Chapter 5853: Rest II

They tore through the frozen Evergrave like a comet through the dark.

Behind them, the Unanimous Frost was gaining. Sixteen purposes in one body, cracking the land beneath it as it came, its glacial light slowing every thread of Noah’s Dream that reached back toward it. Ul’moreth’s hair hung dull gold, his Mana a shallow tide. The Amalgamation’s crowned skull was already rimed with frost.

Then the edges of the Evergrave began to disappear!

At the farthest reach of his Dream, the snow was coming in white and kept coming. A Lineage stronghold, gone. A frozen river, gone. Erased into flat white, and all of it moving inward from every side at once.

|Reading: THE Unwritten Contingency.|

|A clause written into the flow of THE Long Night by THE Curator. If the flow of this region is threatened, the winter accelerates until the region is erased, and the cold begins again.|

|The region will be erased in: ?????|

...!

Far above, the rift had sealed over, smooth and white, and every road out with it.

Only forward.

In his right hand, the coal warmed. A small relic, nothing more. At this pivotal moment... her voice came across it again!

|THE Caretaker of the Long Night speaks.|

|"Dreamer. Come down to me. Break my chains. And I will show you what my rage was for. I will reclaim my seat that was stolen and make things as they were before."|

HUUM!

That voice!

The voice of the snowy woman who had given him missions and presented Lesser Kryos to him thereafter!

In every page she had ever given him, her voice had been level. A scribe speaking to a courier.

It was raised now!

The Unanimous Frost caught them over the burning fields!

It hit like a glacier falling from the sky. The Amalgamation threw itself into its path and was torn apart, rings shattered, ribs split, the golden panda flung tumbling into the cold. Ruination’s circlet blazed, and every piece came back out of her memory exactly as it had been. Emotive’s hair went green, and her Egos reached for the Frost and slid off, again and again.

THE Infiniverse spread her weavinf of realms between them and took the next blow across a thousand Dimensions, and Noah felt three of them crack. Ul’moreth spoke countless versions of Phonemes into the cold, Time and Order and Ending, and for one breath the Frost hung still.

Noah read it!

There was no keystone! The Regent had stood on one Cause, and the Choir-Mother had been one long sentence. But the Frost had been braided by a hand that knew what Noah could do: sixteen purposes in a ring, each one leaning on the others. Pull one, and fifteen held it.

Breaking it from outside was beyond him.

So they continued rushing forth!

THE Unthawed Heart lay at the center of the Evergrave. A vast frozen sun, sunk into the floor of the Dimension like a stone in a riverbed, its light warming nothing.

Its gate was great doors of white ice. The Warden was in the Frost now, but its Refusal still lay over the doors like a skin, turning back every hand that had ever reached for the Heart.

Noah tucked the coal away, reached into his Dream, and drew out a key.

Gold. Warm. Simple. The Tide had made it with no hand at all, for a corpse given freely to a teacher.

|THE Key That Was Never Stolen. What it opens, it opens freely.|

He turned it in the gate!

The Refusal had been made to turn back thieves and the kept. Against a key stolen by no one, opening a door freely, it was helpless. The skin of it parted, and the doors swung open without a sound.

Their figures sank into the heart of this Floor of THE Undersnow.

Inside the Heart was a sea!

A basin of white ice so vast its far shore was lost in light, full of gold. Every memory the Gaunt Regent had ever drained from the dead, poured in here Age after Age. A child’s birthday, a wedding, a mother singing, a dog asleep by a stove. Warm and lost and belonging to no one.

At the center of the sea stood a column of light, and at its heart, a small hollow in the ice.

Empty.

|The Shard of THE Caretaker lay here once. It was taken a while ago. Its trace leads to THE Curator.|

...!

The Regent had drained the Rim-City for Ages to warm this Heart and reach that Shard.

Outside, THE Unanimous Frost hit the Heart. The frozen sun rang like a bell and cracked, and the gold sea began to leak through every fissure.

Below the basin, chains ran down into the dark.

Chains that should hold...THE Caretaker.

The Descent of Chains went down further than the Heart was tall. Pale chains of light, thick as towers, humming with the Curator’s cold blue script. Noah went down along them with his people close around him.

At the bottom, she was waiting!

He had only ever known her as a visage. A tall figure in a dress of frost, pages turning around her, eyes flat and cognizant and very old.

The truth was worse.

The chains went into her. Hundreds of them, wound around her arms and throat and sunk into her chest. She was thin past thinness, her frost dress in rags, a few lanterns hanging empty at her waist. Only three or four pages still turned around her, their edges curling.

Only her eyes were whole, and they were full of a rage so cold the air cracked.

|THE Caretaker of the Long Night speaks.|

|"Dreamer. Break the chains holding me. I will turn my rage on the thing that put me here, and on all the others who earned it."|

"Who earned it?" Noah asked.

|"Those who wounded existence the most."|

Her pages turned, and she said nothing more. Noetic Infinity found the rest sealed behind a wall deeper than the Curator’s. He glimpsed only its edges: a path, something breaking, hands reaching beneath it.

Even now, THE Caretaker was giving him another mission as after she was freed, she would go back to to giving him pages of who to kill and who to pass messages to.

"..."

|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency arrives.|

Existence took a step, and the Curator appeared ahead, still wearing Noah’s face, smiling an ordinary smile.

Between its finger and thumb it held a grain no larger than a grain of sand. Obsidian and gold.

Noah’s own grain of IT answered it so hard his chest ached!

|"Looking for this?"| the Curator asked. |"She dropped it. I picked it up. It wrote a very good clause."|

It tucked the grain away and looked at the Caretaker as one looks at old furniture.

|"I’ll save you some time. I have already bound and weakened her so immensely that saving her won’t matter. Break every chain, and she falls apart in your hands. My reins run through those chains, and the Contingency closes over all of us regardless. So go on. Be a hero. It changes nothing."|

Above them, the Frost hit the Heart again. Gold memory came pouring down the shaft through the cracks.

Noah tested it once. A thin river of his Dream, against the nearest chain.

The Caretaker screamed. It was a terible sound, thin and endless, and the chain drew on what little she had left. He let the beam go.

Break the chains, and they took her with them, and the reins went wholly to the Curator.

The Frost behind them, unbreakable; the Contingency closing in; the Curator above him in Dimensionality, holding the Shard of IT. And lastly...his people spent.

Every road was closed. There was no path! There was no road!

So he stopped looking at the roads.

He looked at THE Caretaker and read her with Noetic Infinity and the Dreaming Grammar together, past the rage, past the chains.

And he saw it.

Deep inside her, at the center of what was left, sat a quiet hollow carved out of the flow of THE Long Night itself, every thread of the winter in this region running through it.

The Epitropos seat.

The Curator had left it in her. Pulling it from a living Epitropos would kill her, and that killing would be felt by whoever set Epitropoi in their places. So it had bound her and drained her and ruled through her chains like a hand inside a glove.

It had drained her so far that the seat sat loose.

And it was surrounded by chains of The Long Night.

The seat was sealed, of course, locked in her as a door to this region had been locked. He looked at the lock, and then at the key in his hand that he had already used once today.

He thought for but an instant, and walked toward her.

Something moved in the Caretaker’s eyes that might have been hope. The empty lantern at her waist flickered once. Behind him, his people went still.

The Curator laughed, softly, as one laughs at a child about to touch a hot stove.

|"Go on, then. Save her. It will mean nothing, and existence will fully close around you!"|

Noah kept walking as behind them...

BOOM!

"OOOH!"

The Unanimous Frost broke into the Heart!

The great frozen sun split open from one side to the other with a sound like the end of a glacier, and the shock went out across the Evergrave for light years. The gold sea of stolen memories boiled over the basin in towering waves. Then the Frost turned toward the shaft, and came down it.

It fell into the Descent of Chains like an avalanche into a well, glacial light filling the black ice from wall to wall. One instruction burned through all sixteen of its purposes. Find the warm thing. End it.

His people closed around him as they were all inches away, sensing impending collapse as they would protect him always!

THE Infiniverse spread her stellar weavings of realms across the shaft like a roof, a thousand Dimensions stacked in layers, and the Frost tore through them one after another while her cracked realms cracked further. The Amalgamation braced itself on the chains beneath her and met the Frost head on, and the walls of the Descent split.

Every piece the Frost tore away, Ruination called back out of her memory. Emotive’s hair went every color at once as she felt the Frost’s sixteen purposes and threw them back at it, louder. And Ul’moreth spoke one stubborn sentence of Phonemes into the dark, and for the length of it, the Frost forgot which of its purposes was meant to move first.

The gold sea came pouring down the shaft through the cracks, warm and bright and lost. Noah opened his hands, and the event horizons along his arms opened with them. The falling memories bent toward him and went in. So did the cold purposes fraying off the Frost above. His seas swelled until he was full to the edges.

The Caretaker watched him from her chains.

|THE Caretaker of the Long Night speaks.|

|"Dreamer. Now. Break the chains. I will not let you down. I will share with you many more things and correct the intensity of THE Long Night here. I can banish THE Curator when I reclaim my authority!"|

Noah stepped up to her.

He looked into her flat, cognizant eyes. The eyes that had handed him three pages and found him useful.

The Curator nearby smiled and shook his head with malice!

And at such a time...

Noah plunged his hand into the Caretaker’s chest!

...!

What!

BOOM!

It went in hard!

Her cracked grey skin split around his fingers like old ice. Something beneath it broke with a dry, splintering crack, ribs of frost giving way, and black cold welled up around his wrist, thick and slow. The chains sunk into her chest ground against his arm as he pushed deeper, scraping, shrieking, and every one of them dragged on the little she had left.

Frozen splinters of her burst out around the wound and hung glittering in the dark. He kept pushing, past the ribs and the cold, down to the last thin thread that was all the Curator had left of her.

The Caretaker screamed!

It tore out of her, the sound of something that had felt nothing but cold for Ages suddenly feeling everything. Her back arched against the chains. Her few remaining pages scattered. Both of her withered hands came up and seized his forearm, clawing at it, and her nails broke against his skin.

|"Dreamer...?"|

Her eyes were wide, all their flatness gone. Disbelief poured through them, raw and stunned, and under it, pain. Real pain, the first she had let herself feel in Ages.

|"No. No... what are you... what are you doing?!"|

His hand closed around the quiet hollow at her center.

The seat!

It was sealed. Locked by Ages of her keeping, a door that answered only to the one it held. Noah brought his other hand to her chest, and in it, THE Key That Was Never Stolen.

He pushed it into the wound beside his own wrist, into the lock at the heart of her, and turned it!

|What it opens, it opens freely.|

...!

The seat opened.

With no force, no theft, and every thread whole. The lock simply gave, as a door gives to the one it was waiting for, and the hollow lay open in his grip. The key he had utilized twice shattered and turned to dust.

The Caretaker’s scream broke apart into gasps. She was shaking. Black cold ran down his arm and dripped into the dark below. Her eyes found his face, searching it for an answer, and found it calm.

Noah leaned close.

"Rest," he said quietly. "You have been in pain for so long in these cold nights."

Her clawing hands went slack on his arm.

"Rest for now," Noah said, "and dream."

Her breathing slowed. For one heartbeat the rage left her eyes, and something very tired took its place, as if she had waited Ages for someone to tell her exactly that.

Then Noah lifted his gaze to the Curator.

|THE Dreaming Human Origin speaks.|

|"Thank you for binding and weakening something I could never touch before."|

|"Remember what I said. I will simply replace existence with my Dream."|

|"This... is just the start."|

...!

Around him, his people went still as even they were shocked.

He took a path nobody had believed was even possible!

And the Curator’s smile broke. It simply stopped being a smile. The corners of the mouth fell, and for the first time, the thing wearing Noah’s face looked like what it was: something very old, watching the one move missing from everything it had written.

Then the seas erupted!

They came out of Noah in a single breath, boundless and unfathomable, a column of blue-gold so vast it swallowed the shaft and swept the Frost up it like a leaf on a flood. Up through the Heart they tore, and out through the frozen sun, and across the whole Evergrave, stitching every light year the Frost had broken. At the edges of the Evergrave, where the Contingency’s white was eating the land, the two met.

The white slowed!

THE Caretaker’s chest split open as a simple white throne bloomed behind her, and Noah carried her body with his hands in her chest as he went towards the seat!

And Noah sat down in the seat.

As he took it, he took her with it. Her dream lay at the very bottom of the seat, where she had kept it all these Ages, and he saw it whole. A stair of light going up out of the Evergrave. Every soul she had ever kept, climbing it. And at the top, a sky. Unbroken. The path above existence, whole again, as it had been before she died.

She had been dreaming of that the whole time.

Noah devoured it without any hesitation!

It settled at the base of his Tree like a lamp set down in a dark room. And as it went, she went with it. Her chains fell away, her grey skin went thin as papper, and her last pages stopped turning and drifted down into the seas.

Her eyes stayed on him to the end.

|"I always knew Existence was cruel and unfair,"| she whispered, and something in the flat old voice was almost a laugh, |"I did not expect for you to have known this as well...haha, good luck. You...will need it."|

Then she was gone, her corpse became fully enveloped in his dream and became contained within it!

HUUM!

The seat closed around him. Every snowfall, every cold wind, every kept dead in every tower in this region of existence ran through him now.

|The seat opens to you freely. Nothing was stolen.|

...!

And the Curator’s reins snapped!

BOOM!

They broke one after another with a sound like ice giving way on a lake, and the Curator staggered as if something had been pulled out of its chest.

High above, the Unanimous Frost convulsed. Its instruction ran back to its giver and found the reins gone, then ran to the seat and found the warm thing it was sent to end sitting in it. Bound to obey whoever held the seat. Ordered to destroy whoever held the seat.

It froze in place, a colossus of sixteen Immensities answering niether!

|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency is somber.|

Its hand went inside its robes, to the grain it carried there, and closed around it tight, as one holds the last thing still certainly one’s own.

|"You do not know what you have done,"| it said quietly. |"Existential Epitropos are those belonging to The Long Night. Seats promised to us. The unfairly killed. The accused. Those left behind to the cold winter. You...have no idea what you have just done."|

HUUM!

Its fingers tightened on the Shard.

Existence took a step, and it was gone!

It did not stay behind as the only wait it had chained another Epitropos was relying on schemes. Noah regained control by devouring THE Caretaker as THE Curator, however powerful he was, seemed bound by some mechanics and weavings of Existence he had not fully grasped!

After all, this being had conjured domains of his past and more, but had not directly attacked him. Why?

There were still many questions, but...

The seas settled around Noah where he sat.

Half of them were blue-gold, warm, full of drifting constellations.

The other half had turned to winter.

White. Glacial! Frost lay over the constellations of his left arm and shoulder like rime on a window. A single streak of white ran down through his hair, cold to the root. And under it all, he could feel every winter in this region of existence as if it were his own skin.

|Part of your Dream has become winter.|

|It is bound to the flow of THE Long Night.|

|It will remain so.|

...!

Noah looked down at his frosted hand, black cold still drying on it, and flexed it.

There were unfathomably many unknowns as even he didn’t knoe the outcome of his actions as for now, he closed his eyes to feel everything as he began to dream!