Rumble!
Mountainous quakes wracked the Culling Slate's steel enamel, scarring pitted moats about its periphery. Fallow fields and craggy dikes ruptured in the ensuing discord, stealing the myriad peoples' startled gaze.
Morrígan and her terrible breakers crested the Abyssal Crow Sect's vast hills, a brook of chittering skulls slathering her bared maw.
Soon, the Buddhists' sacred-gold Dharmachakra and the Bellicosis' autumn-bronze vulture joined her in warding.
At last, the Penumbra wraith gilded the final threshold, entombing the quivering slate whole.
Crack-crack-crack.
Blinding light and damning darkness spilled from the many cracks.
BOOM!
Breaths like unearthly bellows.
Roars like stricken elephants.
When the debris fell to the scored earth, all borne witness to a titan above titans; a beast above beasts, a bunny above Samsara.
Razored fur of bleached platinum rose in peaks beyond peaks of flesh. Dread muscles so full, molten veins crawled every inch of its hulking frame. Eyes of yin-yang spirals matching the sun's reign of the sky.
Crunch!
It gnawed on a sleek, crimson spear, meeting every glare with utter apathy.
"Genesis Spear!" It was unknown who loosed the aching cry; only their terror was known—hung indelibly over the souls of the masses.
**
Karma Bunny's perception stretched from the land's plasmic pith to the great hollow beyond, laying bare all of nature's secrets.
So this is the Celestial Overseer realm ... Even a taste leaves me yearning for more. MORE. Omniscience—who would've thought there were layers to omniscience!
"Oh?" Karma Bunny's laughter rattled the mantle of heaven. "All this time, I've walked across your sleeping body, Overseer? My, my, you're practically drowning in feces, and my crusade has yet begun!"
Overseer Dolores's—or at least, her clone's—cowled aspect congealed overhead. Wordlessly peering down at Karma Bunny, she waved the sects' Mandatis forth.
Nigh wheezing, Karma Bunny lofted his right paw to the heavens and plunged his left paw to the earth.
"Above Heaven."
Slowly, he inverted them.
"Under Heaven."
Englobing blackness overwrought natural order, binding the four Mandatis in cocoons of hallow gold.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Earthly Domain: Karmic Collapse.
"I am ..."
Impenetrable grey fog subsumed the sprawling landscape, putting every man, woman, and child into a hazy stupor.
Heavenly Decree: Purgatory's Wrath.
"Alone."
A grand weave of Truth blundered past the foyer of reality, ringing Karma Bunny's paws in a circlet of duality.
Of Life and Death.
Of Yin and Yang.
Overseer Dolores's clone—encumbered but awake—bristled amid squalls of vitriol made real. "You. Wouldn't. Dare."
Karma Bunny merely smiled as his paws arced the last of their revolution.
Celestial Omen: Samsaric Ruin.
As one, harvests waned and soil waxed,
As one, oceans dried and forests yellowed,
As one, youth rotted and elderly rested,
As one, Death lived and Life died.
**
Violently roused from her slumber, Overseer Dolores could only despair at the apocalypse unfolding across her Celestial Tract.
First, her clone, bound by impossible golden threads, withered into a deadened husk.
Then, the guardian Mandatis were crushed into non-existence.
Her painfully cultivated ecosystem, from the mercantile wanes to the able-bodied menials, disintegrated into ashen heaps. In their wake, the brightest daffodil to the lushest elm wilted into acrid palls.
Cittamātra monks, Abyssal disciples, Bellicosi warriors, and Penumbra prowlers fell lifeless to denuded soil.
Her planet was dying.
"Missing. Envoys Li, Kharon, Pratigha, and Delilah are missing! They knew. My planet is dying, and those craven roaches knew."
Her senses locked onto the rodent fleeing through harried spatial currents.
"And you." A visceral hatred scalded Dolores's very soul. "You will scream as no other has screamed. Suffer as no other has suffered. I will paint a new ode to misery with your weeping skull!"
Celestial Omen: Gaia.
**
Freed of the ravenous hunger that had ailed him, Karma Bunny hedged a desperate escape through the inter-spatial void.
"Have we any hope?" dourly asked Lance.
"The Origin Tofu ebbs as we speak," said Anlîthëma, shaking its dome. "Look, he's already down to the Heavenly Mandate realm."
"Heavenly Mandate ... Wait! Boss, do you remember—"
"Yes, I do!" blared Karma Bunny's heaving cadence. "Excellent suggestion, Employee Lance! If we survive, name a reward; you'll have it!"
"Anything?"
"Watch it ... I'm sober now. Mostly."
"Damn."
**
Dolores's planet form shuddered, beckoning a Dao of equal measure to the Samsara that had racked her so.
Limbs of mountain chains erected in heavenly spans about her sides; a head of volcanic isles helmed her body, which had flattened into a monolithic cuirass; and a war hammer, fashioned from the moon itself, entered her grip.
"We hunt, Luna," she whispered, planting a kiss upon her weapon's shaft.
Tracing the rabbit's course, Dolores hefted Luna to her shoulder's apex.
**
"I ... didn't know you could do that," mumbled Karma Bunny, bracing himself from a tide of shattered space.
A screech beyond sound.
He lapsed into unconsciousness.
**
When Karma Bunny awakened, he found his battered body dangling by his throat amid a sea of asteroids. Eyes of belching lava bored into his own, searing cataracts across his retinas.
"Why?" ground a chorus of thunder and wind. "If your answer pleases me, I may knock a century off your torment."
"Because—" Karma Bunny choked on bloody mucus. "Because ..."
"Because what?"
"The First Mandate! By law—"
"SHUT UP." The Overseer sought to crush his windpipe.
She succeeded.
But Anlîthëma had taught him speech bereft of flesh. All he needed ... was his soul.
"—of the Orthenian Courts, I demand my right to trial!"
Overseer Dolores nocked her arm with a closed fist. "You shut—"
"Sanctioned. Supreme Judiciary Lugh has been selected to preside over your case. Stand by for transport."
A wreath of glyphs wound the grappling duo, forcefully shrinking them to proper human scale. Then, after a blinding flash, they stood over opposite podiums at a jade amphitheater's center.
"Good afternoon, fellow Daoists. Please be seated.
"We are here today to commence the proceedings of Dolores v. Death Bunny, Case Number RA881755.
"I want to remind the Daoists in attendance to maintain respectful decorum. This includes disabling or stowing all spiritual artifacts to avoid disruptions.
"Counsel for the plaintiff, you may proceed with your opening statement."