Chapter 5536: Trials! III
Chapter 5536: Trials! III
The fists came down.
A hundred of them, folded out of a sky that had been drinking screams for ages, huge knuckles of stained cloud and bloodlight dropping together with the two obsidian ones at their center, and the floating terrace of veined gold, that lounging place where an art was talked over with food and drink, stopped being a place at all.
BOOM!
The impact flattened the region.
Gold burned away. The terrace’s foundations, weavings anchored into the Dimension’s own strings by beings who had held them for ages, tore free with a sound like a continent being unstitched, and the shockwave rolled outward across the scorched land in a ring of obsidian fire that walked over three pyramids and left them leaning, and every chained line across a million tiers went down flat as the ground bucked beneath them!
And out of the flattening, the Source True Lifeforms rose.
They rose fighting. THE Creature would grant them that much and nothing else. Nine of them came up out of their own ruin with their density intact, robed existences of the threshold, ancient and patient and very hard to unravel, and their Intent came off them in slow heavy pressures that made the air itself refuse to move, and one of them looked at him with such deep, insulted disbelief that it was almost worth something.
"Who the fuck is this dumb motherfucker?!"
HUUM!
Their Intent converged.
Nine Ananke-grade weights, laid one atop another, one joined pressure built to press a trespasser flat into the very land they farmed, and it fell upon THE Creature with all the piled authority of ages of undisturbed harvest!
And THE Creature simply spread his arms.
HUUM!
THE MAW opened somewhere that was not his body.
It opened in the ground beneath their feet, and in the red sky above their heads, and in the space between their converging weights, because THE Pantheon of All Existence has no shape and never needed one, and the nine masters of the Cultivation Farms suddenly understood, all at once, that they were no longer standing in their Dimension.
They were standing INSIDE him.
The red sky was him. The scorched land was him. The leaning pyramids and the chains and the whole flat butchered horizon was him, and their nine converging Intents poured into a throat that had been swallowing adversity since before the Scales were drawn, and vanished, and did not come back!
"...!"
Their weights guttered and their pressure broke.
And the one who had spoken first took one step backward.
That step was the only warning any of them received.
WAA!
THE Creature moved!
His obsidian flames tore across the emptied sky in a single black stroke, and behind him, unfurling long and white and patient, came the tail.
THE Blank Caudal of the Unwritten Primeval!
White hair threaded with the gold of a thing older than every framework these beings had ever climbed, it whipped out across gigaparsecs of ruined farmland and took the nearest master around the throat, and the Source True Lifeform’s dense and patient existence, that thing so famously hard to unravel, was hauled off its feet and driven down through nine tiers of its own pyramid at a speed that turned black stone into black powder!
CRASH!
And it kept going. It went down through the pyramid’s root, and through the crust beneath, and the tail did not release, it constricted, white coils tightening in the dark under the world while the master’s Trueness bled out of it in sheets of wasted light!
At the peak of that same pyramid, the Gu began to react.
The wheel of mouths, hill-sized and grotesque, shook itself off its perch as ages of training told it that something had entered the land, and it turned all of its mouths toward THE Creature at once and screamed a scream made of every intake it had ever performed!
THE Creature looked at it.
He looked at the bred hunger, the trained appetite, the generations of careful breeding that had produced a thing whose entire purpose was to receive what other beings had carried and hand the profit upward, and his rage found a new floor to flood!
He reached out with his hand.
And the tail came up out of the ground behind the Gu.
SHIING!
It punched through the wheel from beneath and burst out of the top of it, and then it opened, white coils splaying like a hand inside a fist, and THE Creature closed his fingers, and his tail tore the Gu apart from the inside out!
The hill-sized thing came apart in the red air.
And what spilled out of it was not guts.
It was the corpses.
Ages of it, uncounted, the piled weight of every life that had climbed those steps and been sacrifised into that wheel, released all at once into a sky that had no idea what to do with it, and for one moment the whole region was full of the weight of trillions, their labors, their endurances, their small stubborn bearings, hanging in the butcher-red light with nowhere left to go!
And across a million tiers, the chained looked up and saw it!
"...!"
THE Creature’s flames burned white-gold at their edges, and he went to work.
What followed was not a battle! It had the shape of one for a while, because the masters of the Fields were mighty, and they fought with all the art of ages, and two of them managed to wound him. One split his shoulder open with a lance of packed sacrificial essense and THE Creature did not so much as look at the wound. One anchored a weaving into his flames that should have cut him off from his own Pantheon, which was a genuinely excellent idea, and would have worked on almost anything else in existence, and did nothing at all to a being whose Pantheon was the ground the weaving was anchored in.
He took that one in his hands and laid THE Burden of Existence upon it.
HOONG!
The appendage settled onto the master’s back, and it gave that ancient patient thing exactly what it had spent its ages avoiding.
The bearing.
Every era THE Creature had carried, every weight, every adversity borne without complaint since before many Dimensions had a name, moved whole onto a being who had built an entire civilization on the idea that bearing was a waste, and the Source True Lifeform’s knees hit the black stone, and then its hands, and then its face, and it stayed down there making a sound that had no dignity in it whatsoever while its own weavings buckled under a debt it had never once paid a copper toward!
And then he crushed its skull with his heel.
SQUELCH!
Across the region, the pyramids were coming down.
He walked through the Fields and unmade them. The tail whipped and coiled and strangled, taking Gu and master alike, smashing bred hungers into those that had fed them, and where his flames touched the black stone the stone forgot it had ever been stacked. The moth with wings of grasping hands tried to rise off its peak and got half a wingbeat before white coils took it around the thorax and folded it in half the wrong way.
The bloated segmented thing burst and rained ages of stolen carrying across three continents of scorched land. Six pyramids. Nine. Fourteen! An entire district of the Cultivation Farms turned into rubble and rising weight while the red sky churned overhead, and behind his ribs, an ancient Creature kept a calm and terrible tally!
And the last of the nine True Lifeforms, the one who had spoken first, finally stopped retreating and turned to face him with its Trueness burning down to its final reserves.
It roared at him.
"Do you know what you are doing?! What force we belong to?! We stem from-"
The tail was already moving.
It came across the red sky wearing the full weight of a newly-seated Ananke Intent, white and gold and utterly without hurry, and it cleaved the master’s skull apart mid-sentance, and the great and ancient existence that had been about to call on its lineage came apart in two clean falling halves.
"I don’t give a damn."
...!
Silence took the Fields.
The last of the ruin settled. The rubble stopped moving. Across a landscape that had been eating millions daily since before the Scales were laid out, nothing was eating anything at all, and the only sound left in the whole butchered region was the wind pulling at loose chain.
THE Creature floated up into the red sky.
He rose slowly, obsidian flames burning low and even around his frame, until he hung high above the broken pyramids, and from up there he could see all of them.
The chained.
Millions of them, still shackled throat to throat in lines that stretched past the horizon, humanoid lifeforms and beasts both, lying where the shockwaves had thrown them and staring upward at the thing in their sky. He looked down into their faces.
He saw what was in them.
There was no gratitude. Not yet, and maybe not ever, because gratitude needs a future and these beings had been raised in a place that issued none. What he saw was rage. Old rage, buried so deep beneath the climbing and the chains that most of them had probably forgotten they were carrying it, surfacing now in ten million upturned faces at once.
Good.
"I will take your rage and your pain and your suffering," THE Creature said, and his flat voice carried across every area and every chain and every scorched acre of the Fields.
"And I will make them all answer for it."
"...!"
"Don’t let go of that rage. Do not let it go!"
HUUM!
And then he turned in the red sky and shot out toward another direction, obsidian fire tearing a line across the sky, because this had been one district, one region, one flat butchered corner of a Dimension that stretched much further than that, and out there across THE Ghor-Vazhal the other pyramids were still standing and the other Gu were still swallowing and the chained lines had not stopped climbing for so much as a heartbeat.
Decillions.
The number moved through him and would not settle. Countless Decillions of thinking beings across the Fields, born into farmland, raised as flavor, whose entire fate from first breath to last was to be used and devoured so that beings on golden terraces could climb without the excitment of ever having to carry anything, and every one of them had borne something, and not one of them had ever been asked!
And rising underneath all these thoughts, older, unhealed, the thing he never spoke of.
His other half.
Brutalized in front of him. This was what he continued to be reminded of when he looked at all their faces!
His rage rose higher as his first Trial barely began.
A thousand? He would kill fucking millions if he needed to!