Chapter 5924: Existence I

The Legacy was settling.

Noah stood on a terrace of crimson glass inside Ruination’s existence and watched it happen. Below him, across hundreds of light years, the Elsedimensions of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity hung beneath a sky made of moving records, whole again, their cracks sealed with seams of red light.

Old Immense Ones walked their own halls with the slow, suspicious steps of beings who had woken up in a house they recognized and only half believed. Moriarty paced a ridge far off, his Immensity coiled tight around him, arguing with THE Thinker about something. On a quiet slope, wrapped in a cocoon of gold and black, Theon slept, his Root drinking in the Dream Noah had given him.

And at the Legacy’s heart, in a long silent row, stood the statues.

THE Ruined Quantum Existence was truly grsnd.

Ten times THE Infiniverse. A sky of records that went on forever. An existence that had grown out of a core he had once barely understood, and had kept every possibility it ever touched, and was now holding an entire Legacy like a seed in warm soil.

Remarkable!

Then he turned his attention inward.

The Nightmare face was still on.

He had left it there on purpose. The robe of dreams and nightmares still swept around him. The obsidian crown still turned above his head, its gold ember burning. One eye gold, one eye obsidian. When he looked at himself, he saw both at once, and neither seemed false.

A few days ago, his Assimilation Rate had been 2.1%. Now it was 5%. He had crossed a threshold. He could see beneath robes, dream Nightmares, raise them. In the span of time it took a Root Bearer to brew a pot of tea, he had become something that made Ancients seem manageable.

Fast. Very fast!

And Shinjitsu. He had stopped thinking of it as a power some time ago. It was more like a way of standing. A stillness that let everything around him be exactly what it was, so that he could see it, and so that the truth of him could stand beside it, steady.

The film over his skin was still as glass, and through it now ran veins of obsidian alongside the gold.

It felt like a window that had finally been cleaned on both sides.

Outside, beyond Ruination’s existence, the weave of things was moving.

He could feel it through his Dream, stretched thin across the new region. THE Shepherd of Falling Stars, preparing a road across the Gaps for an army on its very first march.

The nine of THE Iron Psalm, standing watch over a smooth empty hollow. The Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened, wandering. THE Grey Mother, asleep! Well, maybe she had gone back to sleep.

Every one of them was stronger than him.

Every one of them had trouble seeing what he was.

That was the advantage. In any room he entered, someone else was stronger. He was simply the hardest thing to grip. Immensity slid off him. Totems read nothing. Nightmares he could answer. Where others would have been crushed, he survived. Where others survived, he took something away with him.

He liked it.

He liked being a Nightmare. The face suited the moment, and the moment was long. He would keep it. And so long as he kept doing what the old Noah would have shied away from, grand and strange and slightly terrible, his Narrative would keep bending toward him, and existence would keep paying him for it.

Hm.

So. The Gaps!

His attention drifted outward again, toward the stretched places.

When the Fallow broke through and existence expanded, his Dream had been pulled wide with everything else, and there were holes in it now. Thin places. Patches of the Undefined Gaps where the new space had grown faster than his Dream could follow. Some of them had been touched by the Fallow as it spilled through, and they sat there in the dark like bruises, grey and soft and half-real, neither empty nor full, faintly smelling of old leaves.

He had been filling them, alongside his Kin. Replacing them, one after another, with his Dream.

He reached for the nearest one, out of habit.

And his attention slipped.

He was tired, perhaps, as a mind is tired after a long day of very large things. Or he was still half-watching Ruination, still half-amazed. Either way, he reached for the grey patch idly, not quite deciding to.

Replacing it slipped his mind.

He simply let his authority touch it.

His pure authority, the authority of THE Dreaming Human Origin in its Nightmare state, slipped out of him and into the grey patch as warmth leaves a hand laid flat on cold stone. It went in gently, with no push and no overwrite, and stayed, and spread.

The grey patch shivered.

Then it drank.

It drank his authority as dry ground drinks the first rain after a long season, all at once and deeply, and as it drank, it changed. The grey softened. The soft places firmed. The half-real dark of the Fallow-touched gap began to take on a texture.

And then it gave something back.

It rose out of the patch in a fine slow mist. Dark and gold, sandy and glitering, the color of his own Nightmare light, but rawer. Newer. It had no shape at all. It was possibility before possibility, the stuff a Nightmare is made of before anything breathes on it and gives it a face. It drifted up out of the gap and across the light years toward him, and it came straight into him, through the still glass of his Shinjitsu, into the center of him.

His Shinjitsu took it.

There was none of the slow, careful work of breaking something down, none of the grinding effort of setting down what was borrowed and keeping what could be true. His Shinjitsu simply opened, and the mist went in, and it fit. It fit as if it had been made for him. It settled into him and became him in the time it took to breathe out.

|Your Authority has entered a gap of existence influenced by THE Fallow of Existence.|

|You have given it. You have not replaced it.|

|The gap has received your Authority.|

|It has released Nascent Nightmare Essence.|

|Your Shinjitsu has absorbed the Nascent Nightmare Essence.|

|Compatibility: unfathomable.|

|Value: greater than fully breaking down an Established Immense One.|

...!

Huh? What???

Noah stood very still on the crimson terrace.

Greater than an Established Immense One.

From a bruise in the dark. From a patch of half-real nothing he had been about to overwrite like a stain on a floor.

What... was this?

He turned his full attention to it.

The gap was still there. It stood unreplaced. It was the same patch of Fallow-touched existence it had been a moment ago, grey and soft at its edges. But now it felt different. Warm, faintly, where his authority had gone in.

Connected to him, as surely as anything his Dream had ever replaced. He could feel it as plainly as his own hand.

And as he watched, another thin thread of that dark-gold mist rose out of it, slower this time, smaller, and drifted toward him.

It was still giving.

Oh?

He reached for a second gap, carefully this time, deliberately. A small one, a few light years across, grey and bruised.

He gave it a little of his authority. Only a little, a single drop.

The gap drank and shivered, and gave back a thin breath of essence, smaller than the first, but there.

He reached for a third gap and did what he had been doing all day. He replaced it. His Dream rolled in and overwrote the grey, and the gap became his, entirely, a piece of his Dream where the Fallow-touched dark had been.

He compared them.

The replaced gap was his. Completely. It held his Dream, it answered to him, it was connected to him exactly as the other two were.

But it was silent. It gave nothing back. It was a room he owned with no one living in it.

The given gaps were his too, just as connected, just as close.

But they were still themselves. Still faintly grey, still Fallow-touched, still carrying the strange soft nature of the place they had been. And somewhere inside that nature, his authority had taken root, and the two had grown into each other, and the thing they had become was breathing. Giving. A thin, steady trickle of Nascent Nightmare Essence, rising out of them and coming home to him.

The same connection. A different kind of life.

Noah’s eyes narrowed.

He wanted to understand this more as he felt like he was on a cusp of something pivotal!

So he reached for a fourth gap, and this time he wanted something. He pushed his authority into it hard, as he would push a Nightmare onto an enemy, and as he pushed, he thought about the essence. About how much more of it he could have. About how it had tasted. About Established Immense Ones and how many of them this was worth.

The gap took the authority.

It gave back almost nothing. A faint, thin wisp, grudging, like a field that had been plowed too hard and salted.

|You have given your Authority with grasping.|

|Existence has received it, and returned little.|

...!

Noah looked at that prompt for a long moment.

Oh?

He experimented more!

He let go of the wanting. He let it go completely, as he had learned to let go in the moth’s dream, and he reached for a fifth gap with nothing in his hands at all.

He thought about his family. A fishing line drifting. His mother telling him he was holding the rod wrong. He thought about his son, asleep in the Dream Engine before any of this. He thought about what it felt like to give something to someone because they needed it, and for no other reason.

And he gave the fifth gap his authority like that.

This time, instead of drinking, it bloomed.

The grey patch filled with light from the inside, dark gold and obsidian, and its soft edges firmed into something like soil, and out of that soil, impossibly, small things began to grow. Tiny obsidan flowers with gold hearts. Thin black grasses that moved in a wind no one could feel. A low hum began to rise out of it, faint and steady, and in the hum, if he listened very closely, there was something that sounded almost like his name.

And the essence came.

It rose out of the fifth gap like steam off a warm field at dawn. A tide, rather than a trickle. It came across the light years and into him and fit into him perfectly, and behind it came more, and more, a slow and steady flow that kept on coming.

|You have given your Authority freely.|

|Existence has received it fully.|

|Your Authority and this existence have melded.|

|This existence remains itself.|

|It now carries an identity related to you.|

|It is generating Nascent Nightmare Essence.|

|It will continue to generate.|

|It gives back to you.|

...!

What...the hell had he just stumbled across?