Chapter 5897: Let It Snow! I

Noah chose his road with care.

THE Long Night.

He had swallowed a sliver of it, and that small taste had shown him what it was: a Narrative, the first and loudest of this Cycle, laid over every Existence like snow. And Narratives, he had decided, were fuel. The question was how much of this one he could eat, and what it would cost him.

He thought about his seat.

|Your Epitropos seat has been fully devoured and remade by your Shinjitsu.|

|It is your own now. It no longer answers to the flow.|

|As an Epitropos whose seat is his own, you may act freely against another Epitropos.|

And there was another Epitropos very close by.

THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency. THE Faceless Immense One. Its domain sat around THE Keepers of Existence, and the Long Night’s snow stopped politely at the Keepers’ borders because of some deal it had made with them.

Noah wanted to know what that deal was.

He stepped into a new window.

|Quantum Dream 4 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 1%. THE First Unveiling.|

|Goal: what unfolds if you eat more of THE Narrative of THE Long Night.|

|Hour 1: You turn your Epitropos seat inward and follow the flow of THE Long Night beneath THE Keepers of Existence.|

|The way opens for you. It opens for very few.|

The glass darkened around him!

His dream-self went down through the flow of the Long Night, through cold and dark and falling snow, and came out underneath the Keepers’ Legacy into a place that looked like the bottom of existence turned upside down.

It was the Curator’s own Undersnow.

Far overhead, the underside of the Keepers’ Legacy hung like a ceiling, and from it, roots dangled down into the dark, thousands of them, pale and thick and twisiting, the roots of every lifeform that lived above. The snow here fell upward, slow grey flakes drifting from the frozen floor toward that ceiling of roots, and the air was so cold it felt solid.

And everywhere among the roots, the Hollow Night lifeforms were feeding.

They were tall and thin and blank-faced, but these ones were heavier. They gave off waves of something like Immensity, false and hollow and hungry. Some of them hung from the dangeling roots and chewed.

Others stood around great figures chained in the snow, Immense Ones from the Keepers’ Legacy with their eyes half closed, and drew slow pale streams of power out of them like sap from a cut tree.

Noah looked closer at the roots.

Each one ended in a small sleeping shape, a Root Bearer from above, curled up and dreaming. The Hollow Night lifeforms were biting down on the Roots themselves, eating them one slow mouthful at a time.

|These are Hollow Night Immense Ones.|

|They are eating the Roots of Root Bearers and harvesting the Immensity of Immense Lifeforms belonging to THE Keepers of Existence.|

|With every Root they eat, their Immensity grows more real.|

|This is the pact.|

|THE Long Night holds back from THE Keepers of Existence. In return, THE Keepers of Existence give THE Curator their lesser members, quietly, a few at a time.|

|THE Curator is using them to raise his own forces.|

|His purpose: to one day take more Epitropos seats.|

...!

Noah’s dream-self stood very still in the upward snow.

It was vile. It was quiet and vile. The Keepers sat in their eternal spring above with plum blossoms falling, and underneath them, their weakest were being eaten alive to buy that spring.

Then the dark at the center of the Undersnow moved!

|THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|

|THE Faceless Immense One.|

|In his own domain, THE Curator holds Ancient Immensity.|

|THE Long Night guards his domain. Very few can enter it unless he allows them.|

|THE Keepers of Existence were allowed.|

|You were not. You entered anyway.|

|He holds the Shard of IT that once belonged to THE Caretaker.|

The Curator rose from the snow.

He was tall, wrapped in long grey robes that dragged through the upward snow, and where his face should have been there was only a smooth, blank surface like a fresh sheet of paper. In one long hand, he held a small bright stone. When he turned his blank face toward the place where Noah stood hidden, Noah felt it look straight at him.

Noah let the dream try the simplest road first.

|Branch A: You strike THE Curator directly.|

|Minute 1: You strike. Your blow lands.|

|Minute 2: In his own domain, he holds truly powerful Ancient Immensity. THE Long Night also answers him fully here. The snow itself turns on you.|

|Minute 3: He writes a single line with the Shard of IT as he erupts with all his power.|

|Your Shinjitsu is grand as you surprisingly survive against such a terrifying force, bjt eventually, you succumb. You have died.|

|Branch A has collapsed.|

The glass shuddered and reset!

Noah breathed out slowly. A straight fight inside the Curator’s own Undersnow, with the Long Night on the Curator’s side and a Shard of IT in his hand, was a quick way to be erased. He would need to take the Curator’s home away from him first.

And he knew something that ate Narratives!

|Branch B begins.|

|Hour 1: In THE Chrysalis, your other body turns to Lifthrasir.|

In the glass, the Ossuary appeared, quiet and grey, with Lygara’s citadel looming behind it, and Lifthrasir sitting where she always sat, small and calm, with Kir One and Kir Two standing on either side of her like two black mountains.

"I need to borrow Kir One to eat something," Noah’s other body said.

Lifthrasir looked up at him, unsurprised.

"To eat what?"

"A Narrative. A small one, living inside a much bigger one."

Lifthrasir smiled.

"It is always hungry," she said. "Take it. Bring it back fuller than it left."

Kir One opened its eyes!

|Hour 2: You open a pathway through your Epitropos seat, straight into THE Curator’s Undersnow.|

|Kirtimukha One steps through.|

In the glass, the upward snow of the Undersnow split open, and Kir One came through it like a mountain walking through a door.

It was vast and obsidian, its faces carved into its body from head to foot, and a faint black film of Shinjitsu clung to it like oil. Its eyes were open. It looked around the Curator’s domain slowly, at the chained Immense Ones, at the dangling roots, at the feeding Hollow Night lifeforms with their false and borrowed power.

It looked at the Curator last.

"Are you alive?" it asked.

The Curator raised his Shard.

Kir One began to eat before any answer came.

|Hour 2, Minute 5: Kirtimukha One devours the strand of The Narrative of THE Long Night that guards THE Curator’s domain.|

|THE Curator’s domain is no longer sealed.|

|Hour 2, Minute 9: Kirtimukha One devours the borrowed Narrative inside the Hollow Night Immense Ones.|

|Their Immensity collapses. They fall.|

|Hour 2, Minute 14: Kirtimukha One devours a title: THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|

|THE Curator’s hold on THE Unwritten Contingency weakens. Its narrative is being eaten away rapidly.|

|THE Curator’s Immensity drops below Ancient.|

The Undersnow changed!

The cold thinned, and the upward snow stopped and hung in the air, uncertain, as if it had forgotten which way to fall. Around it, the Hollow Night Immense Ones dropped from the roots like dead leaves, their false power torn out of them and swallowed. Meanwhile the pale streams being drawn from the chained Keepers’ Immense Ones snapped and flickered out.

And the Curator staggered!

He was still strong, terribly strong, but the ground under him belonged to someone else now. He lifted the Shard of IT in his long hand and began to write, fast, the bright stone scratching lines of light through the air in front of his blank face, lines that declared what was true, lines that tried to make his domain obey him again.

Kir One ate those too.

Every line the Curator wrote, Kir One swallowed before it could finish being true. The Curator wrote faster. Kir One ate faster. Each line was a little shorter than the one before it, and each one came out a little weaker, and the Shard burned brighter and brighter in the Curator’s hand as he poured more and more into it, and still the lines came out half-written and were gone.

|THE Curator is weakened.|

|He is still holding the Shard of IT.|

|He is pouring everything he has left into it.|

Noah stepped out of hiding!

He came through the stilled snow quietly, his Shinjitsu still as glass around him. The Curator’s blank face turned toward him, and for one moment, the faceless thing simply stared.

"You?!" it said, in a voice like paper tearing.

"Me!" Noah said.

He plunged his hand into its chest!

His fingers went through grey robes and cold flesh and on into the deep center of the Curator’s existence, where the Epitropos seat sat like a stone at the bottom of a well, and he closed his hand around it.

|You have reached THE Curator’s Epitropos seat.|

|You begin to claim it.|

|THE Narrative of THE Long Night flows toward you through his seat.|

|You are eating a far larger portion of THE Long Night than before.|

...!

The cold came up his arm like a river, the whole weight of the Curator’s piece of the Long Night pouring into him through that seat, snow and debt and winter and old, old darkness. His Shinjitsu met it and began to sort it, setting down what was borrowed, keeping what could be his. The Curator shuddered around his arm, and the Shard of IT in its hand dimmed.

And far above, through the ceiling of roots, plum blossoms began to drift down into the Undersnow for the first time.

|Beyond this moment, the probabilities grow too murky to see.|

|Quantum Dream 4 has ended.|

...!