It had taken the Nergui a long time to climb the mountain. It had to coordinate the tiny voices (their timbre subsided now to barely more than a whisper) into moving the muscles of its legs and hands to allow it to grasp the ledges, to climb ever further up for long days, to command them to maintain the body’s balance whenever what little blood was left in the meat would pool and the Nergui would slip.

It had fallen, twice, the first time cracking its ribs as it almost rolled down to the root of the mountain, the jutting rocks thankfully missing its spine. Part of its skull had cracked, exposing the meat inside, filling the skull with flies, but the Nergui had little use for this anymore. It had been the second fall, that had broken one of its arms in three places that made it difficult. But it persevered through the day and under the cold light of the moon and reached the summit and it looked down at the world sprawling below it.

The Nergui did not know why it was doing this, not exactly; there was some calling within it, something driving it to reach a high place like an ant, whose brain has been overcome by some parasite. Its instincts bade it to reach a population center, a place where it could offer people miracles in exchange for their worship. But this would not help it in reaching the great thing in the sky, that would take it away from this place forever.

There was some calling inside the Nergui, that drove it to this place: some half-remembered legend of a gaunt man, beset by evils who wished to grant him the world. Or was it a parable of ascension, of being devoured by the birds, bit by bit until nothing remained but pooled blood and bits of bone, leaving the sould free to wander the halls of eternity? But this was not a parable or a fantasy of ascension: the evils were inside the Nergui, part of it, giving it the power to move its vessel beyond its death. As for the birds, they would not touch it. Even the flies had abandoned the Nergui, once its blood had seeped out of its body, perhaps finding the flesh unfit for consumption even by them. A few stragglers had remained, overcome by the gravitational pool of the gods inside it, but even those had perished, in time.

It was dawn when the Nergui reached the summit of the mountain. Raising its arms high, it greeted the sun, welcoming the shearing cold of the winds of that altitude. He dwelt in the high places now, his Kazakh equivalent of the Mount Meru, at the highest point of creation. Now, the great thing in the heavens was close enough to touch but still impossible to reach. It stupidly reached out its tendrils across the world, prodding the minds of lesser creatures, trying to reach the gods and finding no hold. It was to be expected: none of them could understand its language and those that could were base intelligences, too preoccupied with their own survival and uniqueness to even consider the existence of an Other.

The Nergui would need something to latch on to, some great battery of faith to reach the Other. Closing its eyes, it looked into the world as it had seen it before, as a tiny little mote of light in the vast darkness of the universe. Looking closer, it scanned the surface, looked through the rubble, until…

There! A city by a river, where a creature like itself dwelt, grown fat and made manifest by the faith of its citizens, its roots deep, its corpus infused with the city. It was a behemoth that would put even the god of Saryozek to shame, a city-sized creation controlled by a single conglomeration of minds. The Nergui focused further and it saw the god-beast lure the thousands of Mongols in, trap them in the optimal place between its legion of claws and teeth and jaws and then finally bring it all down around them with a snap. The Mongols died in their hundreds between them, the metal and glass of their mounts soaked in the blood and the fine paste that their bodies had been reduced to. In two minutes, two thousand men had gone down its gullet, added to its mass, their intellects absorbed by the god-beast, giving it clarity. Its mind expanded, blossoming like a lotus-flower; at that instant, the Nergui leapt from the top of the mountain, sending its consciousness across the world faster than the speed of thought and found itself within the god-beast’s mind.

And inside it, the Nergui found a screaming, dark vastness of howling minds and fleshly corridors that stretched out forever, valleys of babbling mouths and vistas of the lolling tongues of the million Muscovites, of the Kazakhs, the Chinese, the Uzbekis the Chechnyans, tha Mongols that had joined the great corpus of the city-best that had become Moscow. The god-beast's thoughts washed over him like gusts of wind, endless hunger with bursts of understanding, howling as it passed through the narrow, mountainous regions that were the orchards of muscle and ligament. Oceans of gray matter frothed and writhed, wrethed eternally by thought-storms, the signs of a growing conciousness. And somewhere above, between the clouds of churning souls, there was a scab-brown sun that pulsed madly, perpetually sheding the light of its own growing understanding on it all:

I am here, this is now, the idiot mantra went on. To the Nergui, this beast was barely more intellectually capable than an infant, for all its power and mass. It had outgrown the need for faith and had attained for itself a sizeable anchor in the material world, wanting nothin more than to grow, to become part of it. Perhaps, when it was intelligent enough, it would realize the size of the planet that encompassed it and wish to grow, to extend its reach to the dense depths below, to smother the core and make it also part of the Moscow-creature. And then, perhaps, it would starve to death after long lifeless centuries, crooning to the unheeding, uncaring void. It would fight with muscles the size of continents against the gravitational pull of the sun and might even break away from it, drawn by the prayer-thought of other worlds and finally freeze to death not even halfway through its trek across the void.

The Moscow-beast was short-sighted, plagued by its addiction. But it made for a big enough beacon for the Nergui to latch on to. If only it could occupy it, even for an instant, then it would be able to catch the eye of the drifting titan at the edge of the atmosphere. He nergui counted the newly dead. Two thousand Mongols had perished in the moment between thoughts, their minds melded to the god-beast. Without a moments hesitation, the Nergui jumped upward, scaling the horizon on the soul-clouds and thought-forms of mounts, of screaming men, of warm hearths, of glimpses of childhoods that lingered from the dead and the dying. Reaching the sun-brain, the Nergui jumped through its perihelion, scorched by the idiot-mantra, its layers of self peeling backward, breaking apart, held together only by its own tenacity.

Somwehre far away, at the top of a mountain, the fleshly vessel of the Nergui fell to the ground, tumbling down the mountain, its connection with the controlling self severed for good. There would be no way back for it, it knew. It was either this, or an expulsion to the immaterial realms, to dwell among the dream-scapes as complex imagery in the subconcious vistas of dreamers. It wasn't quite death, but it was so much worse.

The sun-brain's corona was a frothing, burning mass of ideals, desires, of memory that was frothing at the surface. These were selves, impurites that were reduced to thin, molten slag on the surface of the sun-brain, beneath which lay the annihilating id of the Moscow-beast. The Nergui dived inside it, curling its being up into a ball, the gods that comprised its mass sheltering the silver of intelligence which directed them. The outer rim burned as they entered the fusing chromosphere of instinct, the gods burning as they were consumed by the idiot mantra I am here, this is now, I am here, this is now. The Nergui felt their loss as tiny pangs of guilt, knew their absence as ghostly presences in the back of its mind, the way the specter of a limb would have remained in its mortal self. Million-year-old instincts urged it to turn, go back, but the Nergui pushed it aside. The moneky in his brain had no pain centers, no pressure points to sink its claws into to generate fear. It was soon drowned out by the ferocity of the idiot mantra.

In the sun-brain's convective zone, the scrap of selves melted and ran together, pushed here and there by superheated currents. Their intelligences (being denser, harder-packed elements) burned white-hot and shed from them the unnecessary baggage of identity, before they drifted downward. The Nergui looked for one that would be large enough, massive enough to allow it to drag itself down against the current, even as its mass began to she faster now. The sliver at its core heated up, its thought-processes slowly invaded by the idiot-mantra. It examined its surroundings and found a great enough intelligence that burned as ferosiously as the sun-brain itself. Its self-stuff was shed almost completely, but the Nergui knew it for what it was: the Khan, snarling, spitting, fighting even here in the all-annihilating vortex, seeking to exert its influence. Perhaps he thought he could conquer this place, that he could once again muster an army and make it his own. The Nergui responded to this call, latched itself onto it.

I am the Khan, fear me! It repeated its own idiot-mantra. The Nergui approached it, extended its mass and finally enveloped the Khan, absorbing it in its mass. There was only a moment of struggle, as the Nergui was nearly overwhelmed by the Khan, but it laste only for a moment. The Khan was unprepared for the assimilation. Its soul and being were extinguished in a micro-second, increasing the Nergui's mass exponentially. Now, it burned fiercely but it would burn short. The Khan's all-encompassing desire was intoxicating, omnivorous. The Nergui had absorbed three more intelligences before it even had a chance to cement its control. The god-mass around it burned away now, reduced to ash and slag.

I am here, this is now the idiot mantra was tiny, almost lost to the Nergui-Khan. Together, they were a miniature sun on the brink of going supernova, their reserves quickly burning away. They drifted downward, into the sun-brain's radiative zone, where the core of the sun-brain dwelt, troubled by pangs of latent conscience. Is this all? It inquired. Is there more? The Nergui-Khan counted the dead. Almost three thousand now. Soon enough, the core would be sentient and the Moscow-beast would be personified, manifest, impregnable. The Nergui-khan pushed through the endlessly fusing radiative zone and struck a barrier. It was too late, already.

Is this all? Is there more? It asked, the mantra spilling outward, beating down on the reaches of its mind, turning the thought-winds into hurricanes, the thought-storms into identity-squalls. The Nergui-Khan fought against the radiance, but its struggling was futile. Prying tendrils reached out, pelled it apart, separating it. The Nergui-khan was naked before it, tried to run and was finally drawn into the core. The Moscow-beast looked into the wonders within it: the conquest, the ambition, the compacted majesty of the universe and devoured it all. The Nergui-khan was lost, forever, but its intent was a viral thing, malicious and hungry, spreading through the sun-brain, taking over its synapses, destroying the pathways and forming new ones in its stead.

By the time the death-toll reached five-thousand, the Moscow-beast had become painfully aware of all the wonders of the cosmos, of its own insignificance. It had been plagued by a yearning for something greater, something better, something transcending the flesh. Realizing the presence of the great thing at the edge of the world, the possessed fossil-fuels above it, it reached out to it and made contact. Thunder-lizard mind and god-brain clashed for an instant and annihilated each other, reducing themselves into a single, sentient mass and then finally, were gone.

After a single instant of violent birth, the Bone-God was born.