Chapter 5893: Kings! I

<Existential Interlude- THE Pieces That Serve>

Existence is made of pieces.

It takes many things, together, to hold it up. A star burns because gas gathered, and gas gathered because something older pulled it close, and that older thing moved because something older still set it moving. Pull any piece out and look at it alone, and it seems small. Put it back, and the whole works. Everything that lasts, lasts because something somewhere is serving a purpose, whether it knows it or not.

Lets look at the Gilded Lifeforms and the Primeval Ones.

Across the long Ages, they went out into the dark and harvested THE First Causes of Observable Existences, the very first pushes that set whole stretches of existence in motion. They guided those Causes, shaped them, and from them came countless domains where countless lifeforms were born, lived, and thrived. The Gilded and the Primeval lived as kings. They took the grandest potential for themselves, and most of what grew beneath them stayed beneath them forever.

And yet.

Down below those kings, in every domain they shaped, lifeforms built homes and laws and songs. They lived whole millennia and Ages of life and death, raised children, buried parents, and asked the same questions the kings asked, only smaller. All of them came to be because of what the kings had done.

Could anyone truly look past them? Could anyone say the pieces at the bottom of the board serve no purpose, when the board itself would be empty without them?

---

Across the weavings of existence, the Long Night flowed on, and its blizzards blanketed everything. Snow fell over Legacies and Dimensions and the empty Gaps between them, heavy and endless, as it had since the Cycle began.

At a junction between THE Source Lands and THE Infinite Carcosa, in a place very few even knew existed, a narrow pathway wound away from both of them toward a vast Legacy that even other Legacies knew little about.

Some Legacies had astonishing founders. Lucy had built one. Diogenes had built one. Napoleon had built one. Their names alone could make Immense Ones sit up straighter.

And some Legacies were astonishing beyond all measure.

This one was called THE Legacy of THE Hand That Sets the Pieces, and within its borders lived every kind of lifform that had ever been critical to the making of existence as it stood now.

Gilded Lifeforms lived there, bright and proud, the harvesters of First Causes. Primeval Ones lived there, old as the first rocks, slow and patient and immeasurably heavy.

Source Lifeforms lived there, born from the deep springs where existence first welled up. Infinite Lifeforms lived there, endless in some single direction that no one else could follow. Descendants and Progeny lived there, the heirs and offspring of great beings, carrying old bloodlines forward. Provenance Lifeforms lived there, the keepers of where everything came from. Gu lived there in every shape and color. Conduit Lifeforms drifted along the great channels that ran through the Legacy, carrying the weight of existence from place to place.

And three more kinds lived there, strangers to most of existence.

Threshold Lifeforms lived on the edges of things, born wherever one place met another, and they knew of everything that crossed a border they guarded. Echo Lifeforms were born from the long after-ring of great deeds, and each of them carried a piece of history inside it.

And Seed Lifeforms, the strangest of all, were possibilities still deciding what to become, small sleeping shapes that could still grow into anything at all.

Every piece of existence, gathered in one Legacy. Every piece, set in its place.

In one small region of that domain, not a single snowflake was falling.

The Long Night’s blizzard simply stopped at its edges, and the air inside was clear and still and faintly warm. A single island floated there in the quiet, a broad flat stone covered in soft grass, and on it four lifeforms sat around a board.

Each of them gave off heavy, slow waves of Immensity. The weakest of them was an Ancient Immense One at the very least.

The first was a Provenance Lifeform, a tall woman whose skin was marked with fine rings like the inside of a cut tree, every ring an origin she remembered.

Beside her sat a Primeval One, a vast hunched shape of grey first-rock and moss, with two small fires burning where its eyes should be. Across from them sat a Source Lifeform, a figure of pale light that kept spilling over at its edges like a spring that always overflows. And last sat a Conduit Lifeform, a long lean man whose body was half see-through, with currents of existence flowing visibly along the channels inside him.

They were playing Chaturanga.

It was an old game, the oldest form of a game of kings. Four armies sat on the four sides of the board, each with its foot soldiers, horses, elephants, chariots, and a king, and each player tried to capture the kings of the others. Here, the board was a small piece of laid-out existence, and every piece on it weighed as much as an Immensity.

To lift a single foot soldier and move it one square, a player needed the strength of an Immense One.

Every capture added the captured piece’s Immensity to a pot that grew in the middle of the board, and whoever won the game took all of it. They had been playing this one for a very long time, and the pot had grown heavy enough to make the grass around the board lie flat.

The Provenance Lifeform pushed an elephant forward with two fingers, and the island groaned.

"How much longer do you all think we will be here, just lounging around?" she said, looking at the other three. "A new cycle has begun. Not even a new cycle. THE Cycle. THE Promised Cycle."

The Primeval One rumbled, and said nothing.

"THE Long Night was set going as the first Narrative," she went on. "That means that grand personage has already taken the lead. Other Narratives are beginning to bloom everywhere. So what about ours?" She leaned back. "I also want to leave my mark."

The Conduit Lifeform smiled and shook his head.

"The conditions for things to move along are different for every Narrative," he said. "The grander or more unique a Narrative is, the stricter its conditions. A number of Immense Ones dying was enough to set THE Long Night going. The Narrative behind us..." He laughed softly. "Haha. We can never fathom what our great personage attained for our Narrative. We could be sitting here for hundreds of years, or the conditions could be met in the next few days. But until then..."

HUUM!

Everything began to shake!

The board jumped and the pot of Immensity in its center flared. The island trembled beneath them, and far out across the domain, the whole Legacy seemed to catch its breath. All four of them raised their heads at once in shock.

Above them, light was spreading.

Golden auroras were blooming across the skies of the Legacy, slow and brillant, rolling out over the clear air and the falling snow beyond it alike. The Provenance Lifeform rose to her feet, and a brilliant smile spread across her face, and she laughed out loud!

The surrounding existence began to buzz. Flows of information came down out of the aurora like golden sunlight, falling over everything, and every lifeform they touched knew at once what they said.

|Sufficient conditions have been met.|

|THE Narrative of Kings has begun to unfold across existence.|

...!