When shapes begin to walk out of the drifts, they scream and they call them Night Lifeforms. You can... consider them agents. Hands sent into the yard to do a job. An ax doesn’t hate the timber it splits, and the winter doesn’t hold a grudge against the grass. It just sends its workers to clear out whatever went cold."|

|"I can control that agency. I hold the reins now. When the dark steps forward, it only walks where I tell it."|

...!

The hands moved, and the air answered!

Blue runes bloomed out of nothing, one after another, each one as wide as a house and sharp as frost on glass. They hung in rows across the whole record, turning slowly on their own. Noah could read every one of them. Each rune said the same few words in a different grammar.

Gather. Bind. Answer.

THE Drowned Margrave’s eyes went blank first. The grey glass of them cleared, and then there was nothing in them at all, only pale, polished ice where a drowned noble had once looked out at the living.

Behind the armored visor of THE Warden of the Heart, the white light died. What replaced it was a flat icy blue, the color of a glacier at the bottom of a sea.

Far out at the edges of the record, the fourteen Newly Risen Lineage heads opened their eyes. Every eye among them went the same blank, icy blue.

Snow rose!

It lifted off the floor of the record, off the frozen walls, off the flakes still hanging in the air. It gathered into long white currents, and the currents became rivers, and the rivers ran from one Immense One to the next. Fourteen of them, then the two Night Lords. The rivers doubled back on themselves and drew taut, humming, until the whole ring of Immensities was tied together by threads of white.

Then the rivers pulled!

The Immense Ones began to drift toward one another. Slowly at first, then faster, their rivers of snow shortening and drawing them in toward the empty center of the square, where the Gaunt Regent had come apart in grey threads not long before.

Far below, across the Evergrave, the drifts began to move. Shapes rose out of the snow, grey and tall, their eyes burning a cold blue. Noah could feel them standing up, one after another, in the Rim-City and the frozen land beyond it. Forty million, his Dream said. More rose with every breath.

Noah watched all of it with pupil-less gold eyes, and stayed perfectly still.

|This is a shamanic rite of THE Long Night.|

|Its purpose: to bind every Immensity aligned under THE Long Night into a single circle, and to fuse their Causes into one purpose.|

|Those bound within it: THE Drowned Margrave. THE Warden of the Heart. Fourteen Newly Risen Lineage heads.|

|Those answering to it: the Night Lifeforms of the Rim-City, forty million kept dead, their Roots bound through the snow.|

|Within each Immensity, countless purposes are wound together. Within this rite, every one of them is being made to answer to a single giver.|

|The giver: THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|

...!

He followed one of the rivers back to its source. It ran into a Lineage head, a giant of cracked cinders with an iron brand for a head. Its purpose had been the Regent’s for Ages, a hunt without an end. The Regent lay in grey threads now, but the purpose had carried on, and someone had begun to unwind it and wind it again around a new name. Every thread he followed told the same story. Sixteen Immensities, each one an old purpose, each purpose now leaning toward the same hand.

He could see the end of it. Sixteen Immensities braided so tight that no thread would be left to pull. One purpose, and that purpose heavier than any of them.

Stopping the rite from outside was beyond him. He could see that clearly, too.

So he sent his Dream into the braid!

His body answered first. Blue-gold seas gathered in his chest and compressed until they churned at the thickness of a hand, then spilled down both arms. Along them, event horizons opened one by one, black and ringed in gold, each one drinking the cold that poured back off the braid.

Then the beams went out. Narrow and sharp as needles, blue-gold lines driven into the countless threads of Causes that ran through each Immensity. Where a beam struck, a purpose shivered, and a small knot of cold came loose. Another beam, then another, a thousand, then more than he could count, each one tugging a thread a fraction to one side. The braid began to loosen at its knots.

|Dreams: driven into the braid.|

|Destabilizing: the countless threads of Causes within sixteen Immensities.|

|Result: the knots are loosening. The braid still holds.|

|The fusion will complete. Its product will be heavy.|

...!

He reached for his own next!

His Dream closed around Emotive first, and her hair flared white as he drew her in. She asked him nothing. Ruination’s circlet burned brighter, and her crimson and silver shape stood at his side in a single step. THE Infiniverse’s stellar coat of dreaming realms swept inward, and her vast calm settled behind him, close enough to touch.

His pupil-less eyes stayed on the braid for one more breath.

Then they left it!

They turned away from the rite, down through the snow and the frozen walls, toward the one thread in the whole record that had been left unbraided. The coal in his right hand was burning. From it ran threads of white-red light, thin as hair, streaming down through the record toward the center of the Evergrave, toward the Heart, toward a place beneath it where chains had once closed.

|Information: flowing through the Caretaker’s coal in your hand.|

|The Caretaker of the Long Night. An Existential Epitropos, given charge of the flow of THE Long Night in this region of existence. A Provenance Lifeform who was killed from The Breaking during THE First Sundering and swept by THE Long Night since then.|

|Held beneth the Heart, in chains that are THE Curator’s doing.|

|Her rage: ?????|

|Her cold: ?????|

|Her coal still answers to her. It knows the way down.|

...!

|THE Dreaming Human Origin turns his gaze from the rite, toward the Heart, and speaks.|

His voice boomed out behind him, carried back across the record on his power!

|"Fights can be won in many different ways. A loss for you... can also be the Existential Epitropos you locked away."|

|"I wonder how cold the rage of THE Caretaker is?"|

HUUM!

He sent his thoughts out next, quick and sharp.

Ruination, Emotive, THE Infiniverse, and Ul’moreth followed!

Behind them, the colossus of fused dreams lifted its crowned skull. Within its open ribs, the golden shadow of the panda opened its eyes.

CRACK!

The walls of the first dungeon split like paper. The black water rose into the air in one long sheet and tore apart. Noah drove his Dream forward, and all of them went with him: a streak of blue-gold and crimson and every color Emotive burned, obsidian-gold hair pouring out behind Ul’moreth, the Amalgamation’s rings of dreams spinning like wheels of fire. They shot through the cracked walls and out into the snow, tearing through the rows of blue runes and shatering them!

|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency laughs once more.|

The laugh came after them, bright and delighted.

|"What a foolish endeavor!"|

As the words left it, existence took a step!

It made no sound. The whole of existence shifted, one enormous pace of it, and when it settled, the Curator had left the spot where it had stood. Where it had been, snow fell straight through the air, untouched by anything at all.

Behind them, the rite closed.

The braid tightened into one. The snow rivers snapped taut and vanished into a single body, and the air went still, then cold, then colder than anything Noah had felt.

And all around the record, existence froze!

Glacial stellar brilliance poured out of the air, pale blue-white light that neither flickered nor warmed nor moved. Every falling snowflake hung inside it, lit from within by a light older than any star Noah had ever read. The walls froze, and so did the black water. The blue runes stopped mid-turn. Even the rings of the Amalgamation slowed, grinding, as if they had been pushed into deep ice.

Noah’s threads met the stillness at the edge of his Dream, and every one of them moved slower than he meant it to!

|The braid is complete. Sixteen Immensities have become one purpose.|

|Name: THE Unanimous Frost. A single fused purpose, woven from the Causes of THE Drowned Margrave, THE Warden of the Heart, and fourteen Newly Risen Lineage heads.|

|Its Immensity: ?????|

|Its measure: ?????. Heavier than any single Immensity you have faced.|

|All surrounding existence is frozen by its presence.|

|It is hunting.|

...!

|THE Unanimous Frost roars.|

HUUUM!

The sound came out of the freeze as sixteen voices braided into one. Its body rose out of the place where the Immensities had met, a shape made of many. A cinder-cracked brand of iron. Mirrored plates that reflected nothing warm. A veil of old frost trailing for miles behind it. A drowned noble’s coat frozen into armor, with a white light burning at the center of an armored chest. All of it wound together into one vast, moving whole.

It turned toward Noah and his forces, and it came.

Noah read it as it moved. Sixteen purposes bound into one body, and every one of them now carried a single instruction: find the warm thing standing against the cold, and end it. The instruction had been written by a hand that was already gone.

It tore through the frozen light faster than anything that size had any right to move. Something utterly heavy and unfathomable charged across the record, and it was hunting them!