Chapter 5147: False Idols! II
Chapter 5147: False Idols! II
A terrible stillness settled across THE Gilded White Mountain.
Then, from the highest tier of the grandest temple, a massive figure stepped into view.
The Primordial Architect who emerged burned with plasmic golden flames that crawled across his skin in slow whorls, the color brighter and cleaner than the multicolored gold of THE Creature’s fires. He stood twice the height of any other being on the mountain. His body was built in the proportions of a war-statue rather than a living creature. Oh, and he had two heads.
Two heads, side by side, set upon the single massive neck, each one crowned with a halo of its own plasmic flames. Both faces were sculpted. Both faces were handsome.
And both faces were showing rage at this moment, the left head’s anger cold and measured, the right head’s anger hot and open-mouthed, the two expressions working together the way a blade and a bludgeon work together when a single enemy must be dealt with from multiple angles at once.
His voice came from both heads at once, one pitch slightly lower than the other, the overlap creating a strange harmonic resonance that carried down the mountain.
"Your mere presence at the base of this mountain is blasphemous."
Both mouths spoke the same words. Both mouths were moving in perfect synchrony.
"How dare you speak with such disrespect toward the ones who have given us everything? Civilization is togetherness. Civilization is community. Civilization is the acknowledgment that we are stronger when we orient ourselves around those greater than us, and THE Gilded Ones have given us exactly that orientation. They have shared it with us. They have permitted us to stand within their reach. They have given us a glimpse of what existence can be when the highest capacities are actually expressed rather than suppressed. And you, a wretched little Primordial Architect who abandoned his own classification out of grief for a fucking woman, you stand at the base of our mountain and call them false?"
The left head’s mouth twisted into something close to a sneer.
"How dare you, O Creature?"
The right head’s mouth opened wider, the rage pouring through more openly.
"What makes you even think what you are doing is anything other than a suicide mission? That is all this is. That is the only honest description of your career since you abandoned your original foundation. You are a walking corpse pretending to be a movement. You are a grief-soaked little experiment shambling across THE Wyld leaving bodies behind you because you cannot face the fact that the only body you wanted to save was lost to you long ago and no amount of Primordial Architect corpses will bring her back."
Both mouths spoke together again.
"The day you stand before a Gilded One, I want to see if you will talk the same way you talk now. Or whether you will be unable to raise your head. Whether your multicolored flames will gutter down to embers in their presence. Whether your rage will finally reveal itself as the tantrum of a small wounded thing pretending to be a revolutionary. I have seen Gilded Ones at close range. I have knelt in their presence. You do not understand what you would actually face. You do not understand how small you are. Your bravado is the bravado of someone who has never yet been shown the scale."
THE Creature’s visage did not change during any of this.
His flames continued to flicker in their silent rage. His posture remained exactly as it had been, feet planted on the pale stone among the corpses, hands loose at his sides, head tilted slightly upward toward the balcony where the two-headed Primordial Architect stood. His eyes, visible through the flames, held a clarity that did not belong to a being who was shaken by what he had just heard.
When he replied, his voice was calm.
"I hope to very soon stand before a Gilded One."
THE Creature let the words settle.
"Especially THE False Golden Idol. I hope this more than I have hoped for anything across the long climb of my current existence. I wish for it with a depth of wishing that would frighten most beings if they understood the wishing properly. You think I am afraid of that encounter? You have inverted the actual situation. I am not afraid as much as I am impatient. The encounter has been the entire point of everything I have done since I rebuilt my foundation from ash. Every corpse I have laid down has been a corpse closer to the one I am owed. Every tier I have climbed has been a tier earned in service of that single future meeting."
He smiled as it was not a pleasant smile!
"When I finally stand before THE False Golden Idol, I will not speak as much as you imagine I will. I will not waste words on a being who has earned silence from me. What I will do, instead, is split his skull along the structural seam where his Pride is thickest. Or in his case, not Pride as he gave you all Pride while he holds Superbius. I will watch the light in both his eyes change from the expression of a titan receiving reverence to the expression of a child receiving consequence. And I will watch him bleed. I will watch him bleed for a long time, because bleeding is a slow process when it is done correctly, and I have every intention of doing it correctly."
BOOM!
The words carried a weight that pressed the flames of the two-headed Primordial Architect into visible agitation.
The massive being on the high balcony erupted with power. Plasmic golden flames roared upward from his body until they stretched above the roof of the temple itself, their color deepening as his rage climbed into its fully-expressed form. Both of his mouths spoke as one, the voice booming down the mountain with the full authority of his classification brought to bear.
"You have no such power to say such things!"
His halos flared.
"I will show you what your words are actually worth!"
The entire mountain mobilized.
Dozens of Primordial Architects moved from their tiers and their balconies. Flames of various colors bloomed across their forms as they prepared for descent. Weavings of authority unfolded into their combat configurations. The mountain, which had held its balance across long peaceful centuries, committed to the engagement with the full weight of its assembled residents.
And THE Creature simply looked at all of it.
His posture had not changed and his flames had not brightened!
His eyes had not widened pr changed. He absorbed the mobilization with the calm of a being who had anticipated every second of what was about to happen and who felt no need to adjust his plans in response to the mountain’s collective decision.
He spoke without turning his head.
"Witness me, Anaximander."
His voice was soft, reserved, meant only for the being floating behind him.
"Witness, and pray for these poor souls."
---
HUUM!
Multiple Calymmian Proterozoic Scale Primordial Architects initiated Pulses of THE Scales simultaneously from their positions along the balconies of the temples. The somatic weavings formed faster than most beings could follow, fingers curling and uncurling through the ancient sequences, palms rotating outward, hands flicking releases across the air. Verbal weavings layered atop the somatic ones, voices rising together in the old structural formulas that Primordial Architects had been using since long before the temples on this mountain had been carved.
THE Silurian Light bloomed first.
Three of the Calymmian Primordial Architects called on it at the same time, flames with too many colors erupting from their palms, surging down the slope toward the lone figure at the base. Other Pulses followed from other balconies. THE Cambrian Word spoken in somber cadences, causal weavings reaching out to rewrite what had and had not happened at the mountain’s base. THE Ordovician Scream torn from a throat higher up, a sonic unwriting that rode on a wave of authority. THE Triassic Bloom unfurling from another balcony, flowering weavings that sought to replace existing matter with their own growth!
Pulse after Pulse, each one carrying the capacity to end most engagements in a single expression, all of them converging on the same target at the foot of the mountain.
THE Creature floated calmly.
He did nothing!
He simply drifted slightly upward from his rows of corpses, his hands remaining loose at his sides, his multicolored golden flames licking quietly around his form. He watched the incoming Pulses the way a teacher watched a classroom of students all raising their hands at once to answer a question he had already decided none of them were going to get right.
The Pulses reached him!
HUUUUM!
THE Silurian Light landed on his flames first. The three streams of it converged on his chest and his shoulders and his head, and the colors of THE Silurian Light poured into the multicolored gold of his own flames and were swallowed!
His flames drank the incoming fire the way a deeper sea drinks a surface wave, and what emerged on the other side of the swallowing was simply more of his flame burning in the same configuration it had burned in before.
How could they possibly erase his Causality? HIS Causality?!
They knew nothing!
THE Cambrian Word arrived next. It tried to rewrite the consequences of his presence at the base of the mountain, tried to unfix him from the arrangement of who was standing where and who had done what. The Word reached his foundations and found something older than the Word underneath them.
The Word slipped off. The rewriting failed to take hold because the substrate it tried to rewrite had been rewritten so many times by THE Creature himself across his rebuilt existence that no external authority could find purchase on it.
THE Ordovician Scream hit and dissipated. THE Triassic Bloom landed and was burned away by the flames. Pulse after Pulse broke against him, and he simply floated, and nothing about his posture changed!
Oh!!!
Dozens of Pulses. Enough to unwrite entire realms. None of them hindered him!
"..."
A silence fell across the balconies.
The Calymmian Primordial Architects who had released the Pulses held their postures, hands still extended, breaths caught in their throats. Their flames guttered slightly as the collective shock moved through the mountain’s assembled population. The higher-ranked Ediacaran Primordial Architects near the top of the mountain held themselves very still, their two-headed leader Philemon Aristos among them, his plasmic golden flames flickering with something that was beginning to approach doubt.
The shock broke into motion.
The Calymmian Primordial Architects collectively illuminated.
All across the mountain, dozens of them lit up at once as they called upon the full activation of their engineered foundations. Their Proterozoic Bones shone through their skin in golden outlines, ribcages and spines and femurs traced against the air like the armatures of sculptures being lit from within. Their organ systems followed, hearts and lungs and secondary viscera glowing with their own golden light, each configuration becoming visible as the Primordial Architects activated every stratum of their cultivation at once. The mountain became a host of luminous skeletons, dozens of them, all blazing in coordinated desperation.
And then they called upon Infinity.
The ambient seas of THE Wyld responded to the collective summoning. Rivers of Infinity bent upward from the slopes, drawn into the bodies of the blazing Calymmians, poured down through their engineered channels, saturating their amplified Egos with floods their engineering had been designed to hold. Pride flared brighter in some. Wrath in others. Envy in a clustered group of three near the middle temples. Greed in several, Lust in a handful, Gluttony and Sloth in the rest scattered across the remaining balconies. Every one of the seven amplified Egos visible in the population, every one of them surging to full activation at the same moment, every one of them holding back the madness of THE Gamaidjan through the sheer intensity of the engineered emotion.
The mountain became a constellation of engineered brilliance!
The Ediacaran Proterozoic Scale Primordial Architects clustered around Philemon Aristos began to move forward from the highest balconies. Their own amplified Egos were larger, cleaner, more refined than those of the Calymmians below them. Their contributions...were about to land.
And then THE Creature’s skeleton shone.
His multicolored flames thinned momentarily, and beneath them, for a single heartbeat, the architecture of his body became visible. His skeleton was not the ordinary bone lattice of a Primordial Architect. It was something that had been rebuilt. Something that had been smelted down and reforged across his long climb, the Proterozoic components replaced by substrates his mountain-bound opponents had no name for!
His bones glowed with a pale undercolor that looked wrong against the multicolored gold around them, a pale that suggested something older than the classifications the mountain was built on.
He took his fist back, and he smashed it forward toward the mountain.
The motion was simple. Almost rustic in its simplicity. A body punching at air, and the air receiving the punch without obvious disturbance!
BOOM!
In the next moment, more than a dozen of the illuminated Calymmian Primordial Architects felt a terrifying force smash into them at once.
The force did not travel through the intervening space. It arrived and landed inside their bodies directly, in the centers of their blazing Proterozoic structures, the point of impact located in the deepest layers of their cultivated foundations. Their Proterozoic Bones ruptured from within. Their organs, so recently illuminated with the full activation of their engineering, burst.
WAP!
One of them popped like a balloon. Blood, golden flame, shards of Proterozoic Bone, all of it erupted outward from the body in a single explosive moment.
WAP!
Another popped.
WAP! WAP! WAP!
The wet bursts cascaded across the mountain’s balconies as one Calymmian after another detonated from the inside, their amplified Egos collapsing in the same instants their bodies did, their flames guttering into smoke as the engineering that had held them together was undone by a punch that had not visibly touched any of them. More than a dozen of them in the span of a few heartbeats. Bodies rupturing in their own temples. Their debris raining down the slopes toward the pale stone at the mountain’s base!
WAP! WAP! WAP!