[Hlaeth] Ch 33 - Off to Observe Elsewhere

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            Clutching his prize, I saw the Leutnant off and watched the dwarven patrol move off back to the higher hills. Their station was ostensibly on the next mountain over, part of a lesser mine extending back into the stone and providing storage and living areas in a secure underground.

            Which left me to get a better view of the situation.

            The first thing I needed was range of vision, and breadth. That meant some Theurgy between my Mask of Clarity’s visual range, Shugenja sensitivity, and wrapping it all around Second Sight Cast from highest Valence, with Earth Spell giving its rote +1 for just that little bit more effectiveness at VIII+1.

            Work in a little Detect Dimensions, then some True Seeing to lay the world bare, layer all the spells into one another, and give myself some height so I could potentially see right to the horizon.

            Open up the spell carefully, and take a look to the… south and east…

            Huh.

            Without real eyes to get in the way, I was seeing purely by magic, and uh, this was pretty bad…

            I didn’t have to turn my head to pan back and forth, but I wanted to.

            Feature swirled up to full size in Dracoform, taking up the flying task underneath me as I stood there on him, surveying the world directly with magic in a way I had never really tried to before. Spiritually, dimensionally, magically, the Truth of the World…

            Within the range of my vision at this height, extending down and off into the distance of the foothills and valleys, there were over a thousand Apertures visible.

            I sat down on Feature as I shared with him what I was seeing, and his coils quivered in shock, as he couldn’t see anything out there.

            None of them were identical, either…

            I slapped my forehead, staring at what was going on out there. The subtle deterioration of reality happened on just air passing through those Apertures, was breathed in by living creatures, and accumulated planar energies. Once enough synergistic energies accumulated, they would roil and rise up, warping and mutating a Prime in the direction of those energies, turning them into a partial native of another world or realm.

            The contamination would be carried by the very air, so running waters would accumulate them, plants would draw them in, anything that inhaled would be susceptible, all with never going through an Aperture themselves.

            This… was planar instability on a massive scale. It was absolutely the obverse of a Veil that couldn’t be breached… and the strength of the Veil was likely the only thing preventing these from being full-blown Portals.

            The total disaster that would result from just a thousand Portals to alien realms manifesting was world-damning. I was completely familiar with how just a fraction of that number of such things could endanger a whole world.

            The Apertures extended off to the south and east. They weren’t lined up in a perfect order of lines marching in that direction, but the Apertures were aligned around a common point, and I could easily triangulate where they were coming from and follow the arc across the world to center the point on the source of this effect.

            Approximately right exactly where Eldritch the Elf-Mage had said it would be.

            I looked up, and studied the arching dome of the Apertures heading up into the atmosphere.

            I would not have laid odds that they weren’t appearing below the ground, although their effects would have been minimized with nothing actually moving through them.

            This was an unmitigated disaster of horrific proportions, and if the Veil wasn’t Sealed like it was, there wouldn’t be a planet here any more.

            It looked like the gods had done exactly what they were supposed to do.

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            Feature flew us east, skirting the edge of the Apertures hanging in the sky and across the lands below, following an extremely visible corruption of the land where discolored sand and stone grew thicker and stronger, the vegetation turning more and more yellow, running with random other colors that weren’t natural as they extended out to the south.

            I cataloged and marked every Aperture I saw automatically, because I could and had the feeling it was important. The dwarves' stories had informed me that Apertures came and went, nobody knew the timing or methodology.

            Then again, nobody had really been able to see them, either, according to the dwarves.

            It was rapidly easy to discern that every Portal had three traits assigned to it.

            The first was the easiest to discern, as it was Elemental designations. It extended from Prime/Normal all the way to the extremes of the Inner Planes, positive and negative energy. I could see Shadow, Ether, Dream, all the classic Elements and aspects of them, mixed and otherwise, subtle variations on each opening, so all the Apertures of Fire were to different aspects of Fire on a dimensional level, embracing different biases towards Plasma, Light, Heat, Lava, Ash, Smoke, and the like so they didn’t match.

            The second iteration went into the opposite direction, extending out the Astral and plane of souls to the Outer Planes that were destinations of the afterlives.

            Every Aperture thus had some form of Alignment Trait or other bias towards it, Sins, Virtues, Disciplines, and Emotions all equally represented, including Madness itself. There were touches of Heaven, flickers of deepest Sin, rigid things of Direction, and churning messes of Randomness mixed in with the Elemental energies to open a look into a unique world.

            The third Trait seemed centered on the Mortal Realm entirely, like pocket planes or alternate realities. Dominant life forms seemed to change drastically between places, worlds around distant suns or with alien skies or environments. They might be fantastic or primitive, barren or full of wildly primal life forms.

            ‘Prime’ seemed to be the only Trait that crossed all three scales. Prime on the Elemental side meant a mixed and balanced mortal world. Prime on the Outer Side meant a blending ground of non-dominant Alignments, perhaps only animal life there, different balances of magic or science or other forces at work on them. Prime on the Mortal standard meant it was probably a truly baseline alternate reality, likely similar to the one I was standing on, leading to a parallel dimension or world in the Mortal Realm.

            Potentially infinite realms in an infinite multiverse. I could appreciate the fantastic wonder of all these places being accessible and what might be discovered in each of them, and the utter damnation they would bring if they all opened at the same time.

            Air, Heaven, Magic might be showing a glimpse into a radiant realm of cloud cities populated by angels and other Celestials, winged beings flying around in joy as auspicious rainbows glittered and The Light favored everything below fondly. Water and Law/Evil and Spirit turned up a world populated by great hordes of creatures engaged in frenzied slaughter of one another on the surface and in the depths, icthyoid armies clashing in fests of gore and massacre with energy and enthusiasm, a kraken’s tentacles passing through the Aperture and for a moment an eye larger than my head looking through it back at me, trying to capture my will and mind…

            I frowned as I listed out traits and subdivisions of them. Truly almost nothing matched. After passing ten thousand Portals I only found three on the Mortal side that seemed to indicate ties to the same Mortal Realm, so infinite variations might not be infinite, per se, but so large as to render predicting them moot.

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            “Hold!”

            There was a shimmer and a shifting, and at least a third of the Apertures in my current vision vanished together. At the same time, new Apertures opened in new places and positions… and every single one of them had a new Elemental indicator!

            We’d been flying leisurely for two days while I followed the edge of the effect. Abruptly, the whole sky I was studying swept… down from above, as if a great wheel had turned towards me, revolved, and the closing of so many doors now had opened new ones.

            I wasn’t sure what the trigger for this effect was, but the results were obvious. Some Apertures closed, others were unaffected, but all the new ones that opened up were different from the ones that had vanished close to them entirely.

            I eyed a Wood-Death-Insect Aperture a short distance away, looking out into a dark world of pale towering trees and brooding forests, replete with miles-long webways and mounds of towering hives and insect nests… and uncounted millions of insects writhing in endless conflict, killing one another, carrying the carcasses back to their nests to be food for the next generation, uncaring of the mindless stupidity of it all, only there to live, fight, and die, becoming fodder for future directions to eat so they could grow up and kill.

            I saw a hillside move, and realized it was a beetle the size of an aircraft carrier, with a nest the size of a castle on its back as it plodded forward in the distance, and a moving field of smaller beetles writhed over the living surface around it.

            Mmm. Yes, let’s go exploring, not.

            So, exposure to endless numbers of other worlds, a whole very large bunch of them just not places you wanted connections to. And those connections changed randomly in time, place, and destinations.

            Now I was going to have to observe the changes, see if they were actually on a schedule or randomized. If you didn’t know about the traits of each Aperture and they had different trigger lengths, the switches might seem completely random. Also, it didn’t look like they converted all of them at the same time, so either a random element to that or the ‘spin’ was of variable length.

            If this was a sphere, and the other traits represented other rotations, I was looking at a three-way possible rotation from the effect. Easy enough to follow and track by keeping watch.

            Patience now, more than anything else, while I figured what else to do.

            I couldn’t access my Sanctum personally under this Veil, which was annoying. I could message Ices, who basically just mostly slept regardless, or went for the occasional ice slide. Automated Phantasmal Servants could be re-tasked on various endeavors by the homunculi, no reason not to be productive just because I wasn’t there to watch over everything.

            So, I was going to have to keep myself busier out here. I’d dumped the cuttings from the Magic Trees into my Sanctum, so the Servants were busy running about planting those things, while the Simulacra would be Energizing base materials day and night, doing alchemy, making consumables, and basically expending all their spell capacity each day if possible. They couldn’t make true magical items, however, so the things they did had to be on the science or alchemy side.

            That was fine. I had lists and lists of stuff they could work on, especially since the Laws in my Sanctum were a bit less strict as far as technology went…

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            It took over ten more days for the field of Apertures to rotate through all three axes of a sphere. It rotated through the Elemental X-axis once every three days, through the Mortal Y-axis every eight days, and through the Outer Z-axis every thirteen days. The whole ensemble spun only once if the days happened to converge as X and Y did, but on days when more than one axis went off, they also seemed to convert a higher percentage of Apertures than just 1+1 numbers.

            Still, even on multi-days, not every new Aperture switched both Traits, some just converting a single one.

            If the pattern held, there’d only be a triple convergence every 312 days. In the meantime, there’d be partial shifts on a random basis every few days, with no promises for an existing Aperture to go away, nor any kind of preference for older Apertures to be taken away first, as some Apertures had already been popped three times among those I’d seen.

            Now, I had to plan my approach to Houme, and whatever secret it was hiding there, with creatures and powers that had encouraged Eldritch the Eternal Elf Mage not to investigate more closely.

            Mmm.

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