Chapter 5902: Ideals and Dreams!

<Existential Interlude- THE Lamp That Would Not Turn>

An ideal is a promise a lifeform makes to itself about what it will be, no matter what happens around it. It is easy to keep in fair weather. It is only tested in the storm. And the storm always comes!

Long ago, at the far edge of a small Dimension, there lived a Lifeform who kept a lamp. It stood on a black cliff above an endless dark sea, and every night the Lifeform climbed the cliff and lit the lamp so that anything lost in the dark could find its way to shore. It had made itself one promise when it was young: the light would burn for everyone who needed it, whoever they were.

For a long time, that was easy.

Then war came to the Dimension.

The first army came up the cliff and said, "Turn your lamp away from the sea. Our enemies sail at night. Let them drown."

The Lifeform said, "The light burns for everyone," and the army burned its house to teach it a lesson.

The second army came up the cliff and said, "Turn your lamp toward our enemies’ camp, so we can see them sleeping."

The Lifeform said, "The light burns for everyone," and the army took its children away to teach it a lesson.

The third army came and said nothing at all. It only stood around the lamp with its spears and waited, to see how long a single lifeform could hold a light alone.

The Lifeform held it.

It held it through the burning and through the empty house and through the long, childless nights. It held it while both armies cursed its name. Every night it climbed the cliff, older and thinner and more alone, and lit the lamp, and let it shine for everyone.

The war lasted a hundred years.

When it ended, every ship that had ever been lost in that dark sea, friend and enemy alike, had found its way to shore by that one stuborn light. And when the survivors of both sides came up the cliff at last to thank the keeper, they found it sitting beside the lamp, dead, its hands still cupped around the flame.

Its name was lost with the war. The light was what they remembered.

The lamp was still burning.

---

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND stood behind Noah, smiling, and Noah’s mind moved faster than it ever had!

He was wearing an Ancient. He held THE Verdant Regard completely, every root and every eye, and she was a tool unlike anything he had ever held. An Ancient Immense One, injured, but still an Ancient. And standing within arm’s reach of her, completely at ease, was a being who had trusted her, through her whole long existence, to stay meek.

How best to use her?

In the space of a single instant, before the Fiend’s next breath, Noah opened his Infinite Quantum Dream.

|Quantum Dream 6 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 2.1%. True Order III.4.|

|You hold THE Verdant Regard completely.|

|Goal: use THE Verdant Regard against THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.|

The blue-gold glass rose around him, and in the nearest window, the frozen orchard waited.

|Branch 1 begins.|

|Second 1: You let THE Verdant Regard turn toward THE SLEEPLESS FIEND as if in welcome.|

|Second 2: He steps closer. He suspects nothing.|

|Second 3: You pour your Shinjitsu into her dream, and through her dream, into her Immensity.|

In the glass, THE Verdant Regard rose from the base of her plum tree with a soft smile, one hand still pressed to her wounded chest, and the Fiend came toward her, easy and amused.

Inside her, Noah was pouring!

Her Immensity held zero Shinjitsu. Every root of her Regard, every eye in her garden, every thread of ownership she had planted across the Ages, all of it had always been borrowed weight, power she had taken and only ever held on loan. Now Noah ran his own truth through every bit of it, and for the first time in her whole existence, her Regard became real.

|Your Shinjitsu runs through THE Verdant Regard’s Immensity.|

|For the first time, her Regard holds truth.|

|Her borrowed weight becomes, for a moment, her own.|

|Her Immensity compresses and sharpens.|

|THE Verdant Regard stands stronger than she has ever been.|

Her wound sealed itself in a line of gold. Her Immensity, which had lain over her orchard like a heavy blanket, drew in tight and dense and burning, and every frozen tree in her garden burst into green and then into gold, and her eyes, still carefully green on the outside, blazed bright beneath.

|Second 4: She strikes.|

THE Verdant Regard’s hand plunged into THE SLEEPLESS FIEND’s chest!

It went in deep, through his shroud of Causes, through the murmuring vigils, into the center of him, and her Regard went with it, a thousand true roots of ownership driving into the Fiend’s existence all at once and trying to make him part of her garden!

For one heartbeat, the orchard went perfectly silent.

Then the Fiend looked down at the hand in his chest.

He smiled.

His usual easy grin was gone. This one was cold, and slow, and very interested.

"What are you?" he asked softly. "You are not that weak whore."

His ever-open eyes narrowed. "What is this?"

|Second 5: THE SLEEPLESS FIEND erupts.|

His shroud split open!

The murmuring vigils tore apart like old cloth, and behind them was something new, something far beyond an Ancient, far heavier, far older, a weight so vast that the Verdant Regard’s newly sharpened Immensity suddenly felt like a child’s toy. For a single breath, through the gap in his shroud, a glimmer of something leaked out that made the whole glass window tremble.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND is not standing at Ancient Immensity.|

|A glimmer of Unfathomable Immensity leaks through his shroud.|

|His true Profundity: ?????|

He took the Verdant Regard apart in one smooth, unhurried motion.

Her arm came off first, still buried in his chest, and he plucked it out and dropped it in the snow. Then her roots, every true root Noah had just given her, torn up in great tangled handfuls and crushed to green dust. Then her Immensity, peeled open like the rind of a fruit, and he reached straight into it, past her wound, past her garden, into the deepest part of her Domain of Immensity where she kept the thing she loved most.

He drew out Minerva!

The girl was still unconcious, small and pale and curled in on herself, her severed Root frozen in ice beside her. The Fiend held her up in one hand and looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the Verdant Regard’s face, carefully, watching for anything at all.

And he closed his hand!

Minerva was gone. There was a sound like ice cracking, and a little dust of green and gold drifting down through his fingers, and nothing else.

THE Verdant Regard’s face stayed perfectly blank.

Noah was wearing it. Making it move had slipped his mind entirely.

The Fiend watched that empty face for a long, long moment.

"No reaction at all," he murmured. "Not even for her."

He tilted his head. "So this is possession."

He leaned closer, his eyes bright and very awake.

"Who has the capability to possess an Ancient so cleanly? Who are you?"

A thin smile returned, sharp as a blade. "My true enemies should know better than to come against me this way..."

|Second 7: THE SLEEPLESS FIEND finds your thread inside her.|

|Second 8: He follows it.|

|Second 9: Your existence collapses.|

|Branch 1 has ended.|

...!

The glass went dark, and Noah sat in it, very still, and looked at what he had just seen.

He went over it coldly, piece by piece: the Fiend’s strength, the glimmer of Unfathomable behind the shroud, the speed of him, how he had followed the thread back in two seconds flat, and how he had crushed his own daughter purely to watch for a reaction, then read everything he needed from the lack of one.

That was the true face of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND. Noah kept every detail of it!

Then the glass showed him one more thing.

|Branch outcome: a cost.|

|You held THE Verdant Regard’s dream completely.|

|Her dream was the dream of a mother.|

|You used it as a weapon. You ignored it completely. You did not even try to fulfill it.|

|This goes against what you are: THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|To dream is to live the dream, not only to hold it.|

|Assimilation Rate, if this road is walked: 2.1% to 2.0%.|

...!

Noah read that prompt twice.

He had worn her dream like a glove, and he had ignored what it was for. A mother’s dream, and he had left her face blank as stone while her child died in front of her.

That was the wrong road.

He let Branch 1 go, and turned to look at another road.

What if he steered events differently, and still kept the weapon? An Ancient Immense One was too useful to throw away. He cared very little for the Verdant Regard herself. She had fed children to her daughter and called it love. But her power, her Regard...all of that could always be useful.

What if he held her dream, and simply erased who she was?

Empty her of the mother, and there would be nothing left to betray. Only an empty Ancient, waiting for whatever he wished to put inside her.

|Branch 2 begins.|

...!