Chapter 5210: Bellum III
Chapter 5210: Bellum III
In the inner reaches of THE Sanctum Velanthra, past the outer ring of Dreamstones and beyond the pale rose-gold pathways that the attendants used for their daily maintenance rounds, there was a floating landmass that most visitors to the Sanctum never reached because most visitors to the Sanctum did not stay long enough to discover it existed.
The landmass floated at a height that placed it above the primary Dreamstone arrangement and below the ancient dark sky of the Sanctum’s interior, suspended in the specific manner of something that had always been there rather than something that had been placed. Its surface shone with the blended warmth of gold and crimson, the colors not painted onto it but emanating from within it the way the Dreamstones emanated their Prime Cause energies. At its center stood a tree of multicolored composition, its trunk a deep bronze and its branches carrying leaves that shifted through the full range of Cause colorations depending on the angle from which one observed them, the composite of several Causes having taken root in the same soil and found, across the eons, a way to coexist.
Beside the tree, a lake of extraordinary clarity held its water without a single ripple disturbing the surface, the bottom of it visible in complete detail despite a depth that suggested the lake had no intention of being as shallow as it appeared.
Near the lake sat an old man.
He could not truly be considered an old man by the standards of most beings who would assess him, because his foundations carried the specific density of something that had been refining itself for longer than most calibration frameworks were designed to measure.
But he had the quality of age nonetheless. His hair was white and long, pulled loosely back. His robes were plain in the way that things worn by beings who had long since stopped needing to communicate their standing through fabric tended to be plain.
He was known as Old Man Zeke. The Golden Bastion.
His power sat at THE Silurian Paleozoic Scale, the second tier of THE Third Scale of Existence, which placed him above every Prima Serva in the Sanctum and above every ordinary Ordovician Gilded One who had ever come to touch the Dreamstones with the carefully managed hopes of their own cultivation aspirations.
He oversaw the operations of the entire Sanctum not through administrative authority but through the simple fact that nothing occurred within its borders that he did not perceive and nothing occurred that he could not address if the addressing became necessary.
He had been watching the foreign Luxuria enter.
He had watched the brute-force application of an extraordinarily potent Luxuria Ego wash past his guardians with the casual efficiency of a being for whom the Sanctum’s entry conditions were not obstacles requiring solution but textures in the ambient environment to be navigated around.
He had noted the absence of authorization. He had noted the absence of the proper designation standing. He had noted all of these things and had continued watching, because in his experience, beings who could brute-force entry into THE Sanctum Velanthra were beings worth watching rather than beings worth stopping.
Curiosity was the correct response to capability.
When the foreign Luxuria had moved directly to THE Bellum Dreamstone without pausing at the others, Old Man Zeke had found this interesting. Visitors almost never went to THE Bellum Dreamstone first. THE Desidero and THE Cognitio received the majority of first contacts, their truths more immediately legible to beings whose cultivations had been structured around wanting or knowing. THE Bellum Dreamstone attracted primarily the Ira who had earned authorized access.
Then the foreign Luxuria had placed his palm against the stone.
And then THE Bellum Dreamstone had lit up.
Old Man Zeke had straightened slightly in his position by the lake.
In all his years of standing guard over this Sanctum, across the full span of the eons during which he had watched Gilded Ones of varying designations and varying capabilities approach the stones with varying degrees of prepared comprehension, he had never seen a Dreamstone respond this way. The stone did not respond to contact.
It delivered. It gave. It was the receiver rather than the broadcaster in the arrangement, opening its contents to the being touching it rather than projecting those contents outward.
What was being produced right now was utterly ridiculous.
The stone was screaming.
Not literally, but in the specific existential sense of a Cause that had found an existence it recognized as so thoroughly aligned with its foundational truth that the recognition had to be expressed outwardly rather than contained within the ordinary quiet of the contact relationship.
The Bellum Dreamstone had found something in this foreign Luxuria that it had not found in any prior visitor, and it was broadcasting that finding with the enthusiasm of a mechanism finally deployed in the precise application it had been built for.
Old Man Zeke rose slowly from his position by the lake.
Then.
CRACK!
The sky above THE Bellum Dreamstone fractured open with the specific quality of something that had been waiting to open and had finally received the appropriate signal. Rivers of golden Observable Force and obsidian Unobservable Force began to circle the region, the two substrates braiding through each other in the slow deliberate patterns of a declaration being composed rather than an attack being launched!
The booming declaration that followed did not originate from any being present in the Sanctum. It came from the arrangement itself, from the substrate of Vakochev’s Scales registering an event that met its threshold for inscription.
|An Accomplishment worthy of accolades and being carved on Vakochev’s Scales of Existence has bloomed. A Lifeform on the lower rungs of the Scales has attained perfect resonance with a Prime Cause of an Observable Existence, allowing their name and record to be carved onto the Scales.|
...!
Old Man Zeke’s eyes brightened.
The lower rungs.
He turned this over in the specific manner of a being who had learned to take unusual information seriously rather than dismissing it against prior expectations. On the lower rungs of THE Third Scale meant Ordovician Paleozoic at best, which was the entry tier of THE Third Scale, the tier at which Gilded Ones were considered newly arrived rather than established. Most Gilded Ones attempted Prime Cause integration at the Silurian tier, when their Civilizational foundations had developed sufficient depth to sustain the attempt without fracturing. Some exceptional Ordovicians attempted it. Very few succeeded.
But the declaration had said lower rungs!
On the lower rungs of THE Third Scale of Existence.
Old Man Zeke looked down from the floating landmass toward the Dreamstone arrangement below.
He could sense the Luxuria Gilded Ones beginning to gather at the Sanctum’s borders from the broader domain.
The brief pause stretched for several seconds.
Then.
|The Record has been made. With the least possible progression in Vakochev’s Scales, THE Osmontian gazed upon THE Bellum Cause and instantly grasped its weavings fully, integrating them into his existence.|
BOOM!
Old Man Zeke’s eyes shone brilliantly.
"THE Osmontian."
He said the name the way one might say the name of a country one had not known existed until the moment it appeared on a map, the specific tone of a being updating his model of the current arrangement with new information that changed several adjacent assumptions simultaneously.
He looked down.
On the hand of THE Osmontian, below the Dreamstone that was still blazing its crimson pillar into the Sanctum’s ancient sky, crimson rings had begun to form. One after another, settling into orbit around the wrist and forearm of the foreign Luxuria who had brute-forced his way past the guardians and walked directly to the most overlooked of the three active stones and placed his palm against it as though he already knew what he was going to find there.
The rings carried the visual signature of THE Bellum Cause manifesting in physical expression, but they carried it alongside something else, something compressed inside each ring with a density that THE Bellum Cause alone did not account for.
Something that Old Man Zeke’s Silurian Paleozoic perception could register the outline of without being able to fully classify.
He descended from the floating landmass slowly, moving toward the Dreamstone arrangement with the unhurried deliberateness of a being who had a question and had decided the most efficient path to its answer was a direct one.
He wanted to see what THE Osmontian looked like when he opened his eyes!