She chuckled into her sleeve, and swept her finger across the broader host.
"As for the rest of the colony, followers too, but of a gentler sort. Followers of their own paths of advancement. The antlered one, the three-faced one, the stone hound at the rear, each of them walked their own long road to Trueness, and each of them is here because a keeper called and the rewards seemed worth the errand. Look at how loosely they fly. Boredom, in a war-column! Every one of them is idly wondering why so many were sent for so small a task, and every one of them expects to be home before their perch cools. That is the fort of a herd that has never once been thinned. I’ve seen that fort many times, in many magnificent gatherings." She sipped her tea. "I rarely saw it twice in the same gathering."
Then she paused, and her voice turned musing, the idle wondering of a very old watcher turning a specimen over in her mind.
"Though it does make one think, watching the Serpent groom himself against her shadow. These creatures call themselves True. Their whole existence rests on a seamless claim of I am. But if an animal fully and pletely follows another, choosing nothing, steering nothing, simply attaching itself to whichever wake is strongest...is it truly true? Can a claim of I am survive a lifetime of I follow? Hm..." She smiled into her cup.
"Nature loves a paradox. She hides them in the strangest burrows."
Then her voice dropped, hushing into genuine reverence, and she turned her finger downward, to the thing beneath them all.
"And there. Quietly now."
The Steed of Oblivion moved through the dark like a wound of Existence.
It was colossal beyond even this host bined, a mountainous quadruped whose hide had gone the gray of forgotten things, whose failing First Cause flickered through its frame in guttering terminal weavings like a city being unlit district by district, and around it for vast miles, existence simply dimmed.
Ambient essense thinned. The storm quieted! Even the cursed rain seemed reluctant to land upon it, and it walked with its great head hung low, chained at the throat, radiating an ambient field of dimensional suppression that made even the Cenozoic beings above it keep their distance!
"A burden-bearer of the first broods," the old woman breathed. "Bred as a unique type of living Observable Existence when this Dimension was young and its makers still walked it. Look at what’s left of the poor thing. That guttering in its weavings is a First Cause ages deep into its dying. And that awful dimming around it, that used to be the very gift that carried riders between Dimensions, curdled now into a walking suppression that chokes every dimensional law that es near. The keepers, those vile progeny thst are cursed, use them as weapons these days. Imagine finding one of the rarest songbirds in existence and deciding its best use is as a club." She sighed, long and old.
"It is in constant pain. Every step. And it has been walking a very, very long time. What a painful existence. Almost makes one want to make a move and put such a thing out of its misery. Would that not ve simpler? Easier? But alas...I am only here at the behest of s friend and will not be involved on any other matters."
She refreshed her tea, unhurried, as the war-host crawled on below.
"But...let’s take stock, shall we? A predator, unwrapped after ages in the drawer. A follower serpent hiding in her shadow, hoping her path will carry him somewhere. Twenty fortable creatures on their own roads, too mighty to look behind themselves. And a dying burden-bearer dragged along as a siege engine, which The Jarls only ever unchain for prey they genuinely fear losing. Fear. A dying titan has been frightened into spending every treasure he owns at once, and not one of the treasures has thought to ask why...why exactly is such a sordid group of animals moving, and to where?"
She was asking herself of their purpose!
And... that was when she sensed it!
BOOM!
Countless gigaparsecs away, blinding white-gold light erupted across the deep dark!
The old woman’s cup paused halfway to her lips! Her ancient eyes, eyes that had watched eras the way others watched seasons, widened by a full measure as the distant radiance pulsed across the Dimension, and the flavor of it reached her with unmistakable clarity. Pristine. Magisterial. Apex!
Weavings of a Primeval One!
"...Oh?" she said.
But there shouldn’t be any of her kind in the immediate surroundings?
The old woman sipped her tea slowly, and looked back down at the procession, at the cold predator in red and the fawning Serpent and the twenty fortable mighty.
They were all heading towards that same direction as after seeing that light, they became even faster!
"Well now. It seems somwthing interesting is at play..." She set down her cup and rose, white robes settling around her small frame as her golden cloud began to drift downward. "I assumed this was a colony marching on prey. Easy pickings for a dying keeper’s larder. But that light out there...say differently."
Her cloud descended through the storm, closer and closer to the marching party, and her old eyes gleamed.
"So the question flips over. Is this herd closing on a meal, or are those ahead the predators instead?"
A small, ancient smile folded through her wrinkles as she loved to observe nature and how it unfolded.
With that, the old woman floated her golden cloud extremely close to the party of True Lifeforms, settling in barely above Ormarr’s own coils, near enough to see the crimson eyes of the predator in red staring dead ahead, near enough to catch the idle words of the fortable mighty, near enough to hear the Steed’s labored breathing, her tea set clinking gently as she poured herself a fresh cup in the middle of their formation!
And not a single one of them, not the blade, not the Serpent, not twenty True Lifeforms, not even the dying Steed of Those Who Remain...
Could see or sense her at all!
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