Published at 11th of November 2026 10:21 am

Chapter 5982: After II

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The hours came and went somewhat peacefully.

Elpis was undergoing cycles of sleeping and waking, because her unique existence was still healing and something as simple as sleep did more for it than anything else. She seemed...to still be transforming as sleep was the mechanism thst continued to work best.

It was the simplicity of existence.

Noah stood alone at the end of the row with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his straw hat white with snow, and thought everything through.

Ione Kalliste was walking into the dark toward the Shepherd with everything she had seen behind her eyes, and Phaedra was flying toward her father’s people with her sister’s death and her own blood on her face.

Every one of the Shepherd’s servants on that slope had felt his name leave the banner, and so had every being in existence who kept watch on it, which meant that by now, or very soon, everyone who mattered would know exactly where this farm was.

He looked across the countless possibilities ahead and went straight toward the one where his dream would grow best, and it was the simplest thought he had had all day: a farmer whose field lay in the path of a flood did not stand in the field and wait to see how high the water would come. He moved the field!

He held out his right hand, looked at it for a moment, and closed it, slowly, into a fist.

HUUM!

The farm began to fade, gently, from the edges inward. The far rim of the starlit grass dimmed first and the grey light of the Fallow along it drew in on itself, and then the black-gold soil, every row and every furrow, folded softly into the dark, and the three rivers went with it, still running, along with the coop and its curved walls and the shell house with its round amber windows and the warm gold curve of the Farm Wall over all of it.

He held every grain of it! The whole farm sat in his closed hand, the weight of the soil and the cold of the rivers and the small warm heartbeats of everyone inside, and none of it slipped.

In the coop the chickens murmured uneasily and then settled, THE Emperor Penguin came out and looked around at the folding dark with all six gold eyes and let out a long cry of pure delight, and Thalia stood silently at the edge of the Farm Wall and watched the Carcosa disappear around them. Noah carried them all through the folds of existence, and while he carried them, existence went on unfolding around them!

The Return went on too. Every lifeform that had struck him in the war still carried a seed of the Bleeding Nightmare rooted deep inside it, and wherever they had fled, the Return found them. The Half-Unfathomables who had scattered into the Carcosa felt it first, because they had the least to give back, and some of them lived through it, emptied and shaking and very small, though most did not.

One by one, out across the dark, he felt their threads go taut and then go still, and each time, what they had taken came home to existence, and existence gave some of it back to him, freely and multiplied.

|A thread has ended.|

|What it took has returned to existence, and to you.|

He felt each one and let each one go. The Unfathomables who had limped away from the eastern slope with their Narratives pouring out of them went next, somewhere in the long dark between the Carcosa and wherever they had hoped to reach.

Much later, very far away, two threads went taut at almost the same moment, and through them he could feel a lotus of the Shepherd’s Legion, a great white flower turning slowly in the dark with a hall at its heart, and in that hall a presence so vast and so cold that his threads trembled to touch even the edge of it.

Hoh?

Ione Kalliste had reached her King, as the terrifying power he sensed through her made plain, and then, standing before her King, she died, and the Shepherd of Falling Stars received his report and the corpses together!

|Thread ended: Ione Kalliste.|

|Thread ended: Aethon and many others.|

|What they took has returned to existence, and to you.|

Noah stopped for a moment and thought about all the death of the day. They had chosen to come, and they had chosen to strike, and he did not regret what the Harvest had done, so he went on.

One thread he could not follow. It ran from him out into the dark toward Phaedra, as fine and dark as all the others, and he had felt it pulling at her through the long hours since she fled, until, without warning, it was cut. It never went taut and still as the others had; it was severed cleanly, a little way out from her. Something very large seemed to have stepped into the space between them and closed it, similar to how his Bleeding Nightmare had been stopped by that terrifying Cultist...but somewhat different.

|One thread cannot be followed.|

|Something vast stands between you.|

He reached past the cut and found nothing he could read at all, only a vast, quiet edge and darkness beyond it, and for the first time in a long while he felt something close to awe.

Nearly everything in existence lay open to him, and this did not, and he knew whose hand could close a door such as this.

THE Dissolved Progenitor. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought that this being could become his enemy, and the pressure of that fact alone would have made most beings collapse. But alas. Such was existence!

At last, after some time, he opened his hand, and the farm unfolded into a clearing in a forest! Soil and rivers and rows and coop and house and the gold curve of the Farm Wall came down gently and settled into the ground of a place that was very old and very quiet, and all around it stood trees, tall and thick and ancient, their trunks wider than the shell house and their branches meeting far overhead in a roof of dark green, with warm air beneath them.

The snow of the Carcosa still lay on the roof of the coop and the shell plates of the house, and in the warmth of the forest it began, very slowly, to melt.

This was the Undefined Gaps, and these were the forests where the Legacy of THE Acharya had once stood. The Legacy was gone from here now, carried a little while ago into Ruination’s existence with its halls and its hidden statues, and the forest it had left behind was empty. But the ground remembered!

Noah made sure the forest covered them entirely, then went inside, where the fire of Dreams burned on the floor and a small blue-gold girl was asleep in the second chair, and sat down beside her while the snow melted from the roof above them, drop by drop, into the soil of the forest.

He would not stay in one place for long. His farm would keep moving across Existence!

---

Night came slowly under the old trees, not like a sun and mood rose or fell around blank space anyways...but he could always mimic light and darkness.

Noah carried the fire of Dreams out onto the porch, set it on the boards beside his chair, and sat down with an empty jar on his knee, and the nine prisoners in the walled plot were quiet, and for the first time since the snow stopped over the Carcosa, nothing needed doing.

He closed his eyes and looked inward at the seed. It sat near the center of him, small and brown-gold and plain, giving off no light at all, and from it ran roots, very fine and very deep, through his Dreaming Human Origin and along every Branch of his Tree, through the long bright shoot of THE Endless Retelling, and out along every dark thread the Bleeding Nightmare had ever sent into existence.

The seed was small, and what it had rooted into was the size of a war!

Three Powers in one Vein. The Return was giving turned around, the Abominations tore the taken out of the takers, and DOOM answered every strike aimed at him with ruin, its Effect line still reading ???, and all three of them were his.

Every gardener knew a field needed weeding as much as watering, and he smiled into the dark, pleased with his tools. He thought of what Astarothael had told him on the porch, that Essara were cut out of existence and carried away.

This seed had never been cut out of anything. It had been given, so there was nothing in it to put down and nothing to measure against the rest of existence, because it was existence giving itself back, and that was why it could be every rarity and none.

Faintly, he could feel the place inside it where the next Vein would one day open, closed and patient. He could push it, and it would open early and grow crooked, or he could wait, and he would wait, and keep giving, and whatever opened would open in its own time! The war had changed something else, too, because his Shinjitsu sat heavier in him than it had, steadier and harder to bend.

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 12.|

|Shinjitsu Assimilation: 10% to 18%.|

|The next threshold waits at 25%.|

He had become more true in a war against beings who had all come carrying someone else’s story! When he opened his eyes, something was catching the firelight at the center of the farm, and he walked out to the sapling of his Tree and found its slender bark beading, very slowly, with clear gold drops that were warm to the touch and smelled of rain on new soil.

|A carved Essara has returned to existence: Destruction.|

|Existence gives back: Sap of Existence.|

|Sap of Existence: what existence gives freely when what was taken comes home. It is not bled. It carries no wound and no debt.|

|It can open the Veins of Purified Essara.|

|It cannot be taken. It can only be given.|

Kings went to war for Ichor, and Ichor came only from wounds, and this had come from a wound closing. What a thing to hold in his hand! He held the jar he had prepared after he had foreseen this possibility beneath the bark and caught the drops one by one until the bottom of it shone gold, and then he went to the walled prison plot.

Thessaly was the only one still conscious, rooted to the chest with her silver wings pinned beneath the soil, and she watched the jar of gold as he came, furious and afraid and failing to hide either.

This was an Excedere Unfathomable Immense Lifeform, mind you! A daughter of THE Dissolved Progenitor! Through the roots of the farm he could feel her two Essara, Heat and Fear, loosening inside her a thread at a time and sinking away into existence, and each time a little more of them went home, the sapling behind him pulsed again.

He sat at the edge of the plot so that his eyes were level with hers.

"What are you doing to me?" she asked, her voice hoarse and steady.

"The farm is giving back what you took," Noah said. "Everything you took to become what you are, a little at a time, through the roots. It isn’t touching you. Whatever you were before you took anything, it’s leaving that alone."

"And when there is nothing left?" she asked, her eyes never leaving the jar. Her voice cracked on the last word.

"Then you’ll be what you were," he said. "And then...well, you would make good fertilizer. After all, I can’t keep the daughter of THE Dissolved Progenitor alive for too long. You might be a little bright beacon."

He smiled brutally as he said it, because he could be sagelike and calm in the face of disaster, but his tyranny leaked out every now and then! He was actually very angry at the two Sisters as them taking Lifthrasir away from THE Chrysalis allowed for thr progression of many more things that occured up till now.

Even though everybody had made their own choices. Even Lifthrasir.

She turned her face away and closed her eyes, but not before he saw that they were wet. He pressed the soil down a little more firmly around her with the side of his boot and went back to the porch, humming to himself, and sat down beside the fire.

The fire burned low. At the end of the last row, in its fading light, two small green buds were pushing up through the melting snow on two of the mounds, one over Roxanna and one over Lifthrasir, and something vibrant was blooming there that felt grander than any fruit he had ever harvested. Something wss finally growing.

What would grow from...planted lifeforms who had carried Essara of Existence?

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