Whether they were as simple as this butterfly or as grand as a Fold Dweller or a Living Existence or an Early Creature.
At such a thought, Noah smiled.
In the next mont, his body vibrated with authority. His form began to change, to shimr, to dissolve and reform.
And gradually, he transford into the sa shape as the blue, snowy butterfly.
RUIN/EDEN blinked, her holographic form flickering for a fraction of a second. She looked at her Master, at the perfect, crystalline replica of the Azure Frostwing he had beco, and she smiled.
A genuine, almost fond, expression. She then turned back to the complex, swirling data streams of her work.
Noah, in his new, delicate form, flew towards the other butterfly. He landed on the sa glacial flower and began to do as it did, to drink the essence of the cold, to experience the world not as a Tyrant, not as The Early Creature, Osmont, but as a simple, beautiful, and utterly focused creature of the frost.
The original butterfly turned its vibrant, multifaceted eyes towards him, and in its gaze, there was a profound, almost comical, sense of bewildernt.
A look that clearly said… Bro, you are a being of Quadrillions of power. Why the hell are you playing around over here right now?
…!
Off to the side, Ozymandias breathed in the snowy environnt, devouring everything that ca near him.
This part of him took a single step and disappeared, off to further experience…The Way of Hunger.
But in such a manner, Noah began.
He had transford into another creature for the purpose of understanding and living their Way of Existence.
It may be called imitation, as he didn't completely and truly beco a butterfly, but it was a start.
This was how he was spending his ti in the Earliest Folds, a mont of profound and utter peace for him.
How exactly were other people faring as the hours passed?
—
An unknown number of hours later.
Aethelgard.
In the aftermath, there was a profound, terrible silence!
The war for Aethelgard had ended with the quiet, dignified retreat of a force that had tested the walls of a fortress and found them…glorious!
The tens of thousands of Justiciars, their pristine white armor now scarred and broken, had withdrawn, their disciplined silent departure a stark, chilling contrast to the chaotic and vibrant life of the First Folds.
They left behind a scene of breathtaking, terrible carnage.
The Rampart of Aethelgard, once a seamless, golden bastion of impossible beauty, was now a fractured, broken thing in one section!
A massive section of the wall had been torn asunder, a gaping, league-wide wound in the city's defenses.
It was here that the fiercest fighting had taken place, a focal point where the full, overwhelming might of the Justiciar legion had been brought to bear.
And it was here, floating silently before the broken walls, that a new figure had appeared.
He was a king cast in the mold of countless grand Early Creatures!
Gilgash, The First Leader!
His form was a perfect, terrible masterpiece of primordial wonder, his golden hair a cascade of starlight, his eyes the color of a dying sun.
He wore a simple, elegant white chiton, yet his very presence was a crown, a declaration of absolute, unyielding dominion!
He gazed out at the battlefield, at the scattered, broken bodies of his own people and his enemies, and his expression was a mask of cold, unreadable contemplation.
The brilliant, verdant earth of the First Folds in the region next to the Rampart was now a graveyard.
The corpses of Early Creatures, their once-glorious forms now shattered and broken, lay scattered amidst the twisted, tallic husks of the Justiciars.
Fold Dwellers and Living Existences who had been caught in the crossfire were strewn across the landscape like fallen leaves, their small, insignificant endings a footnote in a war of titans.
Forgemaster Vulcan stood amidst the devastation, his massive, bronze form a silent monunt to the battle that had just been waged.
His starlit eyes, which had witnessed the birth of Folds, now held a deep, ancient weariness.
He looked around, his gaze sweeping over the carnage, and then his expression hardened. He turned to a nearby Juvenile Early Creature, a being of a few hundred Quadrillion whose face was a mask of exhausted relief.
"Where is the Elderborn, Osmont?" Vulcan rumbled, his voice the sound of a mountain demanding an answer.
The Juvenile Early Creature blinked, a flicker of confusion in his eyes. He scratched the back of his head, a gesture of profound, almost comical, uncertainty.
"He… I seem to have forgotten about him amidst the war," he stamred.
Vulcan's eyes blazed with a sudden, terrible fury.
The fuck did he an he forgot?!
The air around him crackled, the very ground trembling under the weight of his rage.
"You better hope he isn't one of the casualties down below," he roared, his voice a thunderclap that shook the very foundations of the broken wall nearby.
"Go! Look through every single one of them!"
He looked out at the lines of corpses ahead.
Oh!
This was war!
A grand, terrible, and ultimately, very ssy affair. It is not the clean, elegant chess match that strategists imagine, but a chaotic, bloody brawl where the best-laid plans are often the first casualty. The aftermath is a landscape of broken things… broken bodies, broken walls, broken certainties.
But in that brokenness, in the quiet, somber aftermath, a new kind of clarity can be found.
For it is only when the noise of battle has faded, when the dust has settled, that one can truly see the cost of victory, the price of survival.
It is in the silence of the graveyard that the true, terrible lessons of war are learned. And it is a lesson that is written not in ink, but in blood.
—
In a place that was not a place, in a workshop where ideas were not just thought, but forged from the very fabric of conceptual reality, THE Living Concept stood in quiet contemplation!
Before it, on screens of pure, informational light, the recent, cataclysmic battle for Aethelgard played out on a silent, analytical loop.
It watched the glorious, terrible dance of Principles, the brutal efficiency of the Justiciars, the chaotic, beautiful storm of the Astral Arcana, Haki, and Glyphs thst flashed incessantly.
It was in this state of profound, logical imrsion that a new presence made itself known.
A wave of contemplative lancholy, tinged with a flicker of sothing almost like amusent, washed over the space.
THE Living Emotive had arrived.
Halfway through the battle, it had gone above Aethelgard itself to observe!
"Well," its voice was a lody of a thousand different, subtle feelings all singing in perfect, terrible harmony, "that was quite the show, wasn't it? A beautiful, tragic, and ultimately, very ssy, display of all the new toys our little existences have been playing with."
…!
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