Chapter 5381: Existence II
Chapter 5381: Existence II
THE Creature moved toward the lethal region, and Calypso went with him, and as they advanced she turned to him and whispered.
"Are you the illegitimate child of a Primeval Source Lifeform?" she said. "Because I cannot fathom any other reason they would give you access to this place. I cannot fathom why you advocated for me to come along, either, since the most likely outcome of this little excursion is that we die. Do you understand that? We will die. This place is built for Triassic Scale beings to barely survive, and we are going to walk into the thick of it."
Her voice sharpened.
"Hey. Do you hear me? We will fucking die. Even if you form your Intent in there, it does you no good if you die forming it. A perfect Intent on a corpse is just decoration!"
THE Creature did not slow.
"If we die, we die," he said, and his voice carried the absolute flat certainty of a being who had reduced himself to a single concept and found, in that reduction, a kind of peace that looked from the outside like madness.
"But I need this place if I am to form the Intent I seek. My Intent is not normal. It is not clear, not the way the others’ Intents are clear. The others build their Intents on what they have done, on records and deeds and the things they have accumulated." His obsidian flames billowed.
"Mine is not built on what I have done. My Intent is me. And I am Existence. Not the concept held among other concepts. Existence, entire, the whole of what I am. I do not have an Intent of Existence. I am the Intent. I Am. I Am."
HUUM!
With those words, the titanic form of THE Creature surged ahead, and dove into the perilous deep of THE Effluvium Sanctum, the obsidian flames trailing behind him as he plunged into a region built to kill almost everything that was not exactly what it was meant for, carrying nothing into it but a single concept taken to its absolute, and the will to become it completely or die in the attempt.
He went into the deep of THE Effluvium Sanctum, and the Sanctum tried to end him, and it failed so far!
The ambient Intent pressed in from every floating sea at once, the refined authority that pushed Triassic Scale beings to the edge of unmaking, and it found THE Creature and it pushed. It pushed against his obsidian flames and his interminable Radiation and the titanic humanoid bulk of him, the full lethal weight of a region built to be barely survivable bearing down on a thing that was not even the kind of being the place was built for!
HUUM!
And THE Creature simply withstood it. He did not raise a defense against the pressure the way another being would have. He let it come, let it press, let it try, and he held, because the pressure was an attack on his existence and his existence was the one thing he had reduced himself to so completely that there was nothing left in him for the pressure to find a seam in.
He reached the floating landmasses and began to devour the Sacred Herbs.
He devoured and devoured as minuted passed, his existence akin to a black hole!
He took them in by the field, the herbs heavy with Pure Primordial Essence and threaded with Primordial Source, drawing their refined power into himself through the obsidian flames, and where another being would have used that power to strengthen its body or deepen its reserves, THE Creature fed it all into the one thing. Into Existence. Into the Intent he was forming, the pure unblemished Way of Existence drinking down the resources of a region meant to forge the Fourth Scale, and as it drank, the Intent began to take shape around him in the minutes thst followed, vast and clean and terrible.
It looked, at first, like a Primordial Intent!
Calypso watched from the edge of the lethal deep, holding her own massive beast form against the ambient pressure, and her cold urgency gave way to something closer to amazement. Because it was working. The thing she had been certain would kill them both was working, and the Intent rising around THE Creature was climbing toward the highest rarity the Scales recognized, the near-mythical fifth, the Primordial. She had not believed it possible!
Who the fuck was this guy?!
Behind, the three Fifth Scale Source Lifeforms observed, and their calm sharpened into attention.
They were told to give THE Creature permission to try. They had not expected the trying to reach this high!
And in the center of it, drinking the herbs, holding against the pressure, THE Creature spoke.
"Existence...oh, Existence!" he said, and his voice rolled out across the lethal region, flat and absolute and growing grander as his Intent climbed.
"Many debate it, all of them circling the question of what it means for a thing to be. They treat Existence as a concept to be understood, a foundation to be studied..." The obsidian flames billowed higher.
"They are looking at it from the outside. That is their whole error. You cannot understand Existence from the outside, because there is no outside of Existence to stand in. Everything that could observe it is already inside it. Every being that ever asked what it means to be was a thing that already was, asking from within the very thing it questioned."
He devoured another field of Sacred Herbs, and the Intent climbed higher.
"I have long since stopped asking from the outside," he said. "I will take Existence...and I will pour the whole of myself into it until there is nothing of me that is not it, no breadth, no collection, no second concept to dilute the first! Entirely Existence and nothing else."
HUUM!
His Intent blazed!
"There is no line left between the concept and myself. I have spent so long becoming Existence that I could no longer say where Existence ended and I began. The question had no answer because the question had no edges."
The Primordial Intent shone around him, full and vast, and Calypso and THE Mesozoic Scale beings watched it reach its height, and braced for it to settle into the foundational rarity!
And THE Creature arrived at his conclusion.
"I...will stop trying to hold them apart," he said. "Existence and myself. I will stop pretending they were two things that happened to have grown close. They are not two things. They were never two things. Existence is not a concept I mastered. Existence is merely another form of myself. It is my identity, worn at the scale of everything.When I say a thing is, I am describing myself."
His voice rose to its absolute. "I am not a being who studied Existence. I am not even a being who became Existence. My identity is that of Existence...I Am. That is the whole of it. I Am!"
HUUM!
With the declaration of identity, the Intent distorted.
Calypso felt it first, and her amazement turned to shock, because the thing she had been watching settle into a Primordial Intent stopped settling. It twisted.
It transformed, the shape of it bending into something her perception could not file under any rarity she knew, and behind her the three Mesozoic Scale beings went rigid, all their calm gone at once, because they knew Intents the way few beings in existence knew them, and they could sense what Calypso could only feel.
This was not a Primordial Intent. It had looked like one as it climbed, but at the moment of the identity-declaration it had become something else, something far more unique, an Intent built not on the concept of Existence held among other things but on Existence as the being’s own identity, on I Am as the foundational truth!
It had jumped the track entirely. It had become a thing the Scales had no slot for.
And as it formed, the very existence of THE Creature began to transform!
The obsidian flames changed. The titanic humanoid form changed, reshaping around the Intent that was reshaping it, the Way of Existence and the being who walked it folding into one another the way they had folded in his words, no line left between them, the concept and the creature becoming a single thing in truth and not only in declaration. The Sacred Herbs, the lethal ambient Intent of the Sanctum, all of it poured into the transformation, feeding a becoming that the three watching Mesozoic Scale beings had never witnessed and would not soon forget.
THE Creature had walked a single path completely.
And at the end of it, he was no longer becoming Existence.
He simply, finally, was.