I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 690: Pride! II

Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns, Third Prince of the Bronze Line, Minor Vilicus of the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence!

Achilles’s eyes soured as this fucker was truly a prideful one!

His gold-flame eyes settled on Achilles again.

"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."

He smiled again.

"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."

A murmur ran through the delegation behind him. One of the envoys let her gold-flame eyes drift across Rose again and then across THE Watcher, and she murmured something quiet to the envoy beside her, and the two of them did not hide their smiles.

Achilles watched that too, because Achilles was watching everything right now!

He watched how they held their shoulders, how they kept their hands visible but never quite open. He watched how not one of them, not even the Vilicus at the front, had bowed.

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 would walk into their house, and he would learn its floor plan, and he would learn their Civilizations.

He let his face do nothing and simply spoke.

"Achilles Adrastia. Ninth Adrastia Emperor King. Vilicus of this Observable Existence. I don’t think it has any particular name."

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.

"Lead the way."

...!

Khaemwaset’s smile widened by exactly the width of a blade, and he turned on the bridge with the hem of his gold robe catching the Span’s light and throwing it back in a long bright arc. The delegation reformed around him in the same quiet habitual formation as before, and they began to float back the way they had come, unhurried as ever, as if they had known from the start that this was how it would go.

Achilles took Rose’s hand and felt THE Watcher rise behind him without needing to check, and the three of them stepped onto the Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns and began the crossing into the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence.

He kept his pace steady as the delegation moved ahead, Rose’s hand warm in his own, the Obsidian Span humming faintly under their feet. He tilted his head just enough to speak without turning as he sent a mental message to THE Watcher.

"Do you still feel that darkness you were feeling before?"

THE Watcher’s petals slowed. For a long beat, there was only the low hum of the bridge and the distant rustle of a delegation that had stopped pretending to care whether it was being followed closely.

"I see endless possibilities," the singularity answered. "But I do not know which one will be which."

Not an answer, strictly. A confession in the shape of one!

Achilles didn’t press.

He faced forward again. The obsidian dark of the Unobservable Sea stretched to every side of the Span in a depth his Architect’s Perception still refused to read the floor of.

So he walked, and Rose walked, and THE Watcher drifted.

Half a span ahead, Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns lifted his chin and began to speak without turning.

"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."

Achilles said nothing.

"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."

HUUM!

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.

"The Gilded see your Observable as an experiment," Khaemwaset continued, unhurried, almost kind in the way a tutor was kind to a slow child.

"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."

Rose’s fingers tightened around Achilles’s.

"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."

"And among those at the Second Scale, among those who have given themselves to the Gilded in the proper ways, there are even those who have ascended into Vakochev’s Third Scale. Their names are entrenched in the Scales themselves. Carved, as it were, into the lattice of what exists. If you have true power, you get to hear them mentioned every now and then amongst the glorious Custodes of THE Gilded Ones. A name like Masamuk is too ancient and well known as you will eventually hear the names of Lyanna of Light, THE Superbius Sword, THE Osmontian Custos...you will come to revere many!"

...!

Third Scale! Carved names!

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.

It came in through the soles of his feet first.

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.

Existence flickered.

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.

The next heartbeat, it was gone. The next, it was back. The next, gone again.

And then the flicker settled.

Achilles’s foot came down on the last obsidian plate of the Span, and the dark lifted away from the sides of the bridge entirely, and ahead of him, The Silver Philotimo Observable Existence opened.

...!

It was...a ridiculous fucking paradise.

That was the thought, whole and unfiltered, before he could dress it up in anything more diplomatic!