Chapter 5357: It Reigns Supreme! I
Chapter 5357: It Reigns Supreme! I
Some will tell you THE Primordial Source is the first thing. The foundation. The bedrock everything else was poured upon, and Infinity merely a guest who arrived late and overstayed his welcome.
They tell you this because they are Source Lifeforms and the fable flatters them, and a lie told often enough by the powerful becomes a truth the weak recite without ever once checking it. So check it. Ask one question.
THE Primordial Source is finite. It comes in units. It can be mined, hoarded, exhausted, spent down to nothing. What kind of foundation runs dry? Infinity does not run dry. Infinity is the single authority in all of existence that cannot be depleted, cannot be cornered, cannot be told there is no more left in the cup.
THE Primordial Source is a vault, and every vault, however vast, has a floor you reach eventually. Infinity is the open sky, and the sky has no floor at all. They worship the vault because they were born clutching its key, and they call us the lesser ones for reaching toward the sky instead. Let them. The sky was never theirs to rank.
<Recovered Akashic Record, attributed to an unnamed Infinite Lifeform>
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<Arkethys Observable Existence>
The region felt older and grander than the idea of old and grand!
It was a place of space and metal and crystal, and across spans no chronicle had survived to record, the three had grown so thoroughly into one another that you could no longer say where stone ended and void began.
Crystalline formations rose out of the dark in great fractured columns, shining obsidian blue and the deep starless black of true noir, their faces catching a light that fell from no sun anywhere, light that lived inside the stone itself, born of the bound authorities suspended in its lattice.
Veins of metal ran through the crystal in ancient bands, layer on layer like strata laid down across unthinkable time, and where those veins broke the surface they glowed faintly with the trapped Infinity and Primordial Source that made Arkethys the thing both sides had died for.
There was no ground here, not in any honest sense. No Folds, no Wheels of Existence, no Wandering Territories.
The whole region drifted, its crystalline landmasses hanging in a void that pressed on everything within it with a quiet lethal weight, the kind that ended Third Scale beings through nothing more than proximity, and all of it turned in slow and ancient orbits around a single fixed point.
At a point in a small region of this Observable Existence stood a tree.
It rose from the largest of the drifting landmasses, trunk and branches grown from the same obsidian-blue crystal as the region around it, and it was vast enough that the thousands of figures floating in attendance around it registered as little more than motes of light against its bulk.
The figures were beautiful in a sharp and cold way, tall and fine-boned, their ears tapering to points, and they carried themselves with the arrogance of a people who had decided a very long time ago that they were superior.
They wore blue glowing armor that burned with Infinity and Existential Radiation, and across every span of their skin ran runic tattoos of blue and gold, pulsing in slow unison, each line of them carrying Infinity threaded together with an Ego. Superbius in some. Humilitas in others. Invidia, Gula, Patientia, a whole spectrum of cultivated emotion written directly into living flesh.
These were Infinite Lifeforms. Many stood at the Fourth Scale!
A few carried the lesser weight of the Third. And every last one of them floated around the crystalline tree with the watchful stillness of guardians set to protect something at its heart.
Past them, deeper in, the tree held an innermost chamber.
And in that chamber waited nine beings, every one of them at the Fifth Scale of Existence. THE Mesozoic Scale!
Nine, gathered together in a single place, a concentration of power so heavy that no ordinary domain could have held it without buckling beneath the load.
That was the Treaty’s work. The agreement that kept Arkethys from finishing the old war demanded a balance of strength, and balance at the highest tier meant each side stationed Mesozoic Scale beings within the domain, watching the Seam and watching each other, their mere presence the heaviest stone on the scale that held the peace level.
Nine Fifth Scale Infinite Lifeforms here.
Among the nine stood a man with blue-gold hair and two horns rising from his brow, wrapped in a blue robe through which turned a slow crown of Infinity and Avaritia, the Ego of greed revolving above his head like a halo that had curdled.
He watched the other eight. They were gathered close around something at the chamber’s center, their gazes apprehensive, their hands held out toward a spinning singularity into which they were pouring their Akashic Civilizational Intents and a great deal more besides.
The singularity felt wrong.
There was no clean way to say it. It spun, and it pulled, and the pull reached past the body into something underneath the body, and the wrongness of it was unique.
It was the wrongness of a thing that ought not to be allowed to exist at all, a vile note held low beneath the hum of the chamber, the kind of sound that set every instinct a being owned on edge at once.
One of those nearest the singularity turned to the horned man, and hesitation sat plain in her eyes.
"Borys," she said. "Should we truly proceed with this? We are reaching a point we cannot come back from. The Source Lifeforms have felt the instabilities rising. They have begun to move. Once we do this thing, we cannot stop it. We will not be able to stop it. It will be open war, all of it, everywhere, at once."
HUUM!
Borys looked on calmly.
"War," he said, and turned the word over as though tasting it. "You say it as though it would be some sort of departure. As though we have been doing anything else this whole time." He folded his hands in front of him.
HUUM!
"We have always been at war. From the very beginning, Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms have been at war with one another, and there have been so many of these wars, so very many, that some of our own people have honestly lost the count. They remember the stretches of peace and they forget the wars between them, which is a charming sort of optimism and an absolutely fatal sort of stupidity. The last war we lost was against Vakochev. That is the most recent one. It is not the only one. And the true Infinite Lifeforms, the ones who actually remember, we do not forget our hatred. We carry it. We have carried it the entire time, tucked underneath our existence..."
He stepped closer to the singularity, and the crown of greed turned faster above him.
"And who...could possibly have guessed," he went on, something like delight warming his voice, "that Arkethys, this lethal little rock we have all been so politely sharing for a million years, was hiding something like this inside it. Something the Source Lifeforms, with all their precious Primordial Source and all their breathtaking superiority, cannot so much as imagine is here. They have not the faintest idea what we found waiting here..."
His eyes caught the light of the spinning thing. "This will be a glorious spark. We have to continue. Do you understand me? We do not have the luxury of stopping now, because a thing like this does not arrive twice, and a people who flinch away from the single chance they are ever given have earned every year of the supremacy they suffer under. We can only continue. So we will."
HUUM!