A/N
2 chapters combined into 3k words chapter, enjoy!
Chapter 759: The Mass Migration
The avatar hung in the air behind me, and the Leviathan trembled.
I watched it and thought: it remembers, and I don’t mean me or Snik specifically.
It had never met us before, but somewhere in whatever passed for memory in a being that had been sleeping in the deep water since before most of the structures in the settlement had been built, there was a pattern that matched what it was looking at now.
The Sanguine Aristocracy at full expression. The apex design that Ke Jun had put into this world first, before everything else. The Leviathan was old enough to have known them when they were alive, old enough to have moved aside when they walked through the deep channels, old enough to carry the shape of them in its oldest memories the way a riverbed carries the shape of the water that carved it.
They had probably kept it the way the Leech-kin kept the marrow crawlers. A pet, but at a scale that made the comparison almost funny. Something you cared for, something you fed, something you did not harm because it was yours, and something that understood the command structure in the same wordless way that the crawlers understood Snik's suppression aura.
The Leviathan was terrified because the last time it had seen this, there had been someone above it in the order of things. And now there was again.
From somewhere inside the body I was wearing, Snik's voice arrived.
"That," he said, "is the largest living thing I have ever seen in my life, and I have been alive for over six hundred years."
"I know," I said.
"It is trembling."
"Yes."
"The Crimson Cradle. The thing that I have spent six centuries being afraid of. It is trembling." A pause. "Because of me."
"Because of your ancestors," I corrected. "You're borrowing their reputation."
"I am borrowing a lot more than that at this moment," Snik said. "I have spent my entire existence being afraid of what I am not. Right now, I am looking at the Crimson Cradle and it is afraid of what I apparently am."
I did not have an answer to that, so I did not give one.
Instead, I turned the avatar's attention toward the Leviathan and raised one enormous golden hand, palm outward, fingers up. The universal gesture that said: I am not here to fight.
The Leviathan's eyes tracked the movement. Its trembling slowed, not stopped, but slowed as it realised what it thought was frightening turned out to be less frightening than expected.
I kept my voice even and let it carry through the avatar's presence.
"The world is dying," I said. "The sky is pressing against another world, and when they meet, both end. The people here have done nothing to deserve that. They need to leave, and we need something strong enough to carry all of them to safety." I let a moment pass. "That is why I woke you. I need your help. We need your help."
The Leviathan was still.
The water around it had stopped moving. The ripples had reached the edges of the deep bog and returned and flattened out, and now everything was quiet, then it moved its head, slowly, down and back up.
"Help," it said.
The voice of it was deep enough to feel in the chest rather than hear with the ears, a single word that came from somewhere inside that massive body and arrived like the first sound at the bottom of a well.
Having received the confirmation I was looking for, I let the avatar dissolve.
After all, I had no intention of fighting this thing.
The golden light went out, and I was just a person standing in borrowed clothes at the edge of the deep bog, the Blood Moon overhead and the dark water in front of me and the largest living thing in this world breathing slowly at the center of it all.
I released a breath that I had apparently been holding for a while.
The Weeping Root walked up to me, his translucent face was turned upward, and the expression on it was pure awe.
"The ancestors have been dead for thousands of years," he said. His voice was small and wondering. "How…how did you do that?"
"I don't have time to explain," I said. "We need to go save everyone."
He looked at me for another moment, then gave one short nod, and we went.
***
The whole population had gathered by the time we returned.
They were all here: the Leech-kin in their family groups, the Shaman elders at the edges, the marrow crawlers clustered near their owners, and Ignis, the blind Ash-Seer.
I floated down to eye level and looked at them.
There were not many of them. Six hundred years of a world devouring itself had seen to that. What remained was a settlement small enough that everyone knew everyone else's name, which meant that what I was about to ask was not an abstraction to them. I was not asking a population to relocate. I was asking a community.
"The world is ending," I said. There was probably a better opening, but they already had an idea on what was going on. "Not in the distant future. Today. The portal you have seen in the sky is the place where your world and my world are pressing against each other, and if nothing changes, they will both be destroyed. I have found a way to move your people out before that happens. There is a Leviathan in the deep water who has agreed to carry you."
The crowd processed this.
"Where would we go?" an older Leech-kin woman asked. She had a child on one arm and another clinging to the back of her robe.
"Through the portal," I said. "To my world."
"Your world?" she asked.
"It has three suns and actual sunlight," I offered, not sure what else to say. "There is a lot of water for you to live in."
"What is a sun?" asked the child clinging to her robe.
The mother clearly didn’t know how to respond to that question and said, “It’s the red, blue, and gold we saw through the portal.”
I probably shouldn’t have mentioned anything about suns, all the people here knew about were the Blood Moon. The concept of a sun probably wasn’t even known to them.
"Is there blood?" asked the older child on her arm.
“No, there isn’t,” I replied.
“How can we live in a world without blood?” someone asked.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
From the physiology of the Leech-Kin, it seemed they would be able to function in the water, and my world did have water.
From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, I could hear an old male talking: "I'm not leaving. My family is buried here. My home is here. Everything I've built is here, and you're asking me to walk away from it because of something happening in the sky."
Several voices murmured agreement. I had expected this. It would have been strange if they hadn't.
"What's on the other side?" someone called out. "Do your own people live there?"
"Yes, there’s beings from other worlds who had to leave their home world just like you," I said.
An older Leech-kin man, the one standing beside the woman who had spoken first, crossed his arms. "But what do we eat? Where do we sleep? What about the bog-shallows? Nothing grows without the dark water."
These were real questions. I answered them as honestly as I could, which meant acknowledging what I did not know alongside what I did. My inner world had water, it had soil, it had life, but it wasn’t designed with blood creatures in mind.
"It isn't a promise of everything being fine," I said. "It is a promise that you will be alive to find out.
"That's not as reassuring as you think," the man said bluntly.
"I understand," I said, and I meant it. "You're being asked to leave everything you know for somewhere none of you have ever been, based on the word of a stranger who appeared through a hole in your sky and pushed everyone face-first into the courtyard stones. I am aware of how this sounds."
A beat of silence.
"At least you admit it," the older woman said.
Ignis stepped forward with one hand trailing along the wall of the nearest structure, his ruined eyes pointed slightly upward like he was reading something the rest of us couldn't see.
"I have watched the vapors for hundreds of years," he said. "I have read what the Heavens write for themselves when they believe no one is listening. What the Walker says is true. The world is ending. This is not a distant end. This is the kind of end that happens before you finish the thought you are currently having." A pause. "The Walker is offering us continuation. I suggest we take it."
Most of them were already nodding, not all, but most. The current of the crowd shifted since the person they trust the most had given a clear direction.
Except for one.
He was an elderly Leech-kin, his translucent skin dimmed with age, and he was shaking his head.
"Tarum," said the woman beside him, placing a hand on his arm. "Come with us."
"No," he said.
"Your granddaughter is going. You want to be with her."
"My granddaughter will be fine without an old man slowing her down." He looked out across the settlement, at the buildings, at the paths worn smooth by feet that no longer walked them. "Maren died here. So did my sons. So did everyone else I spent my life standing next to. If the world ends, I end with them. That seems right to me."
The neighbour on his other side tried: "But Tarum, if you come with us…"
"I'm hundreds of years old," he said. "I have had a full life. I have had a life, and I have buried most of it, and I am not afraid of what comes next. I am afraid of being somewhere else when it happens." He looked at the neighbour directly. "If Maren were still alive, it would be different. She's not. So, this is where I stay."
I watched this from where I floated. I did not move to intervene.
The honest truth was that he had made a reasonable argument. He was old enough that the disruption of relocation would be its own cost, and he understood what he was choosing, and the people around him were not in any position to tell him his grief was wrong. I had no standing to impose my will on a man who had decided where he wanted to be when the world ended.
I thought, not for the first time, about what happened to souls in a cultivation world after death.
Every realm I had visited had its own theories. The Realm of the Chosen had the concept of ascension through conviction. The Two Suns World had its saints and its barriers and its complicated relationship with whatever lay beyond them. My own cultivation world had the Heavens, which seemed to be paying attention to things at all times, which implied some level of continuity beyond the physical.
But I genuinely did not know, and I was in no hurry to find out personally.
I looked at the old man one last time, and then I turned away.
***
I had decided to walk with the people rather than fly.
I thought that would be encouraging and motivating for them.
The walk to the deep bog was slower than I expected.
People said goodbye to things. This surprised me, and then it didn't, because of course they did.
The Leech-kin woman with the two children pressed her palm flat against the wall of her home for a long moment before she moved on. One of the Shaman elders stopped at a particular spot along the channel edge and looked out at the dark water with an expression that would make someone’s heart ache. A group of children ran back twice to collect specific rocks they had apparently decided were essential.
A small boy fell into step beside me. He was maybe six years old, or whatever the equivalent was here, with the wide-set eyes of the younger Leech-kin.
"Is the other world scary?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"Is it bigger than this world?"
"No, but it’s always growing bigger."
He considered this. "Will there be things to climb?"
"There are mountains," I said.
He appeared to find this satisfactory and ran back to his mother.
When we reached the edge of the deep bog, the Leviathan was there.
The crowd stopped walking. Every single person, adults and children both, went still at the sight of it rising from the dark water, and for a moment the only sound was the slow movement of the bog around the creature's body.
Then, from somewhere in the cluster of children, a small voice said: "It's enormous."
"We know," the adult said.
"Its eye is bigger than our house."
"We can see that."
"Can I touch its eye?"
"Absolutely not."
"Are we actually going to stand on that?"
"Lord Malachi stood near the big water monster thing before," a child said.
"That wasn't Lord Malachi," a slightly older child said.
"It was Lord Malachi's body."
"That's not the same thing."
"How would you know?"
The adults were less verbal about it, but I could see the same thing working through them. Some of them had heard stories about the Leviathans from elders who had heard it from their own elders, passed-down descriptions of what the world had once supported in its waters. Seeing the reality was different from the stories. The stories had not adequately covered the gills, each one wide enough to walk through comfortably. They had not covered the way the Leviathan's breathing created a tide.
One of the Shaman elders exhaled through his teeth. "I didn't think I'd see one before I died."
"And yet we all are," said the woman beside him.
I led them forward and onto the Leviathan's back.
The hide was warm. It was the warmth of something alive from the inside out, something whose blood ran at a temperature that had not changed in centuries because there had been nothing to change it.
The Leviathan waited as the weight of more people rested on it.
When the last of them were aboard, something happened in the water around the Leviathan's body. A shimmer that began at the waterline and rose, following the curve of its back and sides, expanding above the crowd in a dome of faint light that had no color but made the air inside it feel different, contained, held.
A small boy who had been sitting too close to the edge found himself gently but firmly pushed back toward the center by nothing visible.
He looked at his hands, then looked at the empty air that had moved him, and then looked at the child beside him and said: "Did you see that?"
"Yes," the other child said.
"Good," said the first child. "I thought I imagined it."
"It's like a wall but softer," one announced.
"Don't push on it," said a mother.
"But it gives."
"I said don't push on it."
The Leviathan rose into the air.
The water fell away beneath us in long dark curtains, and the bone-trees and the channels and the settlement buildings shrank as we went up, and for the first time the full shape of this world was visible from above for the people to see: the winding channels, the clusters of structures, the central bog with the statue rising from its deepest point, all of it lit in the red of the Blood Moon that had been hanging in this sky for longer than any living creature here could remember.
I watched from below.
The bubble passed through the portal without resistance. The three suns of my inner world were briefly visible through the tear before the Leviathan moved fully through and the portal closed behind it.
And then they were gone.
I stood in Ke Jun's inner world and let the sound settle. The Blood Moon hung above me, still red, still enormous. The bone-trees stood in their rows. The channels ran their slow dark courses.
I turned to the Weeping Root, who had stayed with me.
He was watching the place where the portal had been, and his expression was doing the complicated thing it had been doing since he first appeared to me, that mixture of enormous grief and something that might have been the beginning of relief.
"It's time," I said. "The connection between the Blood Moon and the cultivation needs to be severed."
He nodded slowly.
"It is the hardest thing," he said quietly. "Of all the things I have done, this is the hardest thing. My master built that over thousands of years. The Blood Moon is everything he was. Every technique, every advancement, every year of his cultivation is threaded through it." He looked up at it. "To cut the connection is to end all of that. To say it is finished."
I looked at him for a moment.
"I don't plan to destroy the Blood Moon," I said.
He blinked. The tears, which had been their constant presence since I arrived, stopped for a moment.
"What?" he asked as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
"I have something else in mind for it," I smiled.