Published at 7th of November 2026 6:32 am

Chapter 5962: The Formidable Nightmares!

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The mighty Hoe had listened to all of it from across THE Farmer’s knees, and she did not like most of what she had heard. Essara were carved. Excedere found the grain of existence and cut it loose, one string at a time, and took it into themselves, and to open the rest of what they had taken, they needed Ichor, which only came when existence was wounded. The more she turned it over, the more it seemed to her that a great many very powerful lifeforms were walking across existence and cutting pieces out of it for themselves.

She knew what it was to be cut. She was made of pieces of something that had once been whole, and every one of her seams remembered the breaking, and she did not think existence enjoyed being carved any more than she had enjoyed being broken. THE Farmer did not carve. He tilled, and tilling broke the ground too, but only so that something could be planted in it, and everything he took from the soil, he gave back with more besides.

She did not like the cat’s offer, either. Astarothael had said it lightly, my gain is your gain, but the Hoe had felt the shape of the words, and there was a hook in them, small and hungry. The mighty Hoe hoped THE Farmer had felt it too, and she suspected that he had, because his hands had not moved at all on her handle.

---

The family came back before he answered. They came out of the grey gaps in a long untidy line, and every one of them was dragging something.

Henry walked in front with his wings half open and the eyes along them watching in every direction, and behind him came a great shapeless thing made of heaped dark flesh and too many eyes, which had been wrapped from end to end in golden tentacles and was being towed along by Thalia with an expression of grim satisfaction.

Kazuhiko was herding three smaller ones ahead of him with the flats of his blades, wet crimson things that kept trying to slide sideways out of existence and kept being tapped back into it. Barbatos flew overhead with something many-jawed clutched in both hands, and it hissed at the snow the entire wey.

THE Emperor Penguin came last, and he was the proudest of all of them. He had a Nightmare by one of its tentacles, a vast obsidian thing covered in mouths that each opened and closed on nothing, and he was hauling it across the black-gold field behind him in short determined bursts, his black-glass plates chiming with every step and his crowned head held very high. When he reached THE Farmer, he dropped the tentacle at his feet and stood there waiting, all six gold eyes shining.

"Twelve," Henry said, a little out of breath. "There were more out there, but these were the ones that came close enough to catch."

THE Farmer looked at the twelve Nightmares lying and coiling and twitching in a heap on his field, and then he set the Hoe aside against the doorframe and walked out past them toward the edge of the farm. He knelt and dug, and out of the black-gold soil he lifted the remnant body of one of the Ancient Gu of Provenance he had planted there long before, a great dark husk of overlapping plates, emptied now and light, its Narrative long since drunk away into the farm.

He broke it gently into pieces, and with each piece he built. The plates went into the ground one after another in a long curving line, set edge to edge and shoulder high, until they made a low dark wall around a wide stretch of field near the rivers, and where the wall began and ended, he hung a gate of the thinnest plate, which swung on nothing at all. It was a pen, the mighty Hoe realized, watching from the doorway, or a coop, or a yard, the kind of place a farmer kept the creatures he meant to look after.

Then he turned and nodded to the family, and they brought the Nightmares across the field and put them inside. Thalia unwrapped her tentacles, and Kazuhiko stopped tapping, and Barbatos let go, and THE Emperor Penguin, with great reluctance, released his tentacle, and twelve Nightmares were left loose in a pen whose walls any one of them could have stepped over without effort.

None of them did. The mighty Hoe watched them carefully, because she had expected them to run, and they did not. They shifted and coiled and looked around with all their eyes, and every one of them, sooner or later, turned toward THE Farmer and stayed turned toward him, because standing inside his farm with his authority running through the ground under them, they could feel something they had never felt before. It was warm, and it was bright, and it did not want to eat them, and not one of them wanted to leave it.

THE Farmer came back for the Hoe and carried her with him into the pen, and the Nightmares drew back from him a little as he walked among them, and then, when nothing happened, drew close again. He stopped in the middle of them, and the Hoe felt him reach for the Branch of his Tree where the Bleeding Nightmare lived.

She knew that Branch. She had felt it rooted into the great four-armed one, bleeding him across existence, and she had felt it run through the cultists until their own dreams swallowed them. But what came out of THE Farmer now was nothing like that. It was the same Nightmare, but turned soft, its hunger set aside, and it reached into each of the twelve gently, carefully, and it did not take anything.

Instead, he gave. The mighty Hoe felt the authority of the farm come up out of the soil, refined and clean and warm, the same authority that ran through her own seams, and THE Farmer poured it through the gentle Nightmare and into each of the twelve. Then she felt him ask them, very quietly, to keep it moving.

She watched what happened next with great attention, because it was beautiful, and because she had never seen anything quite like it. The authority went into each Nightmare and did not stay there. It went around and around inside them, through all their strange eyes and coiled limbs and hidden dark places, through the terror and the hunger they were made of, and each time it went around, it came out a little different, softened by passing through them, mixed with whatever they were.

And then, slowly, it came out of them again, not as authority anymore but as Narrative, thin and pure and clear, a little trickle of it from each of the twelve, so clean that anyone at all could drink it and grow stronger, the weakest lifeform on the farm or the strongest. THE Farmer gave to them, and they turned what he gave into something new and gave it back, and what they gave back could be shared with everyone, and everyone who drank it would grow, and everything that grew would have more to give. It was a circle with no beginning, the Hoe thought, and nothing at all was wounded to keep it turning.

THE Farmer looked around at the twelve Nightmares in their pen, all of them trickling clean Narrative into the snowing air, and he seemed pleased, and then he seemed to think of something else. He turned in a slow circle among them, looking at each one in turn, at the eyes and the mouths and the coils and the many-jawed heads.

"You’re doing very well," he told them, and he sounded completely sincere. "But it’s going to be hard for everyone to collect this if it just drifts off into the air."

He considered them for a moment longer. "Why don’t you all play along with my farming dream? Why don’t you become chickens? And then the eggs you lay can be where the Narrative goes, so we can harvest it."

The pen went very quiet. The twelve Nightmares looked at THE Farmer, and the family looked at THE Farmer, and the mighty Hoe, held in his hand, looked at THE Farmer too, insofar as she looked at anything.

Then the first Nightmare began to change. The great shapeless thing with too many eyes drew in on itself, its heaped dark flesh shrinking and smoothing and rounding, its many eyes gathering together into two, until what sat in the snow was a chicken.

It was a large chicken, with feathers of stellar obsidian flecked through with tiny drifting stars and a comb of deep, glowing crimson, and it looked up at THE Farmer with its two round eyes, and it said, very quietly, "Bok."

...!

One after another, the others followed. The crimson things that slid sideways out of existence became sleek crimson hens with obsidian tails, the many-jawed one became a fierce speckled rooster that hissed at the snow and then seemed to remember itself and crowed instead, and the vast obsidian thing covered in mouths that THE Emperor Penguin had dragged across the field became the largest chicken of all, black as the space between stars, with a single mouth now and a beak to go with it. Twelve stellar obsidian and crimson chickens stood in the pen in the falling snow, fluffing their feathers, and somewhere among them, with a small and dignified sound, the first egg was laid, faintly glowing.

...!

---

Henry stared at the chickens. His wings had gone completely still, and every eye along them was open and fixed on the pen, and his mouth was slightly open as well. Beside him, Thalia’s golden tentacles had slowly sagged until the tips rested on the snow, and Kazuhiko had lowered his blades and was looking at them, and then at the chickens, and then at his blades again.

Barbatos had covered her face with one clawed hand and was shaking very slightly, and it was imposible to tell whether she was laughing.

THE Emperor Penguin was overjoyed. He waddled straight through the gate into the pen and planted himself in front of the enormous black chicken he had dragged in himself, and the two of them looked at each other for a long moment, bird to bird, and then THE Emperor Penguin threw back his crowned head and cried out in triumph, and the chicken, after a brief consideration, crowed back.

On the porch, Lygara blinked her ancient eyes slowly, once, and then again. On the porch rail, Astarothael had sat bolt upright, her tail lashing, and she was staring at the pen of glowing chickens with an expression that was equal parts outrage and something very close to hunger.

THE Farmer bent down, picked up the first glowing egg, and held it up in the snowing light with every appearance of satisfaction. And the mighty Hoe, resting against his shoulder, looked out over the farm and the pen and the twelve chickens that had once been Nightmares, and the family standing frozen at the gate, and she thought, with great seriousness and complete sincerity, that the depths of THE Farmer and his sight were truly grand.

Truly, truly grand.

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