Taylor had, in her life, been present for a number of moments that reasonable beings would classify as significant.

She had watched Source Lifeforms move through her Observable Existence. She had communicated with Infinity.

She had been kidnapped by a temporal assassination squad, trafficked across Observable Existences, survived a lockdown imposed by a Fourth Scale Source Lifeform, and spent several hours watching what she was now privately classifying as the most insane thing she had ever witnessed, which was a monster conducting an Evolutionary Arms Race against a Relictus and an entity of mythic standing simultaneously!

She had seen things.

Sir William Arthur appeared before her and Adrastia in the obsidian space they occupied with the unhurried materialization of a grand being.

He looked at them both...and began rambling right then and there.

"Duty," he said, "is not a concept that existence rewards. It is a concept that existence requires, regardless of whether the requirement is acknowledged or compensated. The beings who understand this and act on it anyway are among the rarest configurations that existence produces."

His measured cadence filled the obsidian space without effort.

"Swords of Existence are few. Those qualified to become them are fewer still. The weight of what they carry and the adversity of what they face ensures that the position self-selects for a category of being that most existences never produce."

He paused.

"But a sword requires more than a blade. Intelligence gathering. Information networks. Support infrastructure. The analysis of threats before they reach the beings responding to them." His eyes moved between her and Adrastia with the assessing attention he brought to everything.

"The Attendants of Existence fulfill these functions. The requirements are less strict than those for Swords, but the position remains for those who are worthy, and it carries what all positions connected to this structure carry- a link to THE Primordial Source."

...!

Taylor processed this internally.

An Attendant.

Not a Sword. An Attendant. Support infrastructure. Intelligence gathering.

She wanted, briefly, to be offended by this.

The Baba Yaga, Attendant of Existence, gathering information while actual Swords went out and did the dramatic things. She could feel the indignation of it forming somewhere in her chest!

Then she thought about the battle she had been watching for the past several hours from the golden sands of a Shore, the booming impacts registering across existence, the three figures trading strikes at speeds that her perception could track but her processing could only partially make sense of.

The monster she had made a deal with, burning with an Absolute Infinity she couldn’t fully read, going against a Relictus and an ancient entity simultaneously and adapting in real time, becoming something incrementally grander with each exchange.

Those were monsters!

She was not a monster. She was genuinely excellent, extraordinarily capable within her own framework, and she knew this about herself.

But she was not that.

Attendant was accurate.

She exhaled.

"Yes," she said. "I’ll become an Attendant."

Adrastia was quiet beside her for a moment, his purple-gold hair catching the obsidian light of the space, his archaic tattoos moving in their slow shifting patterns across his skin. He had the composed bearing of someone who had arrived at his answer before the question was fully asked and was simply waiting for the appropriate moment to deliver it.

"Agreed," he said.

Sir William Arthur nodded once, with the efficiency of a man who had expected both answers.

"You two will begin in The Cornwall Observable Existence." He straightened slightly. "One of the bases of THE Swords of Existence. Let’s go."

He clenched his fist.

Obsidian rivers surged outward from him in every direction, the Primordial Source running through the currents, and the rivers wrapped around the three of them and the obsidian space disappeared.

Existence was unpredictable.

This was the only honest assessment Taylor had ever been able to make of it.

You could be minding your own business at your centennial family gathering, the important beings of your whole Observable Existence present, everything exactly as it should be, and a temporal assassination squad could arrive and kidnap you across the boundaries of time itself and traffic you to THE Braneworld Observable Existence.

And then you could survive that.

And then a Source Lifeform could lock down an entire Observable Existence and erase the temporal assassins!

And then the Source Lifeform could appear and offer you a position within the structure of THE Swords of Existence.

And then...well, you could get trafficked to another Observable Existence entirely.

Taylor of The Light, Baba Yaga, Attendant of Existence, looked at the obsidian rivers carrying her toward The Cornwall Observable Existence and thought that existence was, if nothing else, reliably grand and unpredictable.

Existence...was full of wonder!

---

<THE Braneword Observable Existence>

THE Superbius Citadel of House Ubergulden had a name.

THE Aurum Primalis. The First Gold.

It had held that name since the Second Age, when the House had commissioned its construction from the Avaritia engineers who had spent four hundred years on its foundations alone!

The towers had risen grandly. They rose now into THE Braneworld Observable Existence’s upper dimensional layers in golden spires that measured their height in light years rather than any unit designed for beings who experienced space at the scale of rooms and corridors, each tower a statement of accumulated standing delivered at the only volume the Ubergulden House had ever found appropriate.

In the central tower’s depths, surrounded by the silence of a space designed to contain the full breadth of incoming information without losing a syllable of any of it, a petite woman in a white labcoat stood at the center of a domain filled with multicolored monoliths.

They were similar to Dreamstones in their construction, but these were not Dreamstones. These were unique and more comprehensive, each monolith releasing continuous flows of information into the surrounding space that the woman absorbed without apparent effort, processing and filtering and occasionally speaking a command into the stream before moving to the next.

Ubergulden Morgana.

Her power was difficult to place. This was not an accident. At certain moments it registered as THE Fourth Scale. At other moments, when she moved with a particular intention or when something in the information streams produced a specific response in her foundations, it registered as something beyond that, something that the Fourth Scale framework wasn’t quite large enough to contain cleanly.

She was small. She was calm. She occupied the center of the golden monolith domain with the composed certainty of a being who had stood in this room for eons. At this time...

She tapped one monolith.

A voice emerged from it with crisp efficiency.

"Ubergulden Dietrich has been located alongside other recent entrants within THE Source Lands. He is being escorted to the Superbius Settlement in THE Strand of Broken Scales at this time. Ubergulden Adelheid remains unresponsive through her thread, however vital signs confirm she is alive."

...!