Chapter 5999: Determination!

Elpis had watched the whole thing from the top step of the porch.

She had seen the Farmer sit down against his tall Tree with THE Infiniverse in his lap. She had seen the blue-gold light climb the bark on his side and the crimson-gold climb it on Ruination’s, and she had felt the moment the two lights began to keep time. Then a great blue-gold column had risen somewhere deep inside THE Infiniverse, and the whole farm had gone still around it.

It had made her feel very small, and very safe. Something that big was standing up, and the Farmer was the one holding it straight!

That had been a while ago. He still lay back against the Tree with his eyes closed and gold leaves coming down on his shoulders. THE Infiniverse still slept against him, and the two lights still moved through the bark. Elpis sat with her knees drawn up and her chin on them, and watched him breathe.

She could feel him. She always could. He had given her nine pieces a name when they had none, and ever since, a thread had run between the two of them that never went slack. Through it she felt what he felt, a little softer and a little late.

And through it, she had felt part of him go somewhere else. It was his other body, the one that had left with the being of too many fingers. She had felt it pass through a curtain of blue light, and then she had looked out through his eyes at a forest of black glass with gold light falling into it.

The Farmer saw a dark place. Elpis saw the brightest place she had ever seen!

The dark was only a skin. Under the ground he stood on there was light, more light than anything, seas of it stacked on seas in every color there was. It shone up through the soil and the roots and through him, and he could barely see it.

She knew that light. Her memory held nothing of it, and still every one of her nine pieces leaned toward it, because it was familiar in the same deep place where her name lived.

And every one of them was afraid of it. Something had happened to her there, or near there, a very long time ago. She was almost sure of that, and she kept herself from looking any closer.

Then she had felt him fight, and win, and open something new in his chest. And after that she had felt the thing that made her sit up straight.

He was full. His whole existence was pressed right up against its own edges, and something enormous was waiting on the other side. It reminded her of herself. He was a thing in pieces that was about to come together, and all he needed was one push. One last piece.

She looked through his eyes at the bright seas under his feet, and at the small crystal turning in his hand. The seas were full of those. She could see them from here, scattered all through the nearest light, more than she could count, every one of them small and bright and pretty. He had one. He probably needed many.

She could get them! She knew it in all nine of her pieces. It was the same knowing that let her cut a line.

But he had left her here. He had done it on purpose, and gently, and she knew why. That place was dangerous, and he would never put her anywhere dangerous if he could help it.

Elpis frowned at her knees. He risked his life for her, and for his family, and for strangers who had only just come to his field. He did it over and over, and nobody ever told him he could not. So why was it wrong for her to risk hers for him?

It made no sense. She thought it over twice, and it still made no sense.

He was her only family.

She clenched her tiny fists, and she acted.

Going was the easy part. It had always been easy for her. Other beings needed roads and doors and long walks through existence, and Elpis only needed to think of where she meant to be. She took hold of the thread that ran from her to the Farmer, and she pulled herself along it with everything she was.

On the far side of the Tree, the crimson-gold light stopped moving for one instant. THE Infiniverse stirred against the Farmer’s chest and opened one eye, every color in it turning.

"Elpis?" she said. But Elpis was already light!

She left the porch as a stream of brilliant blue-gold, crossed the field in a blink, and poured into the Farmer’s chest where he lay against his Tree. The thread took her. Existence went past in a long bright blur, a golden sea, a pale cracked edge, a quiet place full of white flowers that made her pieces shiver, and she let all of it go by.

Then she came out of his chest on the other side. She spilled out of the Farmer in a rush of light and landed barefoot on cool moss, small and blue-gold and whole. Black-glass trees stood over her. Gold dust hung in the beams, and it had stopped falling.

The place closed around her, and she knew it!

She had been here. She had been here for a very, very long time, longer than the farm, longer than her name, so long that the knowing sat underneath everything else she was. The air seemed to know her. The light under the ground turned toward her, slowly, all of it at once. Inside the trunks, the small turning lights went still.

Her pieces wanted to shake. She let them shake, and she kept her mind on what she had come for.

She had come for the Farmer. He was right there, tall and still, one hand half raised with the crystal in it. Through the thread she felt his shock arrive, a great blank stillness, the feeling of someone who had been counting everything and had just lost count.

She looked down instead of up at him. The soil was thin as breath to her. Below it lay the seas, boundless, wave on slow wave of every color, and scattered through the nearest of them were the crystals. They were countless. They glittered the whole way down, vibrant and pretty, the same kind he held in his hand, and a few dozen of those would surely be enough to give him his push.

Could he see them too? Did he see what she was seeing? Maybe he saw only the dark. She wondered, and she was afraid to ask. He would probably say her name in the voice he used when something was too dangerous, and then she would have to choose between minding him and helping him.

"Elpis!" She went down before he could say the rest.

It was the most natural thing she had ever done. She sank through the moss and the black soil and the roots without disturbing any of it, a small blue-gold shape falling toward an endless sea, and the sea rose to meet her. Its surface was a thick film of brilliance, many-colored and slow, and she caught hold of it with both tiny fists.

It pulled at her. She felt something drain out of her the moment she touched it, her authority running out through her hands into the light, and she held on harder.

"YAAAH!" She yelled it with everything she had, and she tore the film open.

The tear was only as long as her arm. She pushed her small fingers into it, closed them on the first bright thing they found, pulled it out, and flung it upward with all her strength. Then another. Then a whole fistful!

Every one cost her. She felt it each time, a little more of her authority gone, a little more of the brightness along her rivers going thin. She kept going. This was hers alone to do. A King could never have done it, and neither could the being of too many fingers, and even the Farmer, for all that he could do, could never put his hands into that light and take from it.

So it had to be her. Even if it helped him only a little, it had to be her.

Because he was her only family!

She reached in again, and again, until her arms shook and her light guttered. Then she let go of the film, and the tear closed, and she rose back up through the soil with nothing left in her hands.

The forest floor was erupting! Crystals were coming up out of the ground all around the Farmer, bursting through the moss in small bright fountains, dozens of them, many-colored and softly shining. They rose past his boots and his knees and his chest, and slowed, and hung there, turning. In a breath he stood inside a slow ring of floating light, and every crystal threw its colors across his coat and his face and the black glass behind him.

He stood exactly where he had been. His eyes were wide, and shining, and fixed on her.

Elpis climbed out of the soil onto the moss and sat down, because her legs would hold her no longer. She looked up at the ring of crystals floating around THE Farmer, and at the Farmer standing in the middle of it as a tired, bright smile unfolded from her.

The mighty Hoe, Elpis, looked at this and thought that, for the first time in her short life, she had done something right.

---

<THE Central Mountain, Unknown Region>

THE Shepherd of Falling Stars had gone eleven Ages without bleeding, and he was bleeding now.

It ran down his left side in a slow bright line, from the place where a stripe of blue light had opened him from shoulder to hip. Each drop glowed on the moss for a moment and then went out. He looked at it with real interest. Then he raised his eyes to the thing that had done it.

The tiger stood at the far edge of the golden beam, breathing hard. It was the size of a massive tree, white from nose to tail, and its stripes were made of slow blue light that crawled across its coat and cut whatever they fell on. Its right foreleg was gone at the shoulder. A long wound in its side leaked brightness into the moss. Something from above had done that, it seemed, and had cared too little to finish.

Essara 2 Abomination. He knew it the moment he looked. Everyone knew things here.

The enemy was a full designation above him. Wounded, half blind with pain, and still the most dangerous thing he had faced in four days.

Four days! Four days ago he had walked through a curtain of blue light as one of the names on the banner of Kings, and the curtain had asked every part of him whose it was. It had taken his Exalted Essara, every one of them, down to the first he had ever carved. It had taken every Narrative his Legion poured up to him.

It had left a tall, tired man with a wooden crook and a grey cloak that shed a few small sparks, and the place had looked at that man and named him Essara 1. He had found it insulting for most of an hour, but after that he had found it interesting.

And he had not entered alone. He and THE Iron Psalm had killed more than forty things since then.

Yesterday their scent had come back to them, and the forest had hunted them ever since.

But they were kings. They were powerful. Their Narratives, even if Essara were stripped, made them unfathomably grand.

Forty-seven crystals each.

"Three more," he said aloud.

"Three more," said THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate. "This one will give them."

The Psalm stood four paces to his right, taller than he was and half again as broad, a figure of dark iron with a smooth plate where a face should have been. One unbroken line of Narrative was engraved into it, winding from the crown of its head to its heels, and two narrow iron doors hung folded on its back. It had no mouth. The voice came out of the whole of it at once.

"It was always going to," the Psalm added, and the tiger leapt left!

It crossed the space in one bound on three legs, faster than anything that size had a right to move, and every stripe on its body flared at once. The Shepherd was already lowering his crook.

A crook...was a long and sturdy stick used by many shepered to guide sheep among other things.

His stick could do so much more.

The thin white flame at its hook bent toward the beast, and he spoke to it in the same warm voice he used for his Legions of Immense Ones. "Be still."

HUUM!

For one breath, existence lay quiet under the crook! The tiger hung in the air at the top of its leap. Its stripes dimmed. The black-glass leaves overhead stopped chiming, and the small lights inside the trunks stopped turning. Outside this place, he had once held the grains of a whole Meridian quiet for hours while his Excedere carved them. Here, he had one breath, though four days had taught him to be grateful for a breath.

The Psalm sang. It was a single low note. The two doors on its back swung open, and a gate of black iron stood in the air exactly where the tiger was about to come down. To the Psalm, it had been waiting there since before the leap began. The breath ended. The beast came down into the gate with its whole weight.

BOOM!

Iron screamed. The gate cracked from top to bottom and held, and the tiger twisted in the wreck of it, and one long stripe of blue light swept sideways. The Psalm’s right arm came away at the elbow and rang on the moss. A second stripe took the Shepherd across the thigh, and his leg folded under him.

He went down on one knee and kept his crook up. Sparks fell from the hem of his cloak. Outside, they were falling stars, each one the death of something that had defied him.

Here they were small white embers, and he shook every one he had left into the tiger’s eyes. It roared and turned its head, and that was all he needed. He hooked the crook around its throat.

"Lie down," he said pleasantly and calmly. And it lay down. Its great white body settled onto the moss and lay quiet under his hand, a lamb for one more breath. The Psalm sang its note a second time, lower, and the cracked gate swung shut on the tiger’s neck.

BOOM!

Then there was only the sound of the two of them breathing. The Shepherd stayed on his knee a while. His side was open, his leg would hold nothing, and the light he was losing had made a small bright pool around him. The Psalm stood over its own arm with the stump of its elbow glowing a dull red.

They would mend. Bodies of their weight and narrative always did, though here it took a but longer.

"That one was difficult" he said.

"Everything in existence is difficult, old friend," said the Psalm.

He watched the tiger go. It always happened the same way, and he had seen it more than forty times now. The blue light in its stripes loosened and ran together, and all the brightness the beast had carried sank out of it, down through the white coat and the moss and into the black soil.

Returned to the Mountain, the place called it. Where it went after that, he had never been able to see. Perhaps nobody could.

Everything here went back down in the end. He had no intention of joining it.

The soil stirred. Crystals rose out of the ground where the tiger’s light had gone, small and many-colored, each no bigger than a knuckle. Three drifted toward the Psalm. Three drifted toward him. He held out his hand and let them settle into his palm, and he knew the count before he had finished closing his fingers.

Fifty! And the Psalm had its fifty too.

"Fifty," said the Psalm. It had been counting as well.

He had known since the first crystal what that number meant. Fifty of them would bloom into a Purified Exalted Essara of Existence, grown and never carved, with no wound in it and no debt. It would be an Essara that no curtain could ever strip from him, because it would be truly his.

He had carved Exalted Essara out of the dark for longer than most Legacies had existed, and held more of them than most lifeforms would ever see. Every one of them had stayed behind at that door. But this one would be born on the right side of it.

So this was the key! He had suspected it for Ages, and now he held it in his hand. The banner, the Legions, the long cold war over grains of existence, all of it was the outer room. The true climb was in here, and it paid those who climbed with their own two hands.

Far overhead, something crossed above the canopy. He never saw its shape. He saw the gold light dim from one end of the forest to the other, and he felt the trunks lean, and every small creature in the dark went silent at once. Even kneeling, even bleeding, he knew exactly what he was looking at.

The body he had left on his throne, heavy with every Exalted Essara he owned, would probably have gone excited beneath that shadow.

He smiled up at it, the warm and patient smile his Legion loved him for. That was what waited at the top of this place. He would rise to it. He would be one of the things that swam up there! And one day he would walk back out through the curtain as something the banner had no rank for.

He thought briefly of a troublesome pesk who had killed his Legions and almost made his position slip by defying his Narrative.

A farmer. Someone who had taken his own name off that banner and believed it meant something. Let him scratch at his soil. The Shepherd would attend to him on his road home, when the time came.

What would a farmer who took down his Legions be when he gained power in this place and added it to his already grand visage outside of here? When the time came, the pests would be cleared.

In his palm, the fifty crystals had begun, very slowly, to turn. Four days. In four days he had gathered what years of carving had never given him.

Here, their Narratives had grown wings as they would soar with unprecedented speed!