Chapter 5139: Superbia! II

As the words left her, the surroundings inside her interior seas seethed.

Concentrations of Observable Force surged maddeningly through the multicolored Infiniforce around them, the densities reaching levels that should not have been achievable inside her without external feeding.

The waves she sat upon trembled with the intensity of currents trying to organize themselves around something new. The whole of her interior was shifting in response to what she’d just declared, as if Ubergulden Adelheid was having an epiphany in the literal physical sense, her existence reorganizing itself around the words she had just chosen to commit to out loud.

Noah focused on her closely.

She closed her eyes and opened them. Breathed once, deeply, and the seas around them settled back into a calmer rhythm.

"Can we speak honestly?"

Noah nodded.

"I love speaking honestly the most."

She inclined her head once, almost gratefully, and then she began.

"Bounded Lifeforms cannot fathom the edge that a Gilded Lifeform holds from the moment of conception."

"And yes, Osmont, existence is unfair. Why can Gilded Lifeforms be born with endless potential at the peak of THE First Scale of Existence while Bounded Lifeforms are engineered to climb across eons just to brush against ceilings the Gilded started above? Why do Gilded children manifest authority that takes Bounded centuries to approximate? Why do our Civilizations stabilize on their own while Bounded Civilizations require exhaustive cultivation to settle? These are the consequences of design choices that were made before either of our peoples drew their first breath. Existence as it currently stands was sculpted, and it was sculpted to favor us. To favor my people. It was never fair. It was never going to be fair. And the gap between Bounded and Gilded is, as far as I knew across all of my eons, literally unsurpassable. I believed this. I knew this with the certainty of someone who had walked among both populations and measured the distance personally."

Her hands moved as she spoke, slowly weaving fragments of Infiniforce into illusory shapes that hung between them.

"And then, one day, I witnessed THE Creature."

BOOM!

THE Creature?

Noah’s eyes widened slightly. How had THE Creature influenced her path? How had a former Primordial Architect ended up shifting the trajectory of a Gilded one’s choices to the point where she abandoned her own people to live as Bounded for eons?

She waved her hands.

A multicolored illusory outline of THE Creature appeared between them, the silhouette of a being who was already familiar to Noah, the Primordial Architect who had burned away his own classification.

"This little Primordial Architect is a tiny and yet a grand being," she said softly. "Because his story is a tragic one. And ridiculously, when you trace it back to its origin, it is a love story."

The illusory outline of THE Creature shifted, and beside it formed the silhouette of another figure. Smaller. Softer in its rendering. Connected to THE Creature by a thread of light that ran between their forms with the steady quiet glow of a deep bond.

"Once, before he was THE Creature, he was simply a Primordial Architect among many. And there was THE Soul, a being he shared a connection with that ran deeper than what most beings ever experience. They lived in a region of THE Wyld together. They were quiet in their way. They built a small life that did not bother anyone, that did not reach for grand designs, that was content to simply exist alongside each other across the long slow time available to Primordial Architects."

A third figure formed in the illusion. Tall abd resplendent. Crowned in light that the other two figures did not carry.

"And then a Gilded One passed through THE Wyld."

Her voice tightened slightly at the new figure.

"He found them. He saw THE Soul. And he took a liking to her. The way Gilded Ones take a liking to things. With the assumption that liking something was sufficient grounds for owning it. He approached them and offered to give THE Soul power in exchange for following him. The kind of upward migration that any other being in THE Wyld would have crawled across their own corpse to receive. He offered, and he assumed the offer would be accepted, because he was a Gilded One and they were not."

Her golden eyes darkened.

"THE Soul refused. THE Creature stood by her refusal. They denied him together, quietly, the way they had built their entire small life, and they assumed the matter would end there because what else was there to discuss?"

The illusory crowned figure’s posture shifted in the air between them.

"And then THE Gilded One was offended."

Her words slowed.

"He was a prideful being. Literally so. His pride ran so deep that refusal was an attack on his foundation rather than a simple decline. He used force. He bound THE Creature where he stood, immobilized him with an exertion that THE Creature could not resist. And then, in front of THE Creature, he engineered THE Soul. He altered her existence. He rewrote her foundations. He pressed Gilded modifications into her Bounded weavings the way a brand is pressed into flesh, and he made the changes deep enough that she should no longer have been able to refuse him afterward. He made her something new. Something engineered. Something compelled."

Noah frowned as the illusion played out between them. His expression sharpened with each detail.

"After the alteration, the Gilded One asked THE Soul again if she would be his."

Her voice held a quiet and terrible respect for what came next.

"And of course, with the engineering and the control he had pressed into her, she should have been a different person. She should have been forced to agree. She should have spoken whatever words he wanted her to speak. The compliance should have been automatic. That was the entire point of what he had just done to her."

She paused.

"And yet..she still denied him."

...!

Noah’s eyes held the illusory tableau without blinking.

"The Gilded One was infuriated even further by this. Not because the engineering had failed, although that was part of it. But because the refusal under engineering was, to him, an even greater insult than the original refusal had been. He had reshaped her, and she had still chosen him last. So he proceeded to do a despicable thing. He forced himself on THE Soul. He bound THE Creature in such a way that he could not look away from any of it, could not close his eyes, could not turn his perception aside. He made THE Creature watch every moment from the first to the last."

The illusion did not show this part. Ubergulden Adelheid let the silhouettes hold their positions while her voice carried the rest.

"And after he was done, he collapsed her weavings and scattered her ash into Existence. He did this in front of THE Creature too. He made a lesson of it."

She looked at Noah directly.

"His final words to THE Creature were these. ’You and your kind exist beneath us because that is the order of things. Your refusal cost her this. Your defiance was the cause of her death. Remember this every time you crawl through your remaining eons. You were given a choice. You chose poorly. The next time a Gilded One offers you something, you will accept, because by then you will understand what offers from us truly are.’ And then he left THE Creature alive. That was the cruelest part of all. He left him alive."

...!

Adelheid shook her head slowly.

"It was a ridiculous story. Something that didn’t need to happen. Bounded and Gilded were so far apart that there should have been no need for that kind of demonstration. THE Creature held tremendous rage afterward, and tremendous grief, but he shouldn’t have been able to do anything with either of them. A mere Second Scale Primordial Architect. Even at the peak of his classification, he was nothing in comparison to a Gilded One."

Her voice softened with something that was almost reverence.

"And yet he vowed that day to find that specific Gilded One. To find him and burn him with the very existence the Gilded had used to justify their power. He shattered his own foundation. He started over. He has been working his way up ever since, climbing path after path, abandoning classifications, burning away anything that limited him, all of it pointed toward a single destination. Reaching that one Gilded One. Closing the gap that was supposed to be impossible to close."

She let her hands fall back to her lap.

"His defiance toward the impossible made me try to live like Bounded Lifeforms. I had become disillusioned with the actions of my people long before that, with their casual cruelties and their assumption that the Bounded existed as a backdrop for Gilded amusement. THE Creature’s defiance crystallized something in me. Something that had been forming for a long time. So I took my seal. I went down. I lived among the Bounded for eons. And I enjoyed my time as a Bounded Lifeform. I loved it. The simplicity of it. The wonder. The naivety that came from not knowing how the broader machinery worked. None of you carry the weight of understanding the design, and there is a peace in that ignorance that I had never been allowed to taste before."

Her golden eyes lifted back to him.

"Which brings us to you."

She drew a slow breath.

"If we can speak honestly, I have been thinking about how far you and I can take this. Do you just want to be attached to a Gilded One? To have the access that proximity provides? Do you want to have the same power as one? Do you want to become like one yourself? Where exactly do you see this going, Osmont? I need to know what you see, because the answer changes what I do next."

...!

Noah’s reply came calmly, and grandly, and tyrannically!

"Existence is...unfair."

He let the words sit between them.

"And I simply want to make it fair for myself. I do not seek to become a Gilded One. The classification doesn’t interest me. The borrowed prestige doesn’t interest me. What I do not like, what I have never liked, is that existence has supposedly defined me and slotted me into a tier. A Bounded Lifeform. A category drawn around me before I was old enough to ask whether the category fit. Who decided that? Who held the authority to draw that line and place me on the lower side of it? What is existence, exactly, that it gets to decide who I am before I have a chance to decide myself?"

His gaze held hers steadily.

"So I want to make my own choices. I want to say that Bounded or Gilded does not matter. I want to walk forward as myself, whatever myself is, and I want that walking to carry me through every tier of every classification across every framework that anyone has ever drawn. I want to stand against Bounded Lifeforms and against Gilded Lifeforms as if the difference between them were a footnote. I do not want to be defined into a single definition. The definitions belong to whoever drew them, and I did not draw any of them, and I refuse to be smaller than my own potential because someone else’s pen ran out of ink at a particular line."

He tilted his head slightly.

"That is where I see this going. Not toward becoming you. Toward becoming something for which the question of Bounded versus Gilded is an obsolete vocabulary."

BOOM!

Ubergulden Adelheid looked at him silently for a few seconds.

She let the silence stretch. She did not look away from his eyes during it. The seas of Quintessence Infiniforce around them held still, waiting for her response with the same patience that he was holding.

When she spoke, her voice was calm and quiet and serious.

"You...have put me in trouble."

Her hands folded back into her lap.

"By doing what you did, by leaving your Quintessence Infiniforce inside me long enough for the integration to settle, you Bonded yourself to me as part of the Custodes of THE Gilded Ones. A Custos. One of those who walk and protect the Royal Gilded Lifeforms who sketch and steer the path of Gilded Ones across all of existence. The Custodes are not casual designations. They are oath-bound roles, engineered roles, permanent roles. And the bond goes both ways. A Custos is bound to their charge, yes. But the charge is also bound to their Custos."

Her golden eyes held his with a weight he hadn’t seen in them before.

"I am part of the Superbius Gilded Ones. We rule over the Observable aspect of this Observable Existence and a few other Observable Existences. We are not the entirety of the Gilded Ones here. We are a faction within them, THE faction really. And right now, as a result of your bond with me, I am being questioned. By beings who are thousands of times more powerful than you currently are."

She let the question settle into the still air between them.

"What... do you think I should tell them?"

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