Chapter 6000: A Glorious, Quintessential Dream I

Noah was still weighing what the final push might be when something moved in his chest.

It came from higher than the seed, from the place where a certain thread had been tied since the day he gave nine broken pieces a name. The thread pulled taut. Then a stream of brilliant blue-gold light poured out of him, straight through his coat, and landed on the moss on two small bare feet.

Elpis!

For one breath his mind simply buzzed. He had left her on the porch step of a farm on the far side of existence, and he had left her there on purpose. Yet she stood in the Root Forest of THE Central Mountain with the gold dust hanging still around her, small and blue-gold and looking down at the ground.

Everything slowed, and for once he had not asked it to. The Pulse opened on its own, and he saw her through it. Every being he had met here gave off a wave. The pig’s had run a hundred meters, and the whale’s had gone down through the seas.

Elpis gave off none. The seas were bending toward her instead, every layer of light under the forest leaning up toward one small girl, slowly, all at once.

What was she to this place? He had no time to finish the thought, because he saw where she was looking, and what she meant to do.

"Elpis!" She sank into the ground before he could say the rest. He watched her go down through the soil without disturbing it, a small bright shape dropping toward the first sea, and the sea rose to meet her. She caught its surface in both fists. He felt her authority begin to drain away through the thread, and he felt her hold on harder, and a small fierce yell came up through the moss.

Then she tore the sea open with her bare hands!

Noah had been giving to that sea since the moment he arrived, and all his giving had grown one faint knot of color. She reached in to the elbow and came out with a crystal. Then another, and then a fistful. She flung them upward one after another, and he stood there and could only watch her do what he could not.

The first crystal burst up through the moss at his feet, and then they all came. They rose in small bright fountains all around him, dozens of them, many-colored and softly shining, and they slowed at the height of his chest and hung there, turning. And the place spoke.

|An Innate Tool of Existence, ????, is bound to you.|

|It holds authority far exceeding other lifeforms in THE Central Mountain.|

|A bound Tool is measured as your own power. Its works are not counted as the aid of another Essara Lifeform.|

|Xerion drawn from the first sea by your Tool is yours. It is not a Return, and it will not count toward any Condition of Return.|

|Tool’s authority: spent. It will restore with rest.|

|Small Xerion Crystals: 42 of 50.|

...!

Innate Tool. He looked at the first letters of those two words for a long moment, and then he set them carefully aside for later.

Authority far exceeding other lifeforms here. He had just watched that with his own eyes. And the place had put four question marks where her name should be, so it could probably measure her no better than it measured the seed in his chest.

But it counted her as his own power! The place taxed company, and it had just ruled that she was no company at all. She was his, in the one way that mattered to its count, and nothing she did for him would ever be marked down.

Forty-two. Eight short of an Exalted Essara.

He left them hanging in the air as if he didn’t care for them and went down on one knee. Elpis had climbed out of the soil and was sitting on the moss with her legs straight out in front of her, and the brightness along her rivers had gone thin and pale. She looked up at him with the face of someone expecting to be scolded.

He picked her up. She weighed almost nothing.

"Why did you do that?" he asked quietly.

"You always go first," Elpis said. Her eyes were already closing. "For me. For everybody. I wanted to go first for you, one time."

She yawned, enormously. "And a mighty hoe is for digging. So I dug."

She was quiet for a moment. "Am I... in trouble?"

She was asleep before he could answer.

"No," he told her anyway.

Noah looked down at her for a while. Then he sat on the moss, crossed his legs, settled her in his lap with her head against his arm, and let out a long breath. He had left her behind to keep her safe, and she had decided that was hers to choose.

The crystals were still turning around him. He looked up at them, and he let them come.

They came all at once! Forty-two points of many-colored light closed in from every side and sank into his chest and his arms and his face, and the forest lit up around him. Light poured out through his skin until he could see the bones of his own hands. It was the purest thing he had ever held, essence of existence with nothing in it but itself, and there was so much of it that the moss under him began to glow.

|42 Small Xerion Crystals: taken in at once.|

|Purified essence of Existence held: far beyond the measure of your designation.|

|Your natal Narrative is being induced to grow.|

It wanted to become him. Every part of it pressed toward the oldest Narrative he had, ready to pour in and swell it. He held it back with both hands of his will, and he thought about what the ceiling had actually asked for.

Fuel from his Existence. It had said nothing of a sea or a crystal. It wanted fuel from what he was, and what he was had never been a thing that kept!

He turned the whole flood downward, and he gave it.

All of it went. Forty-two seas oc crystals of the purest essence in existence poured down through him into the ground of THE Central Mountain, through the moss and the soil and the place where Elpis had torn the film, and back into the first sea. He kept nothing!

The light left his skin, and the forest went dark, and for one long breath there was only the gold dust hanging over a man with a sleeping child in his lap.

It was...serene.

Then existence gave back.

|Given: everything received.|

|Existence has accepted it.|

BOOM!

A pillar of many-colored light rose out of the first sea. It came up through the ground beneath him, as wide as the crater, carrying every color the seas held, and it went into him and kept going, up through the canopy and into the dark above. Every constellation in every trunk blazed. The gold dust flew upward. Elpis slept through all of it, and the rivers along her small arms slowly brightened.

His whole existence became sublime. There was no other word for it. Everything he was stood lit from the inside, every Branch of the Tree, every wall, every Dream, and the fullness that had pressed against his edges finally had somewhere to go.

|Fuel received.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin has passed its ceiling.|

|Evolution available. Paths shaped by your Existence: 6.|

...!

Six! Last time there had been three!

|Path 1: THE Boundless Dreaming Origin.|

|Shaped by: the farm you dreamed out of snow. The girl you dreamed back out of the dark. The backbone you anchored.|

|Your Dreams cease to be a Branch and become the Tree. Within your reach, what you dream is.|

He saw it for one breath. A field ran past every horizon, and each thing in it, every stalk and star and river, was something he had dreamed that had simply agreed to be real. Walls would be dreamed, and stand. Enemies would be dreamed smaller. It was everything he had ever been, made total.

|Path 2: THE Infinite Human Origin.|

|Shaped by: your infinity. The density you gave THE Infiniverse. Every wall rebuilt faster than it fell.|

|Your infinity ceases to be what fuels you and becomes what you are. Nothing in you can be exhausted, outlasted or counted.|

This one showed him a man the size of a man, whom nothing could finish. Kings poured whole Narratives into him and watched them vanish. The whale’s wave went into him and never came out the other side. He would win everything, in time, simply by still being there.

|Path 3: THE Nightmare Origin That Bleeds Existence.|

|Shaped by: THE Bleeding Nightmare. DOOM. The army that broke on your field.|

|Your Nightmares take the trunk. Whatever harms you is seeded, and whatever is seeded is already yours.|

The third was darker. He stood in the same coat, and the forest was silent for a thousand meters around him, because everything in it could feel what he was. Black flowers with gold centers opened in the wounds of all that had ever struck him. It was probably the fastest road of the six, and the coldest, and he looked at it longer than he had expected to.

|Path 4: THE Fallow Origin of the Returned.|

|Shaped by: THE Return. Every body you planted. Every Narrative you sent home. The grey fields that rest behind you.|

|Whatever has been taken, anywhere you have given, returns through you.|

Every Fallow region he had ever made lit at once across existence, and everything that had been carved out of them came flowing home through his hands. The planted dead stood up in their rows. Under this one, Kings would wake a little poorer every morning he lived!

|Path 5: THE Unbannered Origin.|

|Shaped by: your name, lifted from the banner of Kings. THE Field That Kneels to No Banner. Every choice you made that no one made for you.|

|No Narrative can rank you, bind you or read you. What is written over others, you may unwrite.|

He saw the banner of Kings hanging in the dark with its long list of names, and his own hand moving down it, and each name going out as his finger passed.

Five roads, then, and every one of them was grand. Then the sixth opened.

|Path 6: THE Infinite Dreaming Farmer of Existence.|

|Shaped by: all of it. Your Dreams. Your infinity. Every choice, every seed, every harvest, every gift.|

|Existence itself becomes your field. Your infinity is its soil, and it never empties. Your Dreams are its seed. Whatever you plant will grow: a crop, a Narrative, a lifeform, an Existence.|

|No record of a comparable lifeform exists.|

...!

He saw a man in a straw hat walking a long line of spil, and the line was the edge of an Existence.

Behind him, whole Existences stood in rows, young and green, each one grown from a single Dream pressed into soil that was himself. He planted, and realities came up. He harvested, and the harvest went back into existence and came home to him doubled, without end. High over the rows, things the size of the whale drifted, and every one of them kept well clear of the farmer’s hat.

His breath was gone!

It held his Dreams and his infinity both, and it held the one thing none of the other five had named. The farming. The plain work of putting something in the ground and tending it until it stood. And he had already begun, far away, at the center of a being who had asked him to be her Mountain.

Noah sat very still in the light with Elpis asleep in his lap, and looked at all six. Last time there had been three, and he had refused to choose. Human. Dreamer. Sovereign. He had shouted that he would take all three and more, and he had taken them.

That would probably never work here. He could feel it. These six lay further apart than those three ever had, and it seemed the push he had been given was one push, enough to carry him down one road as far as it went.

One. So which of them was he?

Noah looked at the six paths for a long time.

The light of the pillar still held him. Elpis slept on in his lap with one small hand closed in his coat, and all around the crater the gold dust hung in the air and waited.

Each of the first five took one part of him and made it everything. The Dreaming path made him what he imagined. The Infinite path made him what he could outlast. The Unbannered path made him what he refused, and the Fallow path made him what others had taken. Every one of them was true. Yet every one was smaller than the man who had earned it.

The third he set down last. It was probably the fastest road of the six, and he could have walked it. But a field ruled by fear grew nothing.

He looked down at the child in his lap. A mighty hoe is for digging, she had said. She had crossed the whole of existence on the strength of it. So what was a farmer for?

He had dreamed, and he had endured, and he had refused, and he had sent a great deal home. But under all of it, every single day, he had put something in the ground and tended it until it stood. That was the choice he had made more often than any other. A being was probably nothing more than the thing it chose over and over, when nobody was asking.

"I am a farmer," Noah said quietly. "The sixth."

|Path chosen: THE Infinite Dreaming Farmer of Existence.|

|Evolution: begun.|

...!