Chapter 5154: Kneel, Ye Unworthy! I

He and THE Creature sat side by side atop a mountain in THE Wyld that was covered in the corpses of Primordial Architects.

It was something surreal to think about. Just days ago, truly not so long, Noah had been learning about THE Creature and THE Living Existences, sitting across conversations trying to build mental maps of what these beings were and where they fit into the broader arrangement of the Folds of Existence, and now here he was sitting beside one of them on a corpse-strewn peak waiting for a Gilded One to descend from the upper face of reality.

Days ago!

As he was thinking about events that seemed like they belonged to months or years ago even though they had rushed past only days ago, THE Creature spoke.

He looked down toward the figure of THE Living Emotive at the base of the mountain, where she stood beside Anaximander with an expression of someone being forced to miss out on a meeting of ultimate proportions. Her hair cycled through petulant yellows and sullen greens, her arms crossed tightly across her chest as she performed her displeasure with the full theatrical commitment of a being who knew she was being watched and wanted the watchers to register exactly how she felt about being excluded.

"I told you to go easy on her in Alfheimr."

THE Creature’s voice held quiet amusement beneath his multicolored flames.

"I did not expect you to take her under your weavings."

Noah looked down and gazed at the petulant face of THE Living Emotive.

"Her emotional fixation jumps from one to another as she is only locked onto me currently. Who knows, the moment a Gilded One descends, she might shift her fixation over to them."

...!

THE Creature looked at Noah with a calm smile.

"I know you know that to not be the case. Out of the many Existences to have risen within our Observable Existence, she is particularly a unique one, and other Living Existences may have not attained their full potential, but hers is boundless if she does not sabotage herself. She did well, spreading stories of THE Earliest Folds across existence to empower herself even more with a soap opera, finding a way to feed herself through the emotional engagement of audiences she never met, because that is not ordinary thinking. That is the thinking of a being whose foundation is emotion itself and who has understood what that foundation permits."

He said such grand words calmly as Noah’s eyes turned sharp.

He wanted to talk more about this, but he felt like there was such little time before everything began crumbling, and so he had to ask.

"You would not do anything without thought behind it, so you calling upon a Gilded One to descend means you are confident in taking care of it, as impossible as that sounds to anyone who thinks in terms of Scales. But I will never be someone who ever talks to another about what is possible or impossible, because I know what I have done myself."

He paused.

"But I still have to ask. A Gilded One is a Gilded One. Are you... confident?"

...!

He asked such a simple, yet terrifying question.

THE Creature did not waste even a nanosecond before he replied calmly and gloriously.

"I am confident."

BOOM!

After he heard this, Noah did not say anything else as he looked up in the same direction where THE Creature was looking, toward the open sky above THE Gilded White Mountain, and thought about many things.

If anyone else had been privy to their conversation right now, they would likely have been looking at the two of them as if they were mad.

What the fuck do you mean confident against a Gilded One? A Gilded One was a Gilded One. Bounded Lifeforms could not even cross into THE Third Scale, so where was this confidence coming from, and what foundation was THE Creature standing on that let him claim such a thing without theatrical qualification? Others would have demanded answers and pressed for specifics and tried to get THE Creature to explain the methodology behind the conviction, but Noah only looked up and thought about all the potential possibilities that could unfold from here, because THE Creature had not asked him for validation and THE Creature had not been looking for reassurance from a peer, THE Creature had made a statement and the statement had landed, and that was enough.

In the next moment.

HUUUM!

The sky above THE Gilded White Mountain began to change, not cracking or tearing or opening in the manner of ordinary traversals but simply settling into something it had always been capable of becoming, the pale atmospheric light deepening as the ambient Observable Force flowing through the upper reaches of THE Wyld bent toward a single point above the peak in slow majestic arcs that redirected every thread of golden force upward toward a destination that had not yet manifested.

Then the destination manifested.

A figure began to emerge in the sky above the mountain, and it emerged not by traveling down into the space but by becoming visible within it, the air parting in deference around a presence that had always been there and had simply been waiting to be perceived. The figure was tall and grand and wreathed in light that did not belong to any spectrum Noah had previously encountered, a gold that was not merely gold but a hue carrying the resonance of something foundational, a gold that pressed against the eye the way a truth pressed against a mind, and every aspect of the figure’s presence layered backward into registers that kept unfolding the longer Noah looked at them.

The pressure began to bloom!

It rolled outward from the figure in expanding rings that did not behave the way any pressure Noah had previously encountered behaved, because each ring carried the specific resonance of a being whose classification sat so far beyond anything the mountain or its corpses or its broken temples had ever accommodated that the rings did not merely press against the substrate of THE Wyld but rewrote what the substrate of THE Wyld was permitted to be within their reach!

THE Creature’s multicolored flames began to rise, and his body began to lift from the cracked railing he had been sitting on, and Noah began to rise alongside him in the same motion as the two of them prepared to face the pressure of the emerging figure head-on.

They did not make it.

The rings of pressure reached them halfway through their ascent, and what happened next was something Noah had never experienced in any of his engagements across any of the frameworks he had ever stood inside of!

The pressure did not strike him. Striking would have been a relationship between two beings in which both beings had positions. What reached him was something that bypassed the concept of position entirely, a weight that did not come from any direction because it arrived from every direction simultaneously, a downward insistence that did not meet his body so much as it became the condition of the space his body was trying to occupy.

He stopped rising.

His ascent arrested itself mid-motion without any decision on his part, his body caught suspended between where he had been sitting and where he had been trying to reach, the momentum of his rise bleeding out into the pressure without producing any further altitude.

Then he began to descend!

HUUM!

Slowly. Inch by inch. Forced back down toward the cracked railing he had just lifted off from, the pressure not merely resisting his attempt to rise but reversing it, insisting that rising was a privilege the arriving figure had not yet authorized him to exercise!

His Hadean configuration held! His bones did not buckle! His organs did not rupture! Infinity began to hum!

But every layer of his engineering was being asked to hold against something his engineering had not been designed to resist, and the holding was consuming capacity he had not previously known he would need to spend simply to remain intact!

Beside him, THE Creature was also descending!

His multicolored flames had flattened against the downward pressure, guttering lower along his body than they had flickered throughout the entire assault on the mountain, and his ascent had reversed just as Noah’s had, his body settling back toward the balcony under the weight of the pressure with the same slow inexorable compression.

The two of them moved downward together!

Noah felt this pressure he had never felt before pushing against him, a pressure that did not measure against any of THE Vakochev Scales he had catalogued across his climbing, a pressure that lived in its own register and that communicated with the fluency of law exactly how large the gap was between the being above and the two beings on the cracked balcony beneath him!

HUUM!

In the next moment, a booming voice filled the sky, filled with cold, prideful, undeniable authority that rolled out lazily and calmly with the patient inevitability of something much larger than the space it was filling.

"KNEEL, YE UNWORTHY."

BOOM!

An unfathomably undeniable pressure descended.

It poured down from the figure in a single vast wave that did not distribute itself evenly through the sky but claimed the sky outright, every cubic measure of open air above THE Gilded White Mountain and for gigaparsecs in every direction becoming the speaker’s domain the moment the command left his mouth, and the claiming manifested visibly as the skies of THE Wyld became painted and covered in gold, an unbroken radiant gold that bore no texture beyond the specific hue of the speaker’s authority, a gold that replaced the ambient weavings and the residual light and the pale atmospheric tones of the entire upper reach of THE Wyld with nothing but his gold, his domain, his casual claim on everything his voice could touch.

The pressure pressed further downward on Noah, and his descent continued!

Beside him, THE Creature held his position as best he could under the same descending weight, his multicolored flames still burning beneath the gold, his gaze still lifted upward with the steady calmness and defiance he had carried!

Above them, the figure had not yet fully resolved into its final visible form.

The gold continued to settle around him. The pressure continued to ripple outward.

THE False Golden Idol had arrived!

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