Chapter 690: Pride! II |
Achilles’s eyes soured as this fucker was truly a prideful one!
"The Collective has considered the matter. Given the evident... condition... of your Observable, and the clear absence of any existing hospitality of the appropriate scale, it would be unkind to expect you to host us here. We have therefore come as the delegating party, and the exchange between our Existences will begin on our side of the Span, where proper reception can be arranged. You are invited."
"The Primordial Philotimo Collective will welcome you. Consider yourselves honored by the invitation. It is not, I should mention, customary for the Collective to extend itself in this direction. We are making an exception."
Achilles watched that too, because Achilles was watching everything right now! .
It was a den of wolves, robed in gold, perfumed with pride!
But they could not do anything, not through the mark Mansa Zulu had burned into his forehead.
He let his face do nothing and simply spoke.
He did not touch the mark on his forehead, and he did not bow, and he let the words stand on their own feet. Then he looked past Khaemwaset, down the length of the Obsidian Span running back into the dark, into the Unobservable Sea that would unmake any being that stepped a single pace off the sanctioned road, and he tilted his chin just enough to make the next sentence into an instruction rather than a request.
...!
"Do you still feel that darkness you were feeling before?"
"I see endless possibilities," the singularity answered. "But I do not know which one will be which."
Achilles didn’t press.
So he walked, and Rose walked, and THE Watcher drifted.
"You should know," the Minor Vilicus said, "that this visit constitutes an act of considerable grace on our part. I would not want the nuance of that lost on you."
"The Primordial Philotimo Collective does not ordinarily extend itself to Observables of your... station. We are here because we have been instructed to be here. The words came down from THE Gilded Ones themselves, and when the Gilded speak, those of us fortunate enough to listen do not quibble about the addressee."
Something in the Span’s gold veining pulsed as he said the name, deferential, as if the bridge itself wanted to be on record as respectful.
"A cautionary one. A study in how existence may go wrong when left unattended for too long. A small, stunted thing, allowed to develop in isolation, left to produce whatever it could manage on its own. And the result, well." His hand lifted, gestured vaguely behind him without looking. "You’ve seen the result. You live in it."
"We have been asked to show you the alternative," Khaemwaset said. "To demonstrate, through the simple courtesy of letting you observe us, what existence looks like when it is permitted to grow properly. The Silver Philotimo is a prime example, and I say that without vanity. Within our Observable there are countless Civilizations at the First Scale, so many that cataloguing them has become its own discipline and its own subfield. Those who have climbed to the Second Scale are not rare among us. They are abundant."
...!
He listened calmly as Khaemwaset went on, something about centuries of refinement, something about the discipline of the Collective, something about how fortunate the visitors were to be permitted so much as a first glimpse, and Achilles nodded calmly as he felt the change begin.
The Span’s gold hum shifted, thinned, sweetened. The Vilicus mark on his forehead warmed. Archean light orbiting his body bent slightly toward the Span’s far end, drawn as if by gravity that had not been there a step ago.
One heartbeat, he was walking through the Observable he had known since the day he first opened his eyes, the stunted thing, the small thing, the thing that had held his ancestors and his wife and every grudge he’d ever counted.
And then the flicker settled.
...!
That was the thought, whole and unfiltered, before he could dress it up in anything more diplomatic!