Published at 7th of November 2026 6:32 am

Chapter 5961: What Lies Past!

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At the far edge of the farm, the five of them had already reached the grey gaps. Noah watched Henry go in first, wings wide and every eye along them open, with Thalia’s golden tentacles fanning out behind him and Kazuhiko’s blades flashing in the soft Fallow light.

Barbatos circled above them all, and THE Emperor Penguin went charging straight into the grey at full speed, his black-glass plates ringing, while somewhere inside the gaps something very large let out a startled roar.

Noah smiled a little and left them to it. He sat back down in the doorway of the shell house with the hoe across his knees, and as he settled, his Dreams went on flowing out of him just as they always did now, without him having to think about it, slow blue-gold waves rolling out over the field and the rivers and down into the soil and out past the farm into the snowing dark.

Sitting there in his straw hat with his hands resting on an old hoe, he seemed nothing more than a farmer taking a rest, and at the same time the whole farm leaned very slightly toward him.

He turned his head toward the porch rail.

"Astarothael," he said. "You were up there, near the top before you crashed and burned and are now a cat bound to a farm. Tell me what the Excedere really are. What does power look like past Unfathomable?"

The cat opened one eye, then the other, and stretched every claw on both front paws before she answered.

She sat up and wrapped her tail neatly around her feet, and she looked at him with enormous condescension. "An Unfathomable is a lifeform whose Narrative is so vast that existence can no longer measure it. That is all. It is impressive, I suppose, the first time you see one."

She sniffed. "An Excedere is a lifeform that has stopped asking existence for anything at all. Excedere means exceeding. They are not only bigger. They have begun to reach past the edges of what existence allows, and existence knows it, and does not like it."

"And how they do that," she said, lifting her chin, "is the only interesting thing about any of them. They carve out existence itself."

Noah waited. Lygara, who had come quietly out onto the porch and was sitting on the step beside him with her gold and silver wings closed, waited too.

"Existence is made of countless strings as even the weakest lifeforms and thinkers know this," Astarothael said. "Everything is strings, trembling, and where enough of them run the same way, there is a grain, and that grain is one essential piece of what existence is. Distance. Weight. Silence. Hunger."

Her small white ears turned forward. "An Excedere finds a grain as their Dimensionality now allows them to do so, and uses their Narrative as a chisel and their Immensity as the hand that cuts Existence holds the cut open, and cuts it loose. What comes out is an Essara of Existence."

Essara.

Essence?

The very Essence of Existence, carved out by truly powerful Immense Ones who could percieve them?

Noah turned the word over quietly. Somewhere under the farm, his Dreams went on sinking into the soil, and the soil went on giving them back a little richer.

"It looks like nothing much," Astarothael went on. "A little kernel you could hold in your paw, made of potent strings wound so tight they hum, with runes turning slowly inside. But it is a critical, core part of existence. A Silence Essara is grey and so still it hurts to look at. A Distance Essara always looks a little farther away than it really is."

Her tail flickd. "You take it in. You seat it. And existence loses one of the many controls it has on you."

"Control," Noah said. Somewhere out in the grey gaps, THE Emperor Penguin roared in triumph.

"Shackles, control...being decided by where you began. Having to end. Having to be in one place at a time. Being read and named by others."

She yawned delicately. "Each Essara you seat breaks one. Each must be different. And if a lifeform seats nine of them, nine different Essara, each one standing alone, it reaches the threshold of Those Who Overcame, and the doors that hold everything else back will no longer hold it. Or so it was supposed to be but...I hear the doors are closed now."

"But even then...it gets progressively harder as you add more Essara to your Existence. You have to continue elevating your Narrative and Immensity to be able to handle more Essara as many Excedere Unfathomable Immense Ones either hold none, or one or two. If you can’t handle it and take more, your Immensity and Narrative explodes. Big boom! The truly powerful Excedere would hold multiple Essara of Existence. And if all Immense Ones are still Those Who Remain, then none of them have integrated 9 Essara. Who knows...who knows."

Lygara stirred beside him. "When I still watched every thread of destiny," she said softly, "I saw the threads of Essara bearers bend. Away from them. As though destiny itself was not sure it was still allowed to touch them."

Her quiet, ancient face was thoughtful. "I never carved Existence. Very few Gu ever have. But others spoke of the ones who did, and she spoke carefully."

"The so called others were right to," Astarothael said, with great satisfaction, taking all the credit for herself.

"How does it give them power?" Noah asked. "The Essara itself."

"Something called Veins. Consider them...powers or great abilities of Narratives. " The cat held up one paw and spread her toes. "Three Veins in every Essara. The first opens the moment you seat it. That is your first power from it, and it will not be the same as anyone else’s, because it grows out of you, out of what you are and what you have done, and out of the moment it opened. Two lifeforms can seat the same Essara and come away as different as fire and stone."

She put the paw down. "The other two Veins, the two other powers of an Essara, stay closed. To open them, you need Ichor."

Noah’s eyes moved to her, and stayed there. Beside him, Lygara went very still.

"When a great lifeform presses its Narrative hard onto existence," Astarothael said, "conquers a region, rewrites it in its own image, wages one of those little wars Kings are so fond of, raises its banner across a thousand Dimensions, existence bleeds. It wounds wherever the Narrative is forced onto it, and out of the wound comes Ichor of Existence. Thick. Slow. Shining in every color existence has."

Her eyes half closed with something close to fondness. "It pools where the fighting was worst. Old battlefields are full of it. A small war leaves a few drops. A war between Kings leaves seas."

"Oh," Noah said quietly.

"Mmm" She sounded pleased with him. "Why do you think the Kings fight over every Existence and every corner, little farmer? Why do Legacies spread their stories across existence and drown everyone who stands in the way? Some of it is pride, and some of it is the banner, but under all of it, for anyone who has carved, it is the Ichor. You need it to open your Veins, and the rarer your Essara, the more of it each Vein drinks."

Essences of Existence! Ichor of Existence! All of it was...the carving and bleeding of Existence itself!

Noah said nothing. He sat with his hands resting on the hoe and let what she had said settle into him, and he thought about the crater in the Ashfall Reaches, and the long war on the banner, and all the regions he had seen torn open and rewritten across existence.

Ichor, then, came only from wounding. It could only be taken, never given. He thought of his own soil, and how existence grew richer every time he gave something back to it.

"..."

"Are they all the same?" Lygara asked. "The Essara."

Astarothael turned to her with an expression of deep pity. "Of course not. Most are Common. Distance, Weight, Light, Darkness, Heat, Cold, Stone, Tide, Wind, Silence, Motion. Every Excedere with any ambition carves one of those first, and they are not weak, whatever the young ones say."

She lickd a paw. "Then there are the Rare Ones, deeper and harder to grip, Memory and Hunger and Growth and Decay and Dream and Fear, and Echo, and Sorrow. Few Excedere ever manage one. And then the Exalted Ones, Time and Cause and Name and Story and Ending and Life, which sit so close to what holds existence together that in a whole Cycle perhaps a handful are ever carved, and every one of them starts a war."

"And past those?" Noah asked, and his voice was as calm as ever.

The cat was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, she spoke more softly than she had yet. "Past those are the ones you only whisper about. Every Beginning. The Last Word. Nothing. Infinity. Truth."

Her ears flattened very slightly. "Self, which they say is the hardest of all, because it cannot be cut out of existence. It can only be found. And Existence itself, which no one has ever carved, and which most believe no one ever can."

Noah’s fingers moved once on the handle of the hoe, and then were still again. Infinity, he thought, and Truth, and Self. He did not say anything, and his face did not change, and his Dreams went on flowing out of him into the snow at exactly the same pace.

He wondered if that red robed woman who erased his Bleeding Nightmare...already had an Essara of Existence, and that was the power that utterly rejected a recently upgraded Bleeding Nightmare.

He was making tremendous gains before she stepped in as he might have added the death of an Excedere Unfathomable if she hadn’t appeared. But alas. Existence was. Existence was!

"There are also the ones you should not carve at all," Astarothael added, with a flick of her tail. "Unmaking. Severance. Devouring. Forgetting. They wound and destabilize existence too much just by being cut loose as they create Abominations of Existence that are just obscene,band Kings and Firsts hunt down anyone who carves them, and the Mountain burns anyone who climbs holding one."

She looked away toward the river. "Not that the Mountain needs an excuse to burn anybody."

"You said the doors no longer hold them," Noah said. "But you didn’t get through."

Astarothael’s tail went still. For a long moment she only looked at the river, and when she answered, the condescension had gone out of her voice.

"At the last door, near the top, everything you have taken asks to be put down," she said. "And Essara are taken. Every one of them was cut out of existence. If they are still something you are holding, something borrowed and wrapped around yourself, the Mountain sees it, and it burns you, and it keeps what is left."

She was quiet. "If they have truly become you, so completely that there is no difference between you and them anymore, there is nothing to put down, and you walk through. That is what the ones who overcame understood. I never did."

Lygara looked at the small white cat with something gentle in her ancient eyes, and said nothing, and Noah said nothing either. He only sat in the doorway with his hands on the hoe, and the blue-gold waves of his Dreams went on rolling out over the farm and into existence around it, quiet and endless, and the farm leaned toward him in the falling snow, and anyone watching would have taken him for a sage, simple and very old and somehow vast.

Then Astarothael turned back to him, and the brightness had come back into her eyes, sharp and calculating and very much her own.

"When I fell," she said, "my Essara did not burn with me. They split apart and scattered, out across existence, and they are still out there somewhere, waiting." She leaned forward on the rail, her tail curling slowly. "If I had even one of them back, little farmer, even one, I would be terrifying again."

She tilted her small white head. "Do you want to go and find it? You have bound me now, after all." The corner of her mouth curved upward. "My gain is your gain. Isn’t it?"

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