Chapter 5972: The Line In The Snow! I

<Lifthrasir>

They came down through the Carcosa from the far side, where the currents ran slow and black and nothing had ever been built, and the snow fell around them the whole way.

Phaedra flew at the front with one hand raised, and from her fingers a pale dawn-light ran out ahead of them into the dark, and wherever it touched, hidden paths lit up silver through the bent currents, the ways existence had been keeping to itself.

"THE Dawn That Does Not Ask," she had said when she first called it, and after that she said nothing more, and only followed the silver.

It was a glorious Vein, a Power of Existence from her Essara of Light.

Thessaly flew beside Lifthrasir with her crimson-trimmed gown snapping in the wind of their passage and her chin in her hand.

"This is the dullest corner of existence I have ever seen," she announced, for the third time. "Nothing good lives here. Nothing good has ever lived here. Why would anything wake up here, of all places?"

Behind them, Kir One and Kir Two came on at their slow enormous pace, faces turning one by one to watch the dark, and said nothing at all.

Lifthrasir said nothing either. The echo of the nine pulses had grown stronger with every current they crossed, a faint ringing at the very edge of her hearing that never quite stopped, and under it there was something else, something she could not name. It was warm. It had been growing warmer for a long while now, and the warmer it grew, the quieter she became.

Then the snow began to change. A flake landed on the back of her hand and melted there, and she felt Narrative in it, faint and very clean, sinking into her skin. The black currents beneath them turned blue, and then a clear deep blue she had never seen in the Carcosa, and the air tasted of nothing but purity. Grass rose out of the dark below them, obsidian-gold, with stars caught in the tips of every blade, and spread away ahead of them for as far as she could see.

Thessaly stopped in the air. Her chin had come out of her hand, and her silver-grey eyes were very wide. "Oh," she said, and then she laughed, a bright surprised laugh that rang out over the starlit grass. "Oh, it is here. It is right here. Sister, do you feel this? Look at it!"

"I feel it," Phaedra said. She had stopped too, and she was not laughing. She had lowered her hand, and her face had gone very still and very reverent, the face of someone standing on holy ground.

"Nine Shards of IT," she said quietly. "Father’s power, waking. It has barely opened its eyes, and already it is remaking everything around it into this."

She drew a slow breath. "This is what he held. This is what he gave up."

Lifthrasir looked down at the grass. She did not think it was the Shards. She knew this warmth. It had reached into the place where she had been erased, into nothing at all, and found a small dream of growing old lying there in the dark, and picked it up, and given it back to her. She would have known it anywhere in existence.

She lifted her eyes and looked ahead, along the silver path, across the starlit grass. There was a farm. It was small, with black-gold soil and three dark rivers and a coop with snow on its roof, and a little house built of curved dark shell with round amber windows. On its porch, in a straw hat, a man was sitting with a cup in his hands.

Lifthrasir stopped breathing for a moment. Then she understood where the waking sentience of IT had gone, and whose warmth it had reached for, and why.

Her mother’s voice came back to her, low and rough and very tired. Not a person. Do not let it fool you into thinking it is one, if it tries.

She thought of the warm hand across the tomb, and the cloth moving across her palms, and her own voice saying I promise. She thought of her ninety-nine years, and of growing old somewhere warm, with her mother on one side of her and her father on the other.

And she thought of the man on the porch, who had given her those ninety-nine years in the first place, and had asked for nothing, and had told her she could reach him whenever she needed.

Perhaps he did not know what it was. That was possible. A waking power reaching for the nearest warmth might seem to be anything at all to someone who had never seen one before.

She could explain it to him.

He was kind, and he listened, and he had always understood things quickly. She could explain, and he would understand, and he would give it to her, and no one would have to fight.

"Let me go first," Lifthrasir said. "Alone. Without any of you."

Her sisters turned to look at her. Thessaly opened her mouth to object, but Phaedra lifted one finger, and Thessaly closed it again. Phaedra studied her youngest sister for a long moment with her cold, very old eyes, and Lifthrasir held still under the look and let her search.

"We have seen this one before, yes? In The Chrysalis? I would say this is a grand and ridiculous coincidence. " Phaedra said at last.

"He is the one who brought me back." Her voice was very quiet.

Phaedra was quiet for a while. The snow fell between them.

"Okay. Then go," she said. "Bring it out, little sister. Or tell us why you could not." She glanced up at the falling snow. "Before the snow stops."

---

Lifthrasir walked onto the farm. Her bare feet sank into the black-gold soil, and it was warm, and she felt the farm feel her, the whole of it, soil and rivers and the long rows and the quiet grey light at its edges. Chickens in the pen turned their round eyes to watch her pass. They were black as the space between stars, with crimson combs, and one of them made a small, polite sound at her as she went by.

The man on the porch did not get up. He watched her come across the field, and when she reached the steps, he set his cup down on the rail, took a second cup from beside him, and filled it from a small iron kettle. Pale pink petals turned slowly in the water.

"Lifthrasir," Noah said. He held the cup out to her. "Sit down. I did not expect to see you so soon."

He was not surprised. She saw that at once. He had known she was coming, or known something was, and he had made tea anyway, and that was so entirely him.

She took the cup and sat down on the step below his chair, and held it in both hands, and let it warm them. Once, briefly, his eyes went past her to the west, toward the far side of the farm where her sisters were as he squinted, and then came back.

The door of the little house opened behind him. Lygara came out onto the porch, small and winged and gold and silver, and stopped. For a moment her ancient face lit up with a joy so plain and so complete that Lifthrasir’s throat closed.

Then Lygara’s eyes moved from her face to the cup in her hands, and to Noah, and back, and the joy went slowly quiet, and something else came into its place that Lygara did not seem to have a name for yet.

"Lygara," Lifthrasir said softly. "You look well adjusted. I thought i sensed something off earlier, but your Destiny feels...fuller and warmer.."

"It is, and I am," Lygara said. She did not come any closer.

Lifthrasir turned the cup in her hands. Through the open door behind Noah, she could see into the warm room beyond: a small blue-gold fire burning on the floor, two chairs, and in the nearer chair, curled up under a man’s coat, a small sleeping figure with blue-gold skin and thin white rivers running across it, glowing faintly in time with its breathing.

She looked at the thing only for a moment.

"I wanted to thank you," Lifthrasir said. She meant it. "For my dream. For bringing me back. I have never thanked you properly. I am thanking you now."

"You’re welcome," Noah said. He said it simply, and waited.

She looked down into her tea. "I have...found my family," she said. "My mother. My... sisters. My father, who is not as gone as everyone believed. They want me, Dreamer. After everything, they want me."

She lifted her eyes to his. "And I have made them a promise, though when I made this promise not too long ago, I did not edpect things to get so complicated and melodramatic. But...that is why I am here. I have come to take it home."

"It?" Noah said. He said the word slowly.

"The sentience of IT." She nodded toward the open door without looking at what lay beyond it. "It belongs to my father. It always did. It is his power, waking up in the wrong place, reaching for the nearest warmth it could find as it seems to have parasitically latched onto your grand warmth and dreams. I do not blame you for taking it in. But...it would be good if you could dream grandly again. Just like how you dreamed and brought me back...and if you could give It to me to bring back to my father."

Noah was quiet for a long time. The snow fell past the porch rail and onto the black-gold field. "She isn’t mine to give," he said finally. "She isn’t anyone’s."

"Your authority and dreams told me once," Lifthrasir said carefully, "that I owed you nothing. That nothing in all of existence owes anything to anything else. You said it as though it were the most important thing you knew."

She held his gaze. "So I am not here as your debtor, Dreamer. You made sure of that yourself. I am Immensely thankful for what you did. I brought to you Shinjitsu and anything else I could of my own guidence. I am sure this wss pivotal for your growth right now, and maybe even why It latched onto your Dreams. I truly am thankful as I cannot overstate that. But right now...I am here as my father’s daughter."

"That’s true," Noah said.

He did not seem angry. He seemed, if anything, sad. "You don’t owe me anything. You never did."

He looked past her, through the door, at the small figure in the chair. "But she’s not a thing."

"It is the waking sentience of a power," Lifthrasir said. "It is not a person."

...!

"The night she came together," Noah said quietly, "something inside her woke up and hurt her. Something set there on purpose, to make her scream when she was whole, so whoever set it would know where she was. She screamed nine times. She held it in as long as she could, because she didn’t want to bring trouble here."

He looked back at Lifthrasir. "And when it was over, the first thing she ever said to me was that she was sorry."

Lifthrasir went pale. Nine pulses, rolling through a quiet garden. Her father’s body trembling in the clear stone. Her mother’s astonished eyes.

She held on to the cup. She held on to her mother’s voice. Not a person. Not a person.

"A mechanism," she said, and her voice was steady, because she made it be steady. "A mechanism my father built, to find what was his. Things do not hurt, Dreamer. They only seem to."

"Then who built the pain?" Noah asked gently. Lifthrasir did not answer.

"My father," she said after a while, "has worked since before I was born to end cruelty. All of it. Every King who drowns a Legacy for a banner. Every war that crushes the small without noticing. Every mother who breaks her daughter and calls it love."

Her hands were tight on the cup. "One waking power returned to the one who held it is a very small price for that. Surely you can see that. Surely you of all beings can see that with how grand your dreams are."

"I can see it," Noah said. "I can see why you believe it."

He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, and looked at her plainly and without any hurry. "But you can’t end cruelty by starting with the one in front of you."

The snow went on falling between them. Lygara stood very still on the porch with her small hands pressed together, as if even though everything was calm, she was feeling a dreadful storm that hurt her very, very deeply!

Lifthrasir looked down at the tea in her hands for a long time. It had stopped steaming. The pale petals had sunk to the bottom of the cup and lay there, curled and still, and she had not drunk any of it. Very carefully, she set the full cup down on the step beside her and stood up while trembling lightly, feeling like she was making an extremely heavy decision!

"I am sorry, Dreamer," she said. "I made a promise first."

Noah looked up at her from his chair. "So did I," he said.

She turned and walked back down the steps and out across the black-gold field, past the pen where the stellar chickens watchd her go, toward the starlit grass and the silver path and her sisters waiting at the edge of it in the snow.

She did not look back! She forced herself not to as on her face was a surge of complexity and shame!

On the porch behind her, Lygara stood between the man in the chair and the girl walking away, and pressed her small hands together, and did not move to follow either of them as her heart was heavy and pained!

Why...did it have to be like this?