A threat! It was casual, playful, and absolutely lethal, dropped between them like a coin onto a table!
Noah’s eye squinted.
He did not panic, but he moved carefully now, with the caution of a man who had walked into a room full of monsters and just discovered the one being in it who could point at him. He wove the frequency of his own Provenance together with the Mantle of THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist, threading a narrow private narrative between his existence and hers, a channel only two authors could share, and he spoke into it.
"I am Osmont," he said. "I am curious about you, and your narrative. That is all."
His gaze swept the gallery of gathered gazes, the sea below, the hunters converging. "Though you seem to be in a predicament where even as a manipulator of narratives, you... might just lose."
...!
Calliope’s reply came bright and fast, colored with something like joy!
|Hah! Now that would be something new. Something worth writing.|
Her pen never stopped moving as she answered, even as THE ONE WHO RETURNS reeled from a blow of the infinite sea.
|But if you can hide beneath the gazes of Immense Ones and sit among them wearing a little mask, then tell me, what exactly can I not do? Losing sounds thrilling. I might allow it.|
Then, without a breath between:
|But hey, forget all that. I don’t tend to find many interesting things about existence, but I love when I find some truly odd and interesting things! Like...did you know a pig’s orgasm can last more than thirty minutes? Sometimes more than an hour, even. Isn’t that wild?|
...!
What the fuck?
Noah’s existence buzzed as he ran the words back through his own weavings to make certain he had heard it correclty!
THE Writer of Mythos was surrounded on every side by hunters sent to collapse her existence and tear a Shard out of her corpse, an infinite sea crashing against her stories, four of the mightiest predators in this Train converging on her position, and here she was, cheerfully informing him about the reproductive endurance of pigs!
Noah shook his head slowly and did not answer.
Instead he looked away from her, out across the wound in the side of the Train, because he had never forgotten why his gaze had been pulled into this cursed room in the first place. He had come for a friend. And so, while THE Writer of Mythos clashed with THE Infinity Eater, Noah sent his gaze across the Cluster!
—
Region beyond region of the dead unrolled beneath his eye, until he found the one he sought.
It was a place where the unburied built cities.
They raised them out of what they had left behind, these dead, walls of stacked and silent things, streets that led only to more streets, towers with no one at the windows and no one who would ever come.
Grey light lay over all of it. Nothing here decayed, because decay was a thing for the living, and so the dead cities simply stood, immense and patient and wrong, a civilization holding its breath forever.
And through them marched THE Creature!
His army of Descendants came behind him.
A massive statue was now visible and walked behind its King, faceless and worn, a mountain of carried figures upon its back turning slowly as it moved.
Noah’s gaze found that approaching enemy of THE Creature, and his gaze became cold.
THE ZENITH OF SUBJUGATION!
THE Sealed One, wearing a Vessel, come personally across the Cluster to meet THE Creature, walking through the dead cities with his hands loose at his sides and an expression of mild, patient interest upon his borrowed face. He did not rush!
He did not gather power or raise a weapon or announce himself. He simply walked, unhurried and condescending, a collector who had come to collect, examining the architecture of the dead as he passed as though he might purchase a piece of it on his way to the transaction he actually wanted!
Two prey, carrying two Shards. Two hunts unfolding across two ends of the same Cluster. And the Sealed One, the most terrible of all the hunters, had not gone for the writer who could shield herself with an army of stories.
He had come for THE Creature.
The Sealed One walked closer, and closer, through the streets of the unburied.
And the statue stopped walking.
It halted mid-stride, the mountain on its back going still, and slowly, deliberately, it turned to face the approaching Vessel. For the first time in a long while it did not look toward the far dark or fade back into stone. It stood, and it faced the collector, and something in its worn grey stance became a challenge!
THE Creature’s flat voice rolled out across the dead cities.
"You are my power," he said. "Existence is my power."
The words fell like slabs of iron laid down one atop another!
"Assimilate into existence," THE Creature said, "and let us not play anymore."
...!
The statue answered him without a sound!
It melded. It fused! The worn grey colossus flowed forward into its King and sank into him, stone becoming weight becoming bearing, and THE Creature’s titanic body drank it all down and CHANGED!
His frame took on some of the statue’s qualities, the ancient grey texture running through his obsidian, the mountain of carried figures settling somewhere into the depths of him, and his hand rose and closed, and a terrible bow was grasped in his grip!
HOONG!
Obsidian white flames of Dimensionality erupted around THE Creature, raging up his titanic frame in sheets of white presense, and the dead cities trembled at the heat of them, and Noah looked down upon his friend with a shining gaze, because THE Creature had stopped bearing and had begun to STAND!
And Noah could not be entirely sure, but when he looked at this monstrous lifeform who had his own foundation and legends surrounding him...he felt like he was still hiding a lot more inside of him!
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