Chapter 5911: Its Me!

Noah was falling!

There was no ground beneath him and no sky above him, only the moth’s two vast eyes, and in both of them, a man asleep on blue-gold water. The more he looked, the more real that sleeper seemed, and the more the Noah standing in the snow seemed to thin.

He let it come.

He had learned that much already after all this time. Here, force fed the thing it struck. So instead, he did what he had done in a hundred hard moments before Shinjitsu and Dreams and Kings. He breathed in, slowly and tyrannically and let himself be exactly where he was at this point in time. Everything else fell away.

HUUM!

His Shinjitsu answered!

This time, instead of flaring, it settled. The burning blue-gold went quiet and clear again, still as glass, and in that stillness, the falling slowed. His Dreaming Human Origin pulsed once beneath it, deep and steady, and Noah reached for a single memory he knew was true.

A wooden dock over cold water, a fishing line drifting, his mother’s voice telling him he was holding the rod wrong. Just like how she was teaching Seo-yeon in her Dream!

He held on to it.

|Your truth is still.|

|You have stopped falling.|

|THE Butterfly That Wakes still holds you.|

The moth’s eyes narrowed very slightly.

"You stopped," it said. Its voice filled the dark. "Most of those caught in my eyes do not stop. Most of them fall until they are a dream I am having, and then I wake, and they are gone."

"I’m not most lifeforms" Noah said as his existence buzzed!

"I know," said the moth. "I Know."

WAA!

"What are you?" Noah asked. "Not your name. What you are."

The moth drew in its great legs and settled in the dark above him, as patient as something that had always had all the time in existence.

"You have been dreaming probabilities," it said, "as if they were a sea you could wade in and wade out of, and leave no footprints. But every possibility has a shadow. Every road chosen leaves a thousand roads unchosen, and those roads do not vanish. They fall. Down and down, into the place beneath every branch, where nothing walks and nothing is walked. We call it The Fallow of Existence."

"We grow there," the moth said. "A Nightmare is what an unwalked road becomes, when it lies in the Fallow long enough and something old breathes on it. It is a dream that has learned to dream back."

"So you were something once. Before something old breathed in you. I am actually more curious about that. "

The moth was quiet for a moment.

"Once...hmm, once." it said.

"Long before your Legacies were young, a mother carried a child she never bore. A small thing. A good thing, maybe. Existence chose a different road, and the child fell into the Fallow, unborn and unwalked. Something found it there, in the dark, and breathed. And it opened its eyes for the first time, and it was me."

Snow drifted down between them. Somewhere far off, the faint ringing went on.

"Is this why you fucking chose to take on the shape of my son?" Noah said quietly.

"I wear what is most unwalked in whoever I find," said the moth. "In you, it was him. Every road where you were a father and did not father. You have so many of those, little Dreamer."

Noah’s existence pulsed again as he wss finding his Dream becoming anchored the more he remained himself and the less mysterious the Nightmare before him.

"Let’s talk some more, Little Nightmare" Noah sat down in the snow, cross-legged, as calm as if he were on the early veiled shore. The cold seeped up through him and he let it. "You said something old breathed on you. Who?"

The vast eyes regarded him for a long time.

"You want to see the hand behind the thread."

"I’m going to see it eventually. You came out of my Quantum Dream. I’d rather know what lives under my house."

Something that might have been amusement moved through the moth’s great body, a slow ripple through the black fur and the sandy light.

"Then look," it said.

And its eyes opened wider.

The sleeping Noah inside them fell away, and behind him, for the first time, Noah saw down.

Down through the moth. Down through the snow and the ash and the dark, into a deep so vast and so old that his Shinjitsu went cold just touching the edge of it. It was a lightless forest, and the trees were roads, countless roads, all of them grey and fallen and grown over, tangled together as far as any mind could reach. Things moved between them. Slow, enormus things, things with too many shapes or no shape at all!

One was a tide that ate likely futures and left existence unable to be surprised. One was a great stillness made of every death that almost happened. One was something so large and so asleep that the whole forest leaned around it as grass leans around a stone.

And in the center of it all, half-buried in the fallen roads, lay a vast grey shape, soft and patient, its wings spread over The Fallow like a blanket over a sleeping child.

Thousands upon thousands of small eyes glitered along the edges of those wings.

Moths!

Every one of them was a thread, like the one in front of him.

|THE Butterfly That Wakes is one cognizant thread of an ancient lifeform.|

|THE Grey Mother of Unwalked Roads.|

|She sleeps in THE Fallow, the deep beneath all unchosen possibility.|

|She has more threads than you have ever dreamed roads.|

|Profundity: ?????|

|THE Fallow is inhabited by others as old or older than her. Existence is vast. Existence is unfathomably vast.|

...!

Noah’s breath went out of him slowly.

"She is always...almost always asleep," the moth said. "Waking would be unkind to existence. She dreams instead, and we are her dreams, her nightmares, and we go out among the branches and gather what no one wanted, and bring it home to her."

"Why show me any of this?" Noah asked.

"Nightmare have no need for secrecy. We are grand enough as we are. And because a thing that learns what lives below either flees upward forever, or it comes down to look. Either way, it feeds us."

Noah stayed silent at these words!

The great eyes tilted as the moth smiled. "Every time you open your probabilities and run your Dream, you light a lantern in our forest. You have been lighting a great many lanterns as I...just happened to be the first to grasp the signal."

Noah sat with that.

He thought of every Quantum Dream he had run. Every branch where he had died, where Rose had collapsed, where Emotive had been torn apart, where the Fiend had crushed a girl in his palm. He had looked at each of them, learned what he needed, and let them go.

He had thought he was letting them go into nothing, but they did not fade! Even possibilities and paths not taken did not fade!

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

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

|The Nightmare’s hold is steady.|

"So what happens now?" Noah asked. "You take my memories of my son?"

"If you cannot answer me." The moth lowered itself, slowly, until the vast eyes hung just above the snow, close enough that Noah could see himself in them, asleep and very small. "It is the only question a Nightmare ever truly asks. Every other thing I said was only the asking. So I will ask it once more, and then you will answer, or you will fall."

The dust drifted down from its wings.

"Which of us is dreaming the other?"

Noah looked up at it for a long time.

He looked at the man asleep in its eyes. He looked at his own hands in the snow, glass-bright with Shinjitsu. He thought of the hundred Henrys, and the boy at a fishing dock that existed only in an unwalked road, and the tired grown man with grey in his hair. He thought of all the Noahs lying in the Fallow, the ones who had died in his glass so he could learn which road to take.

Then he understood what the question was!

The moth had built itself on the oldest thing there was: real and unreal, chosen and unchosen, dreamer and dreamed. As long as he tried to pick one side, it could stand on the other. As long as there were two, it had a place to live.

He stood up.

"You’ve been asking the wrong man," he said.

The moth’s eyes flickered.

"You asked which of us is the dreamer and which of us is the dream, as if there were two of us. As if I’m the man in the snow, and that’s the man in your eye, and one of us has to be less real so the other can be real."

He shook his head slowly. "I am THE Dreaming Human Origin. I’m not the dreamer. I’m not the dreamed. I Am the dreaming."

The snow went very still.

"The man asleep in your eye is me," Noah said. "The man standing here is me. Every Noah who died in my glass and fell into your mother’s forest is me. And every road where I stayed..."

His voice stayed steady. "That’s me too. I didn’t throw those roads away. I couldn’t have. I was never anything except all of them at once."

He held out his hand, palm up, toward the dust falling from the moth’s wings.

"You keep everything I don’t want," he said. "But you made a mistake. I want all of it."

The dust touched his palm.

He let it settle there, every grain, every almost-life, every unwalked road, and he held them as one holds water in cupped hands, loosely, neither gripping nor letting go.

"You asked which of us is dreaming the other," Noah said. "Both of us. Neither of us. You’re a road I didn’t walk, which makes you as much mine as the road I did. So here is my answer."

He looked straight into the vast eyes, at the sleeping man inside them, and the sleeping man, very slowly, opened his eyes and looked back.

"We are one dream," said Noah. "And I am the one dreaming it."

HUUM!

|Your answer has been heard.|

|The split this Nightmare stands on has closed.|

|THE Butterfly That Wakes has lost its footing.|

|Memory: fishing with Henry. Overwritten: 26% to 0%.|

|Memory: the farmland meal. Overwritten: 19% to 0%.|

|Memory: the empty seat. Overwritten: 11% to 0%.|

...!

The moth shuddered!

Its great wings trembled, and the two eyes on them blurred, and the sleeping Noah and the standing Noah overlapped in them until there was only one. The dust stopped falling. The ash stopped falling. For one long moment, the moth simply hung there in the dark above him, vast and silent, looking at him as if he were the first thing of his kind it had seen in all the Ages it had lived.

Then, its eyes flickered as it looked at another direction.

"Oh," it said softly. "Apologies for rousing you, Mother. I never expected...an answer. Much less a perfect one."

Then, far below, at the bottom of everything, in the forest of fallen roads, something stirred.

It was very slow. It was very large. A grey wing shifted, a little, over the whole of the Fallow, and a thousand thousand small eyes along its edges turned at once, all in the same direction, upward, toward a single lit lantern far above them in the dark.

Toward him.

|THE Grey Mother of Unwalked Roads has turned in her sleep.|

|Her attention is on you. Be cautious. Be afraid. Be careful in all your dreams.|

...!