Chapter 5157: For Me, For Her II

THE Primordial Source.

These were the terrifying words to come out of the mouth of the Gerousia, and Noah found his existence buzzing as they landed.

THE Creature. THE Primordial Source.

The two names should not settle together in his mind. None of what he knew...none of it had prepared him for the possibility that this being had actually touched the deepest well of power across Observable Existence, the well that THE Gilded Ones themselves had been pursuing across eons without ever quite closing the distance to it. THE Primordial Source!

THE Creature had it!

THE Creature had it!!!

Was he...a Relictus or connected to them?

Noah observed the figure of Gerousia Aurelius Maximus show visible fear at the reality of what had just stood up in front of him, because the fear was not something a Paleozoic being of his standing would have permitted himself to express under ordinary circumstances.

His recoil through the air, his parted lips, the trembling swords in his white eyes, the luminous hand pressed against the bleeding cut across his chest, all of these composed a picture of genuine alarm that Noah suspected had not appeared on Gerousia Aurelius Maximus’s face in a very long time.

But moments later, his Pride shone through the fear.

His posture straightened by visible degrees as his engineered Superbius foundation reasserted itself against the shock, because even in the face of a being holding THE Primordial Source, a Gerousia of the House of the Crimson Chalice could not remain afraid for long without betraying every principle of the Ego that defined him.

His sharp gaze returned to THE Creature’s transformed figure, and his voice came out once more, though it carried a new edge that the earlier casual laziness had not contained.

"Something as weak as you must have just gained this."

His fingers flexed against his chest wound, the crimson-gold blood smearing across his palm.

"A recent touch, barely integrated, still untested across any real engagement. I will carve you out in this battle before you have the chance to grow into what that Source might eventually make of you. Your confidence is premature. Your-"

THE Creature raised his blade.

The motion was small, almost casual, a single lifting of the multicolored sword toward the cut already opened across the Gilded One’s chest. And shockingly, the Gerousia’s voice actually cut off.

His mouth remained open around the unspoken next syllable, but no sound emerged from it, and the silence that followed was the silence of a presence being denied the continuation of his own speech. His lips moved. His throat worked. Nothing came out!

THE Creature spoke into the new silence.

"There will not be a battle."

His voice came calm.

"The moment I cut you, the battle was over. Having been touched by THE Source, I can now cut you off, and Ordovician Paleozoic does not matter in the face of that cutting, and Superbius does not matter, and the House of the Crimson Chalice does not matter. Only THE Source matters. The Source is the well from which all other authorities drink...Only THE Source matters...only THE Source..."

His obsidian-crowned head tilted slightly.

"I do this for myself. I do it for her. I do it for the countless many who have suffered under your hands and the hands of those who share your engineered Pride. I do this for the Gilded Ones I will scorch out of existence across the climb that remains in front of me, for the houses whose Civilizations I will crumble into dust, for every trembling lesser being who ever knelt before a Gilded One because the Scales told them they had to kneel. I do this until no lifeform across any reach of Observable Existence can look at another lifeform and believe they are grander by virtue of engineered superiority alone."

...!

After these words, Noah observed THE Creature move his left hand as if issuing a silent command.

From the chest wound of the Gerousia, obsidian light bloomed outward and covered everything in the immediate vicinity of the Gilded One’s body, the light not emanating from the wound so much as the wound functioning as a gate that something had just opened.

The Gerousia became frozen in shock, his mouth still not opening, his limbs becoming raised and splayed outward into a cross-shaped configuration that no gesture of his own had chosen, his luminous body held in place by whatever authority THE Creature had just exerted through the opening of the cut.

THE Creature floated over to him calmly.

And then he began the work.

He raised his multicolored sword and began to use it to carve out a Gilded One.

The scene was shockingly similar to what Noah had watched THE Creature do to the Primordial Architects scattered across the mountain’s tiers, and Noah realized in the slow weight of observing it that THE Creature had been rehearsing this exact procedure across every body he had processed.

The methodology was identical. The cuts followed the same structural seams. The extraction of organs proceeded along the same patient sequence. The body being carved was Paleozoic rather than Proterozoic, but the carving itself operated by the same logic, because THE Creature had been practicing on bodies of other classification in order to arrive at this body with the hands of a master who had already completed his apprenticeship.

As if to show...they were all equal.

The golden glistening organs of a Gilded One emerged one by one as THE Creature extracted them.

The Heart of Civilization of a Paleozoic being was different from the Proterozoic version, but a heart regardless. Where Philemon’s Heart had been a dense crystalline structure, the Gerousia’s was a cathedral-like organ of living gold, layered with chambers and sub-chambers that opened and closed as THE Creature’s blade cut it free from its moorings. It pulsed once in THE Creature’s hand before it was set aside, floating in the air beside the Gerousia’s restrained body.

The lungs came next. They were twin structures of luminous gold membrane that had been processing the ambient authorities of the Braneworld across eons of their owner’s life, and they exhaled a final radiant breath as THE Creature cut their connections to the Gerousia’s chest cavity.

Unknown organs emerged in pieces because they had been integrated too deeply to remove intact. THE Creature extracted fragments one by one, each fragment carrying a different axiom of the Gerousia’s Civilization, each axiom sputtering and fading as its host organ was removed from the body that had sustained it.

Then came the skin.

THE Creature began to flay the Gilded One alive.

The carving was patient. The carving was thorough!

THE Creature worked in the methodical rhythm of a being who had been imagining this exact procedure across eons of preparation, and the imagining had accumulated such refined detail that the actual execution looked almost meditative, the movements of his blade tracing the seams of the Gerousia’s musculature with the economy of a master who wasted no stroke.

It was...meditative.

Noah observed in detail, and as he observed, he caught it.

Small tears dropped from THE Creature’s multicolored flaming face. They fell from the outer corners of his obsidian-pupiled eyes and traveled a fraction of an inch through the air before evaporating a nanosecond later against the residual heat of his flames, and others watching from below would not have been able to see them at all, would have missed the signal entirely, would have registered only the terrible procedure and not the grief still running beneath the methodology.

Noah saw them.

THE Creature continued working, and as he worked, his voice came out low, addressed to the frozen and carved body of Gerousia Aurelius Maximus.

"This was what you did to her eons ago when you were done with her."

His blade made another cut.

"You carved her. You opened her weavings and took what pieces of her you wanted and discarded what pieces you did not. You did it slowly, because you had time, because nothing in your classification had ever taught you that time was a resource you should spend carefully on the suffering of those beneath you. Today, you get a taste of your own medicine. Today you find out what it feels like."

His voice carried a quiet tremor beneath the calm, the tremor of a being who had waited for this exact moment across more time than most beings could conceive of.

"I do not hate you, Aurelius. I passed through hate a long time ago. What I carry for you now is the steady cold weight of balance. The scales have been tilted wrong for eons, and someone has to tilt them back, and the tilting is going to feel a lot like what you are currently experiencing, and that is the only right shape for it to feel."

He kept working.

"Revenge and vengeance are sometimes needed to balance the scales."

His blade worked with patience.

"Not always, because not every injury can be balanced, and not every balancing produces a better world than the unbalanced one preceding it. But sometimes the balance is needed, and the need is not vulgar but necessary. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. These formulas were not invented by small beings out of spite. They were articulated across long histories by beings who had observed that some injuries continue to poison existence until they are answered, and the answering, however terrible, concludes the poison in ways that merciful non-action cannot."

He extracted a long ribbon of the Gerousia’s spinal musculature.

"All beings are equal in one specific way, and the Gilded have spent eons denying this equality because denying it was the foundation of their hierarchical authority. But the equality holds regardless of denial. A life is a life. The life of a lesser being and the life of a Gerousia carry the same foundational weight when stripped of their engineered amplifications and measured by what they are in themselves. Equal. Always equal. And when one life takes another without cause, the balance must eventually be restored, and vengeance is the blade that restores it."

His gaze lifted briefly toward the golden skies his flames had overwritten.

"Today is a day for balancing."

BOOM!

Noah watched it all with a sense of somberness settling through his existence, and he saw crimson-gold blood of a Gilded One float in the skies as THE Creature continued the carving. The blood did not fall.

It drifted in slow suspended patterns through the air above the mountain, catching the multicolored obsidian-tinged light of THE Creature’s flames, each droplet glistening with the final residue of a being whose standing had been stripped away layer by layer as his body was processed.

"Bounded can die, and Gilded can die."

HUUM!

Noah witnessed THE Creature carve the being entirely.

And at the end of the procedure, THE Creature reached into what remained of the Gerousia’s body and ripped out the spine. The spine emerged intact, a long articulated column of golden vertebrae threaded with luminous filaments that had once carried the Gerousia’s nervous authority across the length of his frame. THE Creature held it up briefly in the air before setting it aside with the other extracted organs.

All the carved organs and bones floating in the skies began to disappear one by one.

And as each component disappeared, the brilliant life of a Gilded One began to fade, the residual authority that had made Gerousia Aurelius Maximus a Paleozoic being diminishing by measurable degrees with each erased organ, his existence thinning toward a terminus.

As this happened, Noah heard the voice of THE Creature within his mind.

The voice came calm and quiet.

’I am sorry for what is coming.’

’I truly am. I did everything I could not to implicate you further by not aiding you in anything as much as possible. Every choice I made calibrated to keep our involvements separate in the eyes of the existential record, so that when this moment arrived, the consequences would land on me and me alone.’

’But the consequences will not land cleanly.’

’I will draw away their rage. I will leave behind a parting gift for you. But I am sorry, because choices have consequences, and I made mine knowing what those consequences might look like when they arrived. I will bear all of them that come for me. But the nature of Gilded men and Gilded women is spiteful and unpredictable at their highest. Some of their rage may flow to you all regardless of how carefully I tried to wall the blame off. I cannot guarantee your isolation from what follows."

’I...am sorry for what is coming.’

BOOM!

Noah’s gaze became heavy as the transmission settled into his consciousness, because he had known the moment he sat down beside THE Creature that if this being was capable of overcoming the impossible, the overcoming would carry consequences that would propagate outward across existence in ways nobody at the mountain could fully predict.

He had understood the weight of the witnessing when he had chosen to stay. He had said as much, in his monologue about pivotal choices, not that ago.

THE Creature had just carved out a Gilded One in Observable Existence.

A Gerousia of the Superbius House of the Crimson Chalice. Third Seat of the Upper Sanctum. Voice of the Radiant Quorum. Keeper of the Chalice that Does Not Empty.

This was a choice.

And it was a choice that would likely have tremendous consequences.

And just as Noah thought of this.

OOOOOM!

Everything began to shake.

The mountain trembled beneath his feet, and the balcony he was still standing above shuddered with a deeper instability than the one THE Creature’s assault had produced, and the skies above him, the skies that had been painted multicolored-obsidian by THE Creature’s overwriting wave, began to tremble and crack.

Fine fractures began to appear across the upper reaches of the sky, hairline splits that spread outward from multiple points simultaneously, and through those splits something else pressed against the fabric of the Observable from somewhere above it!

Oh.

Oh!

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