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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5870: Lifthrasir
Chapter 5870: Lifthrasir
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
<THE Dreaming Human Origin>Noah thought for a long moment.
Then he nodded to Lygara.
|"You mentioned two names. Napoleon. Diogenes. I know a little of Lucy. But those two, I have never heard of. Could you tell me about them?"|
Lygara gazed down at him, her faceted eyes catching the falling snow.
|"Diogenes came to the Chrysalis before most of the Immense Ones you know were born."|
Her Destiny stirred, and obsidian-gold light rose in the air between them.
In it, a man walked. Thin, barefoot, wrapped in a single ragged cloth, his beard grey and wild. In one hand he carried a small clay lamp, its flame no larger than a fingertip. On his back he carried a clay jar, cracked and patched, large enough for a man to curl up inside.
|"He owned nothing. He gave away his name once, then took it back, because he said a man should own at least one thing he could throw away again. He slept in that jar. He carried that lamp everywhere he went, lit, even in daylight. When anyone asked him why, he said he was looking for one honest thing in existence, and had not found it yet."|
In the light, the barefoot man walked into a vast and shimmering dark. Silk fell around him. Nebulas hung in layers above.
|"He walked into THE Chrysalis with nothing but that lamp. In those days, THE First Gu and Primordial Gu and other wonders you dont know of only drifted. We had no regions. We had no thrones. We simply were, each of us a strand in the cloth, and we did not think to be anything else."|
The barefoot man stopped before a pale, slow shape on a small hill of stones. Its wings were covered in closed eyes.
|"He went to each of the oldest Gu, one by one, and asked each of them a single question. Only one. And he would accept no gift in return. THE First Gu of Wisdom offered him every answer it held. He refused. THE First Gu of Time offered him an extra life. He refused. He only wanted his one answer, and then he would walk on."|
Lygara’s voice softened.
|"His questions changed us. Each one made the First Gu he asked realize what it was. And after he passed through, several of them rose up and took regions of the Chrysalis for themselves, and began to reign over them. THE First Gu of Wisdom’s mountain of answered questions began with his question. It sits at the very top. It is the one question Wisdom has never answered."|
In the light, the barefoot man came at last to a sea of obsidian and gold, and to a vast shape coiled within it.
|"He came to me last."|
She was quiet for a moment.
|"He asked me to show him his destiny. I looked, and looked. And I found no thread for him at all. He had given it away, with everything else, long before he came. He laughed when I told him. He said that was the most honest thing anyone had ever shown him. Then he blew out his lamp, for the first time, and walked away."|
The light shifted. The barefoot man sat down in an empty land, set his jar on the ground, and climbed inside it. Around the jar, slowly, a Legacy grew. Instead of mountains or cities, a quiet expanse of dust and sun, and in its center, a cracked clay jar, and inside the jar, an entire Legacy, made small.
|"THE Legacy of Diogenes fits inside a jar. Every Immensity that has tried to find it has found only the jar, and nothing to fight. He is on Lucy’s level. Some would say beyond it. He simply never wanted anything badly enough to prove it."|
The light shifted again, and now a boy lay on the dirt floor of a small hut.
He was thin, his legs twisted and weak beneath him. Outside the hut, other children ran and shouted. The boy watched them through the doorway, and stayed where he lay.
|"Napoleon was born unable to stand."|
Lygara’s voice held something almost like respect.
|"He came from a forgotten Observable Existence, so small and far out that no Immense One had ever bothered to look at it. For years, he crawled. The other children mocked him. His mother wept for him at night. And one day, when he was tired of watching through the doorway, he called for a rod of iron."|
In the light, men carried in a long, heavy bar of iron. The boy gripped it with both hands, and pulled himself up. The iron groaned. It bent beneath his weight like a bow. And the boy stood!
|"The rod bent. He did not. He walked out of that hut, and he never crawled again."|
The light swelled with marching figures, with banners, with roads stretching out across stars.
|"He conquered his Observable Existence, then the next, then the next after that. Wherever he went, singers went with him. Keepers of memory, who sang his deeds aloud in every land he passed through, so loudly and for so long that existence itself began to hum along. The singers of the Self-Crowned. They still sing, in his Legacy, though no one remembers who taught them the first verse."|
In the light, a man stood in a great hall of gold and stone. Before him, on a cushion, lay a crown.
|"When he had won enough, he went looking for a crown. He asked existence to give him one. Existence, of course, gave him nothing. No one in existence had the authority to crown him. So he picked up the crown himself, and set it on his own head."|
The golden man in the light lifted the crown, and placed it on his brow.
|"He is THE Emperor Who Crowned Himself."|
Lygara’s eyes drifted back to Noah.
|"Lucy thought him vain. He thought her afraid. Diogenes thought both of them were very odd. All three are as grand as each other, in their own ways. And all three, in the vastness of existence, are small."|
The light faded into the snow.
Noah stood silent for a while, thinking.
A man with no destiny at all, carrying a Legacy in a jar. A crawling boy who bent an iron rod and crowned himself.
Narratives. Grand ones!
Every one of them had written their own story, in their own way.
He nodded slowly.
|"Thank you for sharing that knowledge."|
He looked up at her.
|"Now, for my side of the bargain. Is there anything you want, that you cannot have? I am young. My knowledge likely will not match yours. But my Narrative might."|
...!
Lygara’s faceted eyes flashed.
And Noah felt it!
Her Immensity buzzed against him, vast and terrible, rising out of the sea of stars beneath her, and it went far, far past anything he had felt from an Ancient Immensity. It pressed on his existence like the whole weight of an ocean pressing on a single pearl.
A moment later, the seas of Destiny surged!
They rose up around him in great swirling waves of obsidian and gold, and her tentacles came with them, vast and gleaming, curling through the snow until their tips hung almost close enough to touch the blue-gold clouds of dream surrounding his body.
They stopped there, a hair’s breadth away.
Her voice had gone very quiet.
|"My Destiny tends to let my narrative choose whatever might benefit me most. And right now... it chose a memory. A very old one. One I have not let rise in a long time."|
She looked past him, into the snow.
|"I used to be a little thing."|
Her Destiny formed scenes in the air between them, and this time, the light was soft.
A tiny insect drifted through the falling silk of the Chrysalis. Small and pale, the size of a fingernail, its wings thin and trembling, tumbling helplessly on currents far stronger than itself.
|"I was born small. Smaller than you could imagine, looking at me now. I drifted. I had no home, and nothing to eat, and I was always cold."|
In the light, a hand reached up out of the silk and caught the tiny insect, gently, and cupped it close.
|"And then someone caught me."|
The hand belonged to a figure, slender and small, half lost in the light. Something between a Gu and something else entirely.
|"She was a Halfling. Half Gu, and half something else. She never knew what. Neither did anyone. She lived alone, in a little hollow of the Chrysalis, and she took me in, and fed me, and kept me warm."|
In the light, the slender figure sat in a small hollow lined with soft silk, the tiny insect resting in her palm. She was talking to it. Laughing. Pointing out at the falling threads.
|"She taught me about Destiny. She could see it, a little. The threads. Where they went. She taught me how to follow them, how to read them, how to tell which ones were strong and which were fraying. She said I had a gift for it. She said one day I would be very great."|
Lygara’s tentacles curled slowly in the snow.
|"Her name was Lifthrasir."|
The light dimmed.
|"Then, one day, a Primordial Gu passed by our hollow."|
In the light, something vast moved across the Chrysalis, so vast that its shadow alone blotted out the falling silk. It stopped above the little hollow, and looked down.
|"It looked at her, and saw that it could not tell what she was. Half Gu, half something it had no record of. A thing with no clear origin. And it condemned her existence, on the spot, as if she were a mistake in its records that needed to be crossed out."|
In the light, the vast shadow pressed down. The slender figure looked up, and pushed the tiny insect behind her, out of sight.
And then she collapsed!
It was quiet. It was quick. Her body collapsed inward and was gone, and after it, everything about her was gone too, her records, her weavings, every trace that she had ever existed, dispersed into the silk like smoke into wind.
The tiny insect sat alone in the empty hollow.
|"It dispersed her completely,"| Lygara said softly. |"Every record. Every weaving. Every thread. Nothing of her remains in existence. Nothing at all."|
The scene faded, slowly, into the snow.
Lygara looked down at Noah.
|"That is the memory that rose, when my Destiny brushed against your Narrative. I wonder why."|
Her faceted eyes held his.
|"She is gone. All I have of her are memories, and I visit these memories every now and then. That was my destiny, and hers. Nothing of her weavings remain."|
Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly.
He was quiet for a moment, thinking.
Lifthrasir.
He held the name in his mind and turned it over. Whether this would work was anyone’s guess. All of it was uncertain.
But...
|"Did she have a wish? A dream? Anything she wanted?"|
Lygara looked at him for a long moment.
|"A foolish one,"| she said at last. |"She wanted... to grow old."|
Her voice was very soft.
|"She was neither Gu nor anything else, and so she had no idea how long she would live, or whether she would ever die at all. And she hated that. She wanted wrinkles, she said. Grey hair. A small home. Someone to sit beside her in the evenings. She wanted to know how many she had left. She said living forever sounded terribly lonely."|
Lygara’s eyes drifted away.
|"She wanted an ordinary life, and an ordinary ending. That was all."|
Noah closed his eyes.
A name, and a dream.
His Dreaming Human Origin began to buzz.
He reached out with it, passt the Ossuary, past the Chrysalis, past every boundary of space he could feel. And then he reached further, across time, back through the Cycles, back through the silk and the snow, hunting for a single name and a single wish in all of existence.
It was hard!
Harder than anything he had expected. His existence strained under it, every part of him stretched across nameless distances and bottomless reaches. Blue-gold seas of dreams poured out of him and surged around his body in great swirling clouds, turning and rolling over each other, glowing like a vast and gorgeous nebula in the falling snow.
He kept reaching.
A record could be erased, a body collapsed, a weaving scattered into the silk until every thread of it was gone.
But a dream was a different thing.
A dream lived in the reaching, rather than the body. A dream was a thread spun out from a lifeform toward something still to come, toward a future, a hope, a wanting. It pointed forward, away from where it came from, toward what it wanted to become.
And the Primordial Gu had erased everything Lifthrasir was. Everything she had been. Every record of her past.
What she wanted, it had left untouched.
It had no choice. A dream belonged to what came after. It lived in the future she had reached toward, the one where she grew old, and complained about the weather, and had a birthday. And that future, that not-yet, still hung somewhere out in the vast weave of possibility, untouched, because erasing something that had yet to exist was beyond anyone’s reckoning.
And all who dreamed were Human.
He was THE True Human Emperor. Every dream in existence flowed, in the end, toward the sea that he had become.
So he should be able to reach it. Across any distance, any reach, any Dimensionality, any Cycle, any continuum. Because the dream was still out there, pointing toward a little home, waiting for someone to follow its thread back.
His existence strained harder. The nebula of dreams around him blazed.
HUUM!
And then, far away, impossibly far, something answered.
A faint, warm thread. Small and stubborn and very, very old.
Noah grasped it!
|"An existence might die. It might collapse. It might even have its records erased completely."|
His eyes opened, blazing.
|"But its dreams live on. Across all of existence, every dream lives on. Dreams are unfathomably hard to erase."|
...!
The blue-gold seas before him bloomed.
They opened like a flower, slow and soft, unfurling petal by petal of dream-light, and in the center of them, a figure took shape.
She was small. Slender. Shorter than Noah by a head, with a face that was almost entirely human, soft and round and freckled with tiny flecks of gold. Her skin was a pale grey-green, smooth, and only at the edges did the Gu in her show: thin plates of pale chitin along her cheekbones and the tops of her shoulders, catching the light like mother-of-pearl. Two delicate antennae curved back from her brow through a tangle of short dark hair. Her eyes were large and dark and very bright, and if you looked closely, they caught the light in tiny facets.
Behind her, resting along her back, lay two thin, translucent wings, like a dragonfly’s, veined with faint gold.
She wore a simple shift of soft grey clothe. Her feet were bare.
She blinked!
Slowly, she looked around at the falling snow, at the swaying threads above, at the sea of stars, at the vast living citadel. She looked confused, and a little sleepy, as if she had just woken from a nap that had gone on too long.
Then her eyes found Lygara.
They moved up, and up, and up, over the vast coiled body, the gleaming tentacles, the wings like maps of every road, until they reached the beautiful face at the top of it all.
Her eyes widened in surprise.
Then she smiled!
"Little Lygara," Lifthrasir said, and her voice was warm and gently teasing. "Why do you look so... tired? So old?"
BOOM!
Lygara lost her calm!
For the first time since Noah had stepped into the Ossuary, the vast and ancient First Gu of Destiny came completely apart.
Her tentacles lashed. The whole sea of stars beneath her heaved and crashed, waves of obsidian and gold breaking against the citadel walls. The threads hanging above the Ossuary swung wildly, millions of them at once, clattering their bone spindles together like a forest of wind chimes in a storm. Her wings shuddered open and closed. Her golden thread-hair whipped around her face.
And her face, that serene and perfect face, crumpled.
|"Lif...?"|
Her voice came out of her in a dozen voices at once, all of them breaking.
|"Lif. Lif. You... you...!"|
She reached down. One of her vast tentacles came down through the snow, slowly, trembling, and stopped just in front of the small figure, as if afraid that touching her would make her disappear again.
Golden light ran down Lygara’s face, from her faceted eyes, in two long gleaming rivers.
Lifthrasir looked at the trembling tentacle, and then up at the weeping face far above her, and her own smile turned soft and puzzled and kind.
"Oh, Lygara," she said gently. "You got so big."
She reached out, and laid her small hand on the tip of the tentacle.
And Lygara made a sound that no First Gu had ever made in the long history of existence, a sound like a very little insect, tumbling lost through the silk, finally being caught.
Noah stood in the snow, breathing hard, and the prompts came.
|You have drawn a Dream back from the weavings of existence.|
|This Dream is extremely old.|
|This Dream is taboo.|
...!
|Restored from its Dream: Lifthrasir.|
|A child of disaster, collapsed and erased by THE Primordial Gu of Provenance, Cycles ago.|
|Her records were dispersed completely. Her weavings remain largely unknown and undefined.|
|Known of her:|
|She is the child of one of the earliest First Gu to appear in existence: THE First Gu of Calamity.|
|Her other parent: ?????|
|She was neither fully Gu nor fully anything else. THE Primordial Gu of Provenance could find no origin for her, and so condemned her as an error.|
|She could see threads of Destiny before she ever met THE First Gu of Destiny. She taught them.|
|She has returned as a Dream given form, living within your Dream.|
|Her nature now: ?????|
|WARNING.|
|The one who erased her still exists.|
|An erasure undone may be felt by the hand that made it.|
...!
Noah read them, still breathing hard, his existence aching from the reach.
A child of THE First Gu of Calamity. Erased by a Primordial Gu. Her other parent unknown even to existence!
And she had been the one who first taught Destiny to Destiny itself.
He looked up at the two of them. The vast weeping First Gu, and the small barefoot Halfling with her hand resting on the tip of a trembling tentacle, smiling up at her.
And despite the warning, despite the ache, despite everything, Noah smiled too.
Because it seemed his Infinite Dream could do crazy things!
