Chapter 5866: Threads I

Noah lifted the burning pen to the blank page and wrote.

The blue-gold flames followed the tip across the gold, and he spoke the words aloud as they formed, his voice low and steady in the dark of the Descent.

"There are lifeforms existence cannot weave around. It must weave toward them."

The first line burned itself into the page, and the page shuddered.

"Wherever such a one walks, chance leans. Strangers meet who never would have met. Old enemies take the wrong road and arrive at his door. Lost things surface at his feet."

His hand slowed. The pen grew heavy, as if every word pulled against something enormus.

"The threads of every life nearby bend. Slowly. Gently. Inevitably. Until they run through his hands."

The flames around him roared higher, and the white throne behind him groaned.

"Existence has known very few of these. It knows one now."

He pressed the tip down for the last line, and it felt like pushing a mountain uphill with a single finger.

"And it has begun to bend."

HUUM!

The page blazed!

Light poured off it in a wave that rolled out through the Descent of Chains and up through the ruined Heart and away into existence, and Noah felt it go. Felt it go out of him!

His knees buckled.

He caught himself on the arm of the white throne, and the burning pen slipped from his fingers and dissolved into sparks before it hit the shallow seas. His breath came out of him ragged and white, and his arms shook. Across his bare chest, his constellations, blazing a moment ago, dimmed to a low, tired glow, and the horns of radiance above his brow flickered like candles in a draft.

This was the most tired he had ever been. This was the tiredness of a man who had carried something too heavy for too long, and set it down, and found his arms still trembling. It went down and down, into his Tree, into his Dream, into the deepest parts of him, places that had always felt bottomless.

Writing the first page had cost him. Writing this one had nearly emptied him as infinite waves of his dreams began to generate once more!

He lowered himself back onto the cracked throne, slowly, and let his head fall back against the white stone, and closed his eyes.

Emotive was on her feet before he had finished sitting.

She came to him through the shallow seas and knelt again at his side, close, her hands resting lightly on his knee. Her hair had gone a soft, worried blue.

On the page before him, the gold rolled itself up into a second scroll. It closed. A seal of blue-gold flame bloomed across it, dimmer than the first, as if even the seal were tired. And the prompts came, slowly, one after another.

|Your Narrative has been written: THE One the Threads Bend Toward.|

|Existence has accepted it.|

|From this moment, chance will lean toward you.|

|The threads of lives near yours will bend, slowly, until they cross your path.|

|What you need will find you. So will what you do not.|

|Allies and enemies alike will be drawn in.|

|Some threads have waited a very long time to be pulled.|

|They have begun to move.|

Noah read them with his eyes half-closed.

Some threads have waited a very long time to be pulled.

He disliked how calmly that was said.

But he was too tired to worry about it. Every part of him ached, a deep, satisfied, honest ache, and the third page had already bloomed blank in the air before him, and he left it there, unlooked at. Lifting a pen now was beyond him, even if his existence depended on it.

One had to know his limits as he couldn’t enact another grand narrative for a while.

He only sat on the throne, and breathed, and let Emotive’s warm hand rest on his knee, and felt the new Narrative settling into existence around him like snow settling onto a field.

For a while, everything was quiet.

Truly, just seconds passed.

Then something pulsed!

Noah’s eyes opened.

It came from far away. Very far. So far that his Dream, stretching out now across all of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity and the Undefined Gaps beyond it, barely reached the place it came from. A single, slow pulse, rolling in from somewhere outside his charge, outside time itself, and passing through the surrounding existence like a ripple through still water.

It touched existense.

It touched his Dream.

HUUM!

Noah sat up straight on the throne, his tiredness forgotten for one sharp moment.

The pulse had a feeling to it. He could sense it now that it had found his dream. It was vast and old, and it moved like a thread pulled taut across an enormous loom. And under all of that, unmistakably, something he had least expected.

Curiosity!

The prompts came.

|THE First Gu of Destiny has sensed a uniquely emerging Narrative.|

|It predates THE First Sundering. It sits at the Weave. It wants nothing.|

|It holds its own Existential Narrative, and it has felt a new one pull at the cloth.|

|Its weavings have stretched across existence to find the source.|

|They have found glimmers of your dream.|

|A message has been sent.|

|THE First Gu of Destiny invites the source of the emerging Narrative to its home.|

|The message carries no hostility.|

|It is filled, almost entirely, with curiosity.|

|Invited location: THE Ossuary of Unspun Fates.|

|Within THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering.|

|A region where destinies that never came to pass are laid to rest. Their threads hang from the dark by the countless millions, cut short, swaying, each one a life that was meant to happen and stayed unborn. Their bones are spindles. Their silence is very old.|

|The First Gu of Destiny keeps them. It has kept them since before the Sundering.|

|It would like to meet the one who has begun to unleash an unknown narrative.|

...!

Noah sat very still.

The First Gu of Destiny!

Older than the Sundering. Strands in the cloth of existence itself, rather than things sitting upon it.

The very moment he wrote that threads would bend toward him, one of the oldest thread of all had bent.

A slow smile spread across his tired face.

THE Ossuary of Unspun Fates. A graveyard of destinies that stayed unborn. Inside THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering!

The threads were already bending, and all around him, slowly, gently, inevitably, existence had begun to bend!

He got up from his throne as it seemed another trip to THE Chrysalis was due. And he wondered just how many more changes his own narrative would cause to bloom!