Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5706

Chapter 5706: Defy!

Noah did not move!

Not a finger and not a breath he did not need. He stood in the falling silk with the kaleidoscope turning past him and he held himself utterly still, because the thing at the bottom of the one taut strand was looking at him, and it had not yet finished deciding what he was!

It hung no larger than his hand.

Golden plates overlapped along its body, and they caught light from angles the light was not coming from, so that it seemed lit from inside by something that was not quite in this place! Six jointed legs folded neatly against it. Two wings lay closed along its back, and through them, faint and slow, drifted shapes that were not there when he looked directly and were there again when he looked away.

And at its head sat exactly two eyes, deep gold, unblinking, and both of them held him the way a scale holds a weight!

|DREAM GU|

|Rarity: RARE|

|Depth: THE HEM|

|VERITAS: 341 / PROVENANCE: 328 / POTENTIA: 356 / PONDUS: 339|

|Echo: condensed around a shed fragment. Nature of fragment: a dream that was not finished.|

...!

Three hundred and forty-one!

A full Fold above him! Sitting at the edge of the cloth where he had never stood, holding an echo of something a departed being had dreamed and could not carry through the crossing, and looking at him with total patience while his ring went warm and then very deliberately went silent!

Atlas was not going to help with this one.

And then the Gu spoke!

Its voice did not come from its mouth, since it had none that he could find. It came from the silk. Every falling strand in the vicinity carried a thread of it, so that the words arrived from above and around him at once, layered, grand, and unhurried in the way of a thing that has never once been made to wait!

"I sensed the weavings of a Unique Dream here."

The two eyes did not blink.

"Something dreamed in this place that was not of this place. Grandly. Grandly enough to draw me down from where I hang. Nothing dreams as grandly as I do within a great many strands of here, little one."

The wings along its back stirred, and the shapes inside them turned.

"So I will put it to a test. Dream with me. Keep pace, and I will know what you are. Fall behind, and you will simply become part of what I dream."

BOOM!

The Dream Gu dreamed!

And the Chrysalis around Noah was gone!

He stood on a shore of black glass beneath a sky that was a single closed eyelid, and the sea before him was made of every conversation he had ever left unfinished, murmuring, and the tide was going out!

He had one heartbeat to understand what was being asked, and he understood it, because THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer surged up through his quarks and he did not resist the dream!

He joined it!

THE PRECEPT OF THE WAKING DREAM woke inside him, and Noah imposed his own mind’s simulation over the Gu’s, not against it, alongside it, weaving his dream through the Gu’s dream at the seam where the two met!

The tide was going out. He dreamed a moon. The moon rose over the closed eyelid of the sky, and the tide turned, and the sea of unfinished conversations came back in and he stood in it to his knees and let them finish!

The Gu’s dream shifted!

The shore folded upward into a staircase with no top, each step a year he had not lived yet, and it was already climbing without him, and to fall behind was to be left on a year that would never arrive!

Noah dreamed his legs longer. He dreamed the steps shorter. He dreamed that he had always been at the top already and was only remembering the climb, and the staircase, faced with a dreamer who refused its premise, agreed with him!

Faster!

The dream became a city that was also his own skeleton, streets running along his ribs, and something was hunting through it that wore his son’s face and was not his son!

Noah dreamed the streets lit. He dreamed the thing’s true face, and it was only a dream of a fear, and he dreamed the fear a chair and sat it down and told it to wait.

The dream became a fire that burned memories for fuel, and he dreamed himself into a memory the fire could not reach, one it had never been given, a preschool teacher and a word he had not understood at five years old and the way his mother’s hand had tightened on his!

The dream became a silence that ate the names of things, and he dreamed his own name into the silence and let it be eaten and dreamed it again, and again, and again, faster than the silence could swallow, until the silence gave up!

Faster!

The Gu was not slowing!

It was curious now, and its curiosity ran the dreams harder, stranger, folding three into one, a war that was also a wedding that was also the last second before a star collapsed, and Noah dreamed through all three at once, his Provenance blazing, sweat standing on his skin in a place that had no heat, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming alongside a thing three hundred and forty-one Trueness deep and refusing, absolutely refusing, to fall one single step behind!

And then it stopped.

The Chrysalis came back around him all at once. Silk falling. Nebulas turning. Noah standing exactly where he had been standing, breathing hard, his Provenance drawn thin and humming, and the small golden Gu hanging at the bottom of its strand exactly where it had hung.

It looked at him for a long moment.

Then it nodded.

One slow inclination of that plated head, and the shapes inside its wings turned once and settled!

"It is nice," the Dream Gu said, "to see a little one starting out who is a true dreamer."

The strand it hung from began to draw upward.

"There are so few. Most who come here dream of things. You dream with them. That is the older way. Take this."

Something detached from beneath one of its wings and drifted down, slow, turning, and landed in Noah’s open palm!

|DREAMER’S SCALE|

|A shed plate of a Rare Dream Gu, given freely. It carries the Gu’s recognition.|

|Function: a key. In the Chrysalis, the deeper silk of the Dream weavings will part for the bearer. Elsewhere, any dream the bearer walks will know they were acknowledged by something older than dreaming.|

|Function: a mark. Other Dream Gu will perceive the bearer as one who kept pace. Most will not test again. Some will be curious.|

|For a second there, I thought you were dead.|

|My weavings are waking up a bit more, in this place that used to be my home for some time. This construct can have a bit more freedom here. So let us go. You survived one encounter with a Rare one that you cannot overcome, and I would like that to remain the total.|

|Let us find a Common one.|

|You should be able to converse with me more freely here. At most, you can treat me like a database. Ask questions. They will eat your Provenance. Ask anyway.|

"I can ask you a lot of questions," he said. "But tell me something that you feel is the most important for me to know."

|When I was rising in power, I traveled for a time with two Immense Ones.|

|One of them you know. She did not go by Widow then. She had another name, and I will not say it here, since she has earned her quiet and this place listens. The other was a strand of a different kind, and does not matter to this story.|

|The three of us came to a region of THE Chrysalis that holds a mountain.|

|I want you to picture it properly. The whole mountain was made of Gu. Not living on it. Made of it. Millions of them, Common and Rare, locked together into a peak that went up past the sky and out of sight, every one of them powerful enough to kill me twice at the depth I held then, and every one of them still and quiet and waiting.|

|And at the summit sat a Gu so rare that any Immense One in existence would go mad for it.|

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