Chapter 5160: Golden Wrath! III

Noah knew the smarter and more logical thing to do was to simply bend his head down and not say or do a single thing.

THE Creature had already set everything up with a fabricated history, had carved an entire alternative sequence of events into the readable weavings of what had occurred, had positioned Noah and Emotive and Anaximander as incidental survivors who had only escaped THE Relictus’s assault because the greater targets had consumed THE Relictus’s attention.

If any being watching from outside had been privy to Noah’s internal debate at this moment, they might have scratched their heads and wondered why he was making such an illogical choice when the alibi was already in place and the only required action was silent compliance. Bow the head. Let the Sororis Prima proceed. Accept whatever adjustments she intended to make to the broader Observable Existence and address the consequences later, once her attention had moved elsewhere and his power had grown significantly could address those consequences properly.

It was the correct play. It was the move any outside observer with a functioning grasp of logic would have recommended!

But truly, the moment he bowed his head would feel like a moment where fractures bloomed in his Civilization.

He knew the shape of those fractures because he had carried similar fractures in him across other moments of his existence when circumstances had demanded a capitulation his core had refused to offer.

It was like mundane normal humans crossing paths with other humans who happened to be richer or who held positions of power, and choosing not to meet their eyes or speak up, choosing to shrink slightly so that the passage through the encounter would produce the least friction possible.

The choice got them in less trouble in the moment. The encounter passed and the day continued. But they would remember that shrinking afterward, would carry the memory of having abandoned their posture for the sake of convenience, and across the years the accumulation of such small capitulations produced beings who could no longer recognize the versions of themselves that had existed before the capitulations had begun.

The fractures compounded quietly. The original shape of the person eroded along the seams of every small unspoken yielding.

So yes. It was not the most logical thing to do. But he still dared to look at a Gilded One, at a Sororis Prima, and say no!

Thinking of all this reminded him of a particularly unpleasant memory of a man he had hated with every bone in his body across the full span of his earliest years of existence.

Thinking of all this reminded him of the only man he had ever bent his head down to, because truly, he had feared him.

Not respected, not honored, not admired, but feared in the specific way of a child facing a being whose capacity to hurt him exceeded any capacity he possessed to defend himself. It reminded him...of his father.

The memory flashed in his mind like something he could not suppress, and in the stretched instant of his Hadean Mind pulling this moment into extended perception, the memory unfurled with the crisp brutal clarity of a small human scene he had been carrying across more years than he cared to count.

---

He was twelve years old at the time, in that broken-down home in the living room with the stained carpet and the curtains that never properly closed.

His father had stood up from the couch where he had been lying most of the afternoon, his stained robe hanging open and his beer belly sticking out in a pale round hemisphere above the waistband of sweatpants that had not been washed in longer than the boy had been alive, holding a leather belt in one thick hand and a half-empty bottle of beer in the other.

The television behind him was playing something loud that nobody was watching. The light in the room was yellow and dim because one of the bulbs in the overhead fixture had been burned out.

His father had asked him coldly.

"I sat and watched you little shit the whole day while your mother worked, and when I bring a woman friend over, you tell your mom about it? Didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut?"

The twelve-year-old version of Noah had looked at his father with teary eyes that he had been trying very hard to keep from spilling over, because spilling over would have invited a different and worse kind of response from the man who had just stood up, and he had been defiant.

He had not wanted to see what his father had been doing with the woman friend who kept coming over when his mother went to work. He had not wanted to be told to stay quiet about it. He had not wanted to carry secrets that did not belong to him but that he was being forced to hold for the comfort of an adult who had never shown him a single moment of genuine comfort in return.

So when he had looked up at his father with that small defiant gaze.

The twelve-year-old version had met the eyes of the man who had fathered him, and those eyes had held nothing. Not anger or rage exactly.

Simply the flat contempt of a being who considered the small creature before him an inconvenience that needed to be addressed so that the afternoon could continue undisturbed.

His father had beaten him with that belt again and again.

The first strike had landed across his shoulder and sent him stumbling sideways into the coffee table. The second strike had caught him across the back of his legs as he tried to steady himself. The third strike had knocked him to the carpet entirely, and the subsequent strikes had landed while he was down, the leather biting into his back and his arms and the parts of his body he tried to curl into a protective ball around his chest.

His father had not shouted during the beating. His father had spoken steadily, the way a man speaks when he is delivering a lecture that he believes to be instructive rather than cruel.

"When I talk to you, you look down and listen. You do not look at me like that. You do not look at me with that fucking face of yours like you think you have something to say about anything. I gave you your life. I can take it away. Do you understand? Do you fucking understand?"

The twelve-year-old him had understood.

He had kept his head down after that,crying. The leather belt still landing across his back in measured intervals that had begun to space themselves out as his father’s arm grew tired.

He had not raised his head to meet his father’s gaze for the remainder of that afternoon, and he had not raised it for many afternoons that followed, because the pain of the beatings was real and the fear of the pain was realer still, and he had been twelve years old and his father had been a grown man twice his size and three times his weight, and there had been no framework available to the twelve-year-old in which raising his head would have produced any outcome other than more belt strikes landing across a body that was already bruised in patterns that would take weeks to fade.

He had feared what that useless man, that much bigger than him, could do to him.

He had hated that memory so, so much.

He hated the fact that it lived inside him at all. He hated that no amount of climbing across the years since had permitted him to fully evict the memory from the deeper rooms of his existence where memories of that kind took up permanent residence.

He hated that some part of him, some small twelve-year-old part, still carried the shape of having bowed his head, still remembered the exact texture of the carpet against his cheek, still remembered the way his own tears had tasted when they had pooled against his lips because he could not wipe them away without the wiping being seen as another form of defiance that would have earned additional strikes.

He hated that part of him.

And he had spent every year of his subsequent existence, both the years before Ruination and the unfathomable years since, building himself into a being whose shape could not be returned to that bowed posture by any external force regardless of how grand the external force became.

He was not going to bow his head now.

Not to his dead father. Not to Sororis Prima Elzyana. Not to any Gilded One or Superbius Sisterhood or Paleozoic classification that wanted him to look down. Whatever came as the consequence of refusing to bow, he would pay in whatever currencies existence demanded, or his own currencies!

Because the alternative was to become the twelve-year-old on the carpet again, and that twelve-year-old had already paid his portion of the yielding long ago, and no further portion was available from the being Noah had become in the years since.

"...ah."

He shook his head slightly as if to physically erase the memory, and the stretched instant his Hadean Mind had pulled the reflection into collapsed back into the ordinary flow of time.

Before him, Sororis Prima Elzyana raised her brows calmly.

Her amber-gold eyes with their slowly rotating mandalas held him with the patient indulgence of a being who had not been inconvenienced by his momentary pause, and she spoke with the same gentle administrative weavings she had been using since she had descended toward him.

"Am I interrupting you from your thoughts?"

Noah shook his head and sighed, the sigh of a being who had just finished a brief internal excavation and was now ready to speak to the external situation once more.

"No. I’m listening."

His voice came out steady and measured.

"I was saying no. I do not agree that those of us here need to be further bounded and severed. We did nothing to deserve such treatment."

...!

Sororis Prima Elzyana looked at Noah calmly as if she had discovered a particularly bold insect, and Noah kept his gaze on her without breaking the contact, because breaking it at this point would have undone the entire interior argument he had just finished having with himself, and he had committed to the posture of looking up and he intended to maintain that posture through whatever response she issued.

In the next moment, she spoke.

Her voice came calm and cold.

"It is very unique that you would have an opinion."

Her mandala-eyes rotated slightly in their slow internal rhythms.

"And it is more unique still that you would think your opinion matters enough to voice it in response to a directive from a Sororis Prima. Do you understand how the arrangement of authority actually flows across our peoples? Even among the Gilded, the Superbius are the ones with the most say, because our Pride is the oldest amplified Ego and the one around which the broader Gilded hierarchy organized itself across the eons of our establishment. Even Gilded Ones of other amplified Egos follow Superbius direction when Superbius direction is given, because the structure of our authority makes following the only available option for those who wish to maintain their standing."

She tilted her head slightly as her gaze swept across him.

"And Bounded Lifeforms do not have a say. Not in the ordinary sense. Not in any sense that the arrangement of our authority has ever been required to accommodate."

Her voice softened.

"When a gardener decides that a section of soil requires treatment to prevent the further emergence of pests, the gardener does not consult the ants already living in that soil. The gardener does not pause to consider whether the ants might prefer a different configuration of treatment. The ants are not partners in the decision. The ants are part of the condition being addressed. When the treatment is applied, some of the ants will die, and some of the ants will be displaced, and some of the ants will survive and rebuild their colonies elsewhere in configurations the gardener did not specifically intend but that fall within acceptable parameters. The gardener does not feel cruelty toward the ants during this process, because the gardener does not feel anything toward the ants at all. The ants are simply part of the soil. The soil is what the gardener is attending to. The attending proceeds regardless of what the ants might think about it, because ants do not think in ways that gardeners are required to consult."

Her gaze settled on him with the clinical steadiness of someone who had used this analogy many times before.

"Me saying what I said was not a matter of debate. It was not a proposition offered for your consideration. It was not something that a being of your classification is invited to think about and disagree against. It was an administrative assessment of the conditions surrounding a Relictus emergence, and the assessment will translate into actions regardless of the thoughts any ant in the affected soil might happen to form about it."

Her voice carried no cruelty in it!

"And for your unruliness, I will begin with you."

She drifted slightly closer through the air, her tall slender form lowering until she floated at a height that permitted her to look down at him with the intimacy of an executioner preparing to conclude a minor affair before attending to the larger matters waiting beyond it.

"I will bind you further. I will not sever your existence entirely, because you lived due to the late Gerousia Aurelius Maximus’s favor, and honoring his final disposition toward the Bounded around him is the courtesy his standing earned from our Sisterhood. But you will be bound further, Boy. You will feel the binding settle into every layer of your foundations. You will understand, when the binding is complete, exactly where the ants are permitted to crawl within the soil they have been given, and you will not voice disagreements of this kind again because the voicing itself will become a configuration your bound existence no longer permits."

BOOM!

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