Kneeling, when hundreds of apex existences do it at once, has a glorious sound.
It rolled across the black plain of THE Vhelgaros like a slow tide of thunder as Primeval Ones of Ages lowered themselves to the cracked stone, titans of bone and Ego and petrified starlight folding downward rank after rank, and between them the omen-blooded Descendants of the old order sank to their knees with their horned heads bowed, lineage-weavings dimmed in submission before a power their architects’ blood could not argue with!
Thousands of powerful existences! Two armies! One Dimension!
All of it knelt!
Descendant Ilvexa was among the last. The widowed monarch stared at the figure burning above the white ash of her husband for a long moment, her clawed hands slowly closing.
Then she, too, lowered her horned frame to the stone.
THE Creature hovered above his kneeling Dimension, wreathed in stolen First Causes and orbiting Existences of light, and he let the moment stand exactly as long as it needed to stand.
Then he closed his eyes!
—
He opened them somewhere else that was endlessly white and black.
He stood upon a battlefield that stretched beyond every horizon, and the battlefield was ancient.
The ground was bone-white and hard as fired porcelain, split by rivers of pure black that ran without moving, and across the entire endless expanse, corpses lay where they had fallen!
Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands! Titanic frames and small ones, armored and bare, ancient beyond reckoning, every single one preserved mid-fall in white and black, no rot and no scavengers and no wind, a war that existence had chosen to keep exactly as it ended!
THE Creature’s mental manifestation stood at the center of it all, his flames burning low and steady, and before him, at the heart of the dead field, stood the statue.
He looked at it clearly, here, for the first time!
It was colossal. A towering figure of grey-white stone veined through with rivers of black, carved in the shape of a broad-shouldered bearer, its heavy brow jutting over deep-cut eyes that held no pupils, only smooth dark hollows that somehow watched.
Old wounds were chiseled across every surface of it, not decorations but records, gouges and fracture-lines and one long cleaving scar that ran from its shoulder to its hip, each wound edged in black as though the stone had bled ink and the ink had dried!
Its massive hands hung empty at its sides. They were the hands of a thing built to carry, thick-fingered and cracked across every knuckle!
And upon its back!
Upon its back was carved a mountain of...figures! Hundreds of small carved figures clung to the statue’s back and shoulders in a vast stacked heap, bodies upon bodies, some clinging, some slumped, some reaching upward, an entire carried multitude rendered in miniature, fused into the bearer’s frame as though it had walked out of some ancient catastrophe with everyone it could hold and the sculptor had refused to let it put them down!
A bearer. A carrier of masses. A thing that stood, wearing everything it had ever refused to drop!
The statue’s hollow eyes rested on THE Creature’s manifestation, and its cracked mouth held the faint line of its old brutal smile, and it waited!
THE Creature did not make it wait long.
"You will listen to me." THE Creature said.
His obsidian and white-gold flames rose!
"You and I are separate. I do not deny that. But the power is not. The power...is mine."
BOOM!
The white ground trembled beneath the declaration, and THE Creature advanced a step, and a unique immensity of...Existence itself flickered around his manifestation even here!
Existence itself!
"You are stone and memory. When you took your ten Nanoseconds, you did not bring power WITH you..."
His voice dropped.
"You picked up my power. You drew a bow with MY arm. You spent MY reserves, and I am the one standing tired and heavy in a burning sky paying the cost of the draw while you went silent! That is not the mark of a vessel borrowing from something grander. That is the mark of an instrument that knows the way better than the hand that holds it. You have technique. You have memory and knowledge and ten thousand dead reasons. But technique without an arm is a carving on a dead field."
WAA!
He raised one hand and pointed at the colossal bearer.
"I am not a vessel of your power. You are a vessel of mine! Food does not command the mouth as you...are food. I am Existence, as you... are only a part of Existence. And if you do things that do not make sense, if you spend my power on grievances you will not name, if you go quiet when I ask you why... I can easily cast you out"
Oh!
The declaration crashed across the ancient battlefield, and the black rivers in the white ground seemed to run faster for a moment, and the hundreds of carved figures on the statue’s back seemed, for a single breath, to press themselves lower!
The statue looked at him silently.
Its hollow eyes did not blink, because they could not, and its cracked smile did not move, and the silence stretched long across the field of the preserved dead.
And then the statue spoke.
It did not defend itself! It did not explain the bow, or the gazes, or the silence! It asked a question instead.
"Can you affirm," the statue said, "that you will smite down those deemed by existence in the future, regardless of their standing? Whether they be an ant... or an Immense One?"
HUUM!
The question rolled out across the corpse-field.
The black rivers hummed! The white porcelain expanse vibrated beneath a hundred thousand preserved bodies, as though the entire battlefield were leaning in to hear the answer, as though this exact question had been asked on this exact field before, and the corpses were the record of how someone else had answered it.
THE Creature stood among the dead.
"No."
BOOM!
"I will not affirm that. I do not swing on another’s deeming. Not yours. Not even Existence’s. When existence deems a thing, I will LOOK at it. I will look with my own eyes, and weigh it with my own bearing, and judge it for myself. If existence deems them and I deem them, they will fall, whether they are an ant or an Immense One or something neither of us has a name for yet. And if existence deems them and I do not..."
His flames roared upward, obsidian and white-gold, and for a moment the mental manifestation burned bright enough to cast the statue’s shadow long across the field of the dead!
"...then existence can stand in line behind everything else that has tried to move me, and it can learn what all of them learned. I was not made to be pointed. I was made to STAND. A Great Ruler...does not lend out his judgment."
...!
Silence, one more time!
The statue’s hollow eyes stared down at the burning figure standing defiant in the middle of its ancient dead.
And then the cracked line of its mouth moved!
The brutal smile returned, and it was wider than THE Creature had ever seen it, wide enough that fine fractures spread through the stone of its cheeks.
"Okay." the statue said.
It raised one colossal cracked hand and gestured, slowly, across the endless preserved battlefield, at the hundred thousand corpses lying in white and black!
"Every one of them affirmed."
...!
"You are Existence, and I am merely part of Existence," the statue said, lowering its hand, "Your Dimensionality will rise enough soon for you to generate what you need to grasp different parts of existence. Until then, I will..ask for permission next time."
...!
The statue...actually seemed subservient at this time.
The statue stated such words as THE Creature looked at it coldly...and disappeared.
---
THE Creature opened his eyes.
The burning sky of THE Vhelgaros hung above him, healing along its torn seams, and below him a Dimension of Primevals and Descendants still knelt upon the black plain, hundreds of horned and ancient heads bowed toward their new King, waiting for his first command.
He looked past them all.
At the far edge of the Cabin, beyond the crystallized borders where the crossing-dark streaked past, a grand doorway stood in the distance, massive and sealed and humming, the threshold that led forward along the Train, toward the next Cabin, and the next, and the next, toward whatever waited at the head of a chained procession of Dimensions rushing through the dark!
THE Creature’s white-gold flames erupted to their full height, and his voice boomed out across the entirety of his first Dimension.
"Existence is vast and full of terrors. Let us go...so that I can spread my terrors."
HUUM!
He gave the command, and thousands began to move!
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