[Hlaeth] Ch 10 - Old Fossils with some Teeth

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            They were acting as if they weren’t paying attention to me and they’d get to me in time, but at the same time they were definitely probing at me, trying to read me and my link to the manafield, no doubt spooked by the power of what had gone on here and realizing that it was me who had done such a thing.

            What that translated into in normal time was sit there and wait patiently until they were done.

            I, of course, did no such thing. I took it as a teaching moment and I surveyed everything they were doing, openly and blatantly.

            They could feel it, too. I was paying attention to it all, on every level, and I could see everything they were testing out and trying without much effort. They were, in effect, teaching me how they wove High Magic with every moment I patiently stood there and watched them at work.

            It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand the underlying how of what they were doing, I could totally decipher the end results and what they were accomplishing, and being the good student I was, I whipped up a Holo for the lesser elves around me to take a look at and see what they could see, and then started seeing if I could range out ahead of the extra Formations they were drawing and spinning once I adapted to their personal styles and feelings.

            Commander Tellusian and his golden dragon gaped openly at the Formation I was spinning up, obviously one of their High Magic patterns and so something they likely had never seen in such detail in their lives. I barely held back whistling as I worked, and thus letting the manafield Sing with me, as I watched what the High Mages were doing.

            “Ho, Commander, Wurdtrue,” I addressed them two of them directly. “Your High Mages are having trouble reading across the Veil here, which is no surprise. They are over-emphasizing the dimensional penetration aspect of what they are putting up here, trying to find a resonance frequency that will allow them to reach through to the other side and sense what is going on there.

            “That’s probably not going to work at all, so they are wasting time, so we might be sitting here a while.

            “They’ll have much surer results with the ancillary Formation over here, which is measuring thaumic echoes that haven’t receded from the manasphere across a large area. I think this Formation is the source of the mana pulse you might have felt a couple minutes before the dawn, as they took a picture of the shifts across a broad area before Natural Renewal at sunrise swept it away. Given the primary focus of this spell isn’t going to go anywhere, why don’t we crack open that image and take a look at what it says…”

            Elven Commander and Dragon alike goggled as Detect Magic at IX+1, Behold the Uncertainty of the Fundamant, reached into the High Magic, copied the information preserved within it, and unwound it all into a much larger illusion all around us, the Holo still at such a basic level of magic that it didn’t impede what the High Mages were doing at all.

            I replayed back the Thaumic Echo from basically sunrise of the previous day to the moment of the recording as they watched in fascination.

            There was the breach of the initial Portal in a vast field of pale green and verdant life, the stains and Colors of the incoming magic black and red, wild and savage and incredibly solid and powerful, making both elves and dragons around all hiss at the implications.

            The Dimensional Rupture followed, blanketing the whole display in a writhing, jagged shaking and slashing of the bones of reality itself, splitting apart everything living in the area as space was severed and things came apart if not strong enough to resist. The swirling thick green Nature magic as the Elder Trees locked down space were blazing pillars of resistance that formed windbreaks for all those behind them as the destabilizing magic of the Rupture spilled out and cut through everything in its path.

            Then came the brilliant explosion and disruption of the Portal through which all this had happened, the clarity and brightness of it like a crystalline knife slicing through the darkness. The Portal had shattered and collapsed in on itself as the massive amount of magic involved had been sucked back inside and gone somewhere, but not before vomiting up the brilliant source of that disrupting magic, which had flashed across the massive length of the area of effect and slammed into the great Elder Weirwood miles from the point of origin.

            The first threads of darkness were already starting to collapse on the massive circle of shattered and slaughtered life, the pulsing green vanished and a hollow emptiness left behind that the darkness was stealing in to fill faster than life could regrow there.

            A short time later, streaks of color came in from the west, and I zoomed down in on them, seeing living humanoid forms with Nature magic clinging to them moving through the hollowing, drained Colors of the forest, heading for a seared line of true emptiness along the path of that brilliant pulse ending at the great Weirwood, and then events unfolded as the elven scouts had reported.

            My own use of magic blazed up with a casual intensity that radiated for an astonishingly small area around myself, electrum in hue… and absolutely nothing else discernible about it, although the manafield around quickly lit up and wound itself into a brighter harmonious pattern my Astral Ward didn’t conceal.

            The emergence of Feature, clearly bound to my Aura, the pulsing of the Weirwood, and then the first wash of Heavenly Wrath manifested as a narrow, blinding, crystalline pulse of prismatic radiance awash with a dozen hues and colors, lancing down and erecting a Wall of absolute denial in the fading green and across the thickening black, consuming both completely and starting to spread… while underneath them, the green began to grow with visible speed.

            Thence the crisscrossing as vivus began to grow in depth and intensity behind me, the elves arrived on their flying mounts, and events occurred as everyone had witnessed.

            My appropriation of the magical wood had been concealed and diffused into the vivus I was naturally synced into. If they were looking specifically for it at the right time and place, they might be able to find and see it, but eh. Punishing me for taking dead wood would be in very bad form, and they’d likely just ignore it, even if they did see it.

            When the night fell, a literally sweeping line advancing across the green, the way the black thickened in the areas it still remained was both shocking and alarming… but it didn’t matter to the white stealing forward, and the green growing beneath that whiteness. The black was slowly eaten away, devoured, and the green beneath swirled and was ready to erupt forth with new life.

---

            All in all, it was quite a show. Elves and dragons were murmuring and commenting as the Holo finished up just before the dawn, when the Echoes would have been purged from the landscape, eyeing me warily as they did so.

            The spell had also showed the High Mages arriving, and while they had Auras that were more intense at their core than mine, none of them were anywhere near as bright, nor did they make the manafield sing like mine did.

            Even their obvious leader over there.

            I eyed the robed elf, who was taller than his compatriots, silver hair almost wispy, an ethereal quality around him, his facial features longer and more fey than the other elves. He was almost invisible in the manafield, his control and synchronicity with it more pronounced than his peers, but that control also extended out further and farther than any of them in a moving bubble of control that dwarfed and swallowed all the others, and they probably barely realized it.

            A Thirty, I reckoned. Impressive, on its own merits. The eldritch fellow had to be feeling the call of higher realms pretty strongly by now, and was likewise defying it with his own strength of will… or, perhaps, the hard Veiling of whatever was encapsulating the planet was keeping him here, who knew?

            He had his own version of anti-Divination Wards up and I couldn’t tell anything about him that Feature wasn’t relaying with normal vision, except for that infiltration and subtle control over the manafield.

            However, like his compatriots, he’d finally given up on reaching past the Veil to see what was going on in aetheric space and just watched the replay with everyone else. I’d been commenting on things as I went along, pointing out angles of attack, and answering questions while proposing others that had a lot of interested and skilled spellcasters pondering the details of things I’d been pointing out, while casually deflecting inquiries about my own level of power as I did what needed to be done and cleansed the landscape of the incoming necromantic power.

            The High Mages had said little, drawing their own conclusions as everything played out, surreptitiously checking to make sure the data I was accessing hadn’t been altered or tampered with in every way. Their silence, if not approval, at least indicated I wasn’t tricking anyone or anything with what I was doing, and so the replay finished up without interruption.

            “Magos Aelryinth,” spoke up one of the two women among the six mages, the most ethereally beautiful, skin like snow, hair still black as a raven, emerald eyes sharp and gleaming with ageless wisdom. “It seems our people owe you a debt of gratitude for your swift and proper response to the incursion in our lands.”

            “The trees asked, and I couldn’t turn them down, Elder,” I demurred politely in excellent Elven, a response that drew raised eyebrows from several of them.

            “You were correct in your assessment, and we were unable to look past the Veil to see what became of our attackers. Do you perhaps have something you can show us as to the nature and dispensation of them?”

            “I can replay to you what happened just before I was blown through the Veil into your world here, if you desire to see it,” I replied affably.

            “If you would?” she returned, and I raised my hand and waved in a full bore Illusion.

            It replaced the standing world for the aetherscape I’d been rocketing through, making it look like we were streaking through the landless void between realms.

            “Here’s my first sight of the Portal forming between two worlds. The thaumic reading was necromancy, conjuration, powered by heaps of blood sacrifice. I brought up a Spellflare and dumped it on the connection just as the Dimensional Rupture they used for ground-clearing was sent out.” They watched the Pulse surge down the connection with grim expressions. “The Spellflare incandesced the spell and fed it backwards towards the source. The explosion of the dimensional connection blasted me through into the remnant of the opening in your Veil like a leaf getting sucked down a whirlpool…” the image abruptly froze for just a microsecond, magnifying across the distance between worlds, and a wildly jarring kaleidoscopic effect started going off on the opposite end happening there. “My last view of what went on before the Veil ejected me onto your island at rather too much speed.”

            I let my fiery transit into normality terminate at my very abrupt flattening against a certain weirwood’s bark, the impact sudden and sharp enough to make everyone there flinch in surprise.

            “Based on prior experience with Klein Bottles used on exactly this sort of invasion technique, I anticipate something like this happening back at the source.”

            A clearly fake and hypothetical image overwrote the Illusion all around us with the slamming impact of the Spellflare into the source of the really, really powerful magic, which suddenly went completely out of control and destabilized.

            Cubic miles of space tangled themselves up like spaghetti and sauce. Earth exchanged with sky, mass and substances stretched and twisted in ways no physiology could possibly be made for, all of it interfused with exploding blood magic and necromancy lighting off in the wildly uncontrolled explosions of life and soul-eating magic given happy and vengeful free rein.

            Then space snapped back to lines, except all the twisted exchanges were left behind, all the distorted bodies still stretched and bent and tangled, and the earth and sky were still swapped… except now King Gravity was bearing down.

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