Chapter 5970: Don’t let them!

The first morning after the scream was very quiet. Snow lay thick on the curved walls of the coop and on the shell plates of the little house, the chickens murmured in their pen, and the three rivers ran dark and clear through the white field.

Noah got up before any of them had settled, took the small iron tea kettle from the shelf by the door, and walked out to the nearest river to fill it.

Back inside, he held out one hand, and a small fire of his Dreams bloomed above his palm, blue and gold. He set it on the floor, where it went on burning without any wood at all, and hung the kettle over it. When the water boiled, he dropped a few dried petals from the snowy plum forest in the Gaps into a cup, poured, and let them steep until the water turned a faint pink.

It was the first time in a very long while that he had made tea for himself, and holding the warm cup in both hands, he realized it was...an odd practice for him, to say the least.

Him. The supposed Tyrannical Emperor, brewing tea!

Still, he found he did not mind it.

In the second chair beside the little fire, the mighty Hoe was still asleep. She lay curled on her side with her bare feet tucked under her and one small blue-gold hand closed around a fold of his coat. Every so often her brow creased and her fingers tightened, and then she settled again.

Noah drank his tea and watched her breathe. He could still hear it, if he let himself: the nine long bursts going out into the dark, and then the small, old voice saying it was sorry. Sorry, for being hurt. That was the part he kept coming back to.

Lygara sat on the step outside the open door with her wings closed. Astarothael lay along the porch rail with her tail over her nose and, for once, both eyes open. Neither of them knew anything about the scream or what it had called, and to their credit, neither of them pretended to. They had simply come and sat near him, and waited.

Noah set the cup down beside the fire and reached for his Infinite Quantum Dream.

His unwalked roads spread out from the farm in every direction, every path of what might happen and what might have happened, and he went looking along them for the nine pulses. Where had they gone? Who had heard them? What would come back?

The first road he touched was murky. So was the next, and the one after that. Every possibility was clouded over, smeared and grey, and the harder he looked, the less he could see. He pushed his Shinjitsu into it, and the murk only thickened, and around his body the Narrative Walls shivered once, all together.

In truth, that was what bothered him most. He had always been able to see something, even when it was too little. This time, something had made sure he couldn’t.

So he stopped pushing and simply waited in the middle of it, patient. After a long while, one thing began to show through. In every clouded road, deep down, there was a single pale-gold thread with the same quiet signature, and when his Dreaming Human Origin and his Shinjitsu reached for it together, they could hold it just long enough to read.

|Possibilities obscured.|

|The origin of the signal cannot be seen.|

|One thread recurs in every road: THE Dissolved Progenitor.|

...!

Noah opened his eyes. The tea had gone cold, and the fire of Dreams had sunk to a soft blue glow.

THE Dissolved Progenitor. The first hand that had ever held IT! The one who had given himself away so completely that nothing was supposed to be left of him anywhere. Lifthrasir’s father.

Had he truly been the one? Had the hand that once carried her also set that pain inside her, deep in every piece, waiting for the day she became whole again? And if the signal had gone to him, of all beings, what would come to answer it? What would come to take her?

He thought of Lifthrasir once, of her small hands clapping together in delight. Then he set the thought down carefully and left it there. Some questions were better answered when they arrived.

"Something has troubled you, yes?" Astarothael said from the rail. She had lifted her head and was watching him with both bright eyes. "I have never seen you troubled...though I have barely been here for long. It is very interesting."

"Thinking," Noah said calmly. His eyes stayed on the chair.

The cat studied him, then looked past him at the sleeping girl, and for once there was nothing sharp in her face at all. "I do not know who made her scream," she said slowly, "and I do not know what she called. But I know what it means when something is signaled. Whatever answers that will not be small." Her tail curled. "What will you do when it comes?"

Noah picked up the cold cup and looked into it. "Give," he said.

Give? Give what? Give the Mighty Hoe, or Give something else entirely?

Astarothael stared at him for a long moment, plainly convinced he had lost his mind. Then her ears turned slowly forward, and she went on staring, with the look of someone only now beginning to understand.

The family came back before noon, driving a dozen more Nightmares out of the grey gaps, with THE Emperor Penguin hauling the biggest of them by a tentacle in short, determined bursts and his crown held high. The Verdant Regard walked last, her apron dusty. "The far currents of the Carcosa are moving strangely," she reported, without any expression at all.

"Strangely how?" Noah asked.

"Toward the edges of everything you have touched," the Verdant Regard said, "and then away again. Something large is reading the water." She went back to the rivers before he could ask anything else.

That was worth remembering. Of course, it was also worth not panicking about.

Noah added the new Nightmares to the cycle, and soon the coop held twice as many stellar chickens, with fresh eggs glowing faintly in the straw. Then he took up a plain hoe of wood and iron that he had made for himself and went out into the field.

He planted. It would have been easy to call the family to arms or build walls of stone, and he weighed both for about as long as it took to walk to the first row. Walls could be broken. A farm that grew stronger every time it was given to was a much harder thing to take. So he turned new rows at the edges, set his Dreams deeper into them than he ever had, and coaxed the Fallow’s edge a little further into the dark with every step.

Henry followed him for a while, watching, until he could not keep quiet any longer.

"Father, what are you doing?" he asked. "Shouldn’t we be getting ready for whatever’s coming?"

"I am getting ready," Noah said.

"By planting?"

"If something comes to my farm," Noah said, turning the soil, "it’ll find a farm...and so much more." He smiled a little as he said it.

His son...had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

In the late afternoon, Lygara came and walked beside him along the last row. For a while neither of them said anything, and the plain hoe rose and fell, and the snow came down over both of them.

"Can a thing be owned," she asked at last, "if it has learned to want? To feel?" Her voice was very quiet.

Noah stopped and leaned on the hoe. He looked back at the little shell house, at the warm window and the small sleeping shape inside it. "If it can say sorry," he said, "it isn’t a thing."

Lygara nodded slowly. She had known the answer before she asked. Honestly, he suspected she had only wanted to hear someone say it out loud.

When the light began to fade, Noah went back inside and knelt to feed the dream-fire a little more of his Dreams. As it brightened, the mighty Hoe stirred in her chair. She stayed asleep, but her small face creased, and her hand tightened on his coat, and she murmured something into the dark of her sleep.

"Don’t...let them take me back."

Noah set the cold cup down on the floor very carefully, without a sound, and stayed kneeling beside her. Outside the round amber windows, the snow began to fall harder.

Harder, grander, and much, much more Quintessentially!