Chapter 5234: Change! I
Chapter 5234: Change! I
Existence breathes, and epochs pass, leaving Civilizations that become monuments, then crumble to memory, and are long forgotten when that breath comes again. In all these epochs, Infinity reigns supreme.
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Change is the most wanted and least enacted phenomenon across the arrangement of existence.
The beings who most sincerely want change are, as a general pattern across every civilization that has ever risen far enough to record its own contradictions, the beings least equipped to produce it. They want correctly. They diagnose accurately. They can describe with precision the specific shape of the suffering that surrounds them and articulate with genuine moral clarity why that suffering should not be permitted to continue.
And then they return to their lives and the suffering continues, because wanting and enacting are separated by a distance that sincerity alone has never been sufficient to cross.
The distance is power.
Not power in the narrow sense of force, though force is often its most legible expression. Power in the broader sense of the capacity to make the arrangement of existence agree with your preferred configuration of it against the resistance of an arrangement that has been producing its current configuration for long enough that it has forgotten any other state was possible.
The beings who most want change rarely have this power.
They are too kind. Too measured. Too genuinely concerned with the methods by which change is achieved to pursue those methods without restriction. They draw lines around what they are willing to do and find, eventually, that the lines they have drawn form a cage around their own effectiveness.
And so those with ambition rule. Those with tyranny rule. Beings who have never once confused wanting good with doing good, who understand that the gap between the desired future and the current present is measured not in moral clarity but in the willingness to pay the specific price of closing that gap, which is the price of being the one who does the thing that produces the change rather than the one who endorses the change from a comfortable theoretical distance.
Sometimes the beings who enact change are not good beings.
This is the part that the good beings find most difficult to integrate into their understanding of how existence works.
They want the enactors of change to be clean, to be righteous, to be beings whose methods are as admirable as their stated goals. And occasionally such beings appear and occasionally they produce change through admirable methods, and these moments are remembered and celebrated and held up as evidence that admirable methods are sufficient.
They are not sufficient. They are exceptional. The rule is something else.
The rule is that existence changes when something powerful enough to force the change becomes more committed to the change than the arrangement is to its own continuation!
Sometimes brutality is the only language Existence understands.
The ones who enact real change are almost never the ones anyone would have chosen.
They are, occasionally, beings who were born in the dirt and forged their own light in the dark.
Whether existence is grateful for them is a different question from whether existence is changed by them.
It is almost always changed by them.
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Across the vast Observable Existence that had undergone tremendous change under the Directives of one being, the fires of Infinity were still burning.
They moved through Transcendent Folds and across the surfaces of Primordial Realms and through the ambient substrate of every inhabitable space between those designations.
The fire had dimmed from its initial scorching intensity but had not extinguished, the Mandate’s ongoing authority maintaining it as a background condition of the current Observable Existence’s atmosphere, present enough to be felt and insufficient to be fatal to anything above THE Third Scale.
In THE Primordial Realm of Jotunheim, the frost absorbed the heat without opinion.
The frost that covered everything it touched had not melted for longer than most cultivations had existed, the cold woven into the realm’s foundational substrate with the permanence of something that had been present before the distinction between cold and not-cold had been properly established.
The chaos giants moved through the frost in their procession, each one massive in the way that things produced by chaos tended to be massive.
At their head, wearing the body of Abaddon with the easy comfort, walked THE Great Usurper.
Abaddon’s form was massive, as befitted a being who had been one of THE Four and who had carried the claim of Chaos. But the eyes that looked out from Abaddon’s face carried a different quality than chaos tended to produce.
He had felt the changes.
The fire crossing the realm had been the first thing, multicolored and warm and carrying the signature of someone he recognized by the specific quality of the Infinity expressing itself. Then the booming impacts that reverberated through the broader Observable Existence.
Then the tallest mountain in Jotunheim collapsed!
One of Jotunheim’s eastern mountains, which had stood for long enough that even the chaos giants who had grown up beside it had never known a view of the realm without it, was simply gone in a shower of frost and displaced stone that settled across the surrounding terrain in a wide dispersal pattern.
THE Great Usurper redirected his procession.
He arrived at the dispersal site and looked at what had caused it.
A wriggling ball, approximately the size of a large dwelling structure, composed of a Gilded One whose body had been compressed into a shape that the Gilded One’s body had not consented to and was now attempting to recover from, the Gilded physiology’s remarkable resilience working through the compression damage at the speed that Paleozoic Scale Gilded foundations worked through things, which was to say meaningfully fast even under these conditions.
Crimson-gold blood seeped from the point where the compression had found the most structural resistance, and small sounds emerged from within the ball that suggested consciousness was present even if mobility had not yet been fully restored.
THE Great Usurper knelt.
He brought Abaddon’s massive frame down to the ball’s level with the unhurried ease of a being for whom kneeling was a personal choice, and he looked at the compressed Gilded One with the warm attentive expression of someone who had just discovered something they found genuinely interesting.
He smiled.
"Hey there."
THE Great Usurper’s voice came out pleasant, conversational, entirely at odds with the surrounding frost and the collapsed mountain and the wriggling compressed state of his audience.
"You seem to be hurt and in need of help. Is there anything that we can provide?" He gestured backward at the chaos giants standing in their patient procession behind him. "My friends here love to serve at the pleasure of others. We love to be... united."
He let the word settle for a moment with a quality that suggested the word meant more than its ordinary usage implied. "Ah, unity. Unity is such a beautiful thing. Is it not?"
...!