Chapter 5910: Nightmare IV

Noah stood in the snow and looked at the thing wearing his son.

Something in him went very far away.

It was the view from high above where everything became pattern and nothing became panic. From there he could see the shape of it all: a Nightmare, a borrowed face, snow and ash and a voice from the bottom of a well, pieces arranged to make him feel a particular thing.

His Shinjitsu rose over him, slow and still and glass-bright, closing over his skin. Underneath it, his Dreaming Human Origin began to pulse, deep and steady, a heartbeat bigger than his own. And as it pulsed, the dark around him gave up a little more of what it was hiding.

|This is a Nightmare of Quantum Existence.|

|Behind it is something unfathomably powerful.|

|It sensed your use and alteration of countless quantum lines of possibility and probability across existence.|

|Just as you have begun to glimpse countless probabilities of your enemies, other lifeforms skilled in this field can extrapolate probabilities about you.|

|This one is a terrifying Nightmare.|

|Should you lose, or fail to clear it, it will usurp and claim every memory of every possibility it shows you.|

...!

Noah read it once, and understood.

It was going to show him Henry, every Henry, every road where his son had lived or died or waited for him at a table. And if Noah lost here, it would take every one of those memories for itself. His son’s face, his son’s voice, every moment they had ever had, and every moment they might have had, gone into the dark to feed something that kept the roads no one wanted.

Among everything else it could take, it could take his son.

His existence blazed!

The Shinjitsu around him flared from clear glass to burning blue-gold, covering him completely, every inch, until he stood in the snow like a figure cut out of a blazing star!

The ash falling near him turned to light before it touched him. Beneath his feet, the snow melted into steam.

Then he shot forward!

He crossed the distance in nothing, and his fist went through the Nightmare’s chest.

It went through easily. Too easily. Henry’s body came apart around his arm like smoke, and for an instant there was nothing in front of him at all.

Then there were a hundred Henrys!

They stood in a ring around him in the snow, every one of them a little different. One was a small boy in a too-big jacket. One was a teenager with a split lip. One was grown, tired, with grey already in his blue-gold hair. One was a body lying face-down that slowly got to its feet. All of them had the same black-sand tears running from their empty eyes.

|These are the possibilities you did not choose.|

|Every one of them is real to it.|

"Did you think there was only one of me?" a hundred voices said together. "You threw away so many roads, father. I lived down every one of them."

Noah hit them!

He went through the ring like a falling sun. Blue-gold light tore the Henrys apart, five, ten, twenty, scattering them into black glitering dust. He reached for his Dream and dropped it over the whole field like a net, as he had dropped it over Dimensions and Gaps and the Keepers’ frozen Legacy, insisting with all his truth that this place had always been his.

The snow shivered.

Then it held.

|Your Dream cannot replace this place.|

|Every possible path is closed. There is no likelier road for your Dream to make true.|

The dust he had scattered drifted back together. Henry by Henry, the ring reformed, as if nothing had happened at all.

One of them stepped forward. The grown one, with the tired face.

"You helped bring another life into existence," it said quietly. "I looked up to you. I loved you. I was your responsibility, yours to care for and to look after. And you discarded me for the next shiny thing."

Noah tore it in half.

It went on talking from the halves, and then from the Henry beside it, and then from the one beside that, the voice passing from mouth to mouth around the ring as smoothly as a cup passed hand to hand.

"How can mana be manipulated? What fantastic things does existence have for me to explore and learn? What enemies can I make? And what women can I fuck, just so I don’t have to spend a single second looking after my son?"

The voice stayed level. It stayed calm and terribly reasonable!

"You ignored me so much that you found yourself an adopted daughter, something else shiny to hold your attention, so you could forget me even more. Just how terrible a father can you be?"

...!

Noah gave no answer.

He knew what it was. It was something else entirely, a thing wearing his son’s face and reading his son’s lines off the back of every road Noah had left unwalked. He knew that. His Shinjitsu knew that. Every part of him that could tell true from false knew that!

And yet the words landed.

They should not have had any weight at all. They were lies, or half-lies, spoken by something that fed on lies. But as each one left the Nightmare’s mouth, Noah felt it reach for him, not for his body, but for his memory. It pressed against everything he remembered of Henry, and tried to make itself fit there.

|The Nightmare is imposing its words onto your memories.|

|It is trying to make them true.|

|Memory: Henry’s first words. Overwritten: 4%.|

|Memory: the empty seat set at every meal. Overwritten: 11%.|

He saw it happen.

He remembered his son’s first words, and for a moment, in the memory, he was somewhere else. The memory flickered back, true again. But it had been changed, a little, and he could feel the place where it had been changed!

His Dream roared!

He fought, and wasted nothing on argument. He tore through Henry after Henry, blue-gold light ripping through the snow in long burning arcs, and every time one fell, two more stood up out of the indentations in the snow where the bodies had lain, and the voice went on and on, always unhurried, always calm.

"Do you remember the farmland?" it asked, from a Henry with his hands in his pockets. "The meal. You set an empty seat for yourself on purpose, so we would all know you were there in spirit. Do you know what I thought, every time I looked at that chair? I thought, there he is. As always. Absent. You should have just taken the road grandfather took and become a drunkard too. Well, in a way, you are."

|Memory: the farmland meal. Overwritten: 19%.|

"And then you put me to sleep," another Henry said, almost gently. "You put all of us to sleep, for centuries, inside your Dream Engine. You called it protection. And while I slept, you went out and conquered. Tell me, father. What is human about the Dreaming Human Origin, when the humans are all asleep?"

Noah hit it so hard that the snow for a hundred meters around blew away to bare black ground.

The ground was covered in indentations.

They were Henry-shaped, thousands of them.

What was the condition? He thought it in the middle of the storm, cold and clear even while his Dream raged. Power was failing him.

Every Henry he destroyed came back, and every word it spoke pressed a little deeper into his memory. There had to be something else, a door, a condition, some truth this place was waiting for him to find.

But it gave him no time to look.

"In one road, you stayed," the voice said, very softly now, from a small boy sitting alone in the snow. "You taught me to fish. You were boring and tired and there. I was happy in that road."

The small Henry looked up with his streaming black eyes. "You threw that one away too."

|Memory: fishing with Henry. Overwritten: 26%.|

Noah stopped in the snow.

For one breath, he went perfectly still.

Then he reached out with everything he had, his Dream and his Shinjitsu and his Origin all at once, and he took hold of the one Henry in front of him, the first one, the grown one with the tired face, the one the voice kept coming back to.

This time, instead of tearing it, he held it, and pulled.

He pulled as he had pulled the Curator’s seat out of the Curator’s chest, as he had pulled the Sealed One’s existence apart patch by patch, straight down into the center of the thing, past the borrowed face and the borrowed voice, toward whatever was holding all of this together.

The Nightmare’s body split down the middle.

It tore open from crown to heels, and out of it poured light.

HUUUM!

It was stellar light, black and glittering, sandy obsidian brilliance, a storm of it, roaring up out of the torn shell of his son’s body like sparks out of a forge. The snow blew back. The ash blew back. Every Henry in the ring came apart at once into black glittering dust and was sucked into the storm, and the storm rose up and up into the dark and began to take a shape.

Wings.

It unfolded above him, vast and slow and silent, a moth the size of a mountain, then the size of a Dimension, its body a long soft column of black fur glittering with sandy light. Its legs were many and delicate and tucked close. Its antenae swept the dark like slow feathers. And its wings, when they finished opening, were not wings at all.

They were eyes!

Two vast eyes, one on each wing, dark-irised and wet and calm. And when they opened fully, Noah saw what was inside them.

Himself.

In each eye, far away, there was a small figure lying on blue-gold water in a quiet domain, asleep, dreaming. Noah, seen from the other side.

Dust drifted down from the moth’s wings, slow as snow, and every grain of it was a road no one had walked.

"Long ago," the moth said, and its voice had left Henry’s behind, "a dreamer dreamed that he was a moth. He flew, and he was happy, and he did not know he was a dreamer. Then he woke, and he was himself again, and he could not tell any longer whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a moth, or a moth now dreaming that it was a man."

The great eyes blinked, slowly, and Noah saw himself flicker in them.

"Every road you did not take is still somewhere, little Dreamer. Every life you did not live. Every son you did not raise. You think you choose. You think the road you walk is real, and the others are only shadows you leave behind. But I live on shadows. I have lived on them since before your Legacies were young. And from here, among all of them, your one chosen road looks very small. Very thin. Very easy to forget."

The dust fell on Noah’s shoulders. Each grain that touched him whispered a life that was almost his.

"So tell me," the moth said. "Which of us is dreaming the other?"

Its true power broke over him all at once.

It simply looked at him, with both its vast eyes, and in that look, Noah felt the ground of himself go soft. The domain where he lay asleep in its eyes seemed, for a moment, very real. And the Noah standing here in the snow, burning with Shinjitsu, seemed like something much less certain: a dream, a possibility, one road among countless others, and not even the likeliest.

His existence identified it at last.

|You have identified this Nightmare.|

|THE Butterfly That Wakes.|

|It is a cognizant thread of an extremely old and ancient lifeform.|

|That lifeform thrives on every dead and untouched possibility and probability in existence.|

|It feeds on the roads no one walks.|

|Profundity of the lifeform behind it: ?????|

|You are falling into its effect.|

|You are beginning to forget which of you is dreaming.|

...!