Noah did not move!
Not a finger and not a breath he did not need. He stood in the falling silk with the kaleidoscope turning past him and he held himself utterly still, because the thing at the bottom of the one taut strand was looking at him, and it had not yet finished deciding what he was!
It hung no larger than his hand.
Golden plates overlapped along its body, and they caught light from angles the light was not coming from, so that it seemed lit from inside by something that was not quite in this place! Six jointed legs folded neatly against it. Two wings lay closed along its back, and through them, faint and slow, drifted shapes that were not there when he looked directly and were there again when he looked away.
And at its head sat exactly two eyes, deep gold, unblinking, and both of them held him the way a scale holds a weight!
|DREAM GU|
|Rarity: RARE|
|Depth: THE HEM|
|VERITAS: 341 / PROVENANCE: 328 / POTENTIA: 356 / PONDUS: 339|
|Echo: condensed around a shed fragment. Nature of fragment: a dream that was not finished.|
...!
Three hundred and forty-one!
A full Fold above him! Sitting at the edge of the cloth where he had never stood, holding an echo of something a departed being had dreamed and could not carry through the crossing, and looking at him with total patience while his ring went warm and then very deliberately went silent!
Atlas was not going to help with this one.
And then the Gu spoke!
Its voice did not come from its mouth, since it had none that he could find. It came from the silk. Every falling strand in the vicinity carried a thread of it, so that the words arrived from above and around him at once, layered, grand, and unhurried in the way of a thing that has never once been made to wait!
"I sensed the weavings of a Unique Dream here."
The two eyes did not blink.
"Something dreamed in this place that was not of this place. Grandly. Grandly enough to draw me down from where I hang. Nothing dreams as grandly as I do within a great many strands of here, little one."
The wings along its back stirred, and the shapes inside them turned.
"So I will put it to a test. Dream with me. Keep pace, and I will know what you are. Fall behind, and you will simply become part of what I dream."
BOOM!
The Dream Gu dreamed!
And the Chrysalis around Noah was gone!
He stood on a shore of black glass beneath a sky that was a single closed eyelid, and the sea before him was made of every conversation he had ever left unfinished, murmuring, and the tide was going out!
He had one heartbeat to understand what was being asked, and he understood it, because THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer surged up through his quarks and he did not resist the dream!
He joined it!
THE PRECEPT OF THE WAKING DREAM woke inside him, and Noah imposed his own mind’s simulation over the Gu’s, not against it, alongside it, weaving his dream through the Gu’s dream at the seam where the two met!
The tide was going out. He dreamed a moon. The moon rose over the closed eyelid of the sky, and the tide turned, and the sea of unfinished conversations came back in and he stood in it to his knees and let them finish!
The Gu’s dream shifted!
The shore folded upward into a staircase with no top, each step a year he had not lived yet, and it was already climbing without him, and to fall behind was to be left on a year that would never arrive!
Noah dreamed his legs longer. He dreamed the steps shorter. He dreamed that he had always been at the top already and was only remembering the climb, and the staircase, faced with a dreamer who refused its premise, agreed with him!
Faster!
The dream became a city that was also his own skeleton, streets running along his ribs, and something was hunting through it that wore his son’s face and was not his son!
Noah dreamed the streets lit. He dreamed the thing’s true face, and it was only a dream of a fear, and he dreamed the fear a chair and sat it down and told it to wait.
The dream became a fire that burned memories for fuel, and he dreamed himself into a memory the fire could not reach, one it had never been given, a preschool teacher and a word he had not understood at five years old and the way his mother’s hand had tightened on his!
The dream became a silence that ate the names of things, and he dreamed his own name into the silence and let it be eaten and dreamed it again, and again, and again, faster than the silence could swallow, until the silence gave up!
Faster!
The Gu was not slowing!
It was curious now, and its curiosity ran the dreams harder, stranger, folding three into one, a war that was also a wedding that was also the last second before a star collapsed, and Noah dreamed through all three at once, his Provenance blazing, sweat standing on his skin in a place that had no heat, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming alongside a thing three hundred and forty-one Trueness deep and refusing, absolutely refusing, to fall one single step behind!
And then it stopped.
The Chrysalis came back around him all at once. Silk falling. Nebulas turning. Noah standing exactly where he had been standing, breathing hard, his Provenance drawn thin and humming, and the small golden Gu hanging at the bottom of its strand exactly where it had hung.
It looked at him for a long moment.
Then it nodded.
One slow inclination of that plated head, and the shapes inside its wings turned once and settled!
"It is nice," the Dream Gu said, "to see a little one starting out who is a true dreamer."
The strand it hung from began to draw upward.
"There are so few. Most who come here dream of things. You dream with them. That is the older way. Take this."
Something detached from beneath one of its wings and drifted down, slow, turning, and landed in Noah’s open palm!
A scale.
A single golden plate no larger than a coin, still warm, still catching light from angles the light was not coming from, and as it touched his skin, prompts unfolded!
|DREAMER’S SCALE|
|A shed plate of a Rare Dream Gu, given freely. It carries the Gu’s recognition.|
|Function: a key. In the Chrysalis, the deeper silk of the Dream weavings will part for the bearer. Elsewhere, any dream the bearer walks will know they were acknowledged by something older than dreaming.|
|Function: a mark. Other Dream Gu will perceive the bearer as one who kept pace. Most will not test again. Some will be curious.|
...!
The Dream Gu rose along its strand, and the strand rose with it, and in the space of a breath it was gone into the upper silk and only the falling threads remained, gentle and multicolored and no longer looking at anyone.
Noah closed his hand around the scale.
The ring on his finger grew warm again.
|For a second there, I thought you were dead.|
|My weavings are waking up a bit more, in this place that used to be my home for some time. This construct can have a bit more freedom here. So let us go. You survived one encounter with a Rare one that you cannot overcome, and I would like that to remain the total.|
|Let us find a Common one.|
|You should be able to converse with me more freely here. At most, you can treat me like a database. Ask questions. They will eat your Provenance. Ask anyway.|
Noah looked at the ring for a moment.
Then he looked at the scale in his hand, and the silk, and the place where a thing a Fold above him had gone back up into the dark with a nod, and he made a decision about how to spend what he had.
"I can ask you a lot of questions," he said. "But tell me something that you feel is the most important for me to know."
The ring was silent.
Not the silence of before, when Atlas had held back so the Gu could judge. A different silence. The silence of a cluster of records and probability searching a very long life for the one thing in it that mattered most, and taking its time about the search!
Then Atlas spoke, and for once, there was no laugh in it.
|When I was rising in power, I traveled for a time with two Immense Ones.|
|One of them you know. She did not go by Widow then. She had another name, and I will not say it here, since she has earned her quiet and this place listens. The other was a strand of a different kind, and does not matter to this story.|
|The three of us came to a region of THE Chrysalis that holds a mountain.|
|I want you to picture it properly. The whole mountain was made of Gu. Not living on it. Made of it. Millions of them, Common and Rare, locked together into a peak that went up past the sky and out of sight, every one of them powerful enough to kill me twice at the depth I held then, and every one of them still and quiet and waiting.|
|And at the summit sat a Gu so rare that any Immense One in existence would go mad for it.|
|Here is the thing. Existence itself held a Narrative over that mountain. A Ruling, undeniable, older than the two Immense Ones I stood beside. The Ruling said: to reach the peak and claim the Gu, one must follow the path that has been carved. There was a path. It wound up the mountain through all those millions of waiting Gu. And the Ruling was the kind that existence does not argue with, because existence wrote it.|
|So the two Immense Ones climbed.|
|They were strands of the Weave, and they walked the carved path, and the path was a Ruling, and Rulings hold. But the path was carved to break whatever walked it. Every turn of it fed them to the mountain a piece at a time. And halfway up, the two most powerful beings I had ever stood beside could not go further. They were injured in ways I did not know Immense Ones could be injured. She was bleeding light. I will never forget it.|
|And I did not climb.|
The ring was warm in Noah’s hand, and the silk fell, and he did not interrupt.
|I looked at the carved path and I thought, this is a Ruling. It is undeniable. Existence wrote it. Fine. What does it actually say? It says the peak is reached by the path. It does not say the path is reached by walking.|
|I turned around and went back down into the outer silk, and I spent a long while looking, and I found a Common Gu. A Defiance Gu. The least impressive insect you have ever seen. A concept condensed out of nothing, no will, no echo, just a small pure crystallized refusal with six legs, running from me the moment it tasted that I was not food.|
|I caught it anyway. I bound it into the first shield I ever built, and the shield held one thing, which was its Defiance. Not strength. Not depth. Refusal, held up in front of me like a lantern.|
|Then I went back to the mountain, and I raised the shield, and I did not walk the carved path.|
|I walked straight up.|
|And the Ruling of the mountain met a Common insect’s refusal and did not know what to do with it, because a Ruling is a sentence existence wrote, and the Defiance Gu was a concept existence had condensed, and they were made of the same stuff, and the older one was the refusal. The mountain could not decide whether I was breaking its Ruling or expressing it. While it was deciding, I reached the top.|
|I took the Gu. Then I went back down, and I carried two Immense Ones off that mountain one at a time under a shield made out of a bug that was afraid of me.|
|That is the story.|
The silk kept falling. The nebulas turned.
|This is the most important thing I know, and I have spent a very long time knowing it.|
|In Existence, many beings hold Rulings. Existence itself holds Rulings, and Scales, and Narratives, and a great many more things besides. Some of them are undeniable, and they are called undeniable because it is true. You will meet a hundred of them before you die, and every one of them will be written in a sentence that sounds final.|
|But you do not necessarily have to follow those Rulings. Or those Scales. Or the words of anyone else. Including me. Especially me, because I am a record, and records love to be obeyed.|
|Question everything you hear. And then bring your own refusal to it, whatever shape your refusal takes, and hold it up, and walk straight up the mountain.|
|Your own defiance...your own path.|
|That is what leads to the peak. Nothing else ever has.|
...!
Noah stood in the silk with a Dream Gu’s scale warm in one hand and a dead man’s most important lesson warm in the other, and for a long moment he simply held both of them, and did not move, and thought his own thoughts.
"...."
Then he closed his hand, and went to find a Common Gu!
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