Chapter 5867: Threads II

Noah went alone.

Part of his existence stayed behind on the white throne at the bottom of the Descent, with Emotive at his knee and the Nova Dream Sector still spreading silently across existence. Another part of him, a single body woven of night-sky skin and blue-gold constellations, stepped out of his Dream and into the dark between things.

There were still too many unknowns to bring anyone else.

He followed the weavings of Destiny.

THE First Gu of Destiny had left them behind like a trail of thread through a labyrinth. Fine, gleaming strands of obsidian and gold, stretching out across the dark, past the edges of his charge, past the Long Night’s flow here, past the place where time itself grew thin and loose. Noah walked along them, and the strands hummed under his feet, and every step carried him further than a step should.

Then the dark ahead of him split open like a cocoon, and he stepped through.

|Arrived: THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering.|

|In a region that among other things, lives outside the weavings of time, from the age when Immense Ones first rose. Its nature is loose, fluid, and hallucinatory.|

|Region: THE Ossuary of Unspun Fates.|

|Here, destinies that never came to pass are laid to rest.|

|You have been invited.|

...!

Noah looked up, and went very still!

Regions of The Chrysalis was as strange as always. Multicolored silk fell endlessly from somewhere far above, strands drifting down through the air, each one carrying a mood or a memory from a life that stayed unlived. Nebulas hung in layers so thin he could see through one into the next and the next. The whole place shimmered, half-real, as if existence here were still deciding what it wanted to be.

And even here, the snow fell!

Heavy, white, and steady, drifting down through the falling silk, settling on everything. The Long Night had reached even this place, outside of time.

But it was what lay below that held his eyes.

A sea stretched out beneath him to every horizon, and it was made of stars. Obsidian and gold, glitering, slow, its surface rolling in long heavy swells like the breathing of something asleep. And it was something stranger than water. Here and there, its surface parted, and long gleaming shapes rose out of it and sank back down. Tentacles. Thick as mountain ranges, ringed with gold, their undersides lined with pale suckers that opened and closed slowly in the snow.

Above the sea hung the threads.

Countless millions of them, gleaming faintly gold, dangling from the dark above like the strings of an enormous puppet theater with no puppets left. They swayed slowly in a wind beyond his feeling.

Each one ended in a small, clean cut. Each one was a life that had been meant to happen, and stayed unborn. At the end of some of them, small white shapes hung like knots. Bones. Thin and smooth, shaped into spindles, still wound with the last few turns of thread they had carried before the thread was cut.

The silence of it was very old.

And at the center of the sea stood a citadel!

It rose out of the obsidian-gold waves in impossible towers, and it was alive. Its walls were plated in curved, overlapping chitin, gold and black, gleaming like the shell of some vast beetle; its towers ended in long jointed points like the legs of an insect bent upward toward the sky; and its windows were compound eyes, thousands of glittering facets in clusters, every one of them turned toward him. Tentacles wound around its foundations and up its spires like ivy, pulsing slowly, and from its highest gate, a pair of enormous mandibles opened and closed, slowly, in time with the rolling of the sea.

Noah’s breath came out as snow.

He looked at all of it with deep, delighted interest.

And then something spilled out of the citadel!

It poured out of the mandible gate like a tide breaking over a dam.

Tentacles came first, dozens of them, gold and obsidian, unfurling down the citadel’s walls and into the sea in long gleaming coils. Then a body, vast and segmented, the long armored abdomen of an insect larger than any Dimension he had walked through, ringed in gold chitin, its many legs bending and unbending as it flowed down the walls. Behind it, two great wings unfolded, thin and veined like a cicada’s, glittering with patterns that looked like maps of every road anyone had ever walked.

And at the front of it all, rising up out of the coils and chitin, was a woman.

She was beautiful!

That was the most unsettling part. From the waist up, she was humanoid, tall and graceful, her skin smooth obsidian veined with gold. Her face was serene and perfect, a face from a painting. Her hair fell around her shoulders in thousands of fine golden threads, every one of them moving on its own, slowly, like the threads hanging above the sea. Above her brow, a crown of thin curved mandibles rose like a diadem.

Her eyes opened.

They were gold, and faceted, every eye a thousand tiny facets catching the light. And when they looked at him, Noah felt every possible version of himself being seen at once.

HUUM!

He looked back at her, and turned his Dream on her.

|THE First Gu of Destiny.|

|Name: ?????|

|Immensity: ?????|

|Dimensionality: ?????|

...!

Question marks. All of them!

His Dream could feel her weight, though. It pressed against him and he measured it against everything he had ever felt. Moriarty, hovering over THE Legacy Son’s Mountain. The Thinker, in his Lecture Hall, clicking his beads.

She exceeded them both. Easily!

|THE First Gu of Destiny speaks.|

Her voice was soft, and layered, as if a dozen women were speaking the same words a heartbeat apart.

|"For someone to write a budding Narrative that crossed the rivers of Destiny, I thought you would at least hold the level of an Ancient Immensity."|

Her faceted eyes moved over him, slowy.

|"But the weight I feel from you now... it is different from any Immensity at all."|

Around her, tentacles drifted through the snow.

|"Hello. I am THE First Gu of Destiny. Lygara."|

She tilted her head, and her golden thread-hair swayed.

|"I invited you here to compare and exchange upon the grand weavings of Existence. But now... I am not sure I will learn very much from you."|

A small pause bloomed.

|"I will keep an open mind, though."|

Noah stared at her.

His pupil-less gold eyes took in all of her, the beautiful face and the vast insect body and the tentacles curling through the snow, and he felt only wonder.

|"I am THE Dreaming Human Origin, Osmont. You have already learned something new, just from the whisper of my Narrative."|

Noah smiled.

|"I am dreaming grandly enough that, before reaching thirty years since my conception, I am standing before yet another First Gu. One that has existed since before THE First Sundering."|

He spread his hands slightly, as if presenting the obvious.

|"Is there not something grand to learn from that?"|

...!