Chapter 5927: What is Fathomable and Unfathomable

<Ione Kalliste>

The road of falling stars ended in the dark, and Ione Kalliste stepped off it.

Behind her, the dark filled.

Dozens of them came through at once. Unfathomable Immensities in robes of white and gold, stepping out of the falling light in loose ranks, their presences settling over the Undefined Gaps.

Ilarion Vey came among them, grey-bearded and calm. Nysa Aurelle came beside him, small and golden, her cold coin eyes bright. All together, they bent the space around them until the starless dark groaned.

The front was hers alone.

She was tall and very still. Her robes were the pale blue of deep water under ice, and her hair was silver, bound simply at the nape of her neck.

Above her head floated a halo of soft blue light, a thin perfect ring that turned slowly, and behind her, in a wide circle at her back, hung nine blades. Cerulean. Long and narrow, made of nothing but light, each one huming faintly at a different pitch, so that standing near her was like standing near a choir that had been told to hold its breath.

The pressure that came off her alone was heavier than all the dozens behind her put together.

She kept it hidden, as she usually did.

She looked out across the Gaps, toward the thing she had come for.

It was very far away. Thousands of Gigaparsecs, and still she could feel it, a vast grey weight drifting through the dark, leaving frozen moments behind it like a ship leaves a wake. Crimson eyes, hundreds of them, turning lazily. A held breath the size of a region.

THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened.

Even from here, its might pressed against her skin.

Ione let out a slow breath of her own.

Once the Narratives began, the powerful began to show themselves. She had known it would happen. Every old one in existence had known it would happen. Still, it was something else to stand at the edge of the Gaps and watch a thing out of the Fallow walk past like a shadow crossing a field.

Most beings misunderstood what Immensity was.

They thought it was strength. Weight. The ability to crush, to hold, to bend. And it was those things. But at its root, Immensity was the power to direct a Narrative, and to unleash it. A small Immensity could tell a small story about existence. A grand Immensity told a grand one. An Unfathomable Immensity told an Unfathomable Narrative.

And even then, most Immense Ones only ever held a sliver of what a Narrative could be.

A Narrative alone was a single voice. Strong, perhaps. Even overwhelming. But it was one voice in an endless hall. The ones who truly mattered were the ones whose Narratives were woven into the larger Narratives now playing out across existence. Connected.

Braided into the great currents that had begun to move after THE Long Night. When a voice joined that chorus, it stopped being one voice. It became the song.

THE Shepherd of Falling Stars was one of those. His Narrative belonged to more than him. It was threaded through the whole of the Narrative of Kings and Existence itself, bound into its order, pulling on it and pulled by it. That was why she followed him.

Because she had no intention of remaining.

Those Who Remain stayed where they were while existence moved past them for whole Cycles. They held their power and kept their halls and grew old and quiet and certain. In this cycle, the ones who steered the Narratives of existence were the keys to whatever came next. Everyone else would be locked out.

So she followed a key.

And she was a key herself.

That was the part the others sometimes forgot. Ione followed THE Shepherd, and she was loyal to him, and she would die for him if the Narrative demanded it. But she belonged to herself. She had her own Narrative. It burned inside her as the nine blades burned at her back, steady and patient and very sharp.

She had asked him to let her come first.

She wanted to contest her Narrative against something obscene. Something old and wrong and terrible. Something that would test the edges of her and show her where they were.

He had agreed. THE Shepherd was careful. He wanted to know the true extent of the monster from the Fallow before he set his own Narrative against it. Let his Third Legion test how deep the water ran first.

Ione smiled.

Behind her, Nysa stepped up, her golden head tilted.

"Commander," she said. "I thought the master was coming?"

Ione kept her eyes forward.

"I will lead," she said. Her voice was soft and clear and carried easily to every Unfathomable behind her. "I will see the extent of this Nightmare myself. Behind my command this time is the master’s Third Legion."

She lifted one hand.

"The Shepherd’s Lotus."

HUUM!

Space tore open behind them!

It tore in nine places at once, nine great wounds in the dark, and out of each one, something bloomed.

Lotuses.

Nine of them. Each one vast beyond counting, a stellar body shaped like a lotus flower, its petals made of starlight and pale blue fire, each petal wider than a Dimension, opening slowly one after another into the Gaps. They rose out of the torn space in a wide ring behind Ione and the dozens of Unfathomables, and as they opened, the dark around them turned to day.

Inside them, Immense Ones stood.

They were arranged within each lotus as the parts of a great instrument are arranged within its case. At the heart of each flower, on the golden seed-pod at its center, stood two hundred Ancient Immense Ones in rings, robed in white and gold, their hands joined. Around them, on the inner petels, stood a thousand Established Immense Ones in long spiraling rows, each one a power that could end a Legacy alone. And spread across the outer petals, rank upon rank, stood five thousand Newly Risen Immense Ones, motionless, their eyes closed.

Every one of them was linked.

Ione could see it, as she could always see these things. Threads of Immensity ran from every Immense One to every other, through the petals, into the seed-pod, binding them all into one vast lattice of power. The Newly Risen on the outer petals poured their Immensity inward. The Established on the inner petals took it, refined it, wove it into their own, and poured it further inward still. The Ancients at the heart gathered all of it, every drop, and held it in a single pulsing core.

Each lotus breathed. Its petals rose and fell, slowly, in unison with the eight others. And with every breath, the Immensity inside it roiled and churned like a sea under storm, curling in on itself, compressing, pulsing outward again in waves that made the existence in the distant dark flicker.

A formation. The oldest kind. The kind that took thousands of beings and made them into a single blade.

Ione looked up at them.

A single one of those lotuses, alone, could slay an Unfathomable in seconds. She had seen it done. She had done it. And there were nine.

And all of it, every lotus, every petal, every Immense One within them, was bound together to support a single Narrative.

Hers.

That was the true terror of a Legion. The numbers mattered less, and the power less still. The focus was what mattered. Fifty-five thousand eight hundred Immense Ones, nine thousand of them Established, all of them pouring everything they had into one story, so that when that story was told, existence itself told it, striking out with its whole weight.

She would command them.

She would see what her Narrative could do with all of that behind it.

Ione turned back to the distant Nightmare, and let her Narrative wake.

It was called THE Bloom That Answers Calamity.

It was simple, as the oldest Narratives often are. Wherever there was ruin, she bloomed. Wherever there was a calamity too large for existence to bear, her Narrative rose to answer it, and the greater the calamity, the greater the bloom. She had been born in a dying Dimension, the last flower in a burning field. She had grown in every war she had ever stood in. Every terrible thing she had ever faced had made her more than she was.

And now there was something truly terrible in front of her.

Her body lit.

It began in her chest and spread outward, pale blue fire running through her veins, through her robes, through the silver of her hair. Her halo blazed. The nine cerulean blades behind her rose higher, spun faster, their humming climbing into a single clear chord. And behind her, the nine lotuses answered, every one of them flaring at once, their petals lifting toward her, fifty-five thousand Immensities bending their weight into the Narrative of one woman.

She lifted her chin and called across the light years.

"O Esteemed Nightmare of THE Fallow!" Her voice rang out across the Gaps like a bell struck in a great hall. "Might we test our power against yours?"

HUUM!

Far off, the vast grey shape stopped.

Slowly, very slowly, it turned.

Hundreds of crimson-obsidian eyes rolled toward her across thousands of light years, and Ione felt them land on her, one after another, with something she could only call amusement.

And then existence began to change.

All around them, all across the Gaps, the dark began to bloom.

Forests, rather than lotuses.

Obsidian-gold forests, rising out of nothing. Soil spreading where there had been only dark. Trees with black bark and pale gold leaves climbing up into the starless sky, light years tall. Rivers of liquid light winding between them, humming. Vines heavy with glowing fruit.

Grass and moss and small dark flowers with hearts like coals, spreading in every direction, all around the Legion, all around the nine lotuses, rising up past them in towering walls of dark gold growth.

Behind Ione, the dozens of Unfathomables looked around in silence. Ilarion’s calm face had gone very still. Nysa’s coin eyes darted from tree to tree. Inside the lotuses, thousands of Immense Ones opened their eyes and stared out through the petals at a forest that had been nothing a heartbeat ago.

Their faces were somber.

Ione remained calm.

She watched the trees rise and wondered, quietly, if the Nightmare ahead had already begun.

Her Shinjitsu rose.

It came up around her, and through it she looked at the forests, properly, as she looked at anything she truly wanted to understand.

Her eyes went wide!

The Nightmare had stayed exactly where it was.

It was still there, far off, turned toward her, amused. Its authority stopped far short of here. Its grandness had touched none of these trees.

The forests were not its doing.

They were existence.

The Gaps themselves were growing. The soil was existence. The trees were existence. The rivers were existence, humming with something she could feel but not name, a deep, slow, living pulse running through all of it, like breathing.

What Narrative could do this?

What Narrative was so potent that, instead of cutting or bending or ruling existence, it simply changed it, made it grow?

Was there another being out here? Something Unfathomable, hidden in the Gaps, as strong as she was? Stronger?

She had no answer.

Her Shinjitsu found no one. Only the forests, and the pulse, and the Nightmare far away.

And yet.

Inside her, her Narrative stirred. THE Bloom That Answers Calamity felt the forests rising around her, felt the unknown power in them, felt the vast grey thing ahead, and it pulsed. Hungry. Delighted!

Haha!

Ione felt it, and smiled again.

Whatever this was, it was large. It was strange. It was exactly what she had come for.

She let the forests rise. They had attacked no one. They only grew, and hummed, and watched.

She turned her back on them.

She pulled on her Narrative, and on the nine lotuses behind her, and on fifty-five thousand Immense Ones, and gathered all of it into her hands, and fixed every scrap of her focus on the Nightmare ahead.

And she moved!