Chapter 5369: I Dream!
Chapter 5369: I Dream!
Dame Seraphine found the place where her Swords had died, and for a long moment she did not move at all.
There was nothing to find, which was the thing that undid her composure. A death leaves something behind.
A body, an echo, a last expression caught in the air. Her Swords had left her none of that. She felt the absence where their Sources had been, four foundations she had known across long years simply collapsed, gone so completely that even the grief had nowhere to anchor.
Sir William. Botswana. Richard. Lianna!
The new Sword’s protectors, the ones she herself had chosen for this party because they were among the best she could have asked for. Unmade!
The rage came up slowly, which was worse than if it had come fast. It started somewhere deep and built, and by the time it reached her face it had stopped being heat and become something cold and bubbling and absolutely certain.
She turned back toward THE Maw.
Andro fell in beside her without being asked, and the other Fifth Scale Source Lifeforms with him, all of them carrying the same grim understanding. Because the deaths were a catastrophe, yes.
But there was a worse catastrophe sitting underneath the first one, and every Mesozoic Scale being present had already done the math.
Sir William and the others had died. The new Sword had not. Osmont was still down there, and Osmont could not die. The Order had come from THE Domicile of THE Queen Regnant herself!
Whatever he was, whatever he carried, he was the one being in this entire domain that the Swords of Existence could not afford to lose, and he was alone in the deep of a mine that had just eaten four Titan-rarity Swords.
So Seraphine carried her fury, and she went back down!
The storms were worse now. The instabilities that had raged at the depths had climbed and spread, the converted foreign nature howling through the upper reaches of THE Maw where the air had been merely lethal before.
She pushed through them, her Mesozoic Scale presence parting the conversion-storms by main force, Andro and the others holding their own behind her. The mine fought them the whole way down, the foreign nature pressing at their identities, and they pressed back, and they made progress, because Fifth Scale beings did not unmake easily!
And then, partway down, something stopped them.
It rose up out of the storm to meet them, and it was not the mine and it was not the buried thing. It was a being!
An Infinite Lifeform, blue-robed, two horns rising from his brow, a slow crown of Infinity and Avaritia turning above his head, and he looked up at the descending Source Lifeforms with a cold callous smile and eyes that held an arrogance and an age that did not belong to the face wearing them.
Seraphine knew him by the information relayed about all Fifth Scale Lifeforms stationed in Arkethys. Borys!
Her composure, already cracked by the deaths, gave way to plain cold contempt.
"I knew it," she said. "I knew the moment Andro told me the instability rose out of our own ground that you Infinite Lifeforms had your hands in this somewhere. You always do. You can’t help yourselves!"
"Some of you aren’t even beings anymore. You’re mad beasts wearing the shape of beings, and mad beasts need to be put down before they bite! You...WILL BE PUT DOWN!"
BOOM!
...!
Borys did not rise to the insult. He received it calmly, almost warmly, the way a man receives a remark he finds quaint, and when he answered her his voice carried the unhurried cadence of someone explaining a thing he found fascinating to someone he had already decided was beneath understanding it.
"A mad beast," he said, and turned the words over with something like fondness.
He spread his hands, the crown of greed turning above him. "Infinite Lifeforms have been treated as the lesser kind for too long. Beneath the Source Lifeforms. Beneath your precious banner and your precious people. And why? Because the oh so great and esteemed Vakochev laid his Scales across all of existence and sorted everyone into their places, and your kind landed comfortably above mine, and you have called that arrangement the natural order ever since."
His smile widened, cold and patient. "But I have been learning something, down here in the dark. I have learned that there are things older than Vakochev. Older than the Scales he laid. Things that do not care for his sorting at all!"
The crown spun faster.
"So I dream," Borys said softly. "Is that so mad? I dream the way the powerful have always dreamed, except I dream bigger than my place was supposed to allow. I dream of Infinity covering everything. I dream of Infinity reigning supreme, over the Source, over the Scales, over Vakochev’s tidy little order and everyone who ever profited from it." His eyes burned.
"There will be no treaty. The treaty was a thing for beings who accepted their place, and I have stopped accepting mine. Arkethys is ours. And so much more than Arkethys will be ours, before the end."
BOOM!
As the words left him, an apocalyptic sea of blue Infinity erupted from his existence, vast and roaring, his Avaritia Ego blazing through it, and from the center of it his Akashic Civilizational Intent unfurled, a fourth-rarity Intent, an Olympian Intent, the kind that reorganized reality around itself as law!
It poured out into THE Maw, and the dying converted air bent toward it, and Dame Seraphine felt the weight of it land on her like a falling Observable Existence!
He alone, a single being, pressed on Dame Seraphine and every Fifth Scale Source Lifeform around her with an oppression that made all of them feel suffocated, the air going thick, their own Mesozoic immensity suddenly feeling stifled!
He charged.
He came at them coldly, without flourish, the way a beast charges when it has stopped pretending to be anything else, the blue sea of Infinity surging ahead of him, the Olympian Intent reorganizing the space he moved through into a place that obeyed him.
One being, against a Knighting Sword and her gathered Fifth Scale companions!