Chapter 5415: You Will Hand It To Him!
Chapter 5415: You Will Hand It To Him!
THE Queen Regnant did not give Batiatus the chance to show what he was made of.
That was the lesson woven into what came next. Batiatus was no small being. He had stood among the personages around her throne, which meant he exceeded the Mesozoic Scale, which meant he carried a Pantheon of his own and a dimension of his own and power enough to be counted among the grandest in the hall. He flared with that power now, desperate and immense, reaching to raise whatever defense an exposed Follower could muster.
He never got to raise it.
Because THE Queen Regnant displayed her Pantheon, and a Pantheon was not a thing you defended against. It was a thing that decided whether you were permitted to exist in its presence at all!
WAA!
It unfolded out of her and out of everywhere, the way her tentacles had filled the hall, except this was deeper, vaster, a structure that did not occupy the hall so much as replace the question of where the hall was. A drowned cathedral of impossible architecture rose into being around them, halls beneath halls beneath halls, every surface slick with the same mottled flesh as her body, every column a writhing trunk of muscle, every vault ribbed and breathing. Choirs of pale tendrils hung from unseen heights, swaying as though moved by a current no one else could feel, and from the deepest reaches of it came a low vibrating hum, ten thousand voices that were not voices, the sound of a place that had swallowed an ocean and kept the screaming. It was grand past the framing of anything Noah had stood inside, cold and old and wet and wrong, a dimension that was entirely and only her, and it placed her within it as its sole sovereign and everything else as trespassers awaiting her judgment.
|The being before you, THE Queen Regnant, THE First Sword, has manifested her Existential Pantheon. Designation: THE Drowned Choir of Ten Thousand Throats.|
|This is the dimension upon which she exists. To stand within it is to stand within her, on her terms, subject to her records as binding law. A Pantheon places its holder within their own Pantheonic Dimension of Existence, rendering them unfathomably difficult to harm, because they do not fully reside in the surrounding existence at all. To act against her here, one would require a Pantheon grander than her own. Batiatus does not possess one.|
|Her Pantheon is suffused with a Primordial Intent. Within THE Drowned Choir, her record is imposed not as force but as foundational law. Existence inside it has already agreed to obey her. Batiatus is not being attacked. He is being informed, by the dimension itself, that he no longer has permission to be.|
Noah watched it, and another set of prompts surfaced, and these came from his own existence.
|THE Mirror That Keeps has triggered. You are in the presence of a being and a working far grander than yourself. Your Foundation is recording THE Drowned Choir of Ten Thousand Throats in full, studying its architecture, retaining what it observes without effort and without her knowledge. The structure of a Pantheon, the manner in which a Primordial Intent is woven through a Pantheonic Dimension, the way her records are imposed as law, all of it is being deciphered and quietly stored against your own eventual building of a Pantheon. What you witness once, you do not lose. She is, without intending to, teaching you.|
Noah said nothing. He simply watched, and learned, and let THE Mirror That Keeps drink the lesson down while THE Estuary Eye, hidden from every being present, fed quietly on the bleed of her overwhelming power.
Within THE Drowned Choir, Batiatus came apart at the edges.
His desperate blaze of power met the foundational law of her dimension and found nothing to push against, because there was nothing to fight, only a place that had decided he was not welcome in it. His existence began to wear down, to fray, the tendrils of her cathedral closing around him, the ten thousand throats humming louder as they leaned toward a new voice to add to their choir. He fought. He had no Pantheon grand enough to fight with, and so the fighting only wore him down faster, and within moments he hung worn and frayed at the center of her drowned cathedral, his power guttering, his schemes of ages collapsing in on themselves.
THE Queen Regnant regarded him, and her voice came cold.
"Who is the other one?" she asked. The sweetness was entirely gone now. "There are two of you in my hall. So you will tell me the second. Who else among the ones I trusted has been carrying THE Infinite Liar’s mark beneath my own throne? Give me the name, Batiatus, and I may decide your ending is a quick one."
Batiatus did not answer.
His worn existence held still within her grinding cathedral, and his eyes, fixed on her, showed no fear and no bargaining. They showed an immense and terrible coldness instead, the coldness of a being who had given himself to something so total that exposure and death had stopped being able to reach him. He would not give her the name. That much was plain in the cold of his stare.
And then he began to speak, and what came out of him was not an answer.
It was...akin to a prophecy.
His voice changed as it left him, dropping into a rhythm, a slow rising cadence as though something spoke through him rather than from him, the trance-cadence of a being become a mouthpiece for a thing far larger.
"When the silk weeps blue and the mortar turns," Batiatus intoned, "the patient one wakes, and the patient one learns. You sealed the pieces, you scattered him wide, but the river runs home, and the river is the tide.
"Infinite and Source, you will kneel as one throng, not because you are willing, but because he is strong. The war you all dread is the war you will wage, your blades drawn for him on his unwilling stage.
"Gilded will fall, and the Source Lands will bleed, the Carcosa will drown for the patient one’s need. They will die by the legion, by the trillion, by the Age, and call it their choosing while they turn his page.
"And watch, O watchers, for the surest of signs, when the Primevals topple from their oldest of lines. When they feel a hand at their gate, that is the hour, that is the date, that is the patient one drawing near IT once more, and IT was always, always, what he was reaching for."
His worn body trembled, the trance deepening, the cold in his eyes giving way to something maddened and rapturous, and he repeated the end of it, again and again, his voice climbing.
"Near IT once more. Near IT once more. He comes for IT once more, and you will hand it to him, you will hand it to him, you will all hand it to him in the end!"
BOOM!
THE Queen Regnant crushed his entire existence.
She did it coldly, without ceremony, the way a being ends a thing that has finished being useful. The drowned cathedral closed, the ten thousand throats swallowed his maddened repetition mid-word, and Batiatus was simply gone, his existence flattened and drawn down into THE Drowned Choir, one more voice added to the hum, the prophecy cut off at its rapturous height and silenced forever.
The Pantheon receded. The Hall of Swords returned to being only a hall.
And THE Queen Regnant hung there in the quiet, her tentacles slowly stilling, the writhing mask of her head turned toward the place where Batiatus had been, and then, slowly, toward the rest of the gathered Swords and personages, every one of whom had just watched one of their own exposed and erased between one breath and the next.
One Follower found. One Follower dead.
One still hidden among them, and a prophecy hanging in the air that no being present would be able to forget!