The Fold Dweller smiled and nodded, and in that moment, everything froze. Not dramatically...time simply decided to take a break, leaving The First Farmer and this mysterious visitor in a bubble of continued causality while reality held its breath.
The Outsider walked over and picked up the green-gold seed with the careful reverence of someone handling crystallized possibility.
"What is this?" they asked, though the question carried the weight of someone who already suspected.
The First Farmer, cautious but compelled by something beyond caution, answered: "It was a failed Seed. A Seed of Harvest that would have been my finest creation, but I failed. The Principle was too large, too fundamental. It kept trying to harvest itself before it could germinate. A principle that feeds on effort, including the effort of its own creation...the recursion destroyed it before it could stabilize."
The Fold Dweller turned the seed over in their hands, and for a moment, their form seemed to flicker...not quite Fold Dweller, not quite anything definable.
"This... this would have been something grand had you succeeded." Their voice carried the weight of someone who had seen all possibilities and found this one particularly intriguing. "It exceeds any normal or Grand Principle. Even a Leader of a Civilization would have benefited tremendously if such a Seed had come to fruition. The power to make all effort flow toward you, to make opposition itself a form of nourishment..."
The First Farmer felt shock ripple through his ancient form...not at the knowledge displayed, but at the certainty with which it was stated. This wasnโt speculation. This was assessment from someone who understood principles at a level that transcended even his agricultural mastery.
This was someone...not of this Scale of Existence!
"Who... are you?"
The Fold Dweller shook their head, a melancholic smile crossing features that seemed less and less like a Fold Dweller with each passing moment.
"I am just a Creature." ๐๐๐๐๐ฌ๐๐๐ท๐๐ฟ๐๐ก.๐๐ธ๐
Just a Creature.
The words hung in the air with the peculiar weight of truth that was both complete and completely inadequate. The First Farmer blinked in astonishment, and in that blink...
POP!
The Fold Dweller was gone. The Failed Seed of Perpetual Harvest fell to the ground with a sound that echoed through dimensions, landing in the dirt with the weight of abandoned possibility.
A Creature.
THE Creature.
The recognition hit The First Farmer with the force of understanding that rewrites previous understanding. THE Creature had held a failed seed and stated that if only it had been realized, the possibilities would have been grand. THE Creature had seen in this failure something worth noting, worth touching, worth remembering.
Perpetual Harvest.
Why should effort flow from actor to result when it could flow from everyone to one? Why should harvest be seasonal when it could be perpetual? Why should anyone accept the existenceโs terms when those terms could be renegotiated by someone with enough audacity to demand better rates?
The First Farmer would continue tending his garden, creating Principles that would shape reality in ways both subtle and profound. But he would always remember that day when THE Creature had looked at his greatest failure and seen something worth noting.
Because sometimes, the greatest harvests come from seeds that never should have grown at all.
And somewhere in the future that was also the past that was also happening right now, a Tyrant had not just successfully nurtured this seed to life...but now truly held such a wonder at full maturity.
At full bloom!
And he...was just getting started!
โ
The Early Creature, Osmont, sat on his throne of fire, and he commanded them to Kneel!
The throne itself was a monument to absolute authority...carved not from stone or metal, but from condensed flames that had been given solidity through sheer tyrannical will!
It rose behind him like the backbone of a slumbering titan, each vertebra a different shade of crimson and gold, pulsing with heat that warped the very fabric of space around it.
Noah sat upon it with the casual indifference of one who had transcended the need to prove his power, his bare chest reflecting the dancing lights of devastation.
Above, the Primordial Fireballs he had forged hung like a constellation of judgment, each one a miniature sun fold containing enough compressed authority to unmake existence at its most fundamental level.
They simply existed, and their existence negated the possibility of anything else surviving in their immediate vicinity.
But his Mana... oh, his fucking Mana continued its maddening display of infinite potential!
HUUM!
From the very air itself, from the spaces between thoughts and the gaps in realityโs weave, new horrors began to materialize.
Primordial Mana-Flame Wyrms, each one a serpentine nightmare of crystallized fire and conceptual devastation, slithered into being abive Tatiana and her army!


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