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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5967: A Scream Of Pain! II
Chapter 5967: A Scream Of Pain! II
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She did not stay a hoe. Her long handle drew in and shortened, and her blade softened and curved and drew inward, and the light that she was made of gathered itself into a shape, small and upright, standing in the snow on two feet. When it settled, she was a person, or something close to one, no taller than THE Farmer’s waist.
She was small and round-faced and unfathomably sweet to look at, and at the same time she looked very, very old, with the look of something that had existed since before anything else had a name.
Her skin shone blue and gold, smooth and faintly glowing, and across it ran thin rivers of molten white, branching and rejoining over her arms and her cheeks and down the back of her neck, tracing exactly where her nine pieces had once been joined.
Her hair was long and fine and made of drifting threads of gold light, and her eyes were large and deep blue, rimmed with gold, ancient and gentle and a little startled, and she wore a simple wrap of woven blue-gold light that fell to her bare feet.
She looked down at her new hands, small and blue-gold with white rivers running across the backs of them, and she flexed them, and they moved. She could stand. She could see with eyes now, and feel the snow on her skin, and breathe the cold air of the farm. And for the first time, a thought came to her that she had never been able to think before, quiet and hopeful and very bright. Maybe, just maybe, she could be of real use to THE Farmer now.
She turned toward him. He was standing exactly where he had been, staring down at her with his mouth slightly open and his gold and obsidian eyes as wide as she had ever seen them, and she thought his face was the most shocked she had ever seen it, too. The mighty Hoe straightened her small back, and set her small hands together in front of her, and began to bow to him, deeply, as deeply as she knew how.
As she was doing so...
HUUM!
A horrific pain hit her before she was halfway down. It went through her all at once, from the top of her head to her bare feet, and her small body doubled over in the snow and her hands clenched against her stomach.
She knew this pain. It was the pain of being broken, the pain she had carried in her seams for as long as she could remember, the oldest thing she knew. But it was not coming from her seams. Her seams were gone.
It was coming from something else, something set deep inside her pieces, very old and very cold. As the pain climbed, she understood what it was, and the understanding was worse than the pain. It was a condition. Someone had placed it inside the pieces of her long ago, so that if enough of her were ever gathered together again, if nine pieces ever became one, this pain would wake and force her to cry out, and her cry would be a signal, so that whoever had placed it would know where she was.
Someone had wanted to find her. Something had wanted to know the moment she was whole again.
THE Farmer’s hands closed around her. He was kneeling in the snow in front of her, his face gone pale, and his authority poured into her all at once, warm and endless and deep, an endless warm sea of it flowing through every part of her. It soothed everything it touched, and it did not touch this. The pain went on climbing, untouched, and she felt him feel that, and push harder, and still nothing changed.
It wanted her to scream. Every part of her wanted to scream. The pain was pushing up through her toward her throat, harder every moment.
She knew exactly what would happen if she let it out. She would be calling something to this farm, to the soil and the chickens and the little shell house and the warm hands holding her. She would be bringing trouble to THE Farmer, who had only ever given to her, and she did not want to. She really, truly did not want to!
So she held on. She clenched her small jaw and pressed her lips together and held on with everything she had, while the pain grew and grew and grew. It was the memory of her breaking, the moment she had first been shattered into pieces, made ten times worse with every passing instant, and then ten times worse again. Her whole small body shook in his arms, and the molten white rivers across her skin blazed so brightly that the snow around them hissed, and small tears formed at the corners of her deep blue eyes and stayed there, trembling.
THE Farmer went still. She felt the change in him, and she knew he had understood something, all at once. He stopped pushing his authority into her and simply gathered her up instead, both arms around her small shaking body, and held her tightly against his chest, and bent his head down close to hers.
"It’s okay," he said quietly. His voice was very gentle, and very sure.
...!
The mighty Hoe trembled against him. She did not understand what thing would do this, what lifeform would reach into the broken pieces of her and set this waiting there, cold and patient, for an Age upon Age, only so that it could find her again. She did not understand why it had to be now, now, when she was only just beginning to feel warm, only just beginning to be held. The tears at the corners of her eyes spilled over and ran down her small blue-gold cheeks.
And because he had told her it was okay, she screamed.
The moment she did, the pain began to fall. It poured out of her through the scream, the building ache draining out of her body into the cry, and her voice went out of her mouth not as a sound but as a wave, an invisible, pulsing wave that rolled outward from the farm in every direction at once. It went through the snow and the soil and the rivers and the dark beyond them, and kept going, reverberating endlessly outward across existence, and it did not fade.
Nine times it came out of her. Nine bursts, one after another, one for every piece of her, each one pulsing out across existence after the last. She knew, as each one left her, exactly what they were. It was the signal, going out into the dark to whoever was waiting to hear it, and she did not know who that was, or what they would do when it reached them. She only knew that she had just told them where THE Farmer was, and the sorrow of it was almost worse than the pain had been.
When the ninth burst was gone, the pain went with it. It faded slowly, ebbing out of her a little at a time, until her small body stopped shaking and lay still against his chest, and the molten white rivers across her skin dimmed back down to a soft glow. The snow went on falling around them. She was so tired.
She lifted her head and looked up at him. His face was very close, and very worried, and very kind, and she looked at it for a long time with her deep blue eyes still wet. Then she spoke to him for the first time, in a small voice that was very old and very soft. "I... am sorry."
...!
Then, for the first time in a very long time, the mighty Hoe closed her eyes and fell asleep in his arms. The snow went on falling softly over the two of them.
