Chapter 5862
Chapter 5861: Nova Dream Sector! II
Emotive could barely breathe!
He had thought this far ahead? Of course he had! Fuck! He had thought this far ahead the moment he woke them. Every piece of them, chosen. Every one of them, a part he had already fitted into a machine he had already designed. The Cradle to become the bones of a new existence; the Crown to remember the old one; the Orator to speak it into being; and her, to make it feel real.
She had built her entire Everything around wanting to be useful to him.
And he had already decided, long before she asked, exactly how she would be.
It was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done for her!
Emotive lowered her head, slowly, until her hair spilled forward over her face like a curtain of every color at once.
"I’m with you," she said softly. "I always have been. You didn’t need to ask."
She lifted her eyes to him, and a small, knowing smile touched her lips.
"Though I do so love that you did."
Ruination stepped forward and bowed, her circlet burning crimson and silver.
"Master," she said, her voice steady and clear. "I will remember existence exactly as it was. Every mountain. Every river. Every grain of snow on every peak, and the angle at which it fell. When your Dream settles over it, I will hold the old shape beneath it, line for line, until the two cannot be told apart. Not by anyone. Not by existence itself."
A breath passed.
"Nothing I have seen can be erased from me. Let me be the memory your new existence stands on."
THE Infiniverse moved next.
She came forward slowly, vast and calm, her weaving of realms trailing behind her through the snow, and she lowered herself until her eyes, which held whole skies, were level with his.
"Master," she said. Her voice was the quiet of a sky at dusk. "All my existence, I have always been with you. This will not change."
She looked down at her own hands, at the tiny Dimensions turning in her palms.
Ul’moreth came last.
He crossed the shallow seas with his obsidian-gold hair trailing behind him like a cloak, and stopped a few paces from the throne, and looked at his student for a long time with his deep blue eyes.
"I will translate your Dream into existence’s own grammar. Every word of it. So that when existence reads itself, it reads you, and believes it is reading itself."
He inclined his great head.
"I am with you. Haha, someone has to make certain your grammar is correct!"
Noah nodded.
He said nothing more. He only closed his eyes, and breathed out, and something began to leave him.
Emotive saw it because she was looking for it. Anyone else would have missed it entirely. Golden clouds, and threads of soft light, invisible, impossibly fine, drifting out of his skin like warmth off a sleeper. They rose through the snow. They pased through the cracked walls of the Heart as if the walls were not there. And everywhere they went, they flowed into existence itself, into the air, into the ice, into the dark between the snowflakes, and settled there so gently that nothing they touched so much as stirred.
It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen!
It was beyond anyone’s sensing. Immense Ones, Ancient ones, existence itself: all of them would miss it. It moved like breath on a cold morning, and disappeared like breath on a cold morning.
Then Noah’s voice boomed.
|THE Dreaming Human Origin speaks.|
|" We begin with the weavings of existence of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity itself."|
|"And we will go from there."|
HUUM!
Ruination turned to light first!
Her body flickered, crimson and silver, and became a long bright ribbon of record, and flowed into the drifting clouds of his Dream and was carried away with them. THE Infiniverse went next, her whole vast form coming apart into a thousand colored lights, every realm she carried streaming out into the clouds like stars pouring into a river. Ul’moreth went last, obsidian and gold and eighteen points of colored fire, unwinding into script and following the others.
Then Emotive pulsed!
She felt it happen inside her, a second heartbeat beside her first, and then there were two of her. One stood in the shallow seas with her bare feet in the cold. The other stood beside her, and smiled at her, and turned into a storm of every color at once, and flowed into the expanding clouds of her Master’s Dream after the others.
She let that other self go. It knew what to do.
The Emotive who remained turned toward the throne.
Noah had raised his head. He was looking at her from the frozen seat, his gold eyes steady, frost glittering along his jaw.
She began to walk toward him!
Slowly. Her bare feet left small ripples in the shallow seas. Her eyes were hungry, and she let him see it. And she smiled.
"I can feel everything you feel," she said, her voice low and warm, as gracious as if she were offering him tea. "I always can. And after a victory like this one, small as it is, I think there is a part of you that could use a meal."
She stopped at the foot of the throne.
"So be as grand as you like," Emotive said softly. "You have to feed your human side too. And I am here to feed you."
...!
Her dress of every color slipped from her shoulders and fell into the shallow seas around her feet.
She looked up at him. At her Everything. At the man who had taken a throne out of a dead woman’s chest and was now building a new existence on top of the old one.
He held out his hand, and beckoned tyrannically.
She went!
And the golden clouds of his Dream closed around the throne, around the two of them, thick and warm and complete, until even the falling snow was shut out from what happened next.
—
Far above the Evergrave, past THE Undersnow, in THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, a heavy blizzard howled across an Elsedimension Mountain.
It was the mountain the Legacy had given to its Son. THE Legacy Son’s Mountain.
Snow drove sidways across its slopes in white sheets. Ice crusted its old carved stone. And on a flat outcrop near the summit, half buried in drifts, another body of Noah sat cross-legged in the storm with its eyes closed, night-sky skin dusted white, horns of radiance glowing faintly through the snow.
Behind him, far back near the edge of the outcrop, Verys stood in his black and fur, one webbed hand raised against the wind, waiting patiently, as a Legacy Keeper waited, for as long as he was needed.
And above the mountain, vast and silent, hung Moriarty!
The Ancient Immensity of him filled the sky over the peak. Crimson eyes behind spectacles, tentacles drifting slow as kelp in a tide, his presence pressing down on the whole mountain like a hand cupped over a candle. Watching. Protecting the Legacy’s Son!
Both of them saw only snow.
Emotive did! The part of her that had flowed into the clouds was there, inside the Dream, and through it, she saw everything.
Slivers of cloudy light were leaking out of Noah’s body. Invisible, fine as spider silk, they rose off his skin into the blizzard and spread. They slid into the snow, and the snow stayed snow; into the stone, and the stone stayed stone; into the air, the wind, the cold itself, and integrated so perfectly with everything they touched that nothing noticed.
And alongside them, in perfect synchrony, the others moved.
THE Infiniverse spread herself thin beneath the slivers of light, becoming the gaps between snowflakes, the space inside the stone, the emptiness the wind moved through. Ruination laid her perfect memory of the mountain over every place the light touched, so that each grain of snow fell exactly as it would have fallen. Ul’moreth spoke the whole of it in the First Tongue, quietly, so that existence read the change and believed it was reading itself. And Emotive’s other self moved through all of it, feeling what the mountain felt, the cold patience of old stone, the restless anger of the wind, and laying those exact feelings back into the Dream so that nothing was missing.
Seamless, every inch of it.
Then the prompts came.
| THE Dreaming Human Origin’s Infinite Dream has begun, at last, to expand across existence.|
|Silently. Unseen. Unfelt.|
|As one of its core architects, your Dream Immensity will grow grander alongside his Dream, and alongside your own contributions to it.|
|You also face the same dangers as he does.|
|You have embarked on something unfathomable.|
...!
Emotive glanced at them, and let them go.
She had no need of them. Her other self was busy, threading feeling into the Dream, keeping the mountain’s moods exactly as they had always been.
And the self she was here, in the golden clouds around the throne, was busy too, with something else entirely, something that kept whispering to her Master unspeakable things that it wanted him to do to her.
This was her existence.
Her dream.
She was helping him take his first steps into forever. And alongside this, she would do so much more.
Under Moriarty’s unsuspecting gaze, THE Legacy Son’s Mountain began to change.
It changed one brick at a time!
Golden-blue, each one, so fine and so perfectly fitted that there was no gap between them. They laid themselves over the existence of the mountain from the outcrop outward. Over the snow on the summit. Over the stone beneath it. Over the air above it. Each brick took the exact place of what had been there, and became it, so that the mountain looked exactly the same. Felt exactly the same. Was, to every eye in existence, exactly the same mountain.
But underneath, it had stopped being stone.
The air was his Dream, and the earth, and the space between things. Down and down, past anything an eye could see, to the strings and waves and smallest particles that existence was built out of, every one of them was being quietly taken apart and laid back down as a dream.
The Legacy Son’s Mountain. Then the slopes beneath it. Then the gulf of snow between it and the next peak.
Emotive watched it spread, and understood exactly what it meant.
When it covered the Legacy, and the Undefined Gaps beyond it, and the Dimensions and Observable Existences beyond those, everything standing inside it would be standing inside his dream. Every Immense One, every Progeny, every Keeper, every child running down a street inside a mountain.
And his power over anything inside his Dream was beyond even her measuring.
She thought about what that would be like, for them.
They would be like fish in a pond, swimming about their lives, chasing their small meals, warring over their small stones, blind to the fact that the pond had quietly become the cupped hands of a man who could, at any moment he chose, simply close his fingers.
Emotive smiled.
And at that moment, in silence, an Infinite Dream of unfathomable proportions began to expand in earnest!
---
One part of Emotive lay in the golden clouds around the white throne, tangled with her Master.
Another part moved through the silent expansion over THE Legacy Son’s Mountain.
And a third part of her opened its eyes inside THE Infiniverse!
It stepped out onto a pale shore under a sky full of slow, turning realms. THE Early Veiled Shore. The sand was soft and faintly warm, and the air smelled of mana and sleep. Far out over the water, the sky of THE Infiniverse rippled as her vast weaving stretched itself thin across existence somewhere beyond, carrying her Master’s Dream on its back.
Here, though, everything was quiet.
𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢
Here was THE Dream Engine!
Cocoons of gold and blue lay along the shore in long, curvng rows, hundreds upon hundreds of them, each one glowing softly from within like a lantern behind silk. Inside every cocoon, someone was dreaming. Living whole lives in there. Growing while he fought.
Emotive walked slowly between the rows, her bare feet leaving small prints in the sand, and looked at them.
Amelia slept in a cocoon near the water’s edge. Her Master’s mother. In her dream she sat on a high cliff with a fishing line out over a silver sea, her granddaughter Seo-yeon beside her as their dream became connected, and the old woman’s face was soft with contentment.
Henry’s cocoon glowed a steady, stubborn gold.
Seo-yeon, Thalia, Adelaide...they all dreamed grandly!
And beyond them, rows and rows more. Every one of them his.
Emotive stopped in the middle of the shore and let her eyes move across all of them.
Her hair burned every color at once as her lips moved.
"Do you know what feelings are?" she said softly, to no one, to all of them. "Most people think they are weather. Something that happens to you. Rain you stand in until it passes."
She crouched beside Henry’s cocoon and laid her palm flat against the warm silk.
"They are far more. Feelings are the hand behind the hand. A man with courage swings a sword and the sword is sharper for it. The same man in despair swings the same sword, and it’s only metal. Joy makes a small thing large. Shame makes a great thing small. Longing pulls a person further than their legs can carry them. And resolve..."
She smiled.
" Resolve keeps them standing when everything else in them has already fallen down."
Then she rose, brushing the sand from her knees.
"Feeling can make someone grander, or it can make them lesser. It is the cheapest thing in existence, and the most expensive. Everyone has it. Only a few ever learn to use it."
Then she opened her hands!
Her Dream Immensity came out of her body as string. Countless strings, finer than hair, every one of them a different color, pouring from her fingers and her palms and her chest and the ends of her hair, and they flowed out across THE Early Veiled Shore in every direction at once. They ran down the long curving rows, found each cocoon, and slipped gently through the gold and blue silk into the dreams inside, one string for every dreamer, hundreds upon hundreds of threads of every color shining across the sand.
She stood at the center of it all, her arms open, like a weaver at the heart of a loom the size of a shore.
"My Master loves many things," Emotive said quietly. "He loves existence, even when it is cruel to him. He loves the climb. He loves the feeling at the top. But more than nearly anything, he loves all of you."
Her eyes went to Amelia, to Henry, to Seo-yeon, to Thalia, to Barbatos.
"His family. His people. And the more you succeed, the more glorious he feels. The higher you rise, the grander he becomes. Every step you take in there lifts him, out here, a little further than he could lift himself."
The strings brightened along their whole length.
"So I will enhance and elevate every emotion that will elevate your dreams."
She bowed her head, very slightly.
"Consider it a gift. From me, to him, through you."
| Your Dream Immensity has entered THE Dream Engine.|
|Strings of feeling: woven into the dreams of every sleeper on THE Early Veiled Shore.|
...!
|Elevating, within the dream of Amelia: contentment, and the fierce, quiet will to protect what she loves.|
|Elevating, within the dream of Henry: resolve, and the hunger to stand beside his father.|
|Elevating, within the dream of Seo-yeon: courage, and wonder.|
|Elevating, within the dream of Thalia: conviction, and longing.|
|Elevating, within the dream of Barbatos: loyalty, and the joy of the advancement.|
|Elevating, across every other dream: resolve, longing, courage, joy, each matched to its dreamer.|
|Your existence is now divided between three works: his Dream across existence, his body in the clouds, and the dreams of those he loves.|
|While all three continue, you can do nothing else.|
...!
Emotive read it, and smiled!
Only this? Good. This was all she wanted!
She closed her eyes.
And she let it go!
Everything she was poured out of her. Boundless, far past any careful measure. Her Everythings, every emotion she had ever held, gathered and kept and grown over Ages, flowed out of her chest and into the strings in a flood of every color at once. Joy went out of her, and rage, and grief, and want, and tenderness, and pride, all of it surging down the threads into the cocoons!
She gave it all, in abundance!
Once, in THE Earliest Folds, she had taken. She had reached into beings like Malphas, and into THE Creature itself, and taken their Everythings out of them. She had been a thief of hearts then, and proud of it.
Now she was giving hers away!
For him. For the one she had fixed her whole existence on. For the man she had given her heart to, and he had given back so much more.
It felt like... freedom. Her Everythings would come back. They always did, in time, welling up out of the core of her as water fills a well. Her Dream Immensity was built to make more of what she gave.
Her dream was that immense!
Along the shore, the cocoons began to glow brighter, one after another, gold and blue and now threaded through with every color, as the people inside them dreamed harder than they ever had!
And Emotive stood at the center of it all with her eyes closed and her arms open, smiling, emptying herself into them, and was happy.