Chapter 5535: Trials! II

He floated across boundless darkness for an indeterminate amount of time.

Time did not press its claims out here, and THE Creature did not press his! He drifted through the frothing black with his body folded in upon itself, knees drawn up, obsidian flames banked low around his body, curled the way a thing is curled when it is newly born, and in a manner of speaking...he was.

For around his folded form, roiling waves of a deep Ananke Intent burned!

The digestion had finished somewhere in the drifting dark. Two Gilded True Lifeforms had rendered down to their last weavings within his depths, and their essense had carried him across the threshold he had approached for so long, and the second order of Intent now turned around him in slow tidal revolutions, inevitability wearing obsidian, and beneath it, his weight felt even more immense. As if everything he had ever carried had settled at last.

He did not open his eyes for any of it.

He only opened his eyes, and unfurled, when he felt himself slipping across the folds of a Dimension.

The dark parted. Membrane-weavings slid across his flames like curtains of another existence’s law, and as he passed through them, the statue spoke.

Its voice came calm this time. Not the booming verdict of the trial’s declaration, but something quieter and older.

"You stand within THE Ghor-Vazhal." The ancient voice moved through him without hurry. "Its masters call it the Fields. Everything else that has ever learned its name calls it the Cultivation Farms."

"..."

"Here, Source True Lifeforms practice an external art of existence. You bear your adversity. They have decided bearing is inefficient." The calm of the voice made the words worse.

"They cultivate Gu Lifeforms, bred hungers, refined across generations, and they strengthen these Gu through the sacrifice of cognizant lifeforms. Trillions of them. Across countless worlds and realms and domains of this Dimension, lifeforms moving through existence carrying their own adversity are plucked from their lives, refined for flavor, sacrifised, and eaten, and the Gu digest what those lives carried, and the masters harvest the Gu, and progress arrives for them rapidly, externally, at no cost their own existence ever feels."

The membrane-folds thinned ahead. Light the color of old blood bled through.

"Trillions of lives are wiped out daily. It has been so for ages. Boundless suffering stretches across worlds and domains that appear in no records except as acreage." A pause, and the calm voice set down its last stone. "Here, many True Lifeforms who have significantly harmed Existence can be found. That is why the first trial begins in this place. Begin whenever you wish."

...!

And rage coursed through THE Creature.

It ROSE, the way floodwater rises, patient and total, filling every channel of a newly-Ananke existence from the floor upward!

Existence is the carrying! It is the back that bends and does not break! And here was an entire Dimension built by beings who had heard that same truth somewhere in their long climbing, and had answered it with a ledger and a farm! Beings who did not carry. Beings who billed to to others!

Who had turned the bearing of trillions into feed, and called the weaving an art!

The folds opened, and he slipped fully in, and saw where he had appeared.

The skies were painted red.

Butcher red! A vast crimson firmament stretched from horizon to horizon, stained by ages of what rose into it, and below, across a scorched land that had been walked flat by chained feet...rose the pyramids.

They climbed in their dozens toward the red sky, colossal stepped mountains of black stone, each tier worn smooth and dark with use, and at the very top of every one of them, roiling, sat the Gu Lifeforms! Grotesque bred hungers the size of hills, no two alike, one a mass of mouths arranged in a wheel, one a bloated segmented thing whose shell wept, one a beautiful shimmering moth whose wings were made entirely of grasping hands, each of them squatting upon its pyramid’s peak like an idol of appetite!

And up the steps of every pyramid, in procession...climbed the chained.

Millions of them! Humanoid lifeforms and beasts both, shackled throat to throat in lines that stretched back across the scorched land beyond sight, dragged upward tier by tier by weavings that gave them no floor to fall to and no strength to resist, and at the top of each climbing line, at each peak, the processions ended in the mouths of the Gu! Steadily. Rhythmically! An intake as constant and unremarkable, to this place, as breathing, the carrying of trillions rendered down into feed while the red sky drank the noise!

And at a central point among the pyramids, upon a floating terrace of veined gold...multiple Source True Lifeforms were gathered together, laughing, and talking.

Lounging! Robed existences of the threshold, dense and patient and ancient, sharing refreshment above the machinery of their art, one of them gesturing lazily toward a distant pyramid as if comparing yields, another laughing at the remark, the sound of it drifting bright and easy across a landscape eating millions!

THE Creature looked at this scene.

He looked at the wheel of mouths taking its procession. He looked at the chains, and the climbing lines without end, and the laughter on the golden terrace, and somewhere behind his ribs, a statue’s ancient eyes burned, and the floodwater reached the top of him!

And THE Creature roared out with maddened grandeur!

OOOOH!

The sound tore across this tiny region of THE Ghor-Vazhal like the birth-cry of a verdict, Ananke Intent detonating off his frame in obsidian tides, and every chained head across a million tiers turned, and every Gu’s appetite stuttered, and upon the golden terrace, the laughter died mid-note as ancient heads snapped upward toward a fold in their sky that had opinions!

And THE Creature raised his fists, and SMASHED them down toward the gathered True Lifeforms!

And the skies answered!

The red firmament itself convulsed as, across the whole visible heaven, the stained clouds and the bloodlight and the upper airs gathered and folded, forming into colossal illusory fists, ten of them, a hundred, the sky becoming knuckles from horizon to horizon, and they came down with his own fists, all of them, together, as if existence itself was attacking!

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