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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5977: The Ruin That Spares!
Chapter 5977: The Ruin That Spares!
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<Lifthrasir>Her sister said her name, and Lifthrasir’s body trembled as she went down off the ridge once more!
She walked. She could have flown, and she did not call Kir One or Kir Two after her. She walked across the starlit grass on her bare feet, through the ash of the Red Hour and the scattered light of broken phantoms, past Unfathomables who drew back from her without knowing why, until she came to the long dark furrow in the snow. There she stopped, and looked down at it, and then she stepped over it.
The soil was warm. It had always been warm. It came up through the soles of her feet just as it had the first time she crossed this field, the same warmth that had reached into nothing and found her, and for one moment, she let herself feel it all the way through.
Then she closed that part of herself, very carefully, and walked on toward the man in the snow.
It was an utterly dreadful situation. She did not want to do it. But alas. Her dream. Her existence. Her...family.
Her family. She truly, truly hoped she had made the right choice.
Was there even a right choice here? Her mother had said to destroy anything that stood in the face of her dreams. Her mother had not said what to do when the thing standing there was the one who had given her the dream in the first place.
He saw her coming. He was standing again, with the Hoe in his hands, the blood dried dark on his face and his coat black at the sleeves, and the white holes hung around him in their slow broken ring. He watched her cross the whole field without moving. When she stopped, a little distance from him, he did not raise the Hoe.
"Lifthrasir," he said.
"Dreamer." She lifted her hand. White lightning ran across her knuckles, and inside her, the small dark storm of her Calamity turned toward him as she bit her lips. "I... am sorry."
"I know," he said.
That was almost worse. She had prepared herself for anger. For him to be enraged!
But he was just...disappointed.
"THE Ruin That Spares," Lifthrasir said, and let it fall. She let things fall as they would fall!
HUUM!
|Vein called: THE Ruin That Spares (Calamity, Rare).|
|Spared: chosen.|
|Not spared: the Dreamer.|
Existence had a way of putting things plainly.
Calamity came down on everything around him. It did not strike one wall and then the next. It fell on all of them at once, and every wall around him began to break in the same instant, their obsidian-gold light splitting and fraying and falling apart. The air around him broke. The snow broke!
The light of the Fallow broke, and the Narratives of the Unfathomables still pressing in on him broke too, and they cried out and fell back, because her calamity did not choose sides. It chose only what to keep.
And she chose. In truth, she had known what she would choose since the first time she saw this farm from the silver path. She spared the soil behind the Farm Wall, and the three rivers, and the coop full of stellar chickens, and the little shell house with the fire of Dreams on its floor. She spared the gold curve of the Farm Wall itself. And she spared Lygara, small and gold and silver, standing beside the fence post with her hands pressed together with sorrow.
Inside the ruin, everything she spared was renewed. The soil grew darker and richer. The rivers ran brighter. The chickens’ feathers shone. Lygara’s wings, for a moment, blazed with a light they had not held since before the Maze cracked. All of it rose up whole and stronger than before, while everything around it came apart!
But...
She did not spare him.
And this alone caused her heart tremendous pain, as she felt she was betraying everything. But...her dream! Her family!
BOOM!
He did not fall. His walls broke and broke and broke, THE Endless Retelling rebuilt them, her calamity broke them again, and he stood in the middle of it with blood running fresh from his nose and his ears and said, with the same calm he had shown on his porch, "You spared the others."
"They have done nothing to anyone," Lifthrasir said. Her calamity rolled over him again.
"You spared Lygara."
"She is my friend." It came out sharper than she meant it to. Another wall broke!
"You know what it feels like," Noah said, "to choose who matters. To look at everything that’s going to break and pick out the ones you won’t let it touch." He wiped the blood from his lip. "So does she. She picked. She’s the one in my hands."
"It is not a she," Lifthrasir said. "It is my father’s power. And my father is going to end all of this. Please. I feel sick right now having to do this! My father will end all of this!" She swept her hand across the field, the burning snow and the broken phantoms and the white holes in the air.
"All of it. Every war that crushes the small. Every King. Every cruelty. One waking power is a very small price for that, Dreamer. Please, I implore you. You must see it!"
"I do see it," he said. "I see it from right here." He looked at her through the falling ruin.
"You’re spending the dream I gave you to break me for a promise someone else made you. Your father’s going to end cruelty, and he’s starting with her, and with me, and with you. You wish to end cruelty, and yet...you are starting with such a grand cruelty and ungratefulness at this moment."
BOOM!
The words went into her deeper than any blow could have. Was he right? Was that what this was? She did not let herself answer. She called the calamity again, harder, and it fell on him harder, and as it fell, she felt the cost of it open in her own body.
Each calamity left a crack. She had read that in the plain cold words existence had shown her in the garden. Reading it and feeling it were very different things. A thin white line opened along her forearm with each fall of the ruin, and then another beside it, and another, until her arms were webbed with them from wrist to shoulder, and blood seeped from the deepest of them and ran down to her fingers.
She kept going. Her sisters were watching. Her mother was waiting. Her father was lying in a clear tomb with his hands crossed on his chest, waiting to come home. She kept going!
Noah went down onto his knees.
It was not deliberate this time. The calamity fell on him once more, and the walls around his body broke faster than THE Endless Retelling could rebuild them, and with so many white holes still hanging around him, there was nowhere left to rebuild them into. They went down to nine, and six, and three.
He knelt in the broken snow with three walls turning thin and cracked around him, blood running from his nose and his ears and the corners of his eyes, and the Hoe held upright in both hands in front of him.
Behind him, the Farm Wall stood whole. She had spared it. It was the only thing on that whole side of the field still untouched!
Inside it, Lygara stood by the fence post with her small hands pressed together so hard that they shook. The calamity had passed over her and left her whole and brighter than she had been in Ages, and she could feel, in every thread of her destiny, the care with which her oldest friend had chosen to keep her.
And a few paces away, that same friend was breaking the man who had given her a home.
"Go to her," Astarothael said quietly from the post. "Or go to him. Do something or say something you dumb fuckin..."
"Go to which?" Lygara asked, and her voice broke on the word. "Tell me which, and I will. He...commanded us to stay inside his walls. We cannot do anything!"
The cat had no answer for that. Lygara stayed where she was, renewed and untouched and heartbroken, and watched both of them through the warm gold light of a wall neither of them would let fall.
Lifthrasir lowered her hand.
The calamity lifted. Her arms hung at her sides, cracked white from wrist to shoulder and bleeding slowly from the deepest of the lines, and the lightning had gone dim across her knuckles. She looked at the man kneeling in front of her with three cracked walls around him and blood on his face, and the Hoe held upright in his hands.
"Please," she said. Her voice was very quiet, and it shook. "Just...just give it to me."
Noah looked up at her. His face was calm, and very tired, and very kind.
"No," he said.
