Chapter 5747: A Grand Mythos! II

The screaming sea stopped. The falling arrows hung. The pale chains stilled. The smell of scorched starlight and old ozone that had hung over the underworld vanished all at once, replaced by something older and heavier, the suffocating scent of ancient volcanic Source, thick and primordial and wrong for this age!

And deep within the core of the Train, through the Dimensional Cabins, echoed a sound that did not belong to anything living now, the sound of colossal, iridescent scales shifting against iron, something vast turning over in a place it had no right to even be!

|SOVEREIGN COLLABORATIVE INSCRIPTION COMPLETE.|

|Syntax: THE VESTIGE OF THE FALLEN HERO.|

|You have ushered and aided in the emergence of an Unfathomable Narrative.|

|+35 PROVENANCE. +15 VERITAS. +15 PONDUS. +25 OSMONTIAN MOIRAI.|

...!

Upon Calliope’s actual body, down in the burning Cluster, a single page rose.

It lifted off her and expanded, and it expanded for Gigaparsecs, a sheet of writing wider than Dimensions, hanging over the underworld like a second sky! And then it did not dissolve, and it did not burn away.

It OPENED! Like an iron gate swinging wide on ancient hinges!

And rising up out of the page came a COFFIN!

A coffin!

A massive obsidian coffin, black as the space between things, ascending slowly out of the opened page, and the whole Cluster of Dimensions held its breath as the lid began, with a grinding finality, to lift.

Obsidian flames spilled out first, pouring from the seams of the coffin, and then the thing inside it rose.

It...was not perceivable! Noah stared and the weavings of existence could not resolve it, could not draw it, could give him nothing but the shape of the obsidian flames that wrapped it, a humanoid silhouette of pure dark fire standing where a body should be, terrible and vast and impossible.

But Noah knew what it was, knew it in the weavings of his frozen existence, because the weavings that poured off it were the same weavings he had felt on a Shard.

The physical, terrifying Remnant of Vakochev!

Noah looked upon it in astonishment, unable to move his masked eye, and down below, everything stopped.

The Infinity Eater stopped bleeding. The Champion stopped rebelling. The Sealed One’s Vessel stopped its suppression of THE Creature. Adrastia looked up solemnly.

Every hunter, every prey, every collapsed and swirling thing in the whole cluster of underworlds went utterly still, and they all looked UP, at the obsidian coffin and the fire-wrapped titan rising from it, in pure astonishment.

What...had THE Writer of Mythos done?!

Just what, in all of existence, had she written?

And the watching Immense Ones erupted at this time.

The gazes of the Immense Ones blazed, and their weavings crashed across the sky, cold and grand and arrogant, arriving one atop another!

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND observes the fire-wrapped Remnant, and is amused.|

|"You have brought out another part of your body to die? Good. I did not enjoy killing parts of you the first time as much as I should have."|

...!

|THE OVERSEEING ONE recoils. This was not written into his Narrative. A Descendant has authored something he did not permit.|

|"Impossible. A measly Descendant of ink, raising THAT? Who lent her the hand? WHO?"|

|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR studies the Shard-weavings with cold, greedy interest.|

|"That is his true remnant. Not a memory. Not a ghost. Oh boy..."|

|THE GLOATING JAILER counsels caution.|

|"Careful, brethren. We buried this one for a reason. Twice-buried is a Narrative I do not wish to author a third time."|

|THE CACKLING BUTCHER is delighted. THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR, for the first time in an age, is not bored...|

And through all of it, the fire-wrapped Remnant of Vakochev did not react.

He did not look at Calliope who had written him, and he did not look down at the dying underworld beneath his feet. Slowly, deliberately, with the terrible calm of a being who had already died once and found nothing in death worth fearing, the Remnant turned his head UPWARD!

His gaze locked directly onto the observation gallery.

Directly onto the Immense Ones who had slaughtered him an unknown time ago!

...!

Vakochev raised his right arm.

And he swung it, once, horizontally, across the whole span of the tracks of the Dimensional Provenance Train!

His Dimensionality was so unfathomably, monstrously high that in the instant of the swing he vanished from the perception of every existence present, hunters and prey alike, gone from all sight as the movement outpaced the ability of the weavings to hold him.

There was...no explosion!

There was no blast, no fire, no eruption of force!

There was only the sound of reality parting along an unstitched seam, a single clean and terrible sound, as THE Dimensional Provenance Train SPLIT CLEANLY IN TWO!

BOOM!

The residual force of that swing rolled outward in a wave, and Noah, hanging masked at the edge of the gallery, was directly in its path, far too close to the Immense Ones, far too close to the parting of the Train itself.

And it eviscerated him!

The residual wave shredded his masked existence in an instant, tearing his eye apart, unmaking his dreaming presence, obliterating the whole of him where he hung as an eye.

Before, before the forest and the stone and the definition he had made his own, this would have ended him completely, would have collapsed his existence and killed him for good.

But his Dream...was Infinite now.

|Your presence within an Infinite Dream has been destroyed.|

|An Infinite Dream does not end, even in death. The initial cost was paid. You return.|

...!

Noah’s eye reformed!

It bloomed back into existence at the edge of the sky, whole and masked and watching, his dreaming presence stitched back together out of the very dream that could not end, and he gazed out upon what he had helped to make with an existence that had just died and come back.

The other eyes of the Immense Ones buzzed and blazed in fury and shock all around the split, their gazes whipping across the two halves of the sundered Train.

|THE Dimensional Provenance Train has been cleaved and brought to a halt.|

...!

And down in the burning, dying Cluster, upon her own bleeding body, THE Writer of Mythos threw back her head and LAUGHED!

Blood leaked from her nose and ran from the corner of her mouth, painting her chin red, her reserves spent, her ink run dry, her whole existence trembling from the price she had paid, and she laughed and laughed with a wild and ecstatic joy.

"Oh, now THIS," Calliope gasped through the blood, her eyes shining with mad delight, "now this can be considered a Mythos worth observing!"

...!!!