Chapter 5930: Awakening II

Thousands of Gigaparsecs out, at the edge of the battle, a figure moved through the forest.

It was hard to see. It was hardly there at all. A shape of obsidian and gold, half made of the same dark-barked trees and humming rivers it walked among. When the forest swayed, it swayed. When the rivers of light ran fast, it ran with them. When the wind that nobody could feel moved the gold leaves, it moved too.

A piece of Noah. The rest was still on a crimson terrace in Ruination’s existence, and in a snowy little town in a forgotten Dimension, and spread thin across a hundred thousand bloomed Gaps. This piece had simply grown up out of the forest he had given to, and now it walked.

And watched.

Ahead of him, the battle filled the dark.

He could feel it pulling on everything.

Half of existence nearby was leaning toward the Nightmare.

The other half leaned toward the Legion.

Toward the nine lotuses and the woman with the halo. A bright, hot, upward pull, fifty-five thousand Immensities gathered into one point and burning so hard that existence itself bent toward them to look.

And between those two pulls, his forest stretched, groaning, every root taut.

That alone should have been terrifying enough. Two forces large enough to tilt a region of existence.

But what truly enlightened him was something else.

The Nightmare was still not serious.

He could see it clearly. Tens of thousands of Immense Ones, their whole strength braided into one Narrative, a formation as old as Legacies, an Unfathomble Commander at its head, hurling everything they had at it.

And the Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened was... playing.

Fucking playing!

It fought in a way that made one’s skin crawl.

It held, rather than struck.

Its grey glass rolled forward across the dark in long slow waves, and wherever it touched the edge of the Legion’s light, the light stopped. Completely stopped. A spear of cerulean fire as long as a Dimension froze in midair, mid-strike, and inside it, faintly, a moment appeared. The spear’s own almost-death. The instant it had nearly gone out, long ago, in some forgotten fight. And it was held there. Forever. A frozen spear of light with its own near-ending trapped inside it like a fly in amber.

Then the glass reached the outer petals of the nearest lotus.

The Newly Risen there stayed silent. Screaming takes a breath, and the Held Breath took breath first. They simply stopped. One by one, rank after rank.

Their own near-deaths, pulled up out of them and pinned in front of their faces.

And held.

The petals they stood on began to crystalize. Grey glass crept across the lotus from its outer edge inward, crimson at the rims, and as it spread, eyes opened in it. Crimson-obsidian eyes, small at first, then larger, blinking open in the frozen petal, turning to look inward at the core where the Ancients stood with their hands joined.

Noah watched one lotus begin to turn grey from the outside in.

And the thing doing it was giving the fight only half its attention!

Then the Legion answered.

HUUM!

Ione Kalliste raised both her hands.

The nine lotuses rose with her. Every one of them, all at once, petals lifting, cores blazing. The frozen lotus shuddered as its Ancients poured everything they had outward against the creeping glass. And from all nine, Immensity roared inward, ring by ring, Newly Risen into Established into Ancient into core, and from the nine cores, out, in nine blinding rivers of blue fire, straight into the woman with the halo.

Her Narrative answered.

THE Bloom That Answers Calamity!

The greater the calamity, the greater the bloom.

And this was a very great calamity.

She grew!

Her presence, rather than her body. It swelled out of her in a vast blue corona, petal after petal of cerulean light unfolding from her back, from her shoulders, from the halo over her head, until she hung in the dark at the center of a lotus of her own larger than all nine of the others combined.

Her nine blades left their circle and flew, each one stretching as it went, becoming a river of falling stars, nine great streams of white-blue light pouring down out of nowhere onto the advancing glass.

Where they struck, the glass shattered.

Frozen moments broke loose. The trapped spear of cerulean fire burst free and finished its strike. The Newly Risen on the outer petals gasped, and moved, and lived, their near-deaths cracking apart in front of their faces like old ice. The small crimson eyes in the petals squeezed shut and went dark.

And the bloom went on blooming.

For a long moment, across thousands of Gigaparsecs, the dark was a field of blue flowers fighting a frozen sea.

Noah watched it, his figure half-lost among the swaying trees.

Beautiful!

Terrifying, too.

And still, deep under all of it, the pulse moved, slow and steady, carrying both of them.

He raised his hand.

The piece of him that walked in the forest looked down at its own palm, obsidian and gold, half made of bark and light.

He could feel the power moving through it.

More than his own. His Dreams and Nightmares, yes, his Shinjitsu, eight percent and still as glass. But also the forest. The soil. The rivers. Every tree he had given to, giving back.

Every Gap he had tended, humming.

He was connected to it all.

Connected, rather than ruling or owning. A part of the vastness, moving with it. It was very different from his nature of conquering and fealty and tyranny!

His recent advancements had made one thing very clear to him.

For the longest time, he had wanted power.

All of it. As much as he could take.

He had told himself why, many times, usually after something had nearly killed him. Because one day, something too powerful would appear. Something that would look down at him and his mother and his son and his daughter and everyone he loved, and decide they should die. And he would be powerless, with nothing to stop it. He would be an ant under a falling boot, watching the sole come down.

So he had done everything he could to keep that day from ever coming.

Climbed. Devoured. Fought. Replaced. Taken. Grown faster than anything should grow, again and again, until Kings knew his name and Unfathomables kept missing him.

And through all of it, he had told himself one other thing.

That one day, when it was over, he would rest.

He would find some quiet corner of existence. A little land. A house. And he would farm. Grow things. Sit on a porch somewhere in the evening with his family and watch the sun go down over a field he had planted himself. That was the final dream. That was what all of this was for.

When everything was over and done.

But.

He looked out at the battle. At a Nightmare older than most Legacies, playing with an army. At a King’s Legion that had marched for the first time in Ages because of a monster he had let out. At forests in the Gaps that had been nothing a week ago. At a sky full of shut iron gates over a hollow where a Legacy had been.

He had learned a great deal about existence in a very short time.

It was old. Unimaginably old. Older than he could hold in his mind. It had been turning for Ages and Cycles before he was born, and it would keep turning long after. And in all that time, it had stayed unfinished.

There were Those Who Remained, and Those Who Overcame. There were Nightmares and Dreamers and Gu and Kings and things that slept in the Fallow and things still beyond his imagining. Every one of them pulling on every other. Every conflict giving birth to the next. Every weave of existence tangled into countless others.

It would go on forever.

The day when everything was done would stay forever out of reach.

If he kept waiting for that day to live his dream...

He would wait forever.

Noah stood very still in the swaying forest.

HUUM!

So that was it!

Waiting was unnecessary.

He could live his dream now. This very moment. Now, rather than someday.

That was the flow. That was the current.

That was THE Unstriving Current.

Stop pushing the dream ahead of him. Let it be where it already was. Go with it.

He was perfectly sane! He was not going crazy!

And this was no existential crisis, either, in the middle of a war between a King’s army and a monster from the Fallow. He knew exactly where he was.

He simply wanted to truly live his dream.

So.

What did it mean, to be a farmer?

He thought about it seriously.

A farmer needed land. That was the first thing. A plot of ground to tend. Soil to give to, so it could give back.

And he had long since outgrown smallness.

He burned with quintessence. With tyranny. He had walked into Nightmares and out again, torn doors into the Fallow, moved a whole Legacy into another existence. Whatever land he farmed had to be uncommon. A small field would burst around him. A Dimension would be cramped.

Even THE Infiniverse, his own existence, would fall short. Even the Early Veiled Shores wouldn’t quite do it.

But he could feel it, through his raised hand. The connection. The interconnectedness of everything, from the smallest blade of black grass in his forest to the farthest edge of the dark. All of it, one great woven thing.

All of it, potentially, soil.

THE Chrysalis, with its golden seas.

THE Infinite Carcosa, with its boundless infinity.

THE Source Lands.

THE Fallow of Existence, full of every road no one had ever walked.

Why choose one plot?

Why not use existence itself as his farmland?

...!

HUUM!

The forest around him swayed.

Obsidian and gold, light years tall, every leaf turning toward him at once. The rivers of light bent around his feet. The black grass leaned in. The soil beneath him warmed, as if something very large had just been told it was about to be planted. Stellar vegetation rose and fell around him in long slow waves, swaying with a wind no one could feel, and far behind it all, a Nightmare and a Legion tore at each other in a field of grey glass and blue flowers.

Noah stood at the center of it, half-made of his own forest, one gold eye and one obsidian.

And he smiled.

It was a smile of grand tyranny!

It was the smile of a farmer looking out at the widest field anyone had ever seen, and deciding, very calmly, that all of it was going to be his!