VO 5.1: Arise

So much time has passed.

There had been no possible way to track time within his timeless prison. The interior was an endless indigo void, the exterior an unknowable darkness. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Nothing even existed, for all he knew — except for the prison and the prisoner, locked together in an eternal embrace of perfect stasis.

In the strange and inhuman eons that followed — days blurring into years blurring into centuries blurring into millennia — the captive drifted from sleep to drowsiness and back to sleep, consciousness itself becoming a fluid thing, neither fully awake nor truly dormant.

During the stretches of time when he was lucid enough to think, when awareness coalesced from the formless void of near-sleep, the Void-Crowned Emperor was able to stretch out his pitiful, diminishing reserves of power and analyze the nature of his prison.

It was, he had to admit with grudging professional appreciation, a masterwork.

Of course it was. For it was, after all, his research that made its construction possible in the first place.

The crystal was, essentially, a tremendously sophisticated spell container — but that description was like calling the ocean "wet water." The core structure was built not from matter, but from pure crystallized magic: and, more specifically, from layers upon layers upon layers of self-maintaining wards and binding enchantments and curses so intricate that simply perceiving it all at once gave him a headache that probably lasted for the first couple of decades.

There were hundreds of different spells woven into the crystalline matrix.

Thousands, even. He'd stopped counting the minor curse variations somewhere around the eight-hundred-and-fifty-sixths distinct magical signature, and that had been... when? A thousand years into his imprisonment? Two thousand? Time had little meaning in the endless void, and his mind had begun to fray at the edges from sensory deprivation and the slow, inexorable drain of being cut off from the world.

All of these spells — every ward, every binding, every curse designed to sap his strength, drain his titanic magical might, and prevent his escape — fed into one Master Enchantment. A spell so elegant in its construction, so perfectly balanced in its functionality, that it almost had to be of divine origin, for he could find no proper name for it in any of the mortal tongues he knew. He could only describe how it worked, and even that understanding had taken him literal centuries to achieve.

The Spell — and he thought of it with a capital letter, as if it were a living entity (a sentiment, perhaps, not too far from the truth) — drew energy from every action its prisoner took. Every casting. Every use of magic. Every conscious thought that reached beyond simple animal awareness. Quite simply, the more energy he expended on anything, the more power the crystal's many constituent spells received.

The Spell was vampiric in nature, feeding on his strength, using his own power against him in a perfect feedback loop.

But the true genius — the thing that had made him want to scream in frustrated admiration when he'd finally understood it — was that the crystal also drew energy from any outside influence! Any attempt to break the prison from without would only strengthen it instead, feeding more power into the self-sustaining matrix of enchantments.

In other words, the crystal could very well last even until the heat death of the universe itself, powered by the very immortal thing it imprisoned.

It was an incredibly ingenious construction, impervious to almost all attempts at breaking it from within or without.

Almost.

Because despite its arguable near-perfection, despite the years of planning that had clearly gone into its design, despite the combined genius of some of Atlantis’ best magical theorists working in concert — there was a weakness present.

He'd found it sometime in his third millennium of captivity, when rage and despair had finally given way to cold, calculating analysis.

While the Spell was indeed perfect, many of the monitoring and triggering enchantments connected to it had been designed using his own theoretical frameworks. After all, the rebel scum had stolen his research notes, believing, in their great arrogance, that using his own knowledge to destroy him would lead to some sort of poetic justice.

But the rebel Senators made one critical error. One tiny, infinitesimal mistake.

They'd assumed he wouldn't be able to improve upon his own work.

And Zorathar Kael-Tharon, Last Necromancer of Atlantis, Archmage of the Obsidian Tower, the man who had broken gods and bound their essence to his will, was nothing if not a life-long learner.

The imprisonment had given him the one thing he'd never had before while serving as Emperor: time. Unlimited, endless time.

To think.

To theorize.

To push his understanding of higher mathematics and magical theory far beyond anything he'd ever achieved in his first three insignificant centuries of life.

He'd begun by accepting the fact of his imprisonment. The Spell, he had discovered, worked on intention and emotion, drawing power from his very desire to escape. And so, he'd taught himself to simply… stop desiring. To exist in a state of perfect neutrality, his mind empty of hope or rage or fear.

He had learned how to just… be.

It had taken literal decades to master that state. Decades of meditation that would have likely driven a lesser mind completely insane (not that Lord Zorathar was ever truly known for his sanity to begin with). But gradually, infinitesimally, so slowly that progress would have been measured in centuries, the Spell's drain on his magic had lessened.

Not stopped, of course — it would never fully stop — but slowed to a trickle rather than a torrent.

And in that reduced drain, he'd found his opportunity.

Through the decades of minute probes that followed — magical investigations so subtle that they were barely even real at all — he'd finally mapped out the threshold. The exact level of energy he could expend at a certain rate before the Spell would activate its vampiric response and drain him dry once again.

And then he'd begun to test that threshold.

Pushing it.

Expanding it.

Gradually training the Spell to accept higher and higher levels of energy expenditure as the "normal" baseline before triggering its defenses.

This had taken him millennia.

Literal millennia of painstaking work, of testing and adjusting and refining. But slowly, painstakingly, the amount of magical energy he could safely manipulate had increased. And with that increased capacity, he'd begun his real work.

Sabotage.

Much of the prison might have been based on his past theoretical frameworks, but he'd since moved well beyond those frameworks. He'd innovated. Evolved. Thoroughly surpassed his past self. He had discovered vulnerabilities in his own work that he'd never even known existed.

And he'd used that knowledge to begin rotting the spell structure from within.

It was delicate work.

He couldn't simply break the wards outright — that would trigger alarms and the Spell’s vampiric response, undoing in the work of centuries in mere seconds.

No, instead, he had to weaken the enchantments slowly. Chip away at the edges of each enchantment, introducing tiny flaws, microscopic fractures in the magical lattice that held him prisoner.

He worked on the level comparable to molecules. To atoms. To scales so small they were barely even real at all. Changing crystallized magic at such scales was surgery. It was art at the highest level.

But slowly, over thousands and thousands of years, his prison began to fail.

Not catastrophically.

Not noticeably to any external observer.

But internally, structurally, the spell matrix had begun degrading. Wards that should have lasted until the stars went cold were now developing hairline cracks. Binding enchantments that should have held out for a blind eternity were fraying at the edges.

The crystal was rotting from within, like a tooth with hidden decay.

He'd estimated — though time had become so fluid that such an estimation was probably wildly inaccurate — that he would need perhaps another two millennia to finish the job.

Only another two thousand years of patient, methodical sabotage before the structure degraded enough that he could shatter it with a single, well-timed pulse of power from within.

He could wait!

After all, he'd already waited for so long that the difference between two millennia and ten barely even registered anymore.

…

…

…

But then, the scans had started.

The first hint that something was different had been subtle — a tingling awareness of something beyond the crystal. Of some external force pressing against the prison's outer shell. After so much time spent in a near total sensory deprivation, even that faint sensation had been overwhelming.

Light.

Movement.

Warmth.

Nearly forgotten concepts that had become almost mythical to him, filtered through the thick defenses of his prison in mere whispers of perception.

Then he'd been moved.

Lifted from wherever he'd been floating and transported to somewhere else.

And then… the energy assault had begun.

They were scanning him. Whoever had found his prison, whatever age this was, they possessed some means capable of directing enormous amounts of electromagnetic energy at the crystal's surface. Radiation cascades. Particle bombardment!

Unfortunately, every bit of that energy was being absorbed by the Spell and used to regenerate the damage he'd spent literal millennia inflicting.

He'd watched in frustration and rage — the first genuine emotions he'd felt in tens of thousands of years — as spell fractures he'd painstakingly introduced began to heal. As degraded wards reconstituted themselves right in front of him. As thousands of  years of careful sabotage were undone in mere weeks by the inadvertent feeding of external power into the spell matrix.

The idiots, he'd thought with growing anger. They're pouring more power into the Spell! If this continues, my work will be set back millennia!

But soon, then the situation had changed.

Rapidly. Violently.

Alarms had begun wailing beyond his prison.

He'd felt the vibrations through the crystal as something — explosions, spellfire? —shook the structure that contained him. The organized, methodical scans had stopped, replaced by pure chaos. Screams. The sharp, acrid taste of death mana as souls departed their bodies in violent, terrified bursts.

A battle! Someone was attacking whoever had found his prison!

And then, in a moment of fortune so absurd he might have laughed if he'd had the capacity, the crystal was impacted by something different.

Something designed to cut. To slice. To bore through solid matter.

The powerful beam had struck his prison with devastating force. The Spell had, once again, attempted to do what it was designed to do — absorb the energy, channeling it through the matrix, feeding it to the constituent wards and enchantments.

Except this time, the energy had come too fast. Too intense.

It proved too much for the already unstable matrix. The Spell, for all its elegance, had limits. Feed it slowly and it could potentially sustain itself forever. But flood a tiny section of it with more power than it could safely process—

And the whole structure would begin to overload.

He'd felt it immediately.

Felt the wards buckling under the strain.

Felt the carefully balanced energy flows becoming suddenly turbulent. Chaotic. The beam attack continued to pour energy into the crystal, and the Spell continued to try to absorb it, but it was like attempting to stop a tsunami wave by drinking it — the structure was tearing itself apart by even trying.

This was his chance, he realized. His only chance!

The time for patience was over.

He'd gathered himself, pulling together every scrap of power he'd hoarded over millennia, waking up every dormant reserve he'd carefully hidden away from the Spell's vampiric hunger. He'd compressed his magic into a point smaller than a subatomic particle, concentrating it with a precision that would have been considered impossible before his imprisonment; that was only possible now because it was him doing it, and he'd had literal thousands of years to refine his control.

All around him, the battle raged. He could hear it now, sounds filtering through the degrading crystal structure. Voices shouting. Some sort of weapons discharging. The wet, terminal sounds of bodies hitting the floor.

More deaths.

More souls departing.

Their final moments of terror and pain and desperate regret washed over him through the thinning barrier, and he'd lashed out, drinking deep of that abundant death mana, of that emotional resonance, using their fear as fuel, their dying screams as a catalyst.

When the red beam attack finally stopped, he'd been ready.

The spell he'd woven was an attack unlike any he'd ever attempted before.

It had taken him five hundred years just to theorize it, then another thousand to refine the mathematical underpinnings. It was part explosive decompression, part dimensional shear, part reality-fracture. It was magic at the absolute bleeding edge of possibility, drawing upon entirely new theoretical frameworks that might not even be valid, that might very well simply unmake him if he'd calculated wrong.

But he wasn’t wrong. Because he’d had seventy thousand years to prepare for this moment.

He centered himself for the last time, then released the compressed magic in a single, devastating pulse.

The explosion that followed was contained — barely — by a control mechanism he'd woven into the spell itself, a kind of barrier that ensured the entirety of its destructive potential was directed inward, at the crystal's structure, at the Spell's matrix.

The crystal shattered with the sound of a broken egg, in moment he would later find to be disappointedly anticlimactic.

And standing in the space where his ‘eternal’ prison had once existed, wreathed in dissipating magical energies and the slowly sublimating remnants of seventy thousand years of imprisonment, was Zorathar Kael-Tharon.

Free at last.