Chapter 5868: Threads III

Lygara went still!

Then obsidian-gold light pulsed around her, slow and bright, rippling out across her tentacles and her chitin and her wings, and her faceted eyes narrowed, very slightly, with real interest.

|THE First Gu of Destiny is curious.|

|"Interesting."|

Her threads of hair stirred.

|"My Destiny tells me you are not lying. Very well."|

She settled lower in the snow, her vast body coiling around itself, as if making herself comfortable for a long conversation.

|"Let us exchange knowledge. Since you are so young, perhaps I can show you something you have not yet learned."|

The light around her deepened.

|"I will speak to you about...yes, about Existence."|

HUUM!

As she spoke, her Destiny moved.

Obsidian-gold light poured out of her and took shape in the snow-filled air between them, painting what she said as she said it.

|"I have seen many versions of Existence. Many lifeforms wading through it. For someone as young as you, knowledge of Existence itself will serve you well. Most never learn its true nature. Especially now, in THE Long Night, in the endless snow. Everyone has spread out their own narratives, their own weavings."|

The lips of THE First Gu of Destiny curved into something almost like a smile.

|"It is laughable."|

In the air, figures of gold light rose. Vast and grand, draped in long titles that trailed behind them like banners, striding across glittering fields of stars.

|"I watch the Immense Ones strut across the continuum. They drape themselves in magnificent titles. They stage their weavings across gigaparsecs of space. They write Narrative into the void with such frantic elegance. They found lineages and Legacies. They record their triumphs."|

The golden figures raised their arms, and their titles blazed.

|"And they are truly convinced that if they chant their names loudly enough, Existence will lean down out of the dark to applaud their arrival."|

Above the golden figures, the light formed a vast darkness, endless and empty. It was eyeless and faceless, turned toward them in no way at all.

|"But here is what a few know, and what the vast majority never learn."|

Her voice softened.

|"Existence does not watch, my young friend. It does not even have the courtesy to listen."|

In the light, a small creature lay dying in the mud of some obscure, nameless place. Beside it, an Immense One the size of whole Dimensions was crushed into frozen ash. And above both of them, a single scale formed in the gold, its two pans perfectly level.

|"Whether a short-lived lifeform withers in the mud of some forgotten Observable Existence, or an Immense One spanning whole Dimensions is crushed into frozen ash, Existence records the same weight for both. Absolute zero."|

The level scale dissolved.

|"Existence bears no malice toward our designs. Cruelty would require intention. It would require the vanity to care who stands and who is unmade. Existence is simply boundless. And terribly, beautifully deaf."|

The vast darkness in the light rolled onward, slow and endless, carrying the tiny golden figures along with it like dust on a tide.

|"It rolls on through Cycles beyond measure, entirely unaware that any of us ever dared to draw breath inside its ribcage."|

She looked down at her own threads of hair, at the gleaming strands spilling over her shoulders.

|"I am woven of Destiny itself. And yet I know my own threads are only fine embroidery on a burial shroud. A shroud laid over an empty cradle."|

In the gold, a shroud formed, rich and intricately embroidered, draped over a small cradle. The cradle was empty.

|"Every sovereign decree we write, every inevitable prophecy the ancients whisper into the dark, is only a frightened choir, singing into the void and pretending Existence cares to learn the tune."|

The golden figures in the light opened their mouths, all of them, singing silently into the endless dark.

|"Even this Long Night."|

Her faceted eyes moved up, toward the falling snow.

|"Some have begun to say it is the rage of Existence, falling on all those who wronged it."|

She laughed, softly, a dozen voices laughing at once.

|"How can Existence be wronged? It is all narratives. Everyone writes their own. Some build theirs around IT. Some around Those Who Remain. Some around those who did not."|

The golden figures faded, one by one, into the snow.

|"All of it, narratives. Existence cares nothing for me, or for you. Nor for Those Who Remained. Nor for Those Who Overcame. The Gu, Those Who Remain, Those Who Overcame...even lifeforms like Lucy, Diogenes, and Napoleon...even they are not considered much in the vastness of existence."|

...!

Noah’s existence pulsed!

He thought about everything he had heard.

THE Long Night, falling on those who had wounded existence most. The Caretaker had said that. The voice in the seat beat it out like a drum. Let nothing owed stay warm.

The prophecies. The legends. Lucy’s story, in her letter, of them leaning on IT and breaking it, and every door above breaking with it.

And the Existential Epitropoi: the Curator, the Caretaker. All of them, guardians who said they carried the Judgment of existence itself to those who had harmed it.

Was that a Narrative too?

Had someone written it?

The seats of the Long Night had been set by the same hand that turns the Long Night. And the Long Night spoke of debts, and judgment, and wrongs to be righted, as if existence itself were angry.

But if existence was beyond wronging...

If existence was blind to all of them...

Then who was angry?

Was the Long Night itself being steered by something? Something powerful enough, old enough, to dress its own will in the clothes of existence, and let every guardian and every agent and every frightened lifeform believe that this was simply how things were?

Noah’s eyes went wide.

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn!

And then he smiled.

It spread across his face slowly, and then all at once, brilliant and bright, and his gold eyes blazed in the falling snow.

What a wave of information. What a gift!

And yet...

Even this, he would treat as a Narrative. Lygara’s Narrative. A very old and very convincing one, told by a being who had watched existence longer than almost anyone. But a Narrative all the same.

His future self had told him. Trust no narrative of others.

So he would hold it, neither believed nor dismissed, and confirm it for himself, with his own eyes, his own Dream, in his own time.

Noah looked up at THE First Gu of Destiny, coiled in the snow above her sea of stars, and his smile grew wider.