[Warpworld] Ch 45 – The Touch of the Warp

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            “I can feel their touch in the Burning of the vivus. Their influence is out there and constant, and if you let it in… well, we went through that once, and this time you would be TRYING to sense it, instead of trying to ward it away.

            “You are doing exactly the right thing. We have come almost a quarter-mile in the time it should have taken us to come a mere fifty paces. Your Waves of Weight are slamming into the holes I am punching and driving deep and true into the Warp, even if you can’t sense it. I can feel the microtears in the edge of the Rift with every crashing impact, and the way power has to be expended to heal them.

            “If the Warp Gods weren’t actively reinforcing the Rift, we would have closed in a mile or more, simply by the Waves you are sending in.

            “Keep at it. We’re doing exactly what we need to do.”

            My shooting off of volleys of Shards had not stopped, the tonal bells of their detonations a balm of Thunder, rather than a distraction and annoyance.

            “You are nails, and we are the hammer…” Master Artlis breathed out.

            “Yes. And what you are doing is going in ALL the nail holes, every time,” I confirmed. “There’s no need to doubt. You are doing exactly the job you need to be doing.”

            “I will so inform the others. As you said, the lack of feedback from the magic was raising some doubts among them.” He rose to return to his people.

            “Tell them I apologize for the showiness of my spells, and I’d pick a more modest form if it were more effective,” I half-laughed, and he had the grace to chuckle slightly as well.

            Then he tilted his head. “Could you make it visible, with an adjustment to your music?”

            “Elder,” I replied softly, “sensory infiltration includes the visible. Do you really want to see what the Warp is going to show you when your magic crashes into it?”

            He almost recoiled, and I could almost hear the silent curse he bit back as he realized he’d fallen into temptation again.

            There was no need to say more, especially given his embarrassment. Master Artlis spun around and stalked away, irritated with himself and how he had slipped, doubtless examining his own thoughts and wondering how he had been so compromised.

            Elves lived with their magic, organic channels for it, and so were tied much more closely to it than humans were. It was the equivalent of doing work with bare hands, compared to doing work with mail gauntlets on. Humans had to use tools, elves grew intimate with their magic.

            The meshing of their magic with the saurids and the lack of feedback when it hit their target were off-putting. Even Elder Sethanon, trapped all those years in the mana vortex, would have received constant feedback from the vortex on its state and the energies moving through it.

            Throwing something and not being able to see if it really hit its target, or hear the impact, or feel the resistance from the target, made the task a drain and incredibly boring, a strain for the elves to indulge in.

            They weren’t warded by a Heavenbound Pact, among other things, Truth resonating in it and protecting me from a lot of lies being fed my way.

            The Warp Gods were out there, and they were still looking hard for a way to get at us, there was absolutely no doubt of that.

            While it wasn’t ‘fine’, it was expected, and we just had to be wary of it. The showiness of my spells was actually a protection against their influence, trying to infiltrate by sound and sight and smell and sensation. Thunder tolling, Primal energies exploding in Warp-eating vivus, the chiming and crackling of the Walls and the vortex of purified air they kept in motion… it was all there just to block all of the subtle crap the Warp Gods were trying to pull.

            Insidious shits.

-------

Time passes…

            A quarter-mile. Two-thirds of a mile. Two miles in. Five miles in.

            The elves and the saurids were doing their Ritual on Disks now, slowly and constantly moving forward, throwing the Weight at the Rift whose edge had peeled slowly and constantly back, forced back abruptly and even further at each dawn as a new day stole across us.

            The Warp Storm tactic had cost the Warp Gods easily a week of delaying us, which was just fine by me. The mortal realm was whelming, and the Warp Gods were now a little frantic, slowing us down as much as possible.

            It should only be another five days to full closure, given the way the Rift was starting to buckle from all the attacks on it. Now it was they who were on a time limit, not us!

            I carefully didn’t look at the shit they were trying to pull with the vortex above, being subtle and sly about it, trying to make it look like part of the whipping wind from the temperature differentials.

            They were extending out their influence toward the Warped Moon, pulling at it.

            This wasn’t the only place they were reaching from. The Land was happy to point out at least a dozen weak points in reality they were reaching out from, hauling at the very bright moon, pulling it in and down and back towards where it had once come from.

            Its burning impact would explode the Rift back open and herald the end of the world, the sky truly falling.

            They probably attributed its slipperiness and how hard it was to pull on working through lesser Portals to do so. Not on the fact it was on vivic fire.

Still, it was a huge chunk of Warpstone, and that Warpstone wanted to be out of here. It was actually being pushed towards the big hole out of this reality, it was just hard to guide it precisely that way.

            I added some additions to the Seals and Circles I was putting in place, lost in their protective effects, even as over a hundred miles of Walls of Fire were now wrapping around the Warpzone, threatening to either encircle it entirely if it grew smaller, or to grow higher and higher and Burn even more of it in an imbalanced manner.

            I followed the Warped Moon through the gravity awareness of the world, the tracks it left as its orbit decayed, and its course shifted ever north, towards ‘home’.

            I was sure the people on the planet were getting a mite bit panicky as the Warped Moon grew in the sky, passing by day and night now as its orbit decayed and grew faster, trailing bits of whiteness across the sky that Burned out behind it… instead of falling as new corruption and mutation to the ground below, as they had in the past.

            I was kind of impressed they weren’t rash enough to send something crashing out of the Warp, trying to reach us. I guess they could learn from mistakes, as the most anti-magical of them had gotten his fingers stung, and the magical one was just going to be bringing in more fuel for me.

            I knew the Dreadskull of the Avatar of Klaw was certainly going to be eager to see them again. It definitely loved its job atop Mortus Dius, clawing and burning at the Warp, giving back to the Warp Gods as they had given to others.

-------

            “Master Aelryinth! Do you know what is going on?”

            Side effect of being trapped inside a Pyramid Domain howling with unguessable amounts of vivus being interjected into the Land: You don’t know what the heck is going on outside.

            “The Warped Moon is on final approach, Master Artlis!” I called out to him over the equivalent of the stiff wind blowing over everything now. Aeromancy kept it away from the Casters, but it was pure atmospheric pressure, and even blowing across the vivusfall coming from the top of the Warpeater Pyramid’s Dome up there.

            He looked at me as if I was mad or daft or, well, anything. Instead, I was so blasé about it I could have been talking about last year’s grape harvest.

            “By your demeanor, it seems we have little to be scared about, having a moon fall onto us?” he finally asked, endeavoring to keep his face as calm as mine.

            “Everything is happening right on schedule, actually. I’m going to end up leaving here pretty shortly, sorry to have to close your Warp Rift here and run and all.” I tilted my head back to look up at the cyclonic funnel that was now roaring up the outsides of the Warp Rift, fed by Holy flames and a lot of vivic hunger. Spirals of glowing light wound about the Rift as the energy of the Warp being devoured fed a massive pressure differential, and the winds were roaring.

            Roaring, not howling. And every time my Shards detonated, they sounded like a chorus of Thunder helping to shake the world. When the Weight of the World came crashing in, they crescendoed high and hard enough to shake the blood in your veins.

            Inspiring stuff.

            “Will we see it coming?” he asked shortly, following my gaze and trying to look beyond the warring mix of Warp and Vivic energies playing feed-the-continent up there.

            “About two minutes before it hits, the gravito-etheric interference should force aside the Warp and open up the sky. It should be quite the sight. Will be about fifteen minutes from now.”

            Master Artlis’ fingers clenched on his staff. “And you weren’t going to warn us?”

            “Well, sure, in about ten minutes. Should be just enough time for you to finish up and brace for the end of the old world, and the beginning of the new one.”

            There were no eyes of mine to meet with condemnation, and the elf could only sigh. “It has all fallen within your estimations?”

            “Well, I wasn’t expecting four of their champions to die rather abruptly, along with their successors, and that kind of threw off their ability to exert power as suddenly there was a lot of infighting among their servants, and they were a bit distracted. Actually getting them back on the job took some teasing from me. You may have noted a taunting element to the Shard detonations over the past couple of days, goading them back on task.”

            Actually, he had. “I had wondered if my ears were playing tricks on me,” he admitted slowly.

            “Nope. If there’s one thing that the Warp hates, it is defiant, snarky, sprightly cuteness taunting them. They really can’t stand it, being the shits that they are.”

            “And you will be departing?”

            “There’s going to be a big boom. There’s going to be a vivic wave sweeping across most of the planet. You’ll be absolutely fine with the Pyramid here, don’t worry. I’ll be heading on my way home, the Rift will be sealed, and this planet will be out of its time loop.”

            “The Warp Gods?” Master Artlis asked hesitantly.

            “Oh, are they going to have headaches!” I smiled and nodded back to him.

==========

            Well, this is it.

            The sky seemed to explode open. The energies of the Warp were blown back clear to the horizon almost instantly, opening up the whole magnificent northern sky to us, a wild kaleidoscope of auroric energies in the sky… and something big and white cutting across them towards the cyclonic funnel that was the Warp Rift.

            It was much bigger across than the Rift was, and it was coming right for us. Even if some of it went back into the Rift, the rest would impact here, and that would be that. Dropping a moon on a mortal was a pretty effective way to kill them.

            Alas, alas…

            The spirals winding around the Rift rippled once as the weight of a whole lot of Warpstone fell upon them, and they began to billow in place without moving much, while the top of the funnel up there started to open up, distorting with Fire and Light and the protests of the Warp, opening, opening…

            You had to be really, really sensitive to magic to feel the jerk. If you could feel the Veil and dimensional physics, then what you might have sensed was someone uncorking a drain.

            Right now the Warped Moon was being forced at us, but it was also completely ablaze with vivic fire, and the pressure of that was riding the Veil on it, trying to force it out of this dimension, and in any event making it slippery, hard to control, and consuming any random Warp-stuff the moon might be throwing off.

            Right ahead of it was now a yawning void of ‘Shove Moon Here, Please’, and the space inside that was magnifying by the moment as the vivus worked the Veil, teased it back and open and increased the internal dimensions of the Warp with a Seal made of Fire and Light, a hundred times bigger across on the inside than the outside.

            It was a massive drain all that dimensional pressure forced the Warped Moon towards with all the weight of an infinite dimensional plane behind it.

            It dropped on us like a moon. I could see vivic storms playing across the landscape of gibbously growing rock, Warp energies cracking and catalyzing as they were broken, consumed, and propelled the moon down like a rough rocket, something the Warp Gods had not even expected and were likely gleeful of as they directed it where to go.

            But their route was now perfectly centered on the Warp Rift, and as storms grew and blazing mountains towered closer at miles per second, what could they do to things not being quite what they seemed as I opened a virtual door into their Rift more than large enough to admit this moon.

            And then what were they going to do when it came through the convenient passageway?

            It really was moving too quickly, but I thought really fast, and I watched the leading edge of it touch the very tip of the vortex awaiting it. It seemed to shrink grandly, magnificently, compressing down as the internal space was so much bigger right there, fully capable of fitting the moon within it.

            The hand of Creation shoved the ball down the hole, and I smiled.

            A moon of explosives was just shoved down into the Warp, a whole lot of Reality in a place where Reality was anathema, and its energies were gasoline being thrown on the largest of all bonfires.

            The screams of the elves and defiant roars of the saurids were just reaching my ears as the moon poured itself into that funnel over the space of two or three seconds, and then abruptly the sky was clear, save for a sparkling trail of vivus spreading out along its back trail and incidentally wiping out the wild magic auroras as it touched them.

            Then Reality trembled. Within the cyclonic tempest of the vastly-shrunken Rift, from deep inside a heart nowhere near as close as it seemed in space and time, a Light turned on, soft and white and seen more with the soul than the eyes.

            I laughed and stood up, Mortus Dius reaching for the sky, and then I fed a whole lot of the Warp to Creation itself as unwhite Light covered all, while something beyond the Veil screamed in pain and outrage as holds on space and time broke forever.

            Magic activated, the Formation glowed beneath me, and I was off on the next leg of my journey home.

            On my Assay, a new Title scrolled slowly and gratefully into being, an addendum to Champion of Creation: Warp Breaker.

---

            Behind me, a wall of vivus a hundred miles high swept out and across the globe. Anything Warped in the way was going to permanently regret seeing it, changes and mutations and deranged alterations of man and beast Burned pure and clear and away.

            Those seeing it would call it the End of the World, and they were right.

            It was also the beginning of a new one, as the grip of the Warp Gods on this planet was forever broken, and their destiny was finally their own.

            And there was a Briggs and a Sama Rantha totally willing to fight to make sure that they didn’t take the wrong roads, too...

============

            An indeterminate amount of time later…

            The crystalline chrysalis lowered from the bottom of the Warpeater Pyramid, unnoticed by those who had set up camp around the pure white stone of the Edifice, floating there at the top of the world and pulsing with all the magic of the Land.

            The sides of the crystal fell away, and the being within gasped and blinked and took a step before finding their balance.

            She looked at her pale hands, looked down, lifted dark eyebrows, and just shook her head as silver-tipped black hair fell down about her.

            “Sylune definitely messing with us all,” she murmured.

            She looked up underneath the Pyramid where the cloning chamber was, saw the stack of clothes, the Staff and two Rings lying atop it, and smiled in spite of everything.

            “Sure, sure, leave me behind to help clean up the mess,” she muttered to herself about herself, a gesture enough to send the simple tunic and trousers swirling about her and into place. The Staff and Rings followed suit, both of them fully Empowered and ready to go to work, save that they had no Intelligence or similar status, as they had not been linked to a living soul to grow.

            That was her job, to Name them and grow them.

            “At least there’s a native Briggs and Sama here,” she mused, wondering how well those had done in the time it took to grow a Clone. 

            Well, easy enough to find out when she tracked them down and found out, right?

            Whistling to herself and wondering what a former Warpworld might become, she crouched down and slid towards one side of the Pyramid that looked to have nobody about it. She really didn’t want to explain herself to anyone, plus she had to give herself a new name, regardless.

            “Time to bring the Human Tradition to humanity,” she mumbled to nobody in particular, as she slid towards the edge of the Pyramid thrumming contentedly above her, and her new life.

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