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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5951: Broken Things
Chapter 5951: Broken Things
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It had felt THE Farmer’s Dream collapse. It had been lying on the black-gold soil of the farm in the snow, far away from the Maze, but the authority that ran through its handle every time he held it ran through it all the time now, thin and constant, and when the great hand closed over him in that other place, it had felt that authority go cold and tear.
For a moment it had believed the simple lifeform was gone, and it had not known what to do with that belief, and then he had opened his eyes on the farm, whole, and it had felt something in its own seams loosen with relief.
Afterward, it had felt him hurt. It had felt the hour he spent kneeling in the snow, the Nightmares rising out of him one after another, and the grey place where his fire had gone dim, and it had understood that he was in pain. That surprised it, because it knew pain very well, the jagged ache along the edges where its own pieces had been broken apart, and it had always believed that pain belonged only to broken things, and the simple lifeform had not seemed broken at all.
So perhaps he was broken too, in some way it could not see, or perhaps every living thing in existence carried some pain somewhere. It turned that thought over for a long time, and it found that it did not mind the thought as much as it expected. There was something almost comforting in not being the only thing that hurt.
It had watched him feed the farm. He had put fifteen lifeforms into the ground, and then eighteen Gu, and now he was planting dozens more, the broken dead of a King’s army that he had gathered somewhere far away, and every one of them went back to existence through the soil. Existence did not keep them, though, because it was not a thing that kept, and it gave them back to the farmer refined, their Narratives grown into fruit and their stories turned into something he could eat.
It liked that, because it was the kind of thing a hoe should be part of, breaking ground so that something could be given back. When he ate the fruit from the Gu, it felt the Narrative go into him, and it felt something new happen inside him that it had not felt before. He began to build walls.
They rose around his body where no one else could see them, but it could see them, because it saw with something other than eyes. They were barriers, circular and swirling, one turning around another, invisible to everyone but itself, and at the center of all of them, running through them and holding them together, was a river of obsidian and gold shaped into the symbol of infinity, looping through the barriers and around his body without ever stopping.
Every time he filled another wall, the river ran stronger, and the barriers turned a little faster around him. Three had risen out of his own story, and a fourth out of the eaten Gu, and it could tell from the shape of them that he meant to keep building. They were walls meant to keep a hand from closing on him a second time.
Now he was planting the dead, walking up and down the long new rows with the blade in his hands, and every time he pressed a body into the soil and closed the earth over it, something happened that he could not see. A soft light flowed up out of the ground where the body lay, white and green and very bright, and it did not go to him at all. It went outward, into existence, into the soil and the rivers and the snowing air and the long dark currents of the Carcosa, and everywhere it went, existence grew a little richer than it had been a moment before.
It watched the light spred across the farm with every body he planted, and it wondered whether he would ever know he was doing this. He thought he was only farming, gathering Narrative for his walls, and he was, but he was also giving back more than he took, and existence around him was growing fuller and greener with every stroke of the blade. It decided not to tell him, because he would only have made something complicated out of it.
While he worked, it thought about the other pieces. It could feel them out there across existence, scattered and far apart, each one dense and humming in the same chord it had once been, and around every one of them it could feel Narrative, thick layers of it, the storys of everything that had held them or fought over them or died for them across countless Cycles. It had pulled on one of them, gently, while he was busy with the Shepherd’s people, and it had felt that one begin to pull back, and by now it should be close.
When it arrived, he could drain its Narrative, it thought, and build another wall. He was a simple lifeform, it knew that, but he had been hurt badly, and since the hurt he had wanted walls, and perhaps walls would work for him. It had felt sad, watching him kneel in the snow in pain, and it found that it did not want to feel that again, so it would help him in whatever way it could.
HUUM!
Something came down out of the sky. It fell from somewhere far beyond the Carcosa as a long streak of white-gold fire, tearing through the snowing clouds and burning a line across the dark, and it slowed as it came down over the farm until it stopped and hung in the air just above the hoe. It was a fifth piece of IT, dense and bright and humming the same chord the hoe hummed, and the hoe felt its own blade warm at the nearness of it.
THE Farmer stopped in the middle of a row with a body half buried at his feet, and he stared up at the floating Shard with his mouth open. He looked from the Shard to the hoe and back again, and then at the hoe again, harder, and the hoe understood that he was asking it whether it had done this. It pulsed once, lightly, against his palm, and it tried to tell him what it had been thinking, that existence was vast and filled with a great many things, that pain came to everything sooner or later, and that it would get better.
He seemed to understand some of that, because his face softened, and he reached up and took the Shard of IT in his free hand. His existence pulsed the moment he touched it, and the hoe felt him begin to drink, pulling the Narrative out of the Shard, all the thick layers of story that had gathered around it across Cycles of being held and fought over and lost. The Narrative poured into him and kept pouring, far more of it than any of the bodies in the field had held.
He did not put this one into his walls. It watched him send it the other way, down into the small blue-gold sapling at the center of the farm, and the sapling drank it and grew, its four Branches stretching longer and thicker in the snow, and on each of them a new bud swelled and opened on each of the four Branches as they bloomed into floweres, for eight flowers in total, glowing faintly with dreams and nightmares and the hazy shape of infinity.
The walls around him pulsed when the Tree grew, all of them at once, and then a new wall began to form among them, very slowly, trickling up out of his own story the same as the first three had.
He had used the Shard’s Narrative to make himself stronger, it realized, and then his own Narrative had found room to build another wall on its own.
Then the hoe felt itself pull. It had not meant to, or not entirely, but the fifth piece was right there in his hand, drained of its Narrative but still dense and still humming, and every jagged edge along its own seams reached toward it at once. THE Farmer felt the pull through the handle and looked down at it, surprised, and for a moment it was afraid he would hold the Shard back.
He did not. He opened his hand and let the Shard go, and it drifted down to the blade and touched it, and the hoe began to shine, white-gold and blue-gold together, while the fifth piece of IT sank into the blade and became part of it. The edges where it joined were jagged, the same as all the others, and they ached, and for a moment the ache was worse than it had ever been.
Then THE Farmer stepped forward and took the hoe in both hands, and waves of pure blue-gold Dream flowed out of him and down into the handle and the blade. It felt his authority move through it, warm and steady, filling the new jagged seam and the four old ones, smoothing them, closing them a little more than they had ever been closed.
The pain that had lived in its edges for as long as it could remember grew smaller, and smaller, until it was only a dull and distant ache, and for the first time since it had become aware of anything at all, it was content.
It had been made from broken things and had believed for a long time that broken things were all it would ever be, but it was beginning to understand that a thing could be broken and still be held, and that being held was a different kind of whole.
