Chapter 5499: Existence Is A Burden!
Chapter 5499: Existence Is A Burden!
<THE Creature>
Light years away from a moving throne of golden sand, another portion of a Serpent had made a grave miscalculation.
The purple river of an alien Intent had deposited THE Creature upon a sea of bones.
It stretched out in every direction beneath the raging storm of Infinity and Primordial Source, an ocean of fossilized remains so vast that its ribs rose like mountain ranges and its skulls sat like islands, the petrified remnants of colossal things that had died before a long time ago.
Dust of ages drifted across the pale expanse as the rain of authorities hissed down upon bone that refused to dissolve, and through this graveyard of giants, obsidian flames walked.
THE Creature looked around slowly, and once, and completely.
"You brought me to a Grave."
...!
"Haha! The dead make the best floors. They never complain!" Above him, coiled through the storm, the second-greatest body of Ormarr Grimtunge descended into view as his crimson eyes curved with delight! This portion was vaster than the one that had faced Noah, its scales thicker, its presense heavier as the rivers of Infinity slithered over its length in obedient streams.
"You had a unique aura among the scattered ones, dark thing, so you receive the second-greatest portion of me. Consider it respect! Now... be bound, be collected, and be delivered. Jarl Erling will find a use for whatever you are."
HUUM!
Obsidian-purple ropes poured from between the Serpent’s scales in the hundreds as inevitability itself was spun into bindings, the capture already unfolding as law before the ropes crossed the distance!
And yet...
THE Creature did not move.
He measured the enemy instead. The main body of this Serpent outweighed even Ryaenara, and this divided body alone pressed upon the bone sea with a weight that demanded seriousness! He could fight it as he was. He could bear it as he was, the way he had borne everything since before THE Wyld and THE Infinite Unfurling, trading wound for wound across hours of grinding adversity until one of them finished the other.
But...there was no time. He didn’t worry about Osmont as at most, he actually worried for Ryaenara.
And...there was a way to end this quickly.
And he did not like it.
An expression crossed the face of THE Creature at this moment that none of his people had ever seen upon him! It was unwillingness. Deep, ancient unwillingness, the look of a being reaching for a coin he had sworn never to spend as his obsidian flames dimmed low around his frame!
How long had it been? Existence was old as when he utilized that power, it could be considered part of existence. Part of him. And yet at the same time, he had not fully come to terms with it.
But...
"...What must be borne, will be borne," THE Creature said quietly, to no one.
And behind him, existence folded!
WAA!
The storm split as an ancient and massive statue rose up out of nothing at his back, a seated colossus of worn gray stone whose scale mocked even the Serpent, its features eroded smooth by ages beyond counting until only the suggestion of a face remained, and yet that faceless face stared down at everything with an immensity that pressed upon the entire bone sea!
The fossil ranges groaned. The rain of authorities bent around its shoulders. Even the wild rivers of Infinity in the sky slowed their raging as if something very old had entered the room!
It was a power that was his, and also currently not his. It was his, yet inherited. And he...did not like this Paradox.
It answered him. It rose for him! And yet every time it rose, THE Creature felt less like its master and more like its debtor!
Above, for the first time, the Serpent’s laughter stopped.
"...What is that?" Ormarr Grimtunge’s crimson eyes narrowed upon the statue as his hundreds of binding-ropes actually paused mid-descent, an Ananke Intent hesitating.
"A burden," THE Creature said. "One I have recently began carrying."
His obsidian flames erupted!
BOOM!
He moved like a flaming obsidian titan as his form swelled with each stride across the bone sea, ten meters, a hundred, a thousand, existence itself answering his advance! The fossil ranges tore free of the ground and orbited him like moons of bone. Space thickened around the descending ropes until inevitability had to wade! The storm above bent down toward his shoulders as if eager to be worn, and the Serpent understood in a single cold instant that this enemy did not wield powers drawn from existence.
This enemy was Existence, and everything nearby remembered it!
"Motherfucker!"
Ormarr’s ropes crashed down in a woven sky of bindings as his Ananke Intent roared, every cord a law declaring capture already complete!
And THE Creature opened his first True Appendage.
THE MAW!
It tore open across the space before him, a vast horizontal wound in reality lined with obsidian flame, wider than the fossil ranges, deeper than the storm, and it ate! The binding-ropes poured into it and did not bind, inevitability itself devoured mid-declaration as the MAW chewed through law the way fire chews through parchment, hundreds of woven cords unraveling into raw essense between its burning edges!
"You EAT my Intent?!" Ormarr recoiled through the sky as genuine alarm entered his voice for the first time! "Dude, What the hell are you people?!"
THE Creature did not answer.
He raised one titanic obsidian hand instead, and called upon the second of his True Appendages, the one that had grown from the deepest truth of his long existence! For what was THE Creature, beneath the flames and the flat words?
He was the one who bore. He had carried the adversity of Existence alone since the day his other half was brutalized before his eyes, every era of it, every wound of it, every weight that would have crushed civilizations, all of it borne upon one silent frame and never once set down!
And what has been carried... can be placed upon another.
"THE Burden of Existence," THE Creature spoke.
DUN!
It descended upon Ormarr Grimtunge without form or light or warning, and the Serpent’s colossal body simply slammed downward out of the sky!
He struck the bone sea with a detonation that shattered fossil ranges for miles as the weight landed upon him, not force, not gravity, but burden, eras of carried adversity transferred whole onto a single existence, and the Serpent screamed as his coils flattened against the pale ground, his scales splintering, his divided body pressed into the graves of things older than his lineage! What was crushing him could not be fought, because it was not attacking! It was simply everything one being had endured alone, set down at last upon someone else, and the setting down was heavier than any strike ever thrown!
"Get... OFF!" Ormarr’s Ananke Intent surged as his crimson eyes blazed, inevitability straining to declare his freedom!
And that was when the battlefield itself betrayed him.
HUUM!
For at this moment, alongside the eruption of both his appendages, THE Creature allowed the last of himself to emerge, and his Pantheon unfurled!
It did not bloom as realms. It did not rise as architecture! The Serpent’s senses scoured the storm for stanchions and skies and found nothing at all, because the Pantheon of THE Creature had no set shape whatsoever, and it never had! It took on the form of the nearby surrounding existence as the bone sea became Pantheon, the storm became Pantheon, the thickened space and the drifting dust and the graves of the ancient dead all became Pantheon, indistinguishable from what they had been a breath ago except for one absolute difference!
All of it was now his dimension of existence.
THE Pantheon of All Existence!
Ormarr Grimtunge understood the shape of his death one moment too late! He was not standing on a battlefield that contained his enemy. He was standing inside his enemy, and he had been since the fight began, and every fossil and storm-current and mote of dust around him now carried the records of this being! The enemy was not using existence against him.
He was going against Existence itself!
"Collapse," THE Creature said.
And everything did!
BOOOM!
The bone sea folded inward upon the pinned Serpent as fossil ranges the size of continents rose and crashed down like the fingers of a closing fist! Space itself contracted around his coils with the Pantheon’s full authority as the storm descended in a spiraling hammer of Infinity and Primordial Source, and beneath it all, THE MAW opened wide across the ground and drank every fragment of Intent that tried to flee the wreckage! The Burden pressed from above. Existence closed from all sides. Inevitability, the proud second-order law of THE Inevitable Coil, discovered that there was one thing older than inevitability, and it was everything!
"You...!" The Serpent’s voice tore through the collapsing dark as his crimson eyes blazed between the folding fossils, fury and disbelief strangling each other in his throat! "First a seated fucker throws burning Observable Existences at me without standing, and now, now THIS?! Are all of you monsters?! ARE ALL OF YOU FUCKING MONST-"
CRACK!
The fist of Existence closed.
The second-greatest divided body of Ormarr Grimtunge collapsed into itself with a sound like an era ending, coils and scales and screaming Intent crushed down and down and down until nothing remained above the shattered bone sea but a slowly settling cloud of prismatic dust!
Silence returned to the grave of giants.
And in the center of it all, THE Creature stood exactly where he had stood when the battle began!
He had not taken a single step! His obsidian flames billowed slowly around his settling frame as the dust of a True Lifeform rained down across his shoulders like snow that dared not touch him, the shattered fossil ranges rearranging themselves lazily back into their ancient rest at the edges of his formless Pantheon, and the flaming obsidian titan simply stood there amid the devastation with his flat, unhurried gaze, looking for all of existence like a being for whom this outcome had never once been in question!
If others were here, they would have called it showing off!
THE Creature merely breathed out.
"All things are borne," he said quietly to the settling dust. "Then they are set down."
He turned to leave, to find Osmont and the others across this cursed Dimension.
But behind him... the ancient statue had not faded!
The seated colossus of worn gray stone remained where it had risen, and as THE Creature’s obsidian flames stilled, its faceless face began to move! Slowly. Deliberately. On its own! The eroded features turned away from the battlefield, away from THE Creature entirely, rotating toward the far storming dark of THE Krazhor-Nul as if it had heard something out there, something distant!
THE Creature’s flat eyes narrowed as he watched it from the corner of his eyes.
It was Existence, and he was existence. He had to repeat this to himself.
The statue did nothing else but only stare into the far dark, toward something even Existence could not yet see!
Only then did it fade.