Chapter 5165: Reign I

Existence breathes, and epochs pass, leaving Civilizations that become monuments, then crumble to memory, and are long forgotten when that breath comes again. In all these epochs, Infinity reigns supreme.

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The Shroud of Endless Blue shall fall upon Observable Existence. It shall be both salvation and damnation, both the key and the lock, both the bridge and the chasm. Under its weight, the doors of the Scales shall open or the doors of the Scales shall shatter. There is no third path. There is no middle ground. There is only the choice that is not a choice.

The adversity that breaks all others shall forge him. The hardship that ends all paths shall begin his. The Scales demand what the Scales demand, and he shall pay in currencies that have not yet been minted.

Three times shall he face the mirror of undoing. Three times shall he choose between becoming and unbecoming. Three times shall the answer be the same, and three times shall the answer be different.

In the end, which is also the beginning, the Infinite shall stand before the Undefined. And only one shall remain to tell the tale that no one shall hear.

This is an Echo of First Cause.

This is what shall come to pass, for it has already passed, and it shall pass again.

The wheel turns. The river flows. The question echoes.

He shall be the answer, or he shall be nothing.

Or he shall be the question that ends all answers.

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The grandest things across existence have always been born from the heaviest adversity.

This is not a sentiment offered for the comfort of those currently experiencing adversity, because comfort of that kind tends to dissolve under the weight of the circumstances it was meant to address.

This is instead an observation that has been made across the long arc of existence by beings who have witnessed enough cycles of pressure and response to have identified the pattern with sufficient precision to state it plainly.

Pressure applied to a weak foundation collapses that foundation. Pressure applied to a foundation of sufficient depth, however, does not collapse the foundation but compresses it, and compression across sufficient duration produces configurations of density that the uncompressed foundation could never have achieved through ordinary development.

The beings who become grand do not become grand in pleasant circumstances. They become grand in circumstances that would have broken lesser beings entirely, and the breaking that did not occur becomes the engine through which the later grandeur is produced.

Adversity is the forge. Pressure is the compression. The being at the center of the forge either melts into formlessness or emerges from the forge as something the original weaving...could not have anticipated.

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Emotive and Anaximander looked up from the ruined base of THE Gilded White Mountain to observe the brilliant cocoon suspended far above them in the fractured sky, and what they witnessed made every other concern that had occupied their attention suddenly feel small.

Emotive felt the bindings on her existence with a clarity that her own foundations had never before been required to experience. The pyramidal construct embedded in the back of her hand radiated its quiet authority through every channel of her being, commencing the severance of her access to Infinity, commencing the lockout from Observable Force, commencing the forced dormancy of her Civilization.

Her usual cycling hair had flattened into a single muted violet that she was not consciously producing, the color of a being whose expressive palette had been constrained by an external hand that had no interest in her expressive range.

Her chatter that normally accompanied them had gone silent. Every emotion within her had become immensely serious.

She looked up at the cocoon suspended in the sky and wondered how her Fixation must be feeling.

Did he truly feel all the bindings that had been placed upon him? Was he currently experiencing the same severance she was experiencing? Was he worried? Was he anxious?

Had the composure that had carried him through so many prior encounters finally cracked under the weight of a being whose tier genuinely exceeded his own for the first time?

She had never witnessed her Fixation reach a point of genuine distress across her time spent adjacent to him, and the possibility that he might currently be reaching such a point, alone inside whatever cocoon his existence had produced, made her entire being buzz with a specific kind of rage she had not previously felt in quite this shape.

She voiced the rage aloud.

"How dare she?"

BOOM!

Her voice rolled outward across the base of the mountain, and around her body, crimson waves of emotional authority commenced gathering with a density that had not been present a moment earlier.

The crimson authority did not emerge from her internal reserves alone. It was pulling on something broader, reaching outward into the ambient emotional substrate of THE Wyld and of every adjacent region, gathering the specific flavors of rage and outrage and humiliation that those constructs were currently producing inside counless Bounded Lifeforms across Observable Existence.

The pulling was slow. They rose from the stone beneath her feet in the first slow moment, gathered across her shoulders and her arms and her chest in the second, compounded into a full enveloping aura in the third, and by the fourth moment Emotive stood at the center of a crimson storm that had pulled on accumulated emotional product from across an expanse of existence so vast that her usual siphoning capacity could not have accessed even a measurable fraction of it without the catalyst of her current rage.

She looked up at the cocoon above her, and she voiced her next words with the full weight of the crimson storm now gathered around her.

"I felt her!"

BOOM!

"I felt her Pride. I felt her arrogance! Such vile Pride carries a stench across the emotional weavings, and the stench does not dissipate when she departs! And no matter how far she goes, no matter how deeply she retreats...I will be able to pull on it because Pride of that particular flavor cannot hide from someone like me!"

WAA!

She lifted her hands toward the sky where Elzyana had vanished, and her crimson storm intensified around her.

"So. Give me the intensity of your Superbius Pride! Give me the intensity of your arrogance! Give me the full accumulated weight of every moment you have ever spent looking down on a being beneath you, and give me the weight of every casual cruelty you have ever administered! I will gather all of it. I will shatter the shackles you placed on me with your own power!"

BOOM!

The crimson light of accumulated emotions shot upward from her body toward the distant sky and disappeared into the golden canopy above, and a storm of emotions covered the entire region around the mountain as Emotive commenced the work of dismantling her own bindings through a methodology that drew on the very source of the bindings themselves.

Beside her, Anaximander rose from his kneeling position on the pale stone with an expression that was heavy, contemplative, patient.

His tall angular frame straightened by measured increments as he recovered from the descending radiation that had forced him down earlier, and his face held the same scholarly composure that had accompanied him across every prior encounter.

Anaximander’s existence was unique. His power and Civilization and Way was...unique compared to others as he did not truly need authority.

He examined the pyramidal construct on the back of his hand with detached intellectual attention.

The bindings were present on him, but they wouldn’t do too much.

He looked up toward the cocoon above and waited to witness whatever emerged from it.

Far above the mountain, the surging cocoon around Noah continued to expand and intensify.

The rivers of multicolored Infiniforce that had been pouring outward from the cocoon in earlier moments had compounded into outright seas, the seas spreading across the upper reaches of THE Wyld with a density that eclipsed even the ambient Observable Force that permeated the region, the ordinary golden currents of THE Wyld’s substrate now being displaced by Noah’s multicolored substance at a rate that could not be measured.

His Infiniforce stretched across the upper atmosphere of THE Wyld in rolling layered waves, each wave carrying its own combination of colors, each wave pressing outward from the cocoon with the patient persistence of a tide that had no intention of receding.

The seas began to pulse.

The pulsing commenced with the slow patient cadence of a heartbeat, each pulse spreading outward from the cocoon in a spherical wave that rolled across the sky and the mountain and the surrounding regions with the steady timing of cardiac systole, and each pulse was accompanied by a sound that had not been present before.

The sound was a drum.

DUM! DUM! DUM!

Infinity boomed like a drum as it pulsed outward from the cocoon, and the drumming carried the deep resonant timbre of an instrument that had been waiting within the substrate of existence for the specific moment to announce itself.

The first drum was joined by a second drum, slightly offset in timing, contributing its own resonance to the broader rhythm. A third drum commenced alongside the second, and a fourth alongside the third, and soon the sky above the mountain was carrying a full percussive rhythm composed of Infinity pulsing through dozens of overlapping drumbeats that rolled outward in coordinated patterns.

Horns emerged alongside the drums.

The horns were not literal instruments. They were the sonic expression of what Noah’s Quintessence Infiniforce was producing as it moved through the patterns his developmental phenomenon required, and the sound they produced carried the specific heroic cadence of an imperial procession arriving at the culmination of a long journey!

The horns called outward across the sky with long sustained notes that built upon each other in layered harmonies, and the harmonies rose into configurations that felt grand and heroic and imperious all at once, the kind of symphony that would have been composed across millennia if existence had ever permitted a composer with sufficient reach to compose it!

Oh!

Oh!!!

A symphony of drums and horns began to bloom across THE Wyld!

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