Chapter 5957 Red I

Noah looked over his new capabilities one more time, the six Branches of his Tree and the walls turning around his body and the dark new Branch where Ammit’s hunger now lived, and then he closed his eyes and went looking for Diomande. He did not need Eckert’s borrowed eyes for it anymore.

The Ashfall Reaches were full of his existence now, black-gold soil spread across the broken slopes and the Fallow’s grey light sunk deep into the ash, and through all of it he could see the bottom of the crater as clearly as his own field.

Diomande sat cross-legged on the stones at the center of the crater, his four hands resting on his knees and his great elephant head bowed. The surviving cultists sat in rings around him by their rank, the Established farthest out and the Unfathomables closest in, every one of them with their palms turned upward toward him and their eyes lowered, and none of them lifted their gaze higher than the tips of his tusks.

They were pouring their Immensity into him in thin bright streams, and he gathered all of it and turned it inward, down into his own Narrative, until he found the thing that had budded there and wrapped it in the full weight of THE Tusk That Holds the Gate, and squeezed.

It would have worked before. But Ammit’s hunger had already reached the end of the thread, and it had not stayed a bud, it had rooted, threading itself through his oldest memories and his Covenant oaths and the long story of how he had become what he was. When he squeezed, he squeezed his own story, and pieces of it tore loose and bled away across existence in long dark threads, toward a farm in the snow.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare has rooted into Diomande. It cannot be pulled free.|

|THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: every act bleeds.|

|Narrative bled from Diomande: 3.2 per second, rising with every act he makes.|

|Each attempt to remove the Nightmare: a burst of 40 to 60.|

|The Nightmare has spread to those entangled with him. Cultists infected: 31.|

|Narrative bled from infected cultists: 2.4 per second combined.|

|Cultists weaker than you being slowly replaced by their own dreams: 9.|

|All of it is being purified through your farm and absorbed.|

...!

His additions worked magisterially as Noah watched expectantly!

Diomande opened his small dark eyes and looked down at his own chest for a long moment. "Stop," he said quietly to the rings around him, without lifting his head. "Keep your strength. Whatever this is, it is feeding on what you give me."

No one stopped. In the inner ring, an Unfathomable with a third eye burning in her forehead answered him without raising her gaze.

"We were given to you, Elder Tusk, and you were given to us," she said, and she poured herself into him harder than before, and so did every other cultist in the rings. The Nightmare went out into all of them along the same streams they were sending in, and the more they gave to save him, the faster all of them bled.

On the farm, the bar above Noah’s head brightened. A ninth wall formed on top of the eight, filling steadily as the purified Narrative ran into it, while the sapling’s new dark Branch shivred and lengthened in the snow.

|Narrative Wall 9: 0% to 100%.|

|Narrative Walls: 9 of 9.|

...!

"Big guy." Eckert’s voice came along the thread so softly it was barely there, the voice of a man speaking in a room full of people who must not hear him.

"Something’s crawling into everyone around that tusked bastard, and some of those everyones are mine."

Noah had already felt it. Several of the cultists in the rings carried Eckert’s quiet light of unity inside them, and the Nightmare had been leaning toward them along the same lines it used for all the rest. He reachd into it and set those bodies apart, one by one, and the hunger turned away from them.

|Allies marked: bodies held by Eckert’s unity. THE Bleeding Nightmare will not touch them.|

"Thanks," Eckert said, and Noah could hear him smiling even through the whisper. "Look at us, working together again. Catastrophe and calamity follow us everywhere, but damn if it isn’t fun."

The smile went out of his voice, and what replaced it was careful. "By the way, there’s something you should know, now that I’ve had some time inside these people’s heads."

"This was one Branch," Eckert said. "One. The Covenant of the Inverted Peak isn’t a Legacy you can point at. It lives inside other Legacies, this and a dozen more I’ve seen in these memories, and its Branches are scattered across Existence, every one of them keeping its rituals and waiting for the word to come down." He paused.

"Diomande isn’t all that special in there, either. There are others like him, and every one of them answers to someone above them, and almost none of them know who that is. They call the voice at the top THE Hand Above, or they don’t name it at all."

Noah listened with his eyes still closed, watching Diomande bleed on the stones and the rings bleed around him. One Branch, and it had nearly been strong enough to keep a fallen Overcomer, and somewhere beyond it there were more Branches and more Excedere and a hand above all of them that even its own people did not know. It was a great deal of strength gathered in a great deal of darkness, and he had just stuck his hoe into the side of it.

He would be careful, but he would not be afraid, because fear had never once made him stronger, and caution was not the same thing as fear. For now he would stay on his farm and let the walls rise, and let the Nightmares grow and the Branches lengthen, until he was ready to reach higher again, toward beings far too old and far too powerful for a farmer with a hoe to have any business standing near.

The Nightmare kept spreading while he thought it, through every thread of loyalty and help and shared blood that bound the Branch together, and the weakest began to break. An Established in the outer ring arched his back until it should have snapped, his arms bending the wrong way at the elbows and obsidian-gold lines spreading up beneath his skin, and when he opened his mouth to scream, his own dream came out instead, a small grey house beside a field of wheat with a light in one window.

The dream drew him in, and he was gone from the ring, and Noah, watching from very far away, saw the light in that window for a moment before it went out, and did not look away.

Then it was happening everywhere in the outer rings. Established and Ancients twisted where they sat, faces sliding and Immensity leaking out of them in thin bright threads, and one by one their own dreams rose up and swallowed them, and one by one they vanished from the Ashfall Reaches. On the farm, the black-gold soil opened and closed again and again as their bodies arrived, and the long rows grew longer under the falling snow.

|Established and Ancients subsumed by their own dreams: 23.|

|Their bodies have been drawn to your farm.|

|Unfathomables and Half-Unfathomables infected: 11.|

|Narrative bled from Diomande: 9.8 per second, rising.|

|Narrative bled from all infected: 14.6 per second combined.|

...!

The stronger ones did not vanish, but they suffered. In the inner ring, the Half-Unfathomables and Unfathomables clutched at their chests while their Narratives came apart in long dark streamers, their phantoms flickering and failing behind them, and still not one of them lifted their eyes above the tips of Diomande’s tusks. At the center of it all, Diomande sat with his four hands pressed against his own body, bleeding his story away with every breath.

Above Noah’s head, the bar climbed faster than he had ever seen it climb, wall after wall filling and a new one rising on top, and something bloomed in his chest that was hungry and bright and very close to joy. He knew what every one of those walls was made of, and the knowledge sat there beside the joy without driving it away.

|Narrative Walls: 21 of 21.|

Twenty-one walls, nearly three thousand numerical points of Narrative standing between his Dream and the rest of existence, more than twenty-nine average Unfathomables poured out at once. And still it climbed!

And...

HUUM!

Noah frowned at this time as he felt something.

Existence parted above the crater. It did not crack or shatter, it simply opened, one long clean line drawn through the dark sky over the Ashfall Reaches, and the air in every corner of the Reaches went still.

Before anything had come through the opening, every surviving cultist in the crater had already lowered their faces. Diomande alone began to rise, slowly, his four hands pressing against the ground to lift him onto his knees, and a woman stepped down through the opening and touched his shoulder once, lightly, and he sank back down and was still. She wore a long crimson robe that moved without any wind, her golden hair fell to her waist, and her face was so beautiful that it was difficult to look at, calm and perfect and entirely still.

Her eyes were blood red, and wherever they passed, the cultists stopped breathing, and even the existence Noah had spread through the Reaches drew itself tight!

Then runes began to rise from her. They came up off her skin and out of her robe and her golden hair, crimson and gold, small at first and then vast, and every one of them was a shape of burning lines made of smaller runes, and those of smaller runes still, down past anything Noah’s Shinjitsu could follow, until the dark above the crater was crowded with them, each rune as large as a Dimension and turning slowly over the ruined mountain.

Noah looked closer, and he saw that the lines were not lines at all. Every stroke of every rune was a string, thin and taut and shining, and every string was trembling, and the trembling was what made them shine. The woman lifted one hand and plucked a single string, and it rang, and the note went out through the whole of the Ashfall Reaches, and everything in the Reaches began to tremble with it, the broken stone and the drifting ash and the black-gold soil and the bodies of the kneeling cultists, because every one of them had always been made of strings, and her note had reminded them!

Where the note passed, things opened. Inside every stone and every flake of ash, inside the chests of the bleeding cultists, small hidden Dimensions that had always been curled up far too tight to see came uncurled, one inside another, deep spaces that no one had ever known were there, and in every one of them a crimson-gold rune was already waiting.

Everywhere the note reached, Noah’s Nightmares in the cultists went still, and the Fallow’s grey light dimmed under the ringing, and she said nothing to any of them as she stepped behind Diomande and placed both of her hands gently on his back.

The runes poured down into the Excedere.

Noah felt them go through Diomande’s Narrative, through his oldest memories and his Covenant oaths and the long story of his life, uncurling hidden Dimensions inside every thread of it, and in each one they found a root of Ammit’s hunger curled up in its own small space. Then she plucked the strings again, and this time the note was low and terrible, and Noah knew it at once, because it was his own Nightmare’s note, the hum of Ammit’s hunger, matched exactly!

Every rune rang at that frequency together. Diomande shuddered from head to foot and his tusks bowed until they touched the stones, and Noah felt the impossible happen, because the Nightmare that could not be pulled free began to shake with the runes, every root trembling harder and harder in its hidden space until it could not hold its own shape. Root by root, line by line, THE Bleeding Nightmare shook itself apart and drifted out of Diomande’s Narrative as fine grey ash!

|Warning.|

|THE Bleeding Nightmare in Diomande is being shaken apart.|

|Its roots in his Narrative are ringing at her frequency and breaking into ash, one by one.|

|The cause: ?????|

On the farm, Noah’s eyes opened, and the bright hungry feeling in his chest went cold and still. He turned his Dreaming Human Origin and his Shinjitsu across all of existence onto the woman in the crimson robe.

|Identified: ?????|

|Immensity: ?????|

|Narrative: ?????|

|Shinjitsu: ?????|

|Legacy: ?????|

|Rank: ?????|

...!

There was nothing else, only question marcks, line after line. Behind them, her face remained perfectly serene, her red eyes calm, her hands resting gently on Diomande’s back while her runes rang on above the crater!

A monstrous thing had appeared...to ruin his grand harvest.