Chapter 5908: Nightmare II

<Existential Interlude- THE Bell and Its Answer>

Reversal is how Existence moves.

What is stretched will spring back. What is raised high is brought low.

What is pushed, pushes, and what is struck, sooner or later, strikes. Every movement in existence is shared, because each thing is joined to whatever it moves. The hand and the thing it strikes are two only for a moment. Then the answer comes, and they are one again.

Long ago, there was a King who won a great war. To celebrate, he ordered the greatest bell in any Dimension, and an old bell-maker cast it for him in the hills.

When it was done, the bell-maker said, "Remember, a bell is mostly emptiness. The bronze is only there to hold the empty space in shape. Strike it gently, and it will sing for you. Strike it hard, and it will sing to everything."

The King laughed. He hung the bell from the highest tower of his palace, and on the morning of his victory, he struck it himself, once, with all his strength, so that every corner of existence would know he had won.

The sound went out!

It crossed his kingdom in a heartbeat and his Dimension in an hour. On it went, across the dark between Dimensions, and the empty Gaps, and the edges of old Legacies, quieter and quieter but still going, because a sound travels until something empty enough to answer it is found.

The King grew old and died. His children ruled, then their children. The bell hung silent so long that people forgot it had ever been struck, and the kingdom grew rich and proud and careless.

And far, far away, at the very edge of everything, there was a valley so vast and so empty that everything passed through it and nothing stayed.

The sound reached it.

The valley held no hatred for the King. Who had struck the bell, and why, meant nothing to it. It only did what empty things do. It gave the sound back, once, whole, with exactly the strength it had been given.

The answer took Ages to arrive. When it reached the kingdom at last, it came rolling in from the dark as a single note. The great bell shattered, the tower fell, the palace fell, and the whole kingdom shook apart in one long, ringing tone, and the descendants of the King died with no idea why.

Only the bell-maker’s grandchildren, far off in the hills, understood. They had been taught to strike their own bells gently.

Every strike is answered. The harder the strike, the louder the answer. And the answer comes home on its own time, not the striker’s.

---

The domain of THE Dreaming Human Origin was quiet.

Only Noah could enter it, Noah and those he had given the right to, and at this moment, he was alone. His Existential Root Domain had come a long way from the first small, frightened seed of it. Now it stretched in every direction, vast and endlessly deep, and it looked like him.

Seas of stellar blue and gold rolled slowly beneath a sky of the same colors, the water full of drifting starlight, the clouds above lit from within like lanterns. Here and there, things floated on the seas and in the clouds, pieces of his life turned into landscape.

Far off, a dungeon rose out of the water, the first one he had ever cleared, the walls still ringed with heavy snow that stayed frozen forever. Above it turned great illusory Wheels of Existence.

Between the clouds hung small glowing Observable Existences and Dimensions, models of the ones he had walked through, turning like ornaments. And in one quiet cloud, if he looked closely, there was a single lit window in a cheap apartment building.

At the very center of it all, a single point of light blinked slowly, steadily, like a heartbeat seen from very far away. That was THE Infiniverse, drawn into a singularity.

Noah sat on the blue-gold water as if it were solid ground, and laid out what he had taken from THE Sealed One.

Three things floated in the air before him.

The first was a Shard of IT. Small and bright, like the others, and humming, but this one was cooler than the rest, white-gold instead of warm gold, as if it had spent a very long time inside something cold and patient.

The second was the sliver of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor. It looked like a single tear made of grey-blue glass, no larger than his thumbnail, and it was heavier than it had any right to be.

The air around it was quieter than the rest of the domain. Looking at it for too long made something in his chest ache.

Regret!

Just looking at it made him inherently remember all his regrets!

Regret was the oldest split there was: what had happened, and what should have happened instead. Two pasts, pulling on one heart.

The third was the anomaly.

It looked like a single black thread, tied in a knot. As he watched, the knot loosened on its own, slowly, almost undid itself, and then, just before it came free, it pulled itself tight again.

Loosened, tightened, loosened, tightened, over and over, patient and stubbron, a thing that had been refusing to come undone. It reminded him of a wheel that kept turning forever, because it had forgotten how to let go.

As he thought about where to get started...something tugged at him from outside!

He raised his head.

Beyond the walls of his domain, far up in the skies of existence, the white and gold banner of THE Narrative of Kings still hung where it had unfurled. He could feel it from here. And something on it had just moved.

His own name was rising!

It slid upward, smooth and bright, one single place on the list. And at the same moment, the name that had sat just above his slid down past him, and settled where he had been.

|49. THE Dreaming Human Origin|

|50. THE Steward of Returning Ages|

...!

Noah stared up at the banner with a very heavy expression.

He nearly cursed!

What the fuck?

He went back over everything, carefully, fast. Nine vessels, and he had held all of them. The tower, the archivist, the prince, the hermit, the child, the sleeper, the advisor, the walker, the palace. He had eaten every drop of blood and every sliver of consciousness. He had taken the Shard, the Regret, the anomaly. There was no tenth vessel. He was certain of it. He had looked.

And yet a King had just fallen beneath him on the banner, at the very moment he ate the Sealed One, as if the two were connected.

Was it something entirely separate from the Sealed One? But then why would it fall now?

Was it the Sealed One himself? But the Sealed One was gone. Noah had felt the return stop.

Connected to his existence, but not. Separate, but not. It had the same strange shape as a dream and its dreamer: two things, and not quite two.

Noah sighed and shook his head.

He disliked this.

He liked enemies who died cleanly and disappeared. THE Devilish Time Unveiler had died and stayed dead. Oppenheimer had died and stayed dead. Even Little Bobby had been annoying right up until he turned, and then that had been the end of it. That was how enemies were supposed to work.

But THE Sealed One kept messing around. He just needed to be over and gone!

As he was thinking this, existence answered him.

Information drifted down from the banner itself, from THE Narrative of Kings, like warm gold light falling through his domain’s ceiling.

|THE Narrative of Kings has shifted.|

|49. THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|50. THE Steward of Returning Ages.|

|A significant portion of Rulership has been taken by you from THE Steward of Returning Ages.|

...!

Noah read it twice, and then he lay back on the blue-gold water and sighed at the sky.

It was ridiculous. He had finally killed a being who refused to die, cleanly and completely, every last drop of him, and at that exact same moment, a King entirely unknown to him had lost a large part of its Rulership to him.

Existence gave no reason, and Noah needed none. Whatever THE Steward of Returning Ages was, it was tied to the Sealed One somehow, and it was still out there, still on the list, still breathing.

He had found yet another cockroach of an enemy!

And he was going to have to kill it entirely, too.

Somewhere very far away, in a place he had no name for, it felt as if a bell had just been rung.

---

In THE Legacy of THE Hand That Sets the Pieces, on a small floating island where no snow fell, four Immense Ones had abandoned a game of Chaturanga to stare at the sky.

The banner hung above them through the warm, clear air. They had all felt it move.

"He...climbed?" the Source Lifeform said slowly, light spilling over the edges of its body in agitatted little waves. "The weakest name on the list?"

"He did more than climb," said the Conduit Lifeform. The currents inside his half-clear body had gone very still. "Look at what dropped. THE Steward of Returning Ages. Bahaha, something that weak just made it kneel?"

The Primeval One rumbled, a sound like stone grinding on stone, the fires in its eyes barely flickering.

"Luck," it said. "Weak things find luck once. They seldom find it twice. Patience and time will settle it."

The Provenance Lifeform laughed.

She stood at the edge of the island with her ringed arms crossed, looking up at the dim name sitting one place higher than it had any right to sit, and her eyes were bright and hungry.

---

Far away, in the heaving obsidian sea of the Primordial Source, beneath a sky of black lightning, Vakochev stood on the surface of the water and looked up.

He could see the banner even from here. He could see his own name at thirty, a little dimmer than the names around it, and the faint, faint name now sitting at forty-nine, newly arrived.

Behind him, Atlas stood drawn in lines of pale gold, and Anaximander stood with THE Creature, and the Writer of Mythos floated with her book open on her knees, her pen already moving as they all observed the changes!