Chapter 5281: Dust II |
The unique l Superbius capability unfurled from her foundations with the sustained backing of the Fourth Scale entities beside her and Sororis Prima Elizabeth and the ten Sororis Primas distributed through the formation!
The capability took form in the surrounding space rather than from any single point within it, the collective pride of a formation amd power at full expression finding a shape!
A Peacock!
Massive. Golden!
Its body composed not of physical material but of condensed Existential Radiation and Infinity and Observable Force and Superbius and Ira and Cause authority compounded across many Paleozoic Scale beings and multiple entities at the Fourth Scale, the form solid enough to press against the surrounding reality rather than simply occupying it!
Its tail spread across Gigaparsecs of observable space in a fan of golden feathers, each feather carrying concentrated pride that moved through the surrounding existence like a solvent, the emotion not expressing itself as a mood but as a physical condition, pride gushing from the form in waves that melted the structural coherence of the space it touched!
Its eyes burned crimson.
The eyes of Ira Gilded Ones who had fed their rage into the Superbius expression, the war-nature of the Bellum Cause running through the pride of the Cognitio Cause in a compound expression that made the peacock’s gaze not merely proud but hungry, its attention on Sir William Arthur bring imperious!
It was saying bow down!
The waves of pride reached Sir William!
They found him and ran across him and moved past him, and he remained exactly where he was, unblemished, his existence occupying the space the pride waves passed through with the flat indifference of something that had been introduced to pride and had found the introduction... He reached Vireth’s position and stopped. "Decisions compound. A single poor decision produces conditions that make the next poor decision feel necessary, and that decision produces conditions that make the one after it feel inevitable, and by the end of the chain, the beings involved have arrived at a destination they never consciously chose while having made every individual choice that led there."
He looked at Vireth with something that was not cruelty and was not compassion but was simply the attention of a being completing a task.
"You chose to travel. You chose to attempt revision. You chose to stand in the way of the verdict. Three decisions, each compounding on the last."
He tapped his hand outward once.
Vireth disappeared.
He tapped again.
The second Fourth Scale entity disappeared.
Again.
The third.
Again.
The fourth.
The space where they had been held the crimson-gold blood they had produced for a moment, floating in the torn Observable Existence, before the lockdown’s conditions dispersed it into the substrate.
Sir William Arthur straightened his jacket.
"Consequences," he said to no one in particular, "are simply decisions arriving at their natural destination."
WAA!