Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Saltus In Demonstrando: The Tale Of The Nascent God==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">A newborn child talking its first breath.

''A boulder rolling down a hill.

A star finally collapsing into supernova. 

A gnat buzzing across a field of wheat. 

Two galaxies colliding, scattering infinite points of light into the all-encompassing darkness. 

The electron in an oxygen atom spinning at a million revolutions per nanosecond. 

I experience everything, at every point in time.

Is this omniscience?

Am I a god?''<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

'''Premise 1: Our Understanding of God Is A Being Of Which No Greater Thing Can Be Conceived'''.

Two tau argue over a matter of state. The first believes it to be un-taulike to charge such exorbitant rates to the millions of refugees hanging in low orbit, even to demand any price at all to those who no longer even have a homeworld to call their own. The other is unmoved. He knows that the starving apes would extend the same courtesy, and was it not their tiny empire that shed so very much tau blood? Why should the tau, a society based upon the equal distribution of all labor, extend such an alien concept as charity to a race that now pursues peace only when the xenos they so eagerly slaughtered provide the only safe haven left?

One is an optimist, the other a realist, and both are needed if the tau are to survive the coming storm. For while there are those who must fight for the tau, there must also be those who give the tau something worth fighting for. 

''If there is one thing I have learned, while witnessing all of causality at once, it is that survival is not enough.''




'''Premise 2: The Idea of God Exists In The Mind. When Someone Speaks To You of God, You Recognize What They Are Talking About. Not a God, Like The Banal Title Given To Mere Psychic Constructs Representing The Darker Urges of The Sentient Mind, But The God, The Creator of The Natural Universe''' 

A wedding, between an aging man and a younger woman. Some guests disapprove of the age disparity, a holdover from the town's conservative roots, but they are happy all the same. The groom has at last found happiness in the arms of someone who doesn't just see the scars, but instead sees the man beneath. And the bride has at last shown someone who had well and truly given up on everything and everyone, that life is still worth living.

The preacher has already buried so many, sat at far too many funerals for such a small town, and it is beginning to wear at him. He is glad to finally preside over a ceremony dedicated to creation rather than simply commemorating a seemingly endless legacy of destruction. The preacher asks the couple the final question of matrimony, if they are truly willing to dedicate themselves to the entirety of the other, and he can see the bride smile. It is perhaps the most beautiful thing the preacher has ever had the fortune to behold. These two lovers have achieved true happiness on this day. It is the ultimate defiance, as they dare the universe to snatch this fragile thing shared between the two of them.

And in the stars above, in the form of insane automatons wearing the skin of the living in some perverted simulacrum of what they had irrevocably lost, the universe prepares its answer.




'''Premise 3: A Being Which Exists Both In The Mind And In Reality Is Greater Than A Being That Exists Only in The Mind. A Gun Will Always Have A Greater Impact On The Physical World Than The Idea of a Gun'''

In a rare moment of accidental insight, I see myself. 

I see a beast, a bloated thing unnaturally birthed into the natural universe for the express purpose of murder by mentality, another microscopic element of the Swarm that elevated itself to infinitely more. The Swarm is but the subconscious urge of the conscious Overmind, and it directs the Swarm in however manner it sees fit. It molds the Swarm into whatever weapon is required by the task at hand to fulfill its basest desire: to feed. I see that this beast is unique in its form, if not its function. This beast can touch upon a sea of infinite potential, upon the raw ether that composed the infinite links that wove together to form the tapestry that is the Overwill. 

Despite that the hive fleet is scattered, the hordes burned away to nothing under an endless barrage of psychic onslaught, still it fights on, for how can a creature both so simplistic and supreme comprehend such an individualistic notion as defeat? Is a man defeated if an individual bacteria manages to overpower and kill a cell, does the man even acknowledge it? I see the Overwill throw the beast among so many others in one last act of defiance against a foe it could neither comprehend nor consume, a spore hidden among the discharge of what can only be the dying breaths of a hive ship. 

I see the spore sail through the void, still glistening with birth fluids, only to burrow its way between the pulsing star of white spires. And it waits there, for so very long, unseen and untouched. The guardians, in all their immortal arrogance and ignorance, are too busy to hunt the beast's brethren to find the small cancer slowly growing in their beating heart.

Eventually, whether guided by circumstance or the ever-present whisper of the Overwill, a crack forms in the outer shell. A slight tapping sound can be heard, steadily growing louder and louder as more time passes on. Abruptly, it stops, and for a moment there is only silence.

After a long, pregnant second, a claw bursts out. The spore hatches, and the birthing splits open the spore carapace into a thousand upon a thousand shards of chitin and scatters them into the wraithbone halls below.

An ugly, misshapen thing stands in the debris. Slowly, dripping with amniotic fluid and acidic runoff, the beast raises its snout and lets out a low keen.

I remember this moment well. It is when I took my first breaths, and Malan'tai took its last.

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