"Yes."
"Master, can you see the future?"
The Five Seats of Vengeance felt awful. Every time he tried to ask a question, the old chess player answered it first. Being so completely under the other man's control was suffocating.
Worse still was the man's identity.
"That's right. I'm the Dream Tenth Seat, the Chess Master."
"Master, you mentioned the narrative layer. Does that mean you're—"
"Do not speak my lord's true name."
"The Dream God? The blind and foolish one, the unknowable, the unnamable, the Dream God who slaughtered the pantheons of wisdom, knowledge, and truth until almost no one was left to become a god? A-Aza—"
The Five Seats of Vengeance was afraid.
The narrative layer was an ability unique to the Dream Pantheon.
Put simply, Dream Gods believed that everything in their world, including knowledge and the laws of physics, was false. Above them existed a real world, and those who lived there were called Upper-Level Narrators.
To Upper-Level Narrators, the world of the Dream Gods was nothing more than a dream, a book, or a story. Its inhabitants thought they were living people, but they were merely characters in a novel. The Upper-Level Narrators could decide their fates with a few strokes of a pen or taps on a keyboard.
The ability to influence those narrators and change fate and the story was the narrative layer.
The Five Seats of Vengeance wiped the sweat from his forehead. If the gods and God's Chosen of Universe 42 had all gone mad, then...
The Chess Master said:
"No. You're my disciple, after all."
"Damn it! Are you going to kill me?"
At those words, the Five Seats of Vengeance broke into a delighted grin.
*That's right. I'm the Chess Master's disciple. I lived with Master when I was young.