Chapter 5923: Tepid Eerie Nightmare!

<Theon Aletheides>

Theon Aletheides had kept the Archive of Aletheia for many years, and nothing in it described anything like this.

The light came up through the snow.

It was crimson and gold, and it rose out of everything at once. Out of the terrace beneath his feet, and the Elsedimension it was carved into.

Out of the split Elsedimensions beyond, each one large enough to hold an Observable Existence in its valleys. Out of the burned gardens and the halls with their roofs torn away. Out of the old Immense Ones lying across the snowfields, beings who had each, at one time or another, held whole Dimensions in their palms, who now lifted their heads and stared at their own hands as the light ran up through them like water rising in a glass.

It was warm. He had expected something that strange to be cold.

He held the Archive close.

He had pulled it in during the worst of it, while the sky split and the nine gave their ultimatum and the black eye opened. The Archive of Aletheia was an Elsedimension of its own, a library the size of a small dimensional system, shelf upon shelf of records stretching across light-hours of quiet stone, every Narrative and lineage and treaty the Legacy had ever kept.

His Lineage had tended it since before the Sundering. When the Iron Psalm’s Totems came down, he had drawn the whole of it inward and wrapped it in his Root, as a Root Bearer does with the one thing he will not lose, and he had held it there ever since, heavy and humming against the center of him.

A Root Bearer. That was all he was, for all his years. His Immensity remained unformed. Countless years, and the door had stayed shut to him. His Root was deep and old and very, very patient, and it was still only a Root.

Now he knelt in the rising crimson light with an entire library held inside him, and looked up.

The Legacy’s Son hung in the sky above them all.

He was doing nothing.

’He is doing nothing.’

The Legacy’s Son simply hung there, robed in dark and gold that swept down into the light like a waterfall, a crown of black glass turning slowly above his head with an ember burning in its heart. His hands rested at his sides. His face was calm. One eye shone gold and one shone black, and both were looking down at the Legacy with no more effort than a man looking at a field from a hilltop.

And yet.

Theon opened his Root’s senses fully and looked again, properly, as he had been taught to read a damaged record, thread by thread, across every light year of the Legacy at once.

Every stream of crimson light rising out of the Legacy bent, very slightly, toward the figure in the sky.

All of them. Every Elsedimension, every hall, every garden, every one of the old Immense Ones. Billions of threads of light across hundreds of light years, rising out of each and leaning toward the Legacy’s Son, passing through him, through the robe and the still glass-bright film that lay over his skin, and only then out and onward into whatever waited beyond.

Lifting was the wrong word.

The whole Legacy was passing through him!

’Correction,’ Theon recorded, and felt his Root tremble around the Archive. ’He is doing nothing and yet...Everything is passing through him.’

Around him, the Legacy began to rise.

It went slowly, gently, as if a great careful hand were cupping it out of a river. The Elsedimensions drifted up first, whole and broken alike, mountain-realms the width of galaxies lifting free, their snow sliding off their slopes in sheets light-days long. Then the halls, their burned beams groaning. Then the gardens, every frozen forest lifting with its roots still wrapped around its soil. Then the people.

Theon felt himself go light.

His feet left the terrace. The Archive inside him grew weightless for the first time in twenty-three thousand years, and he held it tighter, his whole Root closing around it, terrifed it would slip away from him into the light.

Above him, Elder Moriarty rose too, his Immensity trailing behind him like a torn cloak of night. His face was turned toward the Legacy’s Son with an expression new to Theon.

Below, the frozen statues of the Iron Psalm stayed where they were. A thousand faces in crimson glass, turned up toward the eyes of the thing that had frozen them, left behind in the sky like a forest after a fire.

And far off, behind their wall of gates and pale fire, the nine Unfathomables of the Iron Psalm turned their heads, all at once, and watched an entire Legacy lift itself out of their dominion and vanish into crimson light.

All nine stayed where they were.

Theon understood that, too.

’They could not see where it was going.’

Then the light took him.

---

He opened his eyes in another existence.

The sky was crimson glass, and it went on forever. Across it, slow rivers of light ran in every direction, each river wider than the Legacy had been, and in the rivers, faintly, Theon saw writing. Lines of it, moving, scrolling past at a speed even his trained mind could barely follow, in a script older than anything in his Archive and somehow, impossibly, familiar.

Records.

The whole sky was made of records!

The Legacy had settled beneath it. Every Elsedimension, every hall, every garden, arranged almost exactly as it had been across its hundreds of light years, but whole now, the cracks in the mountain-realms sealed with seams of crimson light. The snow was gone. The air smelled of rain on a vibrant forest.

And standing at the edge of the terrace beside him, looking out across it all, was a woman made of crimson glass.

She was tall. Her hair fell to her waist in long moving strands of red writing. A circlet sat on her brow with a single small steady sun in it. Her eyes scrolled.

Theon could feel what she was, as any Root Bearer feels how deep the water he stands in runs. He reached for the bottom of her with his Root, carefully, out of old habit.

There was no bottom. Only more records, going down.

She turned and looked at him, and then lower, at the center of him, where his Root held the Archive of Aletheia wrapped tight.

"You brought records relating to The Legacy?" she said. Her voice was calm, and a little pleased.

"I... yes. All of it." Theon’s voice wavered. "Forgive me. When the Totems came, I did not know if there would be anything left to keep it in. Who... are you?"

"Ruination," she said. "This is my existence. You and the rest are welcome in it."

Her scrolling eyes rested on his Root. "You did not need to carry that. I have it already. Every record in your Archive. Every record in every archive in your Legacy, kept since the moment it was...well, since a while ago."

The writing in her eyes paused, briefly. "But I understand why you did."

Theon stared at her.

Countless years, his Lineage before him for Ages more, all of it spent keeping one library from crumbling. And she had all of it?

He looked up at the sky full of moving writing that went on forever, and at the woman made of crimson records, and he didn’t even know what to think!

Just what the hell was all this?!

---

<THE Dreaming Human Origin>

Noah watched the last of the Legacy settle into Ruination’s existence and let out a long, slow breath.

Done.

Every Elsedimension of it had gone through him. Every hall. Even the unactivated statues hidden below the folds of the Legacy that seemed to all hold power at Ancient Immensity, and maybe Unfathomable if all of them combined together.

All of it now lay in a Ruined Quantum Existence!

He glanced at the shocked Immense Ones who would acclimate soon as he prepared for questions, and he also saw Ruination overseeing everything while talking to the one weak Lifeform who had been brave enough to speak against Unfathomables when he was not even Immense.

When he looked at this lifeform, at this Theon...he saw that his Dream held more potential than even other Immense Ones!

There would be no harm in helping such a dream flourish. So he sent him a message.

’Your dream was braver than Ancient Immense Ones. Do you want to become a True Dreamer?’

...!

He saw the weak thing turn towards him and tremble as in the next instant, while others had begun fumbling around...

"Yes, Sir!"

Theon shouted loudly as Noah’s waves of Dreams...well, and a bit of nightmares flowed towards him.

---

<Aethon Pyrrhaeus>

Aethon Pyrrhaeus hated pretenders.

The weak, he could forgive. The weak were honest. A Root Bearer who trembled before an Unfathomable was only telling the truth with his body, and Aethon had burned his way down to the plain truth of himself long ago. He could respect a trembling thing.

What he despised were the strong who wore weakness like a borrowed cloak.

And that tepid, eerie fucker had worn it the whole time!

Aethon held his fire across the sky and thought about it, because thinking was easier than looking at what he was holding back.

The Held Breath pressed against his flame from every side. Grey glass, crimson at the rims, a whole tide of frozen almost-deaths rolling out of the Fallow behind that monstrous old thing as it wandered off into the Gaps. Every instant it touched him, it reached for the moments he had nearly died. There were not many. He had burned most of them away. But it reached anyway, patient and endless, and his fire had to keep moving, keep burning, keep refusing to be still, light year after light year of it, a wall of clean pale flame between the Nightmare and what was left of the Iron Psalm.

Behind him, the Ancients huddled. A few dozen. Brunhild held her gates beside him. The bell rang and rang. The chain dragged. Every one of the nine was spending Immensity like water, and it was barely enough.

A passing breath. That was all this was, to the thing that had made it.

And the Tepid Eerie Nightmare had opened the door for it.

Aethon replayed it again, as he replayed every battle, coldly, step by step.

Zero Immensity, down to the last thread. The Totems had read nothing. Brunhild’s full weight had gone through him like light through smoke. Nine Unfathomables had struck him together, and his Nightmare had come back out of its own ash.

Then he tore a door open with his bare hands, and stepped aside to let something older than most Kings crawl out.

And all the while, he had radiated nothing at all, neither pressure nor weight. A small burned figure in a cracked crown, looking at Unfathomables like they were just...any other lifeforms in existence!

Playing weak. To nine of them!

Aethon’s flame crackled, once, very quietly.

He had sent an account. All of it. The Totems, the eye, the fall of the ranks, the door, the old thing. He had sent it the moment the Fallow opened, because some things a Hand leaves for his King to decide.

The answer came now.

It came up through the iron gate locked over his existence, the gate he had chosen, the one he had knelt for, and it filled him from the inside.

’Movements of another King have been sensed in that region. Another Narrative is exerting its presence there.’

Aethon’s flame went very still.

’Consider this field lost. Do not contest it. Observe. Report what unfolds.’

’Above all, watch the Legacy’s Son. The one you call the Tepid Eerie Nightmare. Find out what he truly is.’

...!

The voice withdrew. The iron gate over his existence settled, humming faintly, as a bell hums after it has been struck.

Aethon lowered his veil a fraction and looked around.

Gates. Fire. Grey glass. A sky full of a thousand frozen faces that had been his people an hour ago.

And below, where the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity had lain for Ages, there was nothing at all.

An empty hollow in the new region, light years wide. Clean space, smooth and empty, free of rubble or ruin, as if the whole Legacy had been lifted out of existence like a stone from a riverbed.

And the fucker who had been playing weak had gone with it.

Aethon looked at the empty place for a long time.

Observe, his King had said.

Fine.

But observe what?