On a mountain peak that carved jagged lines into the sky of the Artificial Primordial, Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns stood looking down at seven dead First Scales.
They had co at him together thirty minutes ago, on the assumption that many First Scales made a reasonable wall against one Second. They had been wrong.
He was frowning.
His gold-fla eyes were not on the bodies. His frown was directed at the middle distance, because a voice had begun speaking into his ear.
Which was interesting, because no voice at all was supposed to be able to speak into any ear inside this Domain.
"The Vilicus of the Stunted Observable Existence has killed a Second Scale entity," the voice said, small and calm. "Pantaleon.No remains. He may be more powerful than we anticipated...govern yourself accordingly."
The voice went quiet.
Khaemwaset stood very still as his gold-fla eyes cooled into sothing significantly less warm than the small private amusent he had worn since the bridge!
A Rhyacian. Assimilated whole!
Khaemwaset’s amplified Pride did a small cold readjustnt, the way an insulted Pride did when insult tilted from irritant toward strategic concern.
He thought about the scope of what he had been given.
He was a Minor Vilicus, a representative of the Collective to factional matters too marginal for a Major Vilicus. The stunted.
If he delivered an exchange to the satisfaction of the Great One who had authorized it, the reward was no secret. His Ego would be personally engineered by that Great One.
And the Great One in his case was Mansa Zulu!
A Great Gilded. One of the Unobservable-born. To have one’s Ego modified by Mansa Zulu’s own hand was the kind of thing beings composed poetry about.
The directions he had been given had been loose on purpose.
See what arises from the exchange. If the other side is too weak, I will not intervene. This is only an experint.
That ant Khaemwaset could act freely.
If Adrastia perished inside the Gas, the exchange would effectively end. The Stunted Observable would be revealed as too weak to host a proper relationship, and Mansa Zulu would shelf the experint as a curiosity. The stunted thing could be utilized however the Great One saw fit after that.
After Adrastia, the fiery woman with the green hair would not survive long. The Singular Cognizance beside her was trickier, but there were specialists for that, and specialists were cheap when one had the favor of a Great Gilded One to offer in paynt.
A clean shape. He liked clean shapes!
The only complication was that he had just been told Adrastia was more powerful than anticipated.
So precautions. There was no harm in precautions, and considerable potential harm in not.
His hand fell from his ear as he considered which Second Scale participants he could turn inside the Ga. Ninety-nine remained. Of those, he could identify a few, and of those, pick out perhaps twelve he could share a temporary purpose with.
Twelve was more than enough.
Cooperation was not against the rules of the Last Stand. The Ga imposed equality of status, not isolation. Loose confederacies had ford and broken in Last Stands since before the Silver Philotimo was called the Silver Philotimo.
He could easily arrange a loose confederacy.
He could easily direct it at a single target!
Nothing in existence was set in stone. Khaemwaset understood this better than most, because here he was receiving information in his ear inside a Domain where such information was not supposed to exist. Rules were large gestures. Exceptions were how actual beings lived.
The frown lifted from his face, and sothing far colder settled in its place.
He took a single asured step off the mountain peak and began, unhurriedly, to go find his twelve.
---
A great distance away, inside a region of the Domain that had changed in the last hour from towering epochal forest to sothing colder and stranger, Achilles stood perfectly still.
The region had transford into blazing snow.
The trees still rose in their thousand-mile trunks, but their bark had gone white and pale gold, and the river of Infinity a quarter mile to his left had frozen into a long flat sheet of blue-white glass that humd.
Snow fell.
At his feet lay three First Scales. Or rather, the pale outlines of where three First Scales had recently stood, pressed flat into the snow like impressions in old photographs.
They had co at him together from three angles, coordinated enough that he had afforded each of them a full second of patient attention before whispering the word into his own quiet mind and closing the mont.
Now he stood among the snow-outlines with his eyes closed, letting the Domain press on him, letting his existence process what it had just taken in.
Prompts blood behind his closed eyelids!
|The Miniature Cause ongoing within your existence continues to transform the interior of your foundation.|
|Following the Assimilation of multiple powerful Lifeforms across The Last Stand, compounded upon your active Archean Adaptation, your Inner Dominion is undergoing an unprecedented structural transition.|
|Your Inner Dominion is beginning to produce its own Observable Force.|
...!
Achilles’s closed eyes tightened as the aning of the last prompt arrived and then arrived again!
BOOM!
He felt it!
Inside him, the vast cluster of his Realms, the Realm of Assimilation and the Realm of Chaos and the Realm of Apatheia and the Blind Depths, all of which had been growing, did sothing grand.
They began to produce.
Small droplets of golden river-light blood in the spaces between his territories. Droplets that belonged to no outside source. Droplets that had not been Assimilated from any external being.
Droplets that were being generated, cleanly and quietly, by the interior of his own existence, the way a deep well produced water, the way a living body produced blood!
His Inner Dominion was no longer rely a container for what he had eaten.
It was beginning to beco a source in its own right!
His existence buzzed from the inside out as the droplets thickened and gathered along the edges of his Realms, slow golden beads running together into threads, threads into trickles, trickles into the first faint hints of what might, in ti, beco his own rivers.
His own. Inside him. Originating from him!
His eyes opened, gold-threaded at the edges in a way they had not been a minute before!
Oh!
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