Chapter 5874: A Narrative Spreads!

In a far reach of THE Infinite Carcosa, the seas of Infinity lay still beneath the snow.

They stretched across the region for gigaparsecs, a vast and silent expanse caught somewhere between water and light. Their surface held every number at once. Small infinities lapped at the shores of greater ones, and the greater ones rolled out toward tides so large that no lifeform had ever measured where they ended. Snow fell onto them, heavy and endless, as it fell everywhere now, and sank beneath their surface without a sound.

The seas were old. They had a story, but that was for another time.

And on their eastern shore, something rose!

It climbed up out of a tear in the dark, an obsidian Giant!

A Kirtimukha!

One of THE Faces That Devour Glory!

It stood at the edge of the seas of Infinity, and lowered its head, and opened its jaws.

They opened wide. Wider than a jaw should open. Wide enough to swallow an Observable Existence.

And it began to drink!

The seas of Infinity poured into its mouth in a long, steady current. The snow went with them, swirling down into that black throat in great white spirals. And with every swallow, something else went too. Something lighter than water and heavier than stone. The story of the seas. Every legend that had ever been told about them, every name they had been given, every belief that had settled into them over the Ages, all of it pulled loose from the waves and drawn down into the Giant’s jaws like silk drawn into a spindle.

The seas were part of a Narrative. So was the snow.

And THE Kirtimukha devoured Narratives!

It drank for a long time. The shoreline crept backward. Light years of Infinity drained away into it, and where the seas had been, the seabed lay bare and grey and strangely ordinary, as if it had forgotten it had ever been anything more.

Then someone came down from above.

She descended through the falling snow like a single white feather, slow and straight, and where she passed, the snow parted around her and left her robe untouched. It was a simple robe, white and unadorned, belted at the waist with a plain cord. Her hair was black and bound back tightly. Her face was young and grave, with the stillness of someone who had spent a very long time listening.

In her right hand, she carried a sword.

It was long and narrow and plain, its hilt wraped in worn grey leather, and when she drew near, existence itself began to hum around its edge. A low, steady note, like a bell struck once and left to ring.

Her name was Ilvana. She was THE White Edge of the Continuum, an Established Immense One of THE Legacy of THE Infinite Continuum.

She had crossed here first as a student eons ago, carrying her master’s sword. After her master died, she had stayed.

Ilvana stopped in the air a short distance from the Giant and looked at it, at the long black current of Infinity pouring down its throat, at the grey dead seabed spreading out behind it.

|THE White Edge of the Continuum speaks.|

|"What are you?"|

Her voice was quiet, and very clear.

|"And what are you doing in lands held by THE Legacy of THE Infinite Continuum?"|

The Kirtimukha kept its silence.

Its eyes stayed closed. Its head stayed lowered. It simply kept drinking.

Ilvana’s grip tightened on her sword.

Then the Giant moved!

WUU!

It moved faster than she could see. One moment it was hunched over the seas, jaws open, and the next its fist was already in front of her face, a mountain of black stone filling the whole sky.

She raised her sword as it burned with an Immensity of Infinity!

The fist struck the flat of the blade and the shock went through her like a breaking bridge. She was hurled back across the seas, tumbling through the snow, her robe torn, blood bright on her lips. She caught herself a hundred light years away and stood in the air, and her eyes, for the first time in three Ages, went cold.

Slowly, she lifted her sword in both hands.

And Infinity answered her even more!

It came up out of the seas around her, out of the snow, out of the very fabric of the region, and poured into her blade. Many Infinities, all at once. The small, countable ones that ran along the edges of things. The vast ones that sat beneath them, uncountable, impossible to list. And the ones beneath those, larger still, absolute, stacked layer upon layer down through every Dimensionality she had ever touched, each one so much greater than the last that the one above it vanished into nothing by comparison.

Every one of them flowed into her sword.

They compressed, pressing down into the narrow length of the blade until the blade became a single line of Immensity so dense that existence bent around it, the snow curving inward toward it like water toward a drain.

|THE White Edge of the Continuum roars!|

|"Cut!"|

She swung.

The stroke went out across the seas in a line of white so bright that it erased the dark on either side of it. It cut through the falling snow and the air and a hundred light years of space between her and the Giant in less than a breath, and it carried every Infinity she had ever learned along its edge, each one cutting at its own scale, all at once!

The stroke struck the Kirtimukha full in the chest.

And it stopped.

The Giant stood in the snow with the line of white pressed against its obsidian breast, and nothing happened. The white flickered. Strained. Then it began to crack, long fractures spreading through it, and from the point where it touched the Giant’s chest, the light was being drawn inward, pulled down into the black like the seas had been.

It was eating her stroke!

Ilvana understood a single heartbeat too late.

The Kirtimukha swung its arm once, casually, as a man brushes snow from his sleeve, and the backhand caught her across the whole of her body.

She flew!

Gigaparsecs. Tumbling end over end across the drained seabed and the still-full seas beyond it, through falling snow, past Dimensions that shuddered as she went by. Her Immensity split along its length with a sound like a glacier calving. Her body nearly followed it, one shoulder torn half away, her ribs caved, her sword spinning out of her grip and away into the dark.

She hit the snow at last and slid to a stop!

She tried to rise.

Her body got as far as her knees.

She was still reaching out for her sword, still drawing a thin breath to call it back to her hand, still trying to understand what had just happened, when the light around her dimmed.

A shadow fell across her.

The Kirtimukha stood behind her.

Its crossing of the gigaparsecs she had flown had been beyond her feeling. It was simply there, vast and black and serene, its eyes still closed, and before she could turn, before she could lift a hand, before she could adapt in any way at all, its enormous palm closed around her.

It lifted her up.

For a moment, she hung there in its grip, a small white figure in a black fist, her torn robe stirring in the snow.

Then it squeezed!

It crushed her like a tomato!

An Immensity!

Oh!

There was no other way to see it. A wet, sudden burst, her body collapsing inward in its grip, blood and light and torn white cloth spraying out between its fingers and falling into the snow below. Her Immensity broke apart in its palm like an egg.

And then the Kirtimukha opened its hand, and inhaled.

What was left of her drifted up off its palm. Her Narrative, rather than her body. The story of THE White Edge of the Continuum: the student who carried her master’s sword, the guardian, the eleven Immense Ones she had cut down, the three Ages. All of it rose out of the wreckage in faint silver threads and was drawn into the Giant’s mouth, and swallowed, along with the shattered remains of her Immensity.

Her sword lay somewhere in the snow, gigaparsecs away.

Her story was gone, every word of it. There was nothing left to tell.

The Kirtimukha lowered its head, and turned back toward the seas, and opened its jaws once more.

|...!|

That was when the roars came!

They boomed down from above, enormous and furious, shaking the snow out of the sky. Through the clouds, figures descended. One. Four. Seven. Established Immense Ones, every one of them blazing with Immensity, and every one of them carrying the same signature she had carried. Infinity. Countless Dimensionalities of it, coiled around their bodies like armor.

And behind them, slower, heavier, something else descended.

An Ancient Immensity!

Its weight pressed down on the region like a falling sky, and the seas of Infinity rose up to greet it in great rolling waves, every number in them answering to the one who had come.

The Kirtimukha stopped drinking.

For the first time, it lifted its serene obsidian face toward the sky!

Such a grand weaving unfolded in THE Infinite Carcosa as it was not the only area where thus unfolded, and across existence...the Narrative of a Halfling with less than 100 years of life left to live unfolded!