novelraw Chapter 693: THE Last Stand! I
Chapter 693: THE Last Stand! I
The room was white and gold.
It was a small chamber somewhere in the outer rings of the Coliseum of a Thousand Ascendant Glories, tucked away from the massing crowds, appointed for honored contestants and their companions. White stone walls. Gold inlays that ran along every seam, humming faintly with ambient Civilizations. Low benches. A single high window through which the slow orbit of a gold statue passed and passed again.
Three figures waited inside it.
Achilles sat on one of the benches with Rose tucked against his side, her fiery green hair catching the gold of the inlays and throwing it back warmer. THE Watcher drifted near the high window, platinum singularity quieter than it had been at any point since the flood, golden lotus petals turning at a pace that was not quite rhythm anymore.
THE Watcher spoke.
"Before," the singularity said, voice threading into the room the way it always did, without quite being sound, "my gaze was free. All of existence lay open to it. I observed what I wished. I was the only one of my kind in our Observable Existence, and my observing was a thing that belonged to me alone."
He paused.
"Here, on the way to this place, I saw three others of my kind."
...!
"They were moving toward the coliseum as part of the crowd. Not toward me. Not toward anything that concerned them. They were simply going, the way anyone in this Observable goes somewhere. They did not notice me. My presence was not worth the small courtesy of being noticed."
The petals slowed further.
"I have been a Singular Cognizance since before THE First Cause. I have existed as a watching thing for a length of time that cannot be meaningfully described within the frames this Observable uses to describe time. And in this place, walking in the open, I am one of many. I am a seat number in an audience. My significance within existence feels...diminished."
The Watcher fell silent after that.
He simply said what he had said and let it settle on the white-and-gold air of the room, and the petals around him turned in the slower, quieter way that was the closest thing his kind had to grief.
Rose’s hand tightened on Achilles’s.
Achilles listened calmly.
When the Watcher’s words had finished settling, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of Rose’s head. Her hair was warm against his lips. She made a small sound and leaned into him harder.
"I’ll go see exactly what this Observable Existence has to offer," he said quietly.
He lifted the medallion in his hand and turned it between his fingers.
It was crimson and gold, small enough to rest in his palm, heavier than its size suggested. The surface was worked with glyphs Achilles could not read, though he could feel what they did, which was to bind him to the Game he had signed up for, and bind him to the moment it would summon him into the arena. A hundreds-of-thousands-wide crowd was already filing into the coliseum to watch it. Rose and the Watcher held silver medallions of their own, smaller, plainer, the mark of the audience.
Khaemwaset had explained the Game to him with the same proud lilt he used for everything.
It was called THE Last Stand of the Solitary Sun.
A thousand participants. A single victor. One map, measured in gigaparsecs from edge to edge, seeded with terrain that did not care which contestant lived and which did not. You were dropped in. If you were the last one standing when every other participant had collapsed, you won. If you were not, you were gone.
Very few signed up. The nature of it deterred most. One winner out of a thousand was poor odds for anyone. Truly powerful beings sometimes entered, and when they did the survival rate of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine dropped to something that didn’t need calculating. First Scale could enter. Second Scale could enter. The Game itself levelled the field only so far, which was not far at all when a Second Scale presence was turned loose on a First Scale crowd.
What kept the stream of volunteers flowing at all was the prize.
A Gilded Ticket.
One.
It amplified the bearer’s Ego to the point where they could handle Infinity ad it granted thr chance to be Existentially Engineered by a Gilded One! A shortcut across the most dangerous threshold of the Second Scale, issued at the pleasure of the Gilded Ones themselves. The kind of prize people lined up to die for.
Achilles turned the crimson medallion once more, set it flat on his palm, and closed his fingers around it.
"I don’t know whether to say I’m lucky or unlucky," he murmured, "for the Gilded Game I chose to be..."
He let the sentence trail.
He did not finish it.
Then, the air to his left shimmered.
A golden doorway bloomed in the middle of the white-and-gold chamber, delicate at first, then solidifying into an arched portal that seemed to have been grown rather than made. Through it stepped Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns, smiling brilliantly, his gold robe catching the light of both the room and the portal behind him.
He looked over Achilles with that same warm proprietary smile.
In his hand was a medallion.
Crimson and gold. Identical to the one Achilles held.
"I would not be a good host," Khaemwaset said softly, "if I did not guide you all the way."
...!
"So I have done something reckless and stupid, something I would never ordinarily do. I have signed myself up as well. I will be the thousandth participant. Our thousand is now complete. I will...join you in this glory."
He laughed.
It was not the light exhaled laugh from the bridge. This one was richer, lower, genuinely cruel in the way men laughed when they knew they had just arranged a thing that could not be undone. The sound filled the white-and-gold chamber and dimmed the ambient hum of the inlays, and THE Watcher’s petals stopped turning entirely.
Achilles looked at him coldly. He simply held Khaemwaset’s gold-flame gaze across the room and let his face do nothing at all.
Khaemwaset’s existence flooded his medallion in his hand.
The crimson gold shone!
HUUM!
A breath later, the medallion in Achilles’s own palm also began to shine, blazing bright, the glyphs along its surface flaring to life all at once.
...!
Rose stood up.
In the next moment, before she could reach him, Achilles’s body and Khaemwaset’s body both dissolved into lines of light and were gone from the chamber. The golden doorway blinked shut behind them. The ambient hum of the inlays returned in a low, almost apologetic murmur.
Silence reigned!
Rose stood alone at the center of the room with the silver medallion in her fist and her emerald eyes burning cold.
"That fucking rat," she said softly.
"He’ll die in there. Who the fuck does he think he is? My husband will assimilate him down to the last worthless scrap of whatever he calls a Civilization, and by the time the medallions go dark, there won’t be enough left of Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns for his little Collective to bury."
...!