Chapter 5925: Existence II

Noah stood on the crimson terrace, motionless, for a long time as his mind became filled with understanding and profundity!

Below him, the Legacy went on settling. Moriarty went on pacing. Theon went on dreaming in his cocoon. The sky of records went on scrolling forever.

His eyes were elsewhere.

He was looking at five small grey places in the dark, light years away, and at one of them blooming.

"I have been replacing existence," he said aloud.

His voice was quiet. There was no one near enough to hear it except Ruination, everywhere at once around him, and she said nothing.

"Since the beginning. My Dream rolls over a place, and the place becomes mine, and whatever it was before stops being. A Gap becomes my Gap. A Dimension becomes my Dimension. The Legacy, all of it, replaced, long before today."

He looked at the replaced gap, silent and his. "It works. It has always worked. It made me strong. It made me safe."

He looked at the blooming one.

"But a replaced thing is finished. It is mine, and it is still. It is a room I own with no one living in it. I...have been building an empire of empty rooms."

The hum from the fifth gap rose faintly in the dark. The obsidian flowers turned toward him.

"And this." He was quiet for a while. "This was there the whole time. Every place I ever replaced, I could have given to instead. I could have let it stay itself, and let it learn me, and grow into me, and become something that was both of us at once. It would have been mine all the same. More mine. Because it would have chosen to be."

He thought of the Iron Psalm. Iron gates over existences. Kneel and keep your homes.

He thought of himself, over the Keepers. Over the Verdant Regard. Over a hundred fallen Immense Ones drawn into a black eye.

"Most of the powerful things in existence take," he said. "Kings take. Immense Ones take. I take. We pull existence into ourselves, or we pull ourselves over existence, and we call the result strength. And it is strength, yes. But it is the strength of a man who eats his seed grain because he is hungry today."

He let out a long breath. "Existence will let you take from it. It will even let you replace it. It is generous that way. But if you give to it, truly give, without reaching for what comes back..."

The fifth gap breathed out another slow tide of dark-gold essence, and it came home to him.

"...it gives back. Oh, it gives back!"

He laughed, very softly, once.

"I am a Nightmare," he said. "I have spent the last day making Immense Ones afraid and closing gates forever and tearing doors into the Fallow. And the most frightening thing I have learned in all of it is how to...give."

He was quiet again.

"There are so many paths across existence. I keep forgetting that. I find one road that works, and I walk it until it is the only road I can see. Replacing is a road. It is a good road. I will keep walking it when I need to. But it was never the only one."

His eyes, gold and obsidian, rested on the blooming dark. "You can replace existence. You can devour it. Or you can give to it, and let it give back, and become something it recognizes as...part of it."

HUUM!

Existence was vast and cold and nocaring, right?

It didn’t care for Narratives or Immense Ones. But did it not care for itself? And what would happen when someone actually cared for existence instead of...taking from it?

...!

He thought of the Dreamer and the Devourer parts of him.

"The Devourer would ruin this," he said quietly. "The moment I reach for what comes back, it stops coming. Existence can tell. It can tell the difference between a hand that gives and a hand that is pretending to give so it can take."

A faint, grim smile bloomed. "Of course it can. I can tell. Why would existence be any less wise than me?"

His Shinjitsu pulsed, slow and deep.

|You have grasped a path.|

|Existence can be replaced. Existence can be devoured. Existence can be given to.|

|When Authority is given freely and is truly in tune with existence, the two meld.|

|The existence you give to keeps its own nature.|

|It grows an identity related to you.|

|It is connected to you as fully as any existence you replace.|

|It gives back to you, continuously.|

|Condition: it must be given, not grasped. Existence returns little to a hand that reaches.|

|Your Shinjitsu finds Nascent Nightmare Essence unfathomably compatible.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin: a new way of standing in existence has opened. Its full extent: ?????|

...!

Noah read every line, slowly, and then read them again.

Then he lifted his gaze and looked out across the stretched Gaps.

They went on for billions of light years in every direction. Grey and bruised and Fallow-touched, thin and half-real, countless thousands of soft dark places he had been meaning to overwrite one by one, as a man paves a field.

Where he had once seen empty space, he saw soil.

So much soil.

Oh!

Oh!!!

A slow, grand smile spread across his face, and the obsidian crown above his head turned once, very slowly, its gold ember brightening.

He had been dreaming too small again.

He needed to go big!

Noah stood at the edge of Ruination’s existence, where her crimson sky met the stretched dark of the Gaps outside, and opened his hands, empty, wanting nothing.

He simply let go.

His Dreams went first. Blue and gold, the old color of him, the color of a sky over a field. They came out of his chest and his palms and the still glass of his Shinjitsu like water finding its level, slow at first, and then easily, and then endlessly. His Nightmares came with them. Obsidian and gold, sandy and glitering, the newer color, the color of the crown above his head. The two flowed out of him together, braided, neither leading, and he left them free to go wherever they would.

He gave them no instructions at all.

That was all of it. That was the entire technique, if it could be called one. Give. Let go. Watch.

The Dreams and Nightmares rolled out into the Undefined Gaps.

They went out across the near dark first, the bruised grey places he had been meant to fill, and instead of overwriting them, they sank into them, as rain sinks into a field, and the grey drank, and the grey changed.

He watched it happen across light years.

The soft half-real dark firmed. It went from grey to brown to black, a rich obsidian black shot through with veins of gold, and it was soil. Real soil, or something existence was willing to call soil, dense and warm and faintly glittering. And in it, things began to grow.

Small things first. Thin black grasses that leaned toward him. Tiny flowers with obsidian petals and hearts like coals. Moss, gold and dark, creeping across the new ground in slow glowing tides.

Then larger.

Trees rose. Tall, slow, dark-barked trees with leaves of pale gold that moved in a wind no one could feel, their roots running down into the obsidian soil and their branches reaching up into the starless dark. Between them, rivers began to run, thin bright rivers of somthing like liquid light, winding through the new forest and humming faintly as they went. Vines climbed the trees, heavy with fruit that glowed like lanterns. Over all of it, faint and steady, rose a low hum, a sound the whole forest made together, and in it, if he listened, was something very close to his name.

It went on, light year after light year, then hundreds, then thousands.

The Gaps were blooming!

|Your Dreams and Nightmares are flowing freely into existence.|

|You have given them no direction.|

|Existence across the Undefined Gaps is receiving them.|

|It is changing.|

|Soil is forming. Growth is beginning. Rivers are running.|

|This existence remains itself. It is becoming more than itself.|

|It carries an identity related to you.|

|Tended Existence: spreading. Extent: thousands of light years, and growing.|

|Nascent Nightmare Essence returning: continuous.|

...!

It came home to him Quintessentially. The essence rose out of every new forest and every new river and every patch of obsidian soil, all of it, a slow vast tide drifting back across the light years, and it fit into him as breath fits into lungs.

He kept his hands open.

That was the thing. He could feel exactly how much was coming back, and he made himself look at the forests instead. At a single gold-leafed tree, a few hundred light years out, leaning in an invisible wind. At a river splitting around a black stone. At the moss.

They were beautiful.

That was enough!

All this time. All this time, he had been treating existence like a house to be bought and redone. And existence had been sitting here, patient as soil, waiting for someone to simply give it something!

But he knew there were conditions and limitations. He just had not realized them yet!