Chapter 5968: Family

<Lifthrasir>

Her sisters did not speak to her on the way to THE Sumeru Elysium as throughout, she used the time to sightsee while thinking about Lygara.

They had flown on either side of her through the long dark above the Chrysalis with their great silver wings spread, Phaedra on her left and Thessaly on her right, and Kir One and Kir Two followed a little behind, silent and enormous, their faces turning slowly from one patch of dark to the next. Lifthrasir did not mind the silence. She had spent a very long time not existing at all, and she had learned that most things worth hearing arrived on their own if she waited.

They passed the edges of the Source Lands, where beginnings rose out of the dark in slow golden currents, and then they rose higher, past anything she had ever seen or been told of, until the dark itself thinned and grew pale and warm. Then the light came up beneath them all at once, and she looked down, and saw the fields.

A different place on THE Mountain at the Center of Everything.

Boundless fields!

They went on forever. Golden meadows stretched out below her in every direction, soft and rolling and very still, the grass moving gently in a wind that did not seem to come from anywhere, and every blade of it carried a faint light of its own. There was no snow here and no ash and no ruin, only the meadows and the quiet and the warm pale sky.

And far away, farther than anything had any right to be and still be seen, a small region of THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rose out of the fields of rest, so vast that its lower slopes filld all of the skies.

Lifthrasir took everything in as if watching it all again for the first time.

"We have arrived in a small corner of THE Sumeru Elysium," Phaedra said, the first words either of them had spoken since the Chrysalis. "Try not to touch anything."

---

They came down toward the place where the Firsts gathered. It rose out of the meadows at the foot of a long gentle slope, a great white tower made of some pale stone that Lifthrasir could not name, smooth and seamless and faintly warm to look at, climbing upward in tier after tier until its top stood level with the lower clouds. Around its base, ring after ring of terraces and halls spread out across the meadows, connected by long open stairways that rose and fell without any visible support, and every hall was built in a different way, for a different kind of thing.

She saw a hall of black glass, low and wide, where something with many legs moved slowly in the shadows behind its doors. She saw a hall that was only a ring of standing stones open to the sky, and a hall built entirely of wound white thread, and a hall that hung upside down from the underside of one of the floating stairways with its doors opening downward into empty air. On the far side of the spire, a mountain of creased pale paper rose out of the meadow, every crease of it written over, and she knew without being told that it was the mountain of answered questions that belonged to the First Gu of Wisdom.

There were attendants everywhere, walking the terraces and the stairways in long plain robes, each trimmed in the color of the First they served, and none of them hurried. All were...Root Bearers or weak Immense Ones.

They kept their voices low. When they passed one another on the stairs, the one serving the elder First stepped to the outside and the other did not slow, and when they passed beneath the white tower, every one of them bowed their head without breaking stride. No one had raised a Narrative anywhere in the meadows. Lifthrasir could feel the absence of it, a great held stillness over all the Elysium, and she understood that here, no one ever did.

The halls were not all full. As they passed above the inner rings, Thessaly glanced down at one hall in particular, a tall building of gold and silver threads woven into a maze, with its doors standing open and nothing moving inside.

---

They did not go into the white tower. They went beneath it, down a long stair cut into the meadow at its foot, a stair so old that the pale stone of its steps had worn into shallow bowls, and at the bottom there was a garden. It was small and quiet and walled with the same pale stone, open to the sky, and in the center of it the meadow grass gave way to bare dark earth, and in the earth there was a grave.

It was not dug into the ground. It sat on the ground, a long, clear tomb of something harder and brighter than crystal, and inside it lay a man.

He was tall, taller than anyone she had ever seen, and he lay on his back with his hands resting on his chest and his eyes closed, perfectly still and perfectly whole. His skin was pale gold, and his hair was long and dark, and his face was calm all the way down, with the calm of someone who had made a very large decision and never once regretted it. There was something about him that looked older than the meadows and older than the Mountain, and yet he did not look old at all.

Lifthrasir stopped on the last step. She had not seen her father since before she was erased, and in all the years since, she had been told that there was nothing left of him anywhere in existence, not a body, not a thread, not a shadow. She had believed it. She stood very still and looked at him for a long time, and the garden was so quiet that she could hear the meadow grass moving above them. Then she saw her mother nearby.

THE First Gu of Calamity knelt at the head of the tomb with both hands resting on its clear surface, and she did not look up. She was tall even kneeling, a woman whose shape seemed always on the verge of breaking and never quite breaking, her long dark hair full of slow, silent lightning and her skin dark and cracked with fine lines through which a low red glow rose and fell slowly with her breathing.

Six thin dark wings lay closed against her back. Lifthrasir remembered those wings. She remembered them spread wide above her, blotting out whatever light there was, and she remembered the voice that came with them, and she found that her own small hands had closed into fists at her sides.

Her sisters did not come down the last step. Phaedra and Thessaly stood at the top of the stair behind her, and after a moment Lifthrasir heard them go back up it, quietly, and then she was alone in the garden with her mother and her father.

For a long time, neither of them said anything. Her mother knelt with her hands on the tomb, and Lifthrasir stood on the last step, and the meadow wind moved through the grass above them. Then her mother spoke, without turning her head.

"You came," she said. Her voice was low and rough and very tired. "Phaedra told me you refused at first."

"I did," Lifthrasir said. She did not explain why.

"Good." Her mother’s hands moved slightly on the clear surface of the tomb. "I would have been disappointed if you had come only because you were told to. That was always the one thing I could never teach you, and the one thing you knew without being taught. Your defiance was...admirable."

Lifthrasir came down off the last step and walked slowly across the dark earth until she stood at the foot of the tomb, with her father lying between them. Her mother lifted her head then, and looked at her across his body, and her eyes were the same dark red they had always been, but there was something in them that Lifthrasir had never once seen there before, in all the years she could remember.

"I was cruel to you," her mother said. She did not look away while she said it. "Some things are fire and some things are water, and I am Calamity, and for a very long time I believed that a daughter of Calamity needed to be broken early, so that nothing that came after could ever break her."

The slow lightning in her hair flickered once and went dim. "So I broke you. Over and over, while your father was away holding up the whole of existence, and I told myself it was love."

Her cracked hands pressed flat on the tomb. "It was not love. It was only what I knew how to do. I am sorry, Lifthrasir."

Lifthrasir did not answer. She stood very still at the foot of the tomb, and she found that she could not answer, because she had imagined this so many times, in so many different ways, and in none of them had her mother ever said it so plainly.

"I am not asking you to forgive me," her mother said quietly. "I would not believe you if you did, not yet. I only wanted you to hear it from me, once, before anything else."

She looked down at the still face inside the tomb. "Because what I have to tell you next is not about me. It is about him."

...!

"You were told he was gone," her mother said. "That he gave himself away to existence and left nothing behind. Everyone was told that. It was mostly true."

She traced one finger slowly along the edge of the tomb. "Your father held IT, Lifthrasir. The first hand that ever did. He held the greatest power that existence has ever known, and for a while he carried all of it, and all of existence turned around him."

"And then he found something." Her voice grew quieter. "I do not know what it was. He never told me all of it, not even me. He came home one night from wherever he had gone, and he sat in this garden for a long time without speaking, and when he finally spoke, he said that he had seen a secret at the bottom of everything, and that he could not hold IT anymore, not knowing what he knew. And soon after that, he let IT go. He set things in motion that it would eventually break apart and let the pieces fall...almost as if a reset was needed, and then he gave himself away, his trueness and his origin and the long story of who he was, piece by piece into existence, until there was nothing left of him but this."

She laid her palm flat over the place where his heart lay beneath the clear stone. "But he did not stop. I need you to understand that. He gave himself away, and he has been working ever since, through every thread of himself he scattered and through every one of his children, for longer than you have been alive. Working to gather enough power, enough of himself and enough of IT, to put an end to it."

"To what?" Lifthrasir asked. Her voice came out smaller than she had meant it to.

"To cruelty," her mother said. "All of it. Every Narrative that grows great by crushing smaller ones. Every King who drowns a Legacy to raise a banner."

She paused, and her cracked fingers curled slowly against the stone. "Every war that passes over the small and the weak without even noticing what it kills. Every mother who breaks her daughter and calls it love."

She looked up again, and her dark red eyes were wet. "He saw what existence does to everything in it, and he decided to stop it. That is what he has been doing, all this time. That is his dream."

The garden was very quiet. Lifthrasir looked down at her father’s face inside the tomb, calm all the way down, and then at her mother’s cracked hands resting over his heart, and then at her own small hands, which had come open again at her sides without her noticing.

"Can we be a family again?" her mother asked, very softly. "You and me, and your father, and your sisters and your brothers. I know I do not deserve to ask it. I am asking anyway."

She drew a slow breath, and the red glow beneath her cracked skin dimmed and brightened again. "Will you help me, and help your father, to reach his dream? Not instead of yours. Alongside it. I know what your dream is, my daughter. I always knew, and I truly am proud you are living it, even if the years are few."

Lifthrasir did not answer for a long time. She thought of the man who had reached into the place where she had been erased and found a small dream of growing old and given it back to her, and who had asked for nothing in return, and who had told her she could reach him whenever she needed. She thought of Lygara, coiled in her golden Maze.

She thought of the ninety-nine years she had bargained everything for, so that she could live them exactly as she wanted.

And she thought of what she had wanted, really, underneath the dream of growing old. Not only to grow old. To grow old somewhere warm, among people who wanted her there, who would sit beside her when the years grew long, who had not broken her and would not. She had never once said that part aloud, not even to herself.

She looked at her mother, kneeling at the head of her father’s tomb, the woman who had broken her over and over and had just said she was sorry, and she found that she was crying. She had not cried since before she was erased.

"Yes," Lifthrasir said. Her voice shook. "Yes. I will help him. I will help you both. I promise."

Her mother closed her eyes, and her six dark wings shivered once against her back, and for a moment the slow lightning in her hair went perfectly still. Then she reached out across her husband’s tomb, slowly and carefully, afraid of breaking something, and Lifthrasir took her hand. It was warm. She had not known it would be warm.

Time passed in this glorious peace and serenity.

---

They were still holding hands across the tomb when the waves arrived. They came from very far away, from somewhere far below the Elysium and far out across existence, and they could not be seen or heard, but Lifthrasir felt them pass through the garden, one after another, each a long silent pulse rolling through the pale stone walls and the dark earth and her own body. One. Two. Three.

She counted without meaning to, and the meadow grass above the garden bent all at once and then straightened, and existence itself began to buzz, a low deep hum rising out of everything around them.

Inside the tomb, her father’s body trembled. It was very slight. His crossed hands moved, only a little, and the calm face shifted, only a little!

Four. Five. Six!

Her mother’s hand went rigid in hers, and her mother’s eyes flew open, wide and dark red and full of something Lifthrasir had never seen in them at all, which was astonishment.

Seven. Eight. Nine!

Then the waves were gone, and the buzzing faded, and the body inside the tomb lay still again, exactly as it had been. But it was not the same stillness. Lifthrasir could feel the difference, and so could her mother!

Footsteps came down the old stair behind her. Phaedra and Thessaly stepped into the garden together, and they were not cold and remote now. Their silver-grey eyes were bright, and they came straight to the tomb and stood looking down at their father’s face, and for once their faces were nearly the same.

"Haha! He told us," Phaedra said quietly...

"He said that if enough of the pieces of IT were ever gathered together again, and joined into one, we would know it. He said that would be the sign that his return was near."

"Nine," Thessaly said. "Nine pieces joined at once. That was what we father allowed us to feel as we were nearby!"

She looked across the tomb at their mother. "They are coming together, Mother. Which means the kind of sentience that lived in IT is forming again, somewhere out there. If we find it, and bring it here, to him, it will speed everything he has planned for us."

"Our brothers and our other sisters already have their own weavings of existence to finish for him," Phaedra said. "Every one of them has been given a task. This one will be ours."

She turned, and for the first time since the Chrysalis, she looked directly at Lifthrasir, and her cold, very old eyes were not quite cold. "Little sister. We will bring you along so that you cannot say you were left out from Father’s return!"

...!

Both of the two Sisters, two Excedere Unfathomable Immense Ones, burned with Essara of Existence as they were motivated!