Stairway to Heaven

[Caden Law]

Caden felt his body give out. His soul wasn't going to last much longer afterwards. He had spent too much power, and he knew well the risks that entailed. Blood didn't boil so much as it froze its way up through his throat. His nerves shut down and his joints felt empty, useless. The only thing holding him up after a while was the tomb of ice slowly growing in and around him. Veins were bursting. He could see but he knew his eyes were already useless. He could hear but the eardrums had burst. He could smell but the only scents on the air were blood and fire and a pungent, overwhelming mint.

Blueraven was hitting him with multiple spells at once. Taking his sweet time because there was no other way to do in a Sorcerer unless you were one. Caden knew as much from bitterly earned experience. He could still remember wondering how it felt every single time he had ever ripped the life or the energy out of something. Or someone. Now he knew.

"It won't be so bad after it's over," Blueraven finally assured him as he lowered the scalpel and looked Caden in the eye -- or perhaps in the soul, at this point. "You'll live on, after a fashion. In me, just like the rest of my shadows and aspects. Can you feel it yet?"

"No," the Sorcerer rumbled, his Voice operating independent of a mouth that had frozen shut from the inside out. He could no longer breathe. He didn't need to. He was cold. He was so far beyond cold that the word didn't even have a meaning for him anymore. He was not going quietly. Or at least not willingly.

There was nothing he could do but delay.

But every second delayed was another second lived.

There was still so much he wanted to do. So many things he had planned. So many people he wanted to see, even if it was just one more time. Veshua, maybe. Cadence, just to see what she was like, to wonder what it would've been like if he had been her father instead. His friends from Scara Brae to Salvar to Raiaera -- yes, they were friends, and he had never acknowledged it even to himself, because a Wizard is alone. But he was a Sorcerer too. And he had wanted to go back to Raiaera, back to Beinost and the College Arcana. In his dreams, he never wrote it down, but in his dreams he saw himself growing old and happy as the College's first Archwizard. He saw himself raising a daughter that wasn't his, and maybe a plethora of children who were, and they'd all have futures because Daddy paid for it in blood, sweat, tears, and triumphs. He saw himself holding hands with Neesal. He saw himself cracking jokes with old colleagues. He saw himself dying peacefully in his sleep after several centuries of making the world a place worth living in.

He didn't see himself dying like this.

But this was how it was going to happen.

Murder-by-temporal suicide, just before the end of the world.

Caden could no longer feel anything physical. He couldn't move so much as a single muscle and the last tethers binding his body and soul were stretching taut to the point of breaking. He closed his mind's eye to happy thoughts.

And with neither a mouth nor a throat nor anything else, the Sorcerer Spoke his last act of defiance.

"I'm not making it easy for you."

[Caden Law]

The Sorcerer Blueraven died with neither a bang nor a whimper. He just expired. Cold and alone under the eyes of his Wizarding Namesake.

The other Caden -- the only one left now -- regarded his reflections, the one in the ice and the one beneath it. He couldn't stop from grinning but it was a hopeless, broken grin. He had seen the future and it was grim. Dark. Hellish. But he would be fine, he knew that much. Everything was going exactly as the secret pages claimed. He liked to think of them as Greyspine's intellectual marrow; the source of all his lies and manipulations, the guiding core of it all.

There was a slow building flare of gold light within the ice. Caden watched it travel up and down his other self's corpse, starting at the feet and ending at the crown of the head. It doubled. It tripled. And then it all collapsed into the dead man's stomach and consumed him in a flashing pillar outside of Space but so, so close to Time.

The Wizard shuddered as he felt himself inheriting what was already his: power, prestige, authority. All the responsibility he couldn't care less for, all the power he wanted, not a shred of accountability; not even to the tattered remnants of his own blighted conscience. Magic surged underneath his skin, lighting up the paths of power between his body and soul. He began to laugh again, and then he Laughed. It was a sound both gritty and electric, reverberating within itself and carrying an actual, physical weight that jarred loose dust and loose dirt, clearing the air as it rung out into the night. Here and now, he was king of the graveyard, the tyrant out of Time, out of place. He was the Sorcerer Blueraven of N'Thayn'sal, slowly but inevitably shrouding himself in all his terrible glory. Screams echoed under the thundering chorus of his Voice.

And yet the changes were physical, and not just in the appearance of a Mark on his face or the network branded under his skin. He grew, up and out, acquiring muscle and scars, scaling until he matched the height of his fallen self. Power sparked about him, ravens made out of feathering lightning and congealed sound. His Laugh built its way to a truly primal Scream, that of a Sorcerer born anew. The ice before him cracked and broke, leaving behind nothing at all. Even his other self's Hat was gone, as neatly as if it had never been there at all. Resonant shard staff, the Wand of Nevermorrow; all of it was gone. All that remained was the Sorcerer, grinning fierce and mad at a night full of hateful stars.

When he was done with the theatrics, Caden hunched forward on his hands and knees. He glared at the ground around his feet and reached out with his extra senses. Lines began to etch themselves into the dirt, carving brightly into the air itself. It began to snow as he blended powersets into one another, something that was like inhaling and exhaling all at once -- simple in theory, virtually impossible in practice, and yet he made it seem simple.

"Now falls the curtain and mine is the hand to bring it down. Now I put out the stars and the eyes of the Gods on high. Now I finally understand the conversation I had with Greyspine. And now I do my awful work."

Power lit up along a hundred lines and a thousand spirals. It was the basis for a resurrection spell, the pebble to start the avalanche that would, eventually, awaken the elder thing at the heart of the moon. There would be another battle to precede the next War in Heaven, the murder of the Thaynes, as the one god's servants raged against one another in an orgy of violence like none the world had seen in eons. This would awaken the moon's prisoner, who would awaken others, and then others still. Soon enough, the stars would go out. And then the Thaynes would turn on one another. N'jal was going to eat V'dralla, and it'd all be downhill from there as civil war compounded heavenly war. Thus would N'Thayn'sal come to pass, a supersentient chain of events imposing itself onto every level of existence, the God Untouchable and Unseen.

The God Unstoppable.

"LET THE END COME!

"LET IT ALL GO WRONG!

"I YIELD TO THE THOUSANDFOLD APOCALYPSE OF N'THAYN'SAL!"

He triggered the spell.

[Savas Tigh]

Light flashed and absolutely nothing happened.

Resurrection hit a wall and rebounded into itself, canceling out of existence with little more than a puff of smoke here or there, at worst.

"I beg to differ," Spoke the Dark Wizard Wormaxe, kneeling down in the dark several hundred feet from where the Sorcerer stood. He wasn't much of a savior. He was a scruffy, dirty, blood-stained bearded maniac clad in the tattered remnants of a long coat and a soldier's uniform, all of it black and worn through battle damage and worse. He held a wand in one hand, a carved bone from a man's forearm, and his other hand rested on the ground. At his fingertips and spreading for what looked like a quarter of a mile in either direction was a circle. It glowed silver and cold, lined with green and purple, and every single letter was a sideways rune etched into the ground and the air by concentrated shadow and tiny particles of smoke and ash. It spoke volumes where the man himself might have seemed unimpressive and perhaps even monstrous in his own right. And he was.

But he was also the last thing standing between the worlds of Althanas and N'Thayn'sal, the one man who could hope to stall Armageddon for just one more day.

Here and now, in this darkest of all places, at this darkest of all hours, the only hero left was a villain.

Caden glared at him with such ferocity that it boiled bloodtains from Savas' clothes, but the Wizard merely grinned. "The world is mine to conquer. I'm not about to let you destroy it without a fight."

"What did you do?"

Savas grinned fiercely. "I shut down your Wizardry, old boy. I used smoke and shadow to do it. Those were always my first affinities, you know. Or do you? Judging by your power shift, you gained something from my mentor's passaging, didn't you? But it wasn't everything. Just the tangible stuff. Not the power or the tactical knowledge. Blueraven knows my power as well as I do, but you don't."

"I could be lying," the Sorcerer answered.

"Ohhhh, I doubt that. I'd be paste on the ground if you knew me well enough."

"...then what's your gameplan, Wormaxe? Just going to stand there and talk me to death?"

The Dark Wizard just grinned, disquietingly, with great big blocky teeth and hungry eyes.

Blueraven sneered so hard there were neon shadows in the crevices of his face. "Your counterspell had to be strong enough to shut down your own magic the moment you set foot in it. I can still draw on Sorcery to power mine. You're a powerless half-wit failure of a mage standing alone in the presence of a Sorcerer. You can't win."

"Probably," Wormaxe admitted. "But there's something I should tell you first. Just to take the wind out of your sails."

Blueraven held out one hand and summoned a wand into it. Power crackled between his fingers, along the weapon's length, in the air all around him. Birds crowed in directions that could be neither named nor pointed to. Wormaxe stood, hunched forward. He left behind the bone wand and, with his other hand, drew the dragon's wing from his belt. His grin slowly receded, and something else happened too.

"I'm not alone at all."

His eyes were glowing blue.

[Savas Tigh]

Leaves crackled, powers mixed, fires burned, and the Dark Wizard Wormaxe burst forward veiled in an aura that began teal, blazed blue, and settled back to green. Dragon's wing swung forward and snapped open, the space between strides quintupled in less than the blink of an eye. Ground behind him simultaneously exploded and flash-froze, such that the fires themselves simply stopped cold. For a while, the Wizard continued to trail leaves, and then it was all fire, first blue and then green edged in black. This was as much a reconciliation as it was a last stand. This was shame compounded by secondhand nobility and a conscience that had, frankly speaking, never been there before.

This was what had to be done.

And in a small, dark, ill attended part of himself, Wormaxe knew that his mentor would have been proud of him right now. Just for that, if nothing else.

He had eaten souls and bodies, but he had never consumed friends. Savas had never even had friends. Aeraul was the first. Dying of battle wounds and with a clarity that the man had never known in his life, he willingly gave up the ghost. Savas took a bite out of his throat and inhaled his soul like smoke. It gave him the abilities he needed, combined with his own skill as a Necromancer, to reach out and find what was left of Rowan. He had to pull his other friend from a place that was beyond all comprehension, and even then he was only able to bring back the gist of him. Pieces were missing, torn off by whatever godsawful thing lay on the other side, so vast and monstrous that its presence still weighed on Wormaxe's senses even here and now.

He had already metabolized both of them. They were gone now, nothing left, and it had been a crash course in power retention to keep them from going to waste, the way he had spent all of Undulent Sin's power in the battle against Sijil Kar. It was a sacrifice. Savas wasn't sure how he felt about it.

There would be time to grieve later.

Savas was going to make damned sure of it.

"I murdered the skyrider at Icehenge and warred with a wild godling! Do you think this is going to work?" Blueraven called, sounding more insulting than angry. Savas hit the brakes in mid-air, forcing chi -- magic, whatever you'd like to call it -- into his feet and bringing traction where there wasn't even ground. Out came a wand, its spell readied from the get-go, its aim true.

Darkened missiles cracked and shattered all over Blueraven's wards, skulls breaking on metaphysical rocks.

It was nothing, but it kept Blueraven busy as Wormaxe tried to flank him. Every spell blocked, blasted apart, or countered was another spell Blueraven wasn't throwing at him. The Sorcerer didn't stay still, but his mobility was the movement of the ground around him. He wasn't going to dare risk flight. Savas had air superiority. He had speed. He had two big boots planted squarely in Blueraven's face, plowing through specialized wards like they weren't even there. Dragged along by the wing, it was like a swinging dropkick from on high, knocking the Sorcerer clear from a mound of moving dirt and sending him crashing moonward with a grunt and a curse. Savas touched down a few seconds later and whipped around, dragging the wing with him and sending a wave of shadow and fire where Blueraven landed.

Sorcery burst up through the attack and came back down in the likeness of a crow's beak, gouging out a dozen square feet of solid rock and dirt. The shockwave almost knocked Savas over. He fired off several more missiles without even bothering to look; the wand blew out of his hand from a lightning bolt, shattering so thoroughly that only grains of dust remained. Savas jumped clear on reflex and drew another, the ground exploding behind him. He fired off a few shots and only too late realized Blueraven wasn't there anymore.

The Sorcerer was coming down on him from above.

Inside of a Siege Arcana.

[Savas Tigh]

A great obsidian raven sprouted from the ruins of a nameless street on the dark side of the moon. Blue lines cracked all over it and the bird shattered, blasting out pieces of buildings all around it.

The Sorcerer stood at the very epicenter of a crater more than twenty feet deep and twice as wide, surrounded on all sides by flash frozen glass that had, initially, been molten. He was stone silent, save for the slight labor of his breathing, his hands clenched tight on a pair of wands as he looked around. There was absolutely nothing left around him. Not a godsdamn thing within striking distance, magical or otherwise. He was alone.

And then he wasn't because Savas Tigh was coming up out of his shadow at breakneck speeds, an axe in one hand and the folded wing in the other. Only the reflexes of paranoia kept Caden from being beheaded -- he lunged forward and turned fast enough for the axe's very tip to take the glasses right off of his face. Up came the wands, and then one of them snapped like a twig as the wing unfolded, driving the Sorcerer groundward and pinning him there. Savas didn't laugh. Here and now, he didn't laugh one bit. The axe came down.

Blueraven Screamed and a huge ghostly rendition of his face plowed into the Wizard like a battering ram, disarming him of wing and axe alike. He went tumbling end over end several dozen feet, kicked his way back down to the ground and charged right back in as Blueraven threw himself up to his feet. Out came the bowie, swinging. Savas ducked underneath, then leapt back away from a scalpel to the eyes, then reversed course in mid-air and drove a darkly glowing fist clear into Blueraven's unprotected side. Power burst out of the Sorcerer's torso in the likeness of worms and feathers, contrasting colors that lit the night around them. Savas swept forward and grappled the Sorcerer from that same side, heaving him up and bringing him right back down like he was weightless.

He took a knife deep to the shoulder for his efforts. The ground cushioned Blueraven's landing like a pillow. Dust swept out and that was that. There was a burning feeling as Caden pumped energy into the stab wound, trying to ignite it outright, but Savas willed his own energy into the same area, forcing a fever-pitched stalemate.

Right hook and there went blood and teeth.

Left punch and the hand let go of the knife.

Just before the killing blow, an enormous blue hand punched Savas skyward, then kept punching him, higher and higher until he had adjusted enough to start springing off of it at every impact. There were shockwaves of power each time, and the higher Savas went, the darker the world became and the thinner the air. Eventually, it was just him and a spell being cast by someone who couldn't even see what they were doing anymore.

In came the punch.

Savas grabbed it with his feet, teal leaves spreading around the place where boot met knuckle. He pivoted downward and Screamed, loud, defiant, and fierce. And then he got a running start.

The world turned light again. The air thickened. Savas felt himself gaining speed as gravity met magic met intent met willpower. The further down he went, the faster he was going. Soon he could see Caden again, standing still and dazed, swinging at something that wasn't there anymore, unable to see the man in black against the backdrop of a night sky. Soon he did see, the shockwaves of green and violet fire lighting off from every footfall on the air. But he couldn't move from where he was standing.

His shadow was too heavy.

Never give a Wizard time to prepare.

Never back him into a corner with neither powers nor hope.

And never expect him to go down without a fight.

[Savas Tigh]

It looked like an axe blade falling from the sky when Savas finally made his strike. Blueraven met it with a ghostly blade easily twice the size of Wormaxe's attack, and it didn't do a damn thing to stop him. Dark green and black slashed through blue like a knife through butter.

But it did give Caden the chance to step aside, and that was the only reason Savas didn't bifurcate him then and there. The handchop sliced out a six foot deep trench into the ground, roughly the width of the Wizard's hand. Caden broke free and brought Sorcery to bear at point blank. Here and now it was all speed and preparedness.

Savas was prepared, but Aeraul and Rowan had been faster.

He came up with a palm thrust from his other hand, driving it straight into Blueraven's chest. First came a wave of rotten chi and raw emotion, blasting a halo of blue feathers out of the Sorcerer's upper back. Then came the detonation of a palm full of bone dice, into which Savas had long ago carved Beekiller's Muteblind Howler. No fewer than seven huge violet skulls burst out of his hand and passed through Blueraven, tearing out huge swaths of power as they struck. The Sorcerer didn't stagger or fall so much as he flew back, skidding so hard that his boots gouged shallow ditches into the ground behind him, until at last he struck a tall piece of debris and annihilated it. Magic rung out in every direction, wild and pained and utterly senseless.

Savas lurched forward and got a running start-

Then fell flat as the ground shifted underneath his feet.

"I WAS READY FOR YOU THIS TIME!" Blueraven Screamed, his Voice still weighing on Savas' soul like a ton of bricks. The Wizard silently rolled, but the ground was against him. It took an effort of will and power just to force himself up off of the dirt, springing clear enough to get his footing, and Blueraven was tweaking the ground almost from the moment he landed again.

"I CAN SENSE YOU THROUGH THE GROUND, YOU PATHETIC WORM!"

"You're not Blueraven at all," Wormaxe answered immediately, kicking one foot up and finding purchase on the air itself.

And just like that, the Sorcerer was reduced to a blind and deaf idiot. He responded with overkill, moving every last grain of dirt inside the null-Wizardry field, trying to compensate for the sensory gap. The ground rose and fell at random, stabbing up into the air. Savas just stepped up higher and drew another weapon.

It was the Husker's spidersilk whip.

"He never would've told me how to beat him."

Wormaxe struck the killing blow.

[Savas Tigh]

...except that Blueraven caught it effortlessly, showing no discomfort at the skin of his palm busting and blood gushing out between his fingers. Savas had a fraction of a second to be surprised, and then he was shocked.

Literally.

Sorcerous lightning traveled the length of the whip and blew Savas away, dislodging the weapon from his grip and setting it ablaze in the process. The Wizard didn't even scream as he went tumbling moonward, hit the lip of the Siege Arcana crater and rolled right into it.

"I told you I could be lying."

Blueraven slammed the crater shut with a one-handed gesture, then collapsed to his knees in exhaustion.

That was what his other self had done to cripple him.

He had taken away Blueraven's instinctive knowledge of the limits.

"Damn," Blueraven rasped, spitting blood and feathers and sparks. His vision was blurred. Wormaxe couldn't have known about the other Caden's post-mortem gambit. There was no way. Doubt gnawed at him.

And then a pair of hands came up out of his shadow and locked tight on his throat.

"THERE WON'T BE AN APOCALYPSE!" the Dark Wizard Wormaxe declared, hurtling up out of the shadow and into the light, wreathed in emerald fires and the faces of a hundred laughing dead.

Blueraven gagged and reflexively shot off spells in every direction. Some of them hit. One blew the knife clear out of Wormaxe's shoulder, spraying blood and anguish, but it was a good pain. For the first time in his life, he was fighting the good fight. He did it in the worst way, for the worst reasons, but it was still the good fight. He stood between the worlds, Althanas and N'Thayn'sal, between the rogue god and a hundred million unsuspecting souls, and he held the line. He was a messiah, here in this moment. An unsung messiah whose feats would never be known, a dark messiah anointed in blood and fire, but a messiah all the same. He was a Wizard and this was what he lived for.

The Sorcerer was on his last leg, power-wise. It didn't take long for him to try blasting Savas' face off, but even that was too weak to do more than bloody him. When powers failed, fists and feet followed. Caden knew how to hurt people but Savas had spent a lifetime learning how to be hurt. Punches to the face rolled off, blows to the ribs slipped shy of the mark, and knees bent ahead of kicks that suddenly did nothing. Maybe if Caden had started attacking sooner, physically, it would've been a different story. He was bigger and stronger and just plain better.

Savas never let go.

Not for one bloody second.

He strangled Blueraven down to his knees, onto his back, and then he kept strangling until the Mark burned out and the eyes rolled back and veins burst within them. He kept strangling until every last movement stopped. And then he kept at it a while longer. He didn't know how long. He didn't care.

He had to pry his fingers off one by one, unlocking white-knuckled joints as he went. He sat still for a moment, regarding the corpse beneath him, pale and lifeless as so many others. A better man would have said nothing. A truly good one might have felt remorse.

Savas spat and muttered, "Let that be your epitaph."

[Savas Tigh]

It took him the better part of half an hour before Savas staggered out of the null-Wizardry field and collapsed against a badly deformed lamp post, its light still flickering. He clasped a hand to his mouth and forced the bile down his throat, eyes squeezed tight and mind rigidly focused as he boxed the pain up and put it away for now. His shoulder had stopped bleeding. It was fifty-fifty as to whether that was a good sign or a bad one, but there was still enough left of Rowan to keep him going. Aeraul too for that matter. The essence of either man had faded out, taking memory and identity with it. What remained now were the things that Savas could hang onto, and he desperately clung to them with all his might.

Their ability to generate and channel magic -- chi, as they called it. It helped that they both seemed to have an affinity for fire, give or take. More so Aeraul. The half-man's empathy had also lingered, in a diffused kind of way. Savas could feel it amongst his sixth senses, just lurking there like a little gift box waiting to be unwrapped. He could barely feel minds around him as the anonymous legion -- the anonymi? -- began to trundle through the streets again, literally mending the world around them through sheer force of apathetic routine. Savas watched their progress, the way glass seemed to fall up and back into place, and cracks sealed, and craters filled themselves in; he watched and understood them. They were jailers. They were jailed. They were leftovers from the war Caden had mentioned, shaped by something out of Time and Place for a purpose that was all too easy to understand. Savas slumped down against the lamp post and watched them.

Within an hour, maybe two, the city didn't show so much as a mark from the battles that had so utterly devastated it.

Some of the anonymi changed appearance as time went by. Most continued to wander along their unknowable paths and meaningless errands, but a handful became bigger or smaller, their clothing styles changed just a tiny bit. Outside influence on the collective. One of them even dressed in a manner that Savas found disconcertingly familiar.

He could feel the faintest echo of their screaming. It was a sound that pointedly did not go on forever, and it was so much worse for that.

And even that was preferable to what was waiting on the other side. Savas remembered what was left of Rowan when he finally called him back. He and Aeraul had gotten lucky to find the black bliss of nonexistence. The alternative, even when Savas could not directly bear witness to it, made Hell sound downright inviting. And he had a much clearer idea of Hell than most people.

"And now the question must be asked: What will become of you?"

Savas looked up, hesitantly, to see a tall man wearing some kind of exotic military uniform. It made him think of what the Alerians might come up with in a few decades, if they ever cultivated any taste. Except that it was red. Deep, deep red, and Savas could see the stains of a more familiar, more human red faded into it. An untrained eye would've missed them. He seemed to have a high rank, if the decorations were any indicator. Over this, a desert tan cloak with a hood, huge and sturdy like canvas and leather. He wore a sword on his left hip, attached to his belt with a swivel mount. It looked like a katana with an odd handle, and the scabbard bore a faded zed, beta, gimel. Savas stared at it and thought of lions and tigers. He looked up at the man's face and thought only of monstrous things and the worst intentions for the most ambiguous of reasons.

"You're the Drifter, aren't you," he said, rather than asked. "You're the one who started this mess."

"Arguable," the Drifter admitted with a shrug. "Depending on when and how you define the start and the mess. And possibly the one as well. But I am the Drifter, yes."

"...what the hell are you?" Savas mumbled. He couldn't feel the Drifter's presence at all, empathically, but he could sense him every other way and then some. It was like the fellow was a fact of existence.

"Something not worth explaining," the Drifter answered. "And it's all beside the important question of what is to be done with you, Wormaxe."

"Nothing," Savas answered as he started to stand. The Drifter shrugged again.

"You're due a boon from the Sage God for saving existence. If you so choose it, you could become a Sorcerer. Right here, right now."

Savas stared at him.

He stared a long, long while.

And then he said, "But I'd have to be a slave, wouldn't I. Like Xem'zund was."

"It's not slavery per se-"

"I'll pass."

Silence.

"For now," Savas added.

"It's an offer never made twice," the Drifter informed him. "If you say no now, you won't get the opportunity again. You're at the crossroads for a great many major events, Savas, and you're dangerous at that. If the Thaynes cannot control you, they will not allow you to have such power. Serendipity alone will keep you from ever coming within a mile of Icehenge."

Savas grimaced, but said nothing.

"Are you sure? Do you know what you're turning down?"

"...no," he admitted. "But I want something else right now anyway."

The Drifter's eyebrow quirked up, dark blue eyes focusing intently. Savas told him his desired boon, and the man smiled.

"Somehow," he said. "I don't think your master would be surprised."

"Strike your mother," Savas answered. "Whatever happened to him, anyway?"

[Caden Law]

On the edge between Time and Death, there is a place that looks like nothing so much as what the mind wills it; a place shaped by imagination, because logic alone cannot give it form. For the moment -- what a petty idea that is -- it is a dark, lifeless place, cold by virtue of its emptiness. The ground is cobbled and blue, like the scales on some exotic reptile. There is water, or perhaps just the idea of water trying to stand in for something else, off to one side; literal liquid time congealed beneath the void between abstracts. The liquid ripples. It is rippling right now, it will ripple, and it has already rippled -- all at once. Outside of the liquid, sequential progression of cause and effect means nothing.

Or at least that was the case until a pale, scarred, veiny hand clawed up onto the cobblestones. Time seeped up into the void as a thin, barely existent vapor, clinging to the hand and to the man it heralded.

Caden Law dragged himself up out of Time into the vast dark above and beyond all things. He brought with him the ideas that set the edge into its current state, the effect happening before the cause; it was what it was because he made it that way, and he had always made it that way, before he even got there. He breathed without oxygen, without even the idea of it, his body simply going through the motions -- and his mind going through the motions of having a body, for that matter. He was nothing here, nothing but what he shaped himself to be.

It is a disconcerting thing to be your own raison d'etre, and to have all your component parts held together by nothing but your own existential inertia. To exist because you exist, even after dying.

Welcome, the Sage God greeted him, managing to appear out of nothing even though he had always been there and always would be. He appeared in a million-million forms, all at once, resolving into the likeness of a humanoid draped in a heavy black cloak lined with parchment and covered in the dust of a long forgotten desert library.

Am I dead? Caden asked, his Voice working without the need of anything in his body at this point.

That depends heavily on how you define yourself and upon how you define death, Khal'jaren told him. You are certainly more alive than the vast majority of stakeholders in your Name, if that's any consolation. More alive than many of the people you know as well. But also much more dead than some.

Give me a straight answer, you fucking prick.

There was a War in Heaven and we won, Caden, you and I and all the other gods who now fancy themselves as mere people. The Thaynes and our kin amongst other, lesser pantheons, are merely the ones burdened with the power and responsibility to oversee the rest. We stood up so that you all could stand down, wrap yourselves in meat and pettiness, close yourselves off to the vastness of existence. Think of it as an extended vacation from the responsibilities of what you really are. Surely you remember yourself from the War now, don't you? You, who cast down so many foes and left their memories burning and their souls deformed in the night sky. Don't you? Because I remember you. I remember you very clearly, Blueraven.

The likeness of a man -- of a merely mortal Wizard with a leg up on the competition -- wavered for a time that was shorter than a moment and longer than a billion years. In its place, something undescribable beyond the color blue, the presence of feathers, and the vaguest likeness of a crow. Humanity forced itself upon the wavering image, reasserted itself in vicious fashion.

Don't ask. You already know.

Are you saying that I'm like you?

Khal'jaren nodded. All 'mortal' life is, from the tiniest fly to the most terrible dictator, to the most forgettable peasant. We won the War in Heaven. And we saw that the soldiers of our enemies, the things you now know as Elves, enjoyed the punishment we had accorded them. So a great many of us rethought the matter and decided to join in. Fancy what happened next.

...but what about the ancient peoples the Elves destroyed? The Durklan and others?

In case you haven't noticed, Time is liquid. It is very easy to move, to distort, to shift and stir and swirl around. It was much easier before the things that made us close the Tap. And what a funny name that is, isn't it? The Tap. I like to think that it's a leftover memory, an Akashic thought of some kind.

Caden stood up. Khal'jaren towered over him.

...I'm not the only one, am I?

You're not. The incident that splintered your quantum shadow is still ongoing. What you encountered on the moon was just one of several such Blueravens, all working in their own way to bring about the end. It's a revolt by the world itself, actually. Althanas was never especially happy with what we did to it. It wants to be rid of you all and it's done the best it can to facilitate the process. It's even trying to appropriate and redefine the true, secret name of one of its greatest heroes to help make it happen.

Caden felt a primordial chill run through the core of him. He knew what was about to come next. He knew it before the Sage God ever began to speak.

N'Thayn'sal, more popularly known as the Wizard Blueraven, Caden Law.

[Savas Tigh]

There was one living man left on the graveyard moon of Althanas, sitting idle on a bench in a city populated by damned, mindless, silently screaming jailers of unfathomable eldritch horror. His eyes were closed as he reached out with his other senses, snuck a little bit of himself through the hair-thin crack separating Life and Death; the Firmament and the Antifirmament.

Little more than a tenth-ghost, this wavy little wisp of a Wizard's soul flickered and ran underneath the shadow of something that was literally impossible for him to comprehend. To do so would have killed him and obliterated much of the core of who and what he was in the process. To even attempt would have hurt, the severity of injury dependent upon the amount of effort involved. He whispered the name of an agent and found help where it was to be expected. What followed was a lengthy journey through the space between worlds, to a door that no living man should know about. Savas made the agent open the door. It was a construct. It existed for things like this.

The agent ceased to exist in a violent flash but the door was open. Just a tiny bit. Enough that Savas could repeat himself, slipping a sliver of his essence to the other side.

And once past the Antifirmament, he was little more than the idea of a shadow flickering the corners of the Containment. He moved with a swiftness.

He found them all exactly when he needed to.

Blueraven Brigade and Fireside Company, almost every last one of them. All standing, baffled and intact and in better health than they had ever known, at the base of a vast stairway to a shining place. Rowan and Aeraul, laughing together despite all odds and events to the contrary. They were each missing a few odds and ends, here and there, but they were okay.

They were okay.

The sliver nodded, pulled back. The wisp retracted. Savas drew himself out of the Antifirmament and opened his eyes.

The Drifter stood before him without a word.

"Time for me to get off this rock," the Wizard said.