I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 689: Pride! I

Achilles took Rose up, and he did it without words.

His hand found the small of her back, and the sea of Tian fell away beneath them. THE Watcher’s platinum singularity rose in silence at their side. They climbed together through air that had not yet decided what it wanted to be, past the pillars of white-gold liquid standing upright across the horizon, past the layer where the flood’s last currents still moved, up toward the broken mirror of the sky.

He stopped them at the edge.

The shattered space hung in front of him like a wound that had forgotten how to bleed. Tilted shards of sky hinged open above the First Sea, and through the frame of them the obsidian dark of the Unobservable spread outward in every direction that was not a direction.

The bridge ran out of it, the Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns, holding itself aloft on nothing, obsidian veined with gold, patient as a road that had been waiting a very long time to be walked on.

Rose floated beside him without speaking.

He looked.

Far out along the Span, past the threshold his Architect’s Perception couldn’t cleanly read through, auras began to announce themselves. They were suffocating auras, the kind of pressure that would have taken a lesser version of him and folded him closed like a book nobody was reading anymore!

He felt them settle against his skin, against the heart under it, against the Vilicus mark on his forehead that pulsed once in recognition and then went quiet.

Fear did not come.

He had expected fear to come, and he noted its absence. It was fine. He did not need fear right now. What he needed right now was the cold clarity to watch, to count, to catalog, to stand here with his love at his side and figure out who was walking across his sky.

The bridge began to shine.

HUUM!

Gold light bloomed along the Span from its far end toward its near end, traveling the obsidian surface in a slow wave, and as it passed, the bridge lit from within the way a vein lights when blood finally reaches it. The light reached the near edge and stayed there steady, and in the moment it steadied, the auras on the far side of the threshold stopped being distant and arrived.

There were dozens of them, all at once, each one breaking over Achilles’s perception with a pressure that far exceeded Lamashtu. Lamashtu had been a prisoner wearing his old Scale, hungry and bitter and rotting at the seams. These presences had been born into their Scale and had never known anything else!

Scale Two. Every fucking one of them!

Their pressure was regal!

And then they appeared.

Down the length of the Obsidian Span, a delegation walked into Observable Existence with the unhurried gait of people returning to a place they had decided, a long time ago, to own. There were dozens of them, all robed, all tall, all moving in a formation.

Their garments were gold, but gold did not describe it well enough. The cloth moved like river-light poured into fabric, draped in long panels that fell from one shoulder and gathered at the waist with broad woven belts that bore patterns older than the thread they had been stitched into.

Some of them wore headwraps that rose high and spiraled, stiff with embroidery, while others wore narrow bands of beaten metal across their brows. Rings climbed their arms in stacked coils from wrist to elbow, and collars of plate and stone lay flat across their chests, each collar carved with glyphs Achilles could almost read but not quite.

Their skin was tan and bronze. Every single one of them held their chins at the exact same angle, as if they had been taught it together as children and had never seen a reason to lower them since.

Achilles watched them walk, and he let his Architect’s Perception run down the line, and he read what they were.

Half of them were Primordial Architects, humanoid, and the Heart he carried in his own chest recognized its kin in theirs, though the recognition was not warm. The other half were something else, each of them carrying a lineage that did not announce itself the way Architects did, each of them burning with inheritances native to whatever Observable they had come from.

Under all of it, under skin and cloth and Civilization and lineage, something burned in each of them that Achilles had only ever felt in glimpses... and that something was Infinity. Actual Infinity!

He also felt Pride from them before he felt anything else.

Pride dripped off them the way water dripped off a body that had just climbed out of the sea, unhurried and unhidden and as natural as the fact of being wet.

He had met prideful beings before, plenty of them, but none of them had ever looked so committed to it.

At the forefront of the delegation, one man walked half a step ahead of the rest, and he carried a mark on his forehead.

It was small, obsidian-gold, the same two colors that sat on Achilles’s own brow, in a shape that was not identical but was unmistakably a cousin to it.

Achilles’s focus settled on him.

The man was tall and built heavy with muscle that had not been cultivated for show.

Golden rings climbed both of his arms in thick coils, gems sat flush in the cloth at his chest, and his hair was bound back in thick twisted lengths threaded with still more gold. His beard was cut close and lined with precision, his gaze was cold.

He was a fully formed Primordial Architect at the Second Scale, and the Infinity in him was grand.

Another Vilicus!

The man at the forefront stopped halfway down the bridge and simply looked at him.

For a long moment, he did nothing else. His gold-flame eyes raked over Achilles’s transformed form, over the purple-gold rivers of Archean light, over the archaic crimson tattoos, and he did not hide what his face did as it read.

He was cold, and then measuring, and then there was a small shake of his head, as if he had just been told a joke he did not quite believe had been meant seriously.

Then he smiled, and the smile was not for Achilles.

It was the smile of disdain!

The man’s gaze slid off Achilles and went to Rose, and it lingered there on the green fire of her hair.

He laughed lightly.

It was one single exhaled sound, the kind of laugh a man released when he saw a dog try to walk on its hind legs and managed, briefly, to almost succeed.

Achilles watched all of it, and he kept count, because he was good at keeping count, and because he had promised himself a long time ago that he would never forget a single one of these.

The man on the bridge spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture that on another man might have been welcome.

"How unique," the man said.

His voice was deep.

"Truly unique. One hears, of course, about the... smaller Observables. One hears, and one pictures, and one is rarely correct about what the picturing has produced. But this..." He let his gaze travel across the horizon of white-gold sea, across the upright pillars, across the sky that had only just been taught to break. "This is its own kind of charming. Yes, I shall have to find the word for it later..."

He turned his face fully toward Achilles and touched two fingers to the small mark on his forehead in a formal gesture that was perfectly, almost impossibly, executed.

"Forgive me. Introductions. It would be rude of me to assume that the standards of our house have reached this far. I am Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns, Third Prince of the Bronze Line, Minor Vilicus of the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence. My escort are the honored envoys of the Primordial Philotimo Collective, sent in the first courtesy to greet what has... emerged... on the far side of our new road."

...!