Existence breathes, and epochs pass, leaving Civilizations that beco monunts, then crumble to mory, and are long forgotten when that breath cos again. In all these epochs, Infinity reigns supre.
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Rarely does one have a good reason to kill.
The ordinary killings across existence are committed for reasons that dissolve under examination, petty reasons, inherited reasons, the reasons of beings who were angry that morning or who had been angry across their entire lives without ever locating the original source.
Most who kill cannot defend what they have done once the killing is finished. They invent explanations after the fact. They construct narratives that their listeners are expected to accept without too much scrutiny, and the listeners accept because examining the explanation would require examining the whole bloody arrangent of existence that produced it, and nobody wants to do that work.
But the ones who kill brutally. The ones who take their ti. The ones who lay the corpses down in rows and make sure the rows can be counted by anyone watching from above.
Those ones always have a good reason to kill.
The reasons are old in those cases. The reasons have been carried across eons, braided into the weavings of a being’s existence so tightly that the being and the reason can no longer be separated. The reasons have been denied across generations. The reasons have waited. And when the mont finally arrives for the reasons to be expressed, the expression is never sloppy. Brutality is a form of precision when the brutality has been earned.
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At the base of THE Gilded White Mountain, THE Creature was wreathed in multicolored golden flas tinged with a bloody light.
He stood on a stretch of pale stone that had been clean an hour ago. The stone was no longer clean. Corpses of dozens of Primordial Architects lay arranged across its surface in neat parallel rows, each body set down with a craftsman’s care, each drained and dull Proterozoic Bone and Organ already extracted and placed in its own discrete pile beside the body it had co from.
Ribcages open to the air. Skulls split cleanly along their structural seams. Spinal columns laid out full-length, the vertebrae separated and sorted by their individual tiers of cultivation. The work had the quiet thoroughness of a butcher who had been practicing for a very long ti and who took a certain pride in how the cuts ca out.
The multicolored golden flas across his body flickered as he worked on the last corpse in the row. The flas held too many colors for any mortal perception to fully resolve, and the bloody undertone moved beneath them like a second layer of fire that belonged to an older and sadder fire than the one on the surface.
Behind him, Anaximander floated with a complex expression on his face.
He alone had been allowed to co to witness this.
The mountain rose above them both.
THE Gilded White Mountain was one of the grander landmarks of THE Wyld.
Its slopes ran pale as old ivory, veined with gold in patterns that suggested deliberate placent rather than natural mineralization. Structures climbed its flanks in tiered arrangents, each level holding temples carved from white stone and capped with golden roofs.
The temples were beautiful. Columns stood tall enough to require craning of the neck to take in at all. Arches curved in ways that should not have supported themselves and did anyway because of the authority woven through their stones. Friezes along the upper registers depicted scenes of Gilded Ones receiving reverence from kneeling Primordial Architects. The friezes had been carved with loving attention.
The mountain held dozens of Primordial Architects across its tiers.
So belonged to the designated eighty-one for the Civilizational Holy War. Others were hangers-on, lieutenants, mbers of the rival clique that had consolidated here as an alternative to THE Deliverance’s faction. They stood along the balconies of the temples now, their faces showing anger and incredulity as they watched the base of their mountain fill up with corpses.
None of them had descended yet.
THE Creature finished with the last body.
He stepped back and he surveyed his rows. And then he turned his face upward, and the multicolored golden flas across him flickered with a silent rage that was older than the mountain itself.
His voice rolled across the slopes.
"Not all life is equal."
The sound carried without effort. Simply a voice pitched to reach the upper balconies of the highest temple with the sa clarity it reached the stones at his feet.
"I will concede that plainly. None of us are born into equal positions. So are born with more power. So with less. So with engineering that grants advantages others will never touch. So with circumstances that collapse their potential before they have a chance to cultivate it. Existence is not fair, and the unfairness is not an error to be corrected. It is a structural feature of how things ca to be arranged."
He took a slow step forward among his rows of corpses.
"But inequality at birth is not the sa as supremacy in kind."
"No single life is so suprely above another life that the greater life may command the lesser without question. THE Gilded Ones are not so suprely above the rest of us that everything they say should be followed as if it were an undeniable command. They were not placed at the top of existence by any authority higher than themselves. They positioned themselves there, across THE First Cause, by making sure the configurations favored them when the configurations were still being written. That is not holiness. That is engineering. And engineering can be undone."
His flas flickered brighter.
"THE Gilded Ones eat. THE Gilded Ones fuck. THE Gilded Ones are born and THE Gilded Ones die, eventually, when a sufficient counterweight is brought to bear against their cultivation. They sleep. They have bad days and petty grievances and insecurities that they nurse in private. They are not so different from the rest of us once the gold paint is scraped off."
He gestured upward toward the temples.
"Why should they be idolized? Why should you bend your heads when their ssengers pass? Why accept the engineering they write into your foundations that alters your very mind to be subservient to them, so deeply that when you kneel you believe the kneeling is your own choice? Why turn on your own people to serve theirs? Why betray the kin you grew up alongside, who suffered in the sa realms you suffered in, who bled in the sa battles you bled in, so that you might receive a thin sliver of favor from a False Golden Idol who will not rember your na a year after you have given everything for him?"
His flas flickered with a deeper red now.
"Why... did you share anything about her?"
...!
His voice cracked slightly on the last question, and the crack was the only sign of the grief that lived beneath everything he had just said.
He composed himself within a heartbeat.
"Philemon Aristos."
The na rang out across the mountain with the specificity of a bell struck against a wall.
"Philemon Aristos, I know you are on this mountain. I know you have been on this mountain for a long ti, hiding behind other Primordial Architects. I know what you did, eons ago, when a Gilded One nad THE False Golden Idol passed through your territory asking questions. I know what you told him. I know the words you spoke and the directions you pointed and the small betrayal you offered so that you might receive a favor in return that never properly arrived. You sold a location. You sold a na."
The flas around him burned in their silent rage.
"I...have co to collect."
His voice steadied into sothing that was nearly calm.
"I can do this the easy way. You co down the mountain yourself. You stand before . I split you open the way I have split these others open, and your corpse joins the rows at my feet, and the rest of your little clique on this mountain gets to continue their existences without further interruption. A clean transaction. A closed ledger. The rest of them walk away."
He gestured at the corpses around him.
"Or all of them can join you. Every Primordial Architect who has been enjoying your company on this mountain can beco like the ones down here. I have the ti. I have the patience. I have, as you can see, the working thod. I would prefer to keep this focused on you alone, because my quarrel is with you, but I do not require that preference to be honored. The mountain will be leveled either way by the ti I leave. The only question is how many of its occupants get to see the morning."
His eyes lifted to the highest temple.
"What will it be?"
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