Published at 11th of November 2026 10:21 am

Chapter 5980: The Dream Returned

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

Lifthrasir stood alone at the far edge of the furrow, cracked from head to foot now, fine white lines running across her face and her throat and her bare arms, one for every calamity she had let fall, and the deepest of them were still bleeding. Behind her, on the western ridge, her sisters hung in the air with their silver wings spread.

At her shoulders, vast and dark and swaying, stood Kir One and Kir Two, and though the Harvest had left them thinner and slower, their great obsidian faces turning this way and that with none of their old certainty, they still stood there. They had been made to protect her a hundred years, and while she lived, they would not stop.

Noah walked toward them across the black-gold soil with the Hoe in his hands and blood dried on his face, and stopped a few paces from the furrow. He...knew Kir One well, and that was the hard part.

In the long quiet stretches in THE Chrysalis, he had sparred with the giant more than once, slow heavy bouts where neither of them was trying to win, and after every one, Kir One had bent its vast head down to him and asked the same question in its deep, careful voice. Not so very long ago, Kir One had stood beside him and helped him!

Now Kir One looked down at him from beside Lifthrasir, every face on its great head turned toward him, and many were grand, but even more were...sad. "Kir One," Noah said quietly. "Step away from her." The giant did not step away. It opened its mouths!

Kir One came at him, and Kir Two came with it, thinner and slower than they had been and still the Faces That Devour Glory, every face they turned toward him pulling at his walls and his Dreams and the farm behind him. A single word would have sent the Abominations climbing out of both of them to tear every swallowed Narrative out in gold. He kept the word. Some endings should be done by hand.

He struck! He brought the flat of Elpis’s blade across Kir One’s chest, once, and the Bleeding Nightmare seed inside the giant bloomed all at once, and the Return pulled, and everything Kir One had devoured began to pour out of it in long dark streams. Kir Two lurched in on his other side, and he turned and struck it the same way, and it staggered and went down onto one vast knee. Kir One stood a moment longer, and then it fell, slowly, the whole great obsidian height of it coming down into the snow at the edge of the furrow with a sound that shook the coop behind the Farm Wall. What a fall that was!

|Kir One has fallen. What it devoured has returned to existence, and to you.|

It lay in the snow with its faces turned up toward him, going dark one by one, until the nearest one, the one that had always bent down to him after their bouts, moved its great mouth very slowly. "Are you...alive?" Kir One asked.

Noah stood over it for a long moment, and something moved in his face that he did not let all the way out, and his hands tightened on the Hoe before he nodded, slowly, the same as he had after every bout.

"I am alive," he said, very quietly. "You, sadly, are not." Kir One looked at him a moment longer, and then the last of the light went out of its faces, and beside it, Kir Two lowered its great head onto the snow next to its brother and did not raise it again.

|Kir Two...has fallen.|

"..."

Alas.

Alas!

Lifthrasir had watched all of it. She stood above the two fallen giants who would have guarded her a hundred years, and her cracked face stayed still while her hands began to shake. She lifted one of them, and white lightning crawled across her knuckles, weaker than before and flickering, as the small dark storm of her Calamity turned inside her one last time. She aimed it past him, at the warm gold curve of the Farm Wall and everything beneath it, the soil and the rivers and the coop and the little shell house, Henry and Thalia and all the rest of them behind the line, and she chose, deliberately and carefully, to spare Lygara and nothing else again. "THE Ruin That Spares," Lifthrasir said, and her voice broke on it as endless shame flooded her, and her Shinjitsu...began breaking apart!

The calamity began to fall toward the Farm Wall, and Noah felt it coming down over everything he had planted. He could break it by breaking her, all of her, her Narrative and her story and everything she was, until nothing of her was left to fall, or he could take back what he had given. He looked across the countless possibilities in front of him and went toward the one where his dream still lived.

He stepped over the furrow! It was the first time in the whole war that he had truly crossed his own line, and every lifeform on that field saw him do it. He walked through the falling edge of her calamity, and it broke three of his walls on the way, and he kept walking until he stood in front of her, close enough to touch.

She looked up at him with her cracked face wet with tears and shame. How? How could everything have gone so wrong? "I am sorry," she said.

"You don’t have anything to be sorry for," Noah said gently, holding her eyes. "You chose. So did I."

She held his gaze and he held hers, and for a moment, in the middle of the falling calamity, it was very quiet between them. Then he laid his hand gently on her chest, over the place where, a little while ago, she had set a small dream of growing old that he had found lying in the dark where she had been erased, and he took it back.

It came to him warm and small, the same as when he first found it, and the calamity stopped falling everywhere at once, and the white lightning went out across her knuckles. Lifthrasir looked at him a moment longer with something in her eyes that might have been relief.

Then she sat down in the snow, and then she lay down in it, beside the two fallen giants who had guarded her, and she was gone as her entire body...dimmed tremendously.

|A Dream you gave has returned to you.|

...!

He had faced THE Primordial Gu of Provenance for her! A Body of his had died for her, and Lygara had died for her too, and Lifthrasir may never even have known it. He stood over her in the snow and let that be the whole of the moment, and existence, which had answered every gift he had ever given, gave him nothing back for this one.

Inside the Farm Wall, Lygara stood by the fence post with her small hands pressed together, unprecedented pain flushing across her existence. She had felt the calamity pass over her and leave her whole, the last thing her oldest friend had ever chosen to spare, and she had watched the giants fall, and the farmer cross his own line, and lay his hand on her friend’s chest, and take back the dream. She stayed where she was, because she understood that Lifthrasir had made a choice with her eyes open, knowing exactly what it would cost, and no one had the right to take that from her, not even at the end.

She stood with her hands pressed together until they shook, and then until they ached, but she could not stop the tears, and an odd howl of sorrow left her mouth!

Noah heard the cry behind him and rose to his feet with nothing at all showing in his face. He looked down at the small cracked figure lying in the snow between the two dark giants for one long moment, and then he stepped back over the furrow onto his own field, turned back toward the war, lifted the Hoe, and went on. In his hands, Elpis hummed a little louder, because she had felt how heavy he had become all at once, the whole weight of it settling into him and staying, and she wanted him to know she was there. He knew!

On the western side, Phaedra stared down at her youngest sister’s body in the snow. Her face was white, and her silver wings had gone completely still with shock and rage! "Father and our mothers..." she said, very quietly, "will remember this!"

...!

The snow began to fall again.

It came slowly at first, one flake and then another, drifting down out of the dark over the Carcosa where every flake had hung still since the war began, and then more, soft and steady, settling on the black-gold soil and the starlit grass and the white plates of the fallen giants, on the craters DOOM had left along the eastern slope, and on the shoulders of everyone still standing. Every one of them looked up.

Noah looked up too, and for a moment the wonder of it caught him completely, because existence had held its breath for a whole war and was only now letting it out!

The war ended in pieces, slowly, with no single moment anyone could point to. The Shepherd’s and Iron Psalm’s army broke first. With Roxanna lying still in the soil, the eastern slope pitted with smoking craters, and the strongest of the Unfathomables erased or emptied where they knelt, nothing was left to hold the ranks together, and the Half-Unfathomables at the rear fell back, one and then a dozen and then all of them, scattering into the dark of the Carcosa in every direction.

Ione Kalliste walked. She came back up the eastern slope with her grey glass arm at her side and Aethon a step behind her, and at the top she turned and looked down at the farm one last time, at the farmer in the falling snow and the long dark rows and the gold curve of the Farm Wall.

Then she went into the dark toward the Shepherd to tell him what she had seen. Noah watched them go and let them, because he already knew they were alresdy affected with his Nightmare. All of them were. Their time was limited!

On the western ridge, Phaedra gathered what was left to her. The Harvest had pulled at her Essara of Name until she bled holding on to it, a thin dark line still running from one nostril and another from the corner of one eye, and her sister lay dead at the edge of the furrow with her giants beside her. She looked down at the farm for a long time before she spread her silver wings.

"This is not finished!" she said. "Remember my face, Dreamer. You will see it again!"

She rose into the dark and was gone in an instant! She left Thessaly behind, because she could not reach her. Thessaly had come down off the ridge in the last of the fighting, while the Red Hour still burned, to stand over her little sister’s body, and she had stood there too long. When she finally lifted her head and spread her wings to follow Phaedra, the thread of the Bleeding Nightmare in her chest bloomed all at once, and she went down onto her knees in the snow!

|THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: bloomed in Thessaly.|

|Status: [Rooted] (Bleeding Nightmare, holding). She cannot rise.|

She called THE Thing Behind Every Door anyway, and her Fear rolled out around her, the oldest and surest weapon she had, and found nothing on that farm afraid of it for the third time that day. Noah smiled at that, coldly and briefly. Then he turned to his family behind the Farm Wall. "Now," he said.

They came over the line together for the first time in the whole war! Henry came first with his wings wide and every eye along them open, Thalia beside him with her golden tentacles reaching, then Kazuhiko and Barbatos, and THE Emperor Penguin with his crowned head lowered and his black-glass plates ringing. They surrounded the kneeling silver-winged woman, and Thalia’s tentacles wrapped her from shoulders to knees, and the Bleeding Nightmare held her still! And Thessaly of the Progenitor’s children...did not rise again.

They found Brunhild of the Iron Psalm sitting in the starlit grass at the foot of the eastern slope with her blade across her knees. The Harvest had emptied her nearly to nothing, and she looked up at Henry when he came for her with an expression of perfect, exhausted calm.

"Go on, then," she said, and did not resist.

Seven Unfathomables of the Shepherd’s army knelt in the grass nearby where the Harvest had found them, too emptied to stand, let alone flee, and the calm grey-bearded giant who had once carried Ione off a burning field was among them, watching the family come toward him through the falling snow and saying nothing at all.

Then, as the seconds trickled away, Noah planted them, every last one! He dug the rows himself, with Henry beside him and a plain shovel of wood and iron, at the far edge of the farm where the black-gold soil had crept out past the furrow during the war.

He planted the fallen first: Roxanna in her burnt-gold armor with her cracked hands crossed on her chest, the few Unfathomables whose bodies the Return had left whole, since of the ones the Abominations and DOOM had reached only ash and craters remained, and Kir One and Kir Two side by side. At the end of the row, small and cracked and still, he planted Lifthrasir.

Beside the new rows he built a second plot, walled it with plates of dark husk from the soil, and put the living inside it: Thessaly, Brunhild, and the seven emptied Unfathomables. He planted them too!

He set them down in the black-gold soil up to their chests, and the Bleeding Nightmare rooted them there, held and alive, to be tended. The snow came down softly over all of them, and Noah, looking over his new rows, felt the old farmer’s pleasure at a good day’s planting rise in him in spite of everything. What a harvest this field would give!

Thessaly watched him work. When he came to the edge of her plot to check the soil around her, she lifted her silver-grey eyes to his face. "Why did you not kill me?" she asked, her voice hoarse. "You killed my sister."

He crouched so that his eyes were level with hers and looked at her for a long moment, already seeing every use the farm would make of her, all the way to the end. "The field doesn’t waste anything, Existence does not waste anything." he said.

She stared at him without understanding, and he left it unexplained. He pressed the soil down a little more firmly around her, as he did for every seedling on the farm, and moved on to the next.

His family stayed close while he worked. Henry dug where his father dug and carried what his father carried, and when the work was done he stood beside him at the end of the new rows, beside and not behind, with his wings folded and the snow settling on them!

Thalia went back to the Farm Wall and watched the dark. THE Emperor Penguin climbed onto the mound over Kir One and Kir Two, threw back his crowned head, and let out one long, solemn cry over the fallen giants that rolled out across the whole field!

The Verdant Regard took a broom from beside the coop and went out onto the field to sweep the snow back over the scorched patches where the Red Hour had burned, without any expression at all.

It was a heavy, heavy moment.

When the light began to fade, Noah sent the others inside THE Infiniverse. He stayed.

He went into the shell house once and came back out with a cup in his hands, and walked alone to the end of the newest row, to the smallest mound, where the soil was still faintly warmer than anywhere else on the farm with the last of a small dream of growing old.

He knelt and set the cup down carefully in the snow beside the mound.

It was plum-petal tea. He had offered her a cup once, on his porch, and she had let it go cold, and now pale pink petals turned slowly in it while steam rose into the cold air and the snow fell all around it, and he knelt there beside it for a long time after it stopped steaming.

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