Chapter 5421: Tides of Quintessential Change! IV

Noah’s vision went elsewhere as the glorious Symphony continued!

In the halls of the twenty-seventh Citadel, THE Living Emotive emerged.

She came through the breathing golden corridors wrapped in her Primordial Intent, THE Amaranthine Sovereign, and the Gilded Ones in her path went down. Superbius and Ira, beings of engineered Pride and amplified Wrath at the Fourth Scale and below, dropped to their knees before a Luxuria, their Egos bending under an Intent of Emotion and Ego that pressed on the very architecture of what they felt. Behind her stretched the lines where Luxuria had been transported across THE Braneworld like merchandise, like stock, cargo to be used for the pleasure of higher castes, and she moved along them releasing her own kind and gathering them, her Intent rolling outward and propagating itself, overwriting the engineered Egos of the kneeling Gilded and forcing them to pledge fealty to her master.

She looked at the kneeling ranks and her voice came cold.

"This is only the twenty-seventh," she said. "Twenty-seven Citadels, out of how many. There are so many more to take, so many more lines to walk, so many more of mine still bought and sold in the dark while we stand here being pleased with ourselves." Her Primordial Intent flared. "So no, we don’t rest. Not at twenty-seven. Let’s go. We have an entire Observable Existence to turn over, and I intend to fucking turn over all of it!"

HUUUM!

The symphony continued!

|And I was sold, and I was someone’s thing,

a pretty pain they kept on offering.

I learned my worth was anything I’d seize,

and now I bring the buyers to their knees.|

...!

Noah’s gaze moved elsewhere!

Above a third Citadel, THE Great Usurper floated, and around him hung two hundred Triassic Scale beings, every one of them bound under his control, a ring of Fourth Scale puppets suspended in the gold sky.

His grand voice rolled out across them.

"My attack on the Mesozoic Scale Ealdor here has already begun," he said. "Internally. I am in him now, spreading my Unity through his mind the way I have spread it through everything else. But I will be honest with all of you, because you are about to die for me sadly. A Fifth Scale being is still too strong. Still too hard. My Unity reaches, and his mind does not yield the way lesser minds yield, not yet." The two hundred drifted, bound and waiting.

"So a great many of you are going to die here today. That is simply true. But while I keep working at him from the inside, the rest of you will turn your Intents on him from the outside, all at once, and you will push, and you will ruin his focus, and you will make it impossible for him to hold himself together against me." Something like amusement entered his voice. "Let us see whether Unity can grasp the mind of a Fifth Scale Acedia after all. I have always wanted to find out. Today seems as good a day as any."

WAA!

More drums beat, and the symphony continued!

|It doesn’t change. The hunger doesn’t end.

The era turns. There’s nothing to defend.

And every day they swore would stay the same

is ash now. Say it with me... Let it change!|

His vision moved once more.

Over another Gilded Citadel, already wiped from existence, two figures stood.

Erwin and THE Primordial Paradox hung above the emptied seat, teacher and student, their Quasi-Primordial Intent woven between them into a single working. Boundless weavings of Paradox crackled across the dead Citadel, contradiction made law, the records of the Gilded who had lived here not destroyed so much as rendered impossible, unmade in a way that left no room for them to have ever been. Erwin in his Schrodinger humanoid form said nothing. There was nothing left below them to say anything to. The information of the place had simply ceased, the way they had vowed it would, complete cessation, and they turned together toward the next one.

|I am the change you didn’t think would come.

I am the bill that’s finally come due.

You marbled us like cattle for the sum,

and now the farmer’s hungry. Now it’s you.|

He continued getting information on a variety of things as the next one was...THE Creature.

THE Creature arrived at one of the largest Citadels in all of THE Braneworld.

It was a colossal thing, this place, a Gilded capital sprawling across a region large enough to hold the lesser Citadels whole, its towers built from bone-gold and breathing wall, its heights crowned with the lattices of a dozen ruling Houses, a place that had stood as a monument to the entire engineered order for longer than most beings remembered.

THE Creature floated above it, his titanic figure shrouded in obsidian flame, his Egoic Intent of Existence blaring out across the capital so that reality itself leaned toward him. Calypso appeared behind him an instant later, her massive beast form unfolding into the gold sky.

And an instant after that, the auras of two Mesozoic Scale Ealdor Gilded Ones rose coldly from the capital to meet him.

Two Fifth Scale beings, lifting out of the largest seat in the Observable Existence, their power vast and ancient and certain.

THE Creature regarded them, and his words came grand and cold.

"Existence always has its dues," he said, the obsidian flames roaring. "Everything that takes, owes. Every order built on the grinding of the small owes, whether it has been made to pay or not. This place...has owed for a very long time."

His burning eyes fixed on the two rising Ealdor. "Today, I have come to collect. All of it. With interest."

BOOM!

Ruination’s voice continued to boom out!

|It doesn’t change until you make it change.

You hold the line until you break the line.

So break it. Burn the old and cruel and strange.

The era’s turning. This one’s mine. It’s mine.|

And finally, above another of the largest Citadels in THE Braneworld, a last body of Noah arrived, and beside him came Thalassarch Nereon.

They appeared together in the gold sky, and the contrast of them was a thing the Gilded below would remember in their final moments. Noah in his cerulean, calm and upright, one being among the vast dark. And beside him the leviathan, light years of crowned coral and trench-deep flesh, uncoiling across the heavens with his Olympian Intent of grief pouring off him in suffocating waves, every voice in it still whispering that it was his fault, his fault, his fault, turned now outward at last toward the ones who had driven him to it. Nereon looked down at the capital and roared, and the roar was a tide!

WUU!

Two Mesozoic Scale Ealdor Gilded Ones rose from this Citadel as well, their Pantheons already beginning to form around them, two Fifth Scale beings unfolding their dimensions to meet a grief-mad leviathan and the quiet blue being at his side.

|And every day is not the same.

Not anymore. Not after this.

I made my choice. I chose the name.

And nothing that I burn, I’ll miss.|

Noah listened to the closing of the symphony as it faded through his perception, the heavy beat slowing, and he knew, with the certainty of the being whose Cause underwrote the day, that after today THE Braneworld Observable Existence would never be the same again.

There were many other Observable Existences under the control of the Gilded Ones, scattered across the vastness, more than he could count and more than he could reach for a long while yet.

But THE Braneworld. This one. The one that had birthed him, and Amelia, and THE Creature, and so many of the monsters now tearing it open.

This one, at least, looked like it would change hands today!

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