Chapter 5575: We Follow!
Chapter 5575: We Follow!
<Ianthe Kallias>
Ianthe Kallias had carried the weight of an Observable Existence in her body since she was young, and until this war, she had believed that meant something.
The sky of THE Golden Expanse had been gold all her life. Now it ran blue and wrong, rivers of Infinity pouring through it in torrents, and beneath those torrents the invaders’ Pantheons stood unleashed across the plains, palaces and coils and hungry geometries pressing their laws down onto ground that had never obeyed anyone!
Their Intents came ahead of them like weather. Hundreds of her people held the line with their bare bodies and their exemplified weight, and the line was moving the wrong way.
She drove her fist through an Infinite Lifeform’s descending claw and felt the claw’s law try to write itself onto her bones before her weight crushed it out!
CRACK!
Beside her, old Peleus staggered, three Intents grinding against his shoulders at once. Past him, the twins fought back to back in a shrinking circle. Everywhere she looked, her people were giving ground, one stubborn step at a time, and Ianthe felt the fear she had been swallowing all day rise up her throat. Not fear for herself. Fear for all of them!
The invaders spent bodies the way rivers spend water, and her people had only the bodies they were born in.
Then... the hum arrived. A heavy and unfathomable hum!
It was simply there, underneath everything, a single sustained note so old that her body recognized it before her ears did, and her body’s opinion was terror!
Across the battlefront, thousands of beings looked up at once.
High above the breaking line, where nothing had been a heartbeat ago, something now floated.
It was titanic. It was shaped like a man, and it was the color of deep crimson gold, marked across its skin with spirals and dot-lines of burning stellar blue, hung with strands of pale bone, mantled and horned, and above its head a crown made of slowly turning blood floated without dripping!
Around its whole frame, streams of blood swirled in endless crossing loops, the same shape over and over, a symbol she would never afterward forget.
She could not have said what it was. Nobody on that field could. Understanding was not offered!
Its aura pressed down, and Ianthe’s knees nearly went. This thing had come to their side of the war, she could feel that much in the way its weight fell only forward, onto the invaders, and still her hands shook.
It was the dread of standing near something out of the first age of existence, ancient beyond the weavings of ages, and the dread did not ease when she told herself it was rescue!
The Infinite Lifeforms received it truly.
Their formations had already stopped. Rivers of Infinity faltered mid-pour. Beings who had spent the day as executioners now hung motionless in the silver air, and Ianthe watched creatures wearing Cenozoic weight begin, visibly, to shake.
The floating figure raised its staff.
At the staff’s crowned tip, a single drop of blood formed. Crimson gold, with a stellar blue light living in its depths. One drop, above a battlefront that stretched past the horizon’s patience!
The drop popped.
HUUM!
The battlefront ahead of her ceased to be a place.
Everything the invaders held turned crimson gold at once, event horizons blooming across the plains in their uncounted numbers, twisting light and law and Pantheon-palaces into themselves with a force that made Ianthe’s exemplified body feel like a leaf pressed in a book!
The hum became a roar and became a pressure that bent the world’s edges inward, and through it she saw the Infinite Lifeforms crack like vessels, their hoarded Infinity leaking out in ribbons, their bodies coming apart into red!
BOOM!
When the light thinned, the plains were painted. A film of crimson gold lay across the ruined ground where the invading army’s forward strength had stood, shimmering with blue, and nothing that had ridden in on those rivers moved anywhere upon it. The rivers themselves were gone. The unleashed Pantheons were gone!
The pressure of a hundred foreign Intents was gone, and its absence rang louder than any of it.
The war in THE Golden Expanse was not over. Ianthe could feel the rest of the invasion out beyond the horizon, vast and undeterred, still arriving.
But the field before her was finished.
And the being that had finished it did not chase, and did not speak, and did not land. It simply floated there above its own blood, grand and unhurried, arms loose at its sides, the crown turning over its head and the endless loops of blood crossing and recrossing around it, letting itself be seen at full length by every survivor of both sides, as though being witnessed were itself part of the work.
Then, slowly, it turned toward the horizon, where the rest of the war was waiting!
Ianthe rose from her knees, and she watched.
There was nothing else to be done with what was happening in the sky. The titanic crimson gold being drifted out from the cleared battlefront, unhurried, the crown of blood turning above its head, and where it went, the war simply ended.
She saw it stop above the burning reaches east of the plains, where the blue rivers had been pouring. It raised its staff!
One drop of blood formed at the tip, crimson gold around a heart of stellar blue, and Ianthe braced herself this time, and the bracing did nothing at all.
BOOM!
The east turned crimson gold from earth to sky, event horizons blooming through the invaders’ ranks, and every single Infinite Lifeform within that region cracked, leaked, and collapsed into red. Not most of them. Every one!
Then the being drifted on, south, to the shattered terraces where the twins’ home had stood, and did it again. One drop!
Just one drop of blood!
Then the high passes. One drop. Then the coast of the golden sea, where the largest mass of the invasion had gathered its Pantheons into a fortress of stacked laws, and Ianthe thought, surely, here it will need more!
And yet still...
One drop was all it required.
BOOM!
She did not know what this lifeform was. No one on the field knew what it was!
But her people were already speaking of it in low voices between the drops, and a name was forming out of nothing, because beings must call a thing something or go mad looking at it. The crown gave them the word. By the fourth region, Ianthe heard old Peleus murmur it, and realized she had been thinking it for some time.
The Blood-Crowned One.
It was not a grand name. It was simply true!
Region by region, drop by drop, the Blood-Crowned One unmade the invasion of THE Golden Expanse. There was no battle in any of it. A single ridiculous thing happened: every Infinite Lifeform, cleared out and completely collapsed, until the rivers ran nowhere in any sky she could see, and the last foreign Intent guttered out of the air like a lamp pinched between fingers!
And then THE Golden Expanse was entirely cleared.
"..."
A heavy silence fell upon it.
It was the first true silence in longer than Ianthe could count. No rivers pouring. No Pantheons grinding their laws against the ground. No screaming, hers or theirs.
Just the wind moving over ruined gold plains slicked in crimson, and hundreds upon hundreds of Superpowered Lifeforms standing in the wreckage of everything, slowly raising their heads.
Every single one of them looked up.
The Blood-Crowned One floated at the center of the sky, staff loose in its grip, the loops of blood turning endlessly around its frame.
Then it spoke.
"I will lead you."
BOOM!
The voice was ancient and booming and everywhere at once, arriving in the chest before the ears, and Ianthe flinched, and could not look away.
It did not even seem like a request!
There was no question mark living anywhere inside those words. The being was not offering. It was telling them what it would do, the way the sky tells the ground it will rain!
"For ages, you have been defending against an onslaught of enemies," the voice rolled on, slow and vast. "Age after age, they have come for your homes, and age after age, you have held your lines with your bare bodies, and buried your dead, again, and again, and again. No more."
The staff turned, once, unhurried.
"I, THE True Human Emperor, will lead you."
A pause came, in which the whole of THE Golden Expanse seemed to hang from a thread.
"Will you follow?"
HUUM!
The hum swelled beneath the words, ancient and enormous, and the oppressive silence that followed was the heaviest thing Ianthe had ever stood under, heavier than the Observable Existence she carried in her body, because this weight asked something of her!
Her emotions would not settle into any single shape.
His words about her people resonated in her bones. Dying age after age. Burying the dead again and again!
That was her mother, and her mother’s line, and old Peleus’s four sons, and every golden field she had ever seen churned to mud and red!
He was right!
And at the same time, she was afraid of him. Deeply. He had asked nothing of them before saving them. He had wiped out the very enemies that were butchering them, armies of Infinite Lifeforms, whole invasions, with single drops of blood, and power like that did not need their consent for anything, and yet here it floated, waiting for their answer.
But beneath the fear, and beneath the awe, there was something else. And it was actually fairly simple.
She was tired. She was so tired of the cycles of death.
And this fearsome being that none of them could understand had protected them. If he could continue to do so...
Ianthe Kallias stepped forward over the ruined ground, the first body to move up in all of THE Golden Expanse. She put her hand on her chest, over the weight she had carried since she was young, and she raised her voice to the sky.
"We follow!"
HUUM!
She was a single lone voice in a silence the size of a domain!
But she was the first. And how she thought was how many just like her thought!
Old Peleus rose from beside his dead, put his hand on his chest, and said it. The twins rose together, hands on their chests. Then the line she had fought beside all day, then the survivors of the terraces, then voices from the passes and the coast, Superpowered Lifeforms rising one after another out of the wreckage across the whole golden breadth of the domain, hands over hearts.
"We follow!"
"We follow!"
It became a phenomenon!
All those within THE Golden Expanse looked up as they said it. Some of them said it holding the corpses of their families in their arms. Some said it kneeling, too injured to stand, pain written across their faces as they looked around at the devastation of everything they had built, and then looked up, past all of it, toward the fearsome being promising to lead them.
Their voices rose and joined and rose again, hundreds becoming a single sound rolling across the cleared plains, grief and exhaustion and hope all speaking the same two words!
"WE FOLLOW!"
The Blood-Crowned One looked down upon all of it, the crown turning slowly above its head.
And it gave them its last words.
"I will lead you towards an age of humanity, and empowerment. Towards an age where those who butchered you... will fear even standing before your shadows."
...!
The words burned through Ianthe and many others!
Her blood boiled. There was no gentler way to name it. Because what better emotion was there to rouse up, if not revenge? They had been prey for so long that she had forgotten there was another way to stand!
Those who butchered them, afraid of their shadows!
...!
Ianthe threw her head back and roared, and around her, THE Golden Expanse roared with her, hundreds of voices tearing loose at once with a fervor that shook the crimson from the ruined ground, louder than the war had ever been!
"WE FOLLOW!"
HUUM!