-
Pressure shoved at Caden's back and the heat of flames licked at his ears, all out of synch with when the explosion actually happened behind him, which itself was out of synch with when the bed-sized cannon shell slammed into the road, which actually ended up happening after the road itself wasn't there anymore. The crater, at least, formed when it was supposed to.
The Sorcerer laughed the way that only a nervous wreck can. It was with an effort of will, most of it unconscious, that he remained causally intact even as the world all around him shuddered and broke. A crater formed several hundred feet ahead of him; Caden swerved and dodged an explosion before the shell hit ground. He looked up in time to see a great white halo flickering in the sky, along with the silhouettes of an entire air fleet -- an air battle, actually, complete with shapes jumping from ship to ship and tow lines and smoke -- and then it was all gone. Just Larkatz's vanguard bearing down on him as if guided by divine providence. And maybe they were. Caden knew relatively little about the orc pantheons, but it would hardly have come as a surprise if they were just the Thaynes and their ilk by another name, or if they were every bit as nosy as their Althanian counterparts.
He saw a great emerald fireball arc through the sky and disappear. He heard the tail-end of a scream that never actually began anywhere. He looked up in time to see an airship slam into the nearest mountain top, followed by the barest outline of a great beam of power, and then nothing; the mountain was unscathed and the ship was nowhere in sight. Caden crested around the base of one mountain and went careening down into a valley when at last, he saw them.
An untrained eye would have attributed something mythical to them: twin rows of staggeringly ancient lanterns, ruined beyond easy recognition by the passage of ages. They were enormous things intended to be seen from a distance, and there were yet more lanterns running all around the mountain where they stood. An untrained eye would have thought them mythical in the sense of being signals to the gods, or perhaps precisely laid tributes to ancestors beyond naming. Caden was willing to bet blood money that Stonecoat would have thought as much.
But Caden was more than a mere Wizard or Sorcerer.
He was a sailor.
And he had flown.
Two and two leapt all the way to eight as Blueraven sloped his road and launched himself into the air. The ground behind him detonated as the foreshocks passed and causality began to reassert itself properly. He had a few seconds tumbling along, shoved farther and harder than he would have been by virtue of a shockwave, and then magic coalesced into a cloud around his feet. Surfing low sky, Blueraven went hard to the next mountain, and then the next after that. The deeper into the range, the more populous each row became, until finally Caden passed by ancient structures; towers that had long since collapsed into disrepair. He could feel the weight of the unquiet dead clear through the thin walls of life and the unknowable beyond, even without natural aptitude for it.
Every mountain he passed was shorter than the next, until at last Caden came to a perfectly circular valley where an ancient city once stood. Buildings still rose high and proud, long abandoned things that they were. Skeletons littered the streets, stripped of meat and cloth by the elements, bleached white by the sun, preserved by the apathy of nature; as verdant as the outermost mountains had been, the core of the range went from frosty to desert-like in no time flat. Caden looked over his shoulder to see the five ships looming over some of the distant peaks. He looked ahead to see another seven coming fast. And there was another coming from the West, huge and alone compared to the fleets. Whatever was about to happen would not do so without an incredible backdrop going for it.
Without a warning, the world went black. The last thing Caden remembered was the anticipation of an ugly landing.
-
He awoke to the sound of cannons blazing and high-end magicks cooking off far, far above. Caden didn't even waste time assessing his surroundings; he had crashed into the top floor of an ancient tower of some kind, slammed into someone's study table and somehow ended up on a broken chair with wheels attached. That was good enough for him. He summoned his staff out of a nearby wall, got a running start to the nearest window and almost fell to his death when he absently noticed how all the skeletons here were posed in exactly the same way, unmolested by animals or elements alike. And yet still perfectly stripped and bleached despite the lack of sunlight.
The weight of the dead felt scarier. Caden shook his head and got a running start again-
Stopped cold and dove to one side as the Dark Wizard Wormaxe swooped in and smashed ten thousand year old glass for one of the most pointlessly dramatic entrances Caden had seen in years. His protege went so far as to roll along the ground several times in a manner reminiscent of Rowan or Aeraul before coming up on one knee. His right arm was extended outward, his fingers clutched tight around an eerie length of emerald scales and etched bone.
Did I not say that you would find him here? Asked the disembodied Voice of Kholia Horren, the dead Wizard Blightcrow, which should've been thousands of miles away in a basement somewhere. Just like what Caden now recognized as the severed wing of a guardian dragon from the antechamber of Sijil Kar's tomb, apparently retooled into some kind of staff-weapon. It looked like a full-length dragon's wing sprouting from a Coronian sword handle.
"That you did," Savas answered noncomittally as the wing folded in on itself and then compressed to the size and general shape of a particularly sturdy seeming wand. In light of that, it took Caden a few seconds to notice that the disembodied Voice was coming from a jawbone strung around Savas' neck like a pendant.
"Where did you get such marvelous toys?" he asked.
"Graveyards," Savas answered as he fitted the wand into the quiver he carried on his belt. It was an easy means of concealing enough wands to decimate a small village. "Among other things. Don't ask how I carry or work with all of them. Trade secret." Cue the unquestionably insane, blocky-toothed grin. It was not the first time Caden had seen his erstwhile apprentice pull off something impressive. Hopefully, it wouldn't be the last. He actually felt, for all of five seconds, a surge of pride in the man. This was what he was really capable of, corpsediddling be damned. "What happened?" he asked.
"I don't know. I think someone sucker-punched me. Where are the others?" Caden asked.
Immediately, something blue up in the skies above. Bits and pieces of wood and metal rained down outside the temple window, accompanied by bits and pieces of humanoid bodies that were burnt beyond further recognition. Someone detonated a high level spell out there, rattling the whole city to its foundations. The answer was an inhumanly mad laugh.
"EYE-BERK HELLHAND WILL NOT FALL TO SUCH PETTY MAGICKS!" Roared a dreadfully familiar Voice.
"THEN HELLHAND'S A-GETTIN' CHOPPED OFF AT THAH WRIST!" another thundering Voice answered, perhaps even louder than the first.
This was, in turn, followed by the roar of a Voice that was neither human nor orc. It blasted through Blueraven's eardrums and hit a purple note somewhere deep in his soul, accompanied by a disquieting feeling of familiarity that he couldn't place even though he desperately wanted to. His knees almost buckled under the sheer weight of the power, the rage, the awful duumvirate of purpose and entitlement. His stomach twisted and he wanted to throw up, but for all the familiarity of that Voice, he couldn't name it for anything. Wormaxe grit his teeth under the onslaught of that dread power, but he was just barely able to stay standing.
"I don't know who that is, but I wish he'd shut the frak up," Wormaxe Said, relying on his own Voice just to be heard above that sorcerous battlecry.
"Can't place it, but I have a sick feeling that I'll know it when I see it. I could throttle the Drifter right now. What in the Ninth Hell's going on out there?"
"A battle of two or three fleets, a rogue ship, an army or two, and worse," Wormaxe explained. "I don't know where Rowan is. I'm assuming he took out one of the orc ships but whatever he's doing now, if he's even alive...can't say one way or another. Situation's gone pear-of-anguish shaped. First it was Larkatz, then the mystery fleet, then fricking dragons showed up, then another orc fleet came out of nowhere. And in the middle of it all's been Hellhand's ship, which pretty much beats up everything that goes near it. I think one of them summoned demons or something, and I think Hellhand's the one behind the flying skeletons."
"Great," Caden rasped to himself as the battlecry finally died down. "What happened to the Brigade?"
"We need to summon them in," Savas answered. "There wasn't any way to get so many men through the mountains on foot. It's not like we can even take part in the fighting."
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
Ugh. Unsophisticated sounding drivel.
"Guessing that's our eleventh hour savior. Nice to know Larkatz still hasn't consolidated his grip on the orcs," Caden admitted. "Alright. You're the summoner here, not me. What do we need to do?"
"...probably refrain from summoning at all," Savas told him. "I basically yank things through the antifirmament. I don't think a living person would do well with that under ideal circumstances. As nasty as things out there are right now, they're just an echo of what's going on in Dead Man's Land."
Caden stared at him, but Savas said nothing to explain. Their options were limited. His sense of Time had gone out at some point during his unconsciousness, and all Caden had left in its place was a feeling of impending doom. Whatever caused the ripple was getting closer.
"Stonecoat-" Cue another godsawful Roar. "Stonecoat said something about this place being home to a forsaken race of antiquity. A fair folk that sailed the clouds and ruled the land from far above, until at last they ripped open a hole in the sky and ascended to make war on Heaven."
Click.
"Fucking Hellfire."
Click, clickedy, click-click.
"FUCKING HELLFIRE!"
"What?" Savas mutely asked, the actual sound of the question lost beneath the roar.
"Fair folk my godsforsaken ass, Drifter! STOP SCREWING WITH ME!"
The city rattled under the force of another sky high detonation. Larkatz's Voice echoed like thunder, audible even over the roar and the blast. Blueraven's Voice muted all of them.
"What the hells?" Wormaxe asked.
Blueraven turned to the nearest window and got a running start. He didn't even waste a breath explaining.
He just.
Kept.
Moving.
All the way down.
-
Elves came to the shores of Raiaera from unseen lands, first setting foot where Anebrilith used to be; where Beinost is today.
Kebiras has no elves now, only the Treserán, who could almost be mistaken for savage green elves in their own right.
And these same Treserán speak an archaic form of Raiaeran.
Elves ultimately derive from the Sidhe and the Eldarin, a collection of inhumanly beautiful, utterly alien proto-elves isolated to the Red Forest of Lindequalmë, not too far from where Anebrilith once stood.
The Elves worship a pantheon of alien gods, no matter how they may dress it up or down to soften the sheer otherness of their deities.
Someone lied in the Book of Thayne Lore, and it's almost impossible to know just how much.
Time in Althanas can be, has been, and will continue to be rewritten -- because it's never truly been written at all. It is a liquid. It ripples. It has tides, bubbles, and currents.
And it can splash.
Things can be dropped in and plucked out.
There was a War in Heaven and the Elves and their Star-Gods lost.
They were cast out in kind, the Eldarin and the Treserán, their gods warped and chained, and all of History broken in their wake as two shattered peoples grew apart and became lesser versions of the eldritch divinities they could have been.
To the victorious Thaynes go the spoils.
But the relics, Caden knew in his gut, the relics were still there. Waiting. Because someone made sure to drop them into place, someone who knew that the losers still had a purpose to serve in the grand scheme of things. And it was just like the Sage God of the Desert to put his pieces exactly where they would find one another, whether they were cooperating or not.
He hit the ground like a bomb going off. Magic ripped apart a dozen layers of sediment and stone and artificial construction, until he had dropped all the way down into a dark chamber resembling nothing so much as the rifled interior of a great cannon, where every groove was lined with scriptures of truly ancient proto-language; words so old that Caden only viscerally understood them at best. He began to work magic again and slowed his descent until at last, down in the dark beneath a city of the dead, he saw exactly what he knew was waiting for him.
Big Salvic boots clunked down on hard, eldritch wood.
It wasn't a stairway to Heaven, but it'd do just fine.
-
Cannonfire shattered a cloud of smoke and lead shot the size of fists raked across a hull of harshly enchanted wood and metal, gouging out huge holes and mangling orcs within sprays of fire and shrapnel. Rowan ran just a few steps ahead of the onslaught, his katar dragging through the air alongside him. He reached the end of the ship's side and jumped clear, surrendering to the twin forces of gravity and inertia so as to better conserve chi. It hadn't been nearly long enough since the last time he did something like this.
The ship behind him stayed aloft, flaming, with a trio of dragons malevolent rising up on its other side and blasting orcs clear off the deck with thin blasts of superheated air. Bodies caught fire as they passed the edge of the deck. It was a long way down.
Rowan slammed down on top of another airship, this one a more balloon-like vessel that reminded him of the airships Aeraul spoke of, the ones in Alerar. It was more heavily armed and armored than any elven contraption could ever hope to be, but there were still plenty of similarities -- up to and including point defenses on top of the ship. Rowan dodged them only by virtue of being a pale target wreathed in teal light on the bright blue background of the open skies, an already obscure candle flickering under the glow of magic more intense than he even cared to think about. Even upon landing, the orcs didn't pay him any attention; they were huge things conforming to the ork trope, similar to the ones he'd seen and heard of back in Long Teeth. They were lost in the sound of their guns going off, laughing insanely as they tried to shoot down the flights of dragons that elegantly wove between their shots.
The whole boat rattled as Rowan came to his feet, a stray spell from the titanic confrontations playing out all over the airborne battlefield. An undefined mass of Hellhand's necromantic constructs was swarming all over one of the demons summoned by the dragonriders, tearing out huge chunks of its flesh even as it cut a bloody swath through their ranks en route to the very ship Rowan had just fled. When the whole ball of violence hit, they smashed right through the already broken, burning hull and proceeded to tear the ship and crew apart from inside, all while trying to obliterate each other. Rowan didn't have time enough to watch the whole show play out. He had work to do.
He ran up and stabbed one of the gunners in the back, severing his spine and taking out three or four major organs in the process. The katar had a big, nasty blade. The ork didn't seem especially surprised -- he barely even noticed until Rowan yanked the blade out and kicked him over the side. He battlecried all the way out of earshot. Rowan moved to his next target and took the head off another ork with one hooking sweep of his katar, then got to a third and settled for kicking him off the ship outright.
No sooner had he opened up a gap in the ship's defenses than it was being exploited by a dragonrider. The beast swooped in like some kind of chimeric falcon, clawed hind-limbs dragging foot-deep scars into the metal armor as it broke to a stop. It was shaped like a cross between a brightly feathered bat and a horse with a crocodile's head and a long, thin tail ending in peacock feathers. It was also armored as much as the rider could get away with. Rowan didn't get a good look at him, but he wore all black leathers and lightly made armor, complete with a hood and a strangely shaped mask and goggles to protect his eyes. He was carrying what looked like a cross between a rifle and a staff weapon with a blade slung under the tip. Without even taking the time to aim his shots properly, he started picking off orks while the dragon braced itself and took a breath deep enough to visibly inflate its chest cavity.
Rowan, being Rowan, considered this the perfect time to run up and stab the dragon through a gap in its armor.
The explosion that followed completely stripped him of his battle aura and knocked him right off the balloon's edge. The boat itself shuddered and the balloon folded in half at the middle, tearing off huge strips of metal and spewing bolts out like rapid-firing gunshots. Gravity kicked in. The boat dropped. Aeraul spread his limbs out to maximize air resistance and the ship barely fell past him a full minute later. It took that long for him to recover enough that he could reach out with his chi and slow himself to a relative stop high above the earth.
The ship crashed somewhere in the mountains, exploding with a visible shockwave. Rowan stood up in the sky and cracked his neck a few times. He was bleeding all over. There was a major burn on his sword arm. Chi rose from his feet to his knees, knees to hips, and hips to shoulders, out from there. He got a running start and went back to the battle with an eye on Hellhand's ship.
-
Rowan wasn't the only one. It looked like everything was converging on Hellhand's battleship. And not without reason.
In a sky full of steampunk malevolence, demonic entities run amok, dragons spewing fire and the magical assassins riding their backs, where spells were going off like bombs in every direction at once, Hellhand's battleship was still the biggest, nastiest, meanest looking thing flying. It was a rickety boat made of dragon bones and rotten liviol, held aloft less by magic than by its own disdain for laws of nature -- it might as well have been an unliving being in its own right. Its sails were nothing less than leathered quilts sewn from the flesh of hundreds, and its crew was a ragged mixture of skeletons and fresh undead still screaming and crying as they followed unspoken orders from their hellish captain.
Here and now, the Warlock stood close to his ship's helm as if brazenly demanding that his enemies take shots at him. More than a few took him up on the offer, but none of their attacks made it to within five feet. Hellhand's wards were too powerful, too thorough, and not even magekiller rounds were getting through this time. He bellowed his own war cry every so often and only Larkatz and one other dared to respond.
By the time Rowan had come within a minute's jog of the battleship's keel, it was overshadowed by the sleek shape of Larkatz's personal flagship. More than twenty cannon rained down on Hellhand's position with steel shots on the order of a hundred pounds each, and covered in antimagic scripts. Most glanced off of the battleship's defenses as Hellhand brandished his staff and readied his counterattack. Five of them made it through and tore into the topmost decks, plowing down into more than three dozen underdecks that had been crammed into place by the laws and whims of magic rather than physics; it was no surprise that Hellhand's battleship would be bigger inside than out.
Larkatz's ship coasted hard around to Hellhand's side, sweeping underneath and looping back for another go. Rowan reached Hellhand's keel as the second volley came in, yet even over the racket of steel rending through rotwood and bone, he could hear Larkatz's Voice.
"I'MA COMIN' FOR YA, EYE-BERK! I'MA TEAR YA GODSDAMNED HEART OUT AN' EAT IT!"
A cannonball tore out through the bottom of the ship, taking several skeletons with it. In pieces. Rowan glanced himself over to make sure he hadn't been hit, then scrambled inside. He wasted no time with fighting his way through each deck, all of which ranged from seven to eighteen feet tall. Larkatz had already cleared a path for him.
Rowan came topside at the very moment that Larkatz's Voice rang out again -- "C'MON, BERK! WE GOT A 'LOCK TO BREAK!"
The uruk slammed down from his own ship surrounded by a halo of crumbling magicks, accompanied by a near-man-sized goblin with a great big rifle and more secondary guns than Rowan cared to think about. Several other orks and borcs followed suit, but none of them were anywhere near as intimidating as Larkatz the Butcher. He was nothing less than an engine of destruction, charging across the deck at breakneck speeds while Hellhand started triggering his contingencies. Skeletons rose from the ship's insides, spirits burst through the wood, fresh undead blocked the Butcher's path -- and not one of them so much as slowed him down. He was covered from head to toe in runes both defensive and destructive and there wasn't a damn thing they could do to stop him. Those servants of Hellhand that had a physical form were simply swatted aside, if he even paid attention to them at all.
Axes in hand, Larkatz bullrushed up the stairs towards the pilot's station. Hellhand met him at the top with a blast of raw magical power that actually glassed the air around it, but the uruk barely slowed at all. He sliced through the spell ten times in rapid succession, then brought both axes to bear on the Warlock. He was like a berserker who had gone so far past the oceans of rage that he had charted a new continent of incomprehensibly tranquil fury on the other side. It was all Hellhand could do, even with powers augmented by his time on the other side, to block those murderous axes with his staff. The deck shattered around his feet, splintering up but holding in spite of itself.
Rowan was so transfixed upon the sight of the duel that he almost lost his head. Kneejerk reflexes saved him from one of Larkatz's orks, and swift work with the katar kept him alive after that. It was all a green blur for too many long, miserable seconds; green and red and bleached white and teal. Rowan Screamed and couldn't even hear the sound of his own Voice. He heard gunshots at the end of the battle and saw the goblin put one right through all of Hellhand's defenses, between his legs without actually hitting him. It didn't have to hit him. It just had to puncture enough of the wards to put the Warlock off balance. Hellhand roared so loud and with such force that it blew Larkatz down the stairs and annihilated the helmsman beside him. The Warlock leapt after him, his staff shining like hellfire, casting shadow rather than light. Larkatz rolled clear and Hellhand smote the deck before him, blasting a hole clear through his own ship.
The two orcs had just enough time to look each other in the eye. They started to attack.
And then a great mirror-feathered dragon billowed up alongside the ship. Its rider wore all red and gold. His hands were held high overhead, clutching what looked like a newborn star of blood and fire.
"Fuck," Rowan managed to blurt out.
-
To normal people, apophenia -- the tendency to see patterns where there might not be any -- is somewhere between a justification for superstitious belief and a serious hindrance in day-to-day life. For a Wizard, apophenia is a survival skill. It can be the difference between spotting a hidden curse and getting your soul blasted out of your body and ripped apart.
For Savas Tigh, here and now at the heart of the Seven Steps of Heaven, it was cause for what could charitably be called concern.
More like pants-shitting terror, really, but concern is a much nicer word.
As the latest spell of mass destruction went off and cast the world in an unholy mix of reds and blacks and yellows and oranges, Savas saw patterns forming in the battlefield. He saw the rudimentary formation of a grand arcanum, the likes of which he hadn't witnessed in anything but stories. Its points were explosions that never seemed to end, thin trails of heat and cold that only barely stood out at any distance, and the shaped distortions within them that looked oddly like Sideways writing. It was precise work writ macrocosmically large on a microcosmic scale, and Savas had a grim feeling that he was the first to notice it. And he was much too far away, too far below it all, to even try doing something about it.
The sky was immediately clear, but what few clouds remained had formed a broken circle around the sky battle. And at the center of it all, there was Hellhand's battleship, covered in collapsing magicks, demons, dragonfire and worse. The red glow faded and Savas could finally see that most of the ship's midsection had been blown off on the starboard side, annihilated clear out of creation with one huge hit. And now a great mirrored dragon had landed in the vessel's gaping wound, spewing a tight stream of rainbow-colored fire like a napalm sandblaster.
Another huge spell went off and the dragon and its rider both survived, though they'd been blown away from the ship. And there were sparks all over Hellhand's vessel, and the dragon was coming around for another go and-
There.
Savas squinted to see, but he could just barely make it out.
A small ship, thousands of feet above the battle. Something was glowing upon its bow.
Savas felt his blood run cold as the glow started to descend at the speed of a freshly cast spell, aimed for a point that he recognized as the exact center of the arcanum.
Just before it could hit, there was an enormous flash of golden lit from below; the magical afterburn of an ancient engine turning for the first time in countless eons.
Glow hit flash.
With a ripple, the sky tore wide open.
-
Space warped and, like the thin film stretched taut around a soap bubble, Time burst. All laws of causality and physics went screaming out of a window that doesn't exist in a direction that can be neither named nor pointed to. Viewed from afar, from a nice safe distance, it looked like nothing less than a snowman made out of overlapping hydrogen explosions that forced the atmosphere above the Seven Steps higher and higher until it formed a more conventional bubble out into space. And then, still a nice safe distance from where Time was gone and Space had broken, the bubble stretched.
It reached. The stars were not all right, but the only one that mattered was exactly where it needed to be, when it needed to be there. A tunnel formed through the void between Althanas and its sole remaining moon, and the atmosphere of the world below seemed to stretch and replicate itself to extremes not seen in eons...
...but that's for later.
Assuming that there can be a later.
There is no now, there was no future, there will be no past. This is the sort of thing that motivated the closure of the Tap. Magic is, at its most fundamental conception, a distortion of Space and a defiance of the laws of physics built up around it. It's willpower affecting physical reality. And Time as we know it -- as Caden Law knows it -- is all bound up by Space. Time is defined by physical entropy; the forever countdown to something so far in the future that balding little monkeys like the Wizard will never even know what it is. Break Space, as happens when you or someone else conducts a truly epic Working, and you break Time by default. It's a lot like detonating a grenade underwater. Time is displaced. Some of it is destroyed outright.
What remains is a tangled chaotic mess, endless ripples cascading off of and into each other.
And were it not for the layered games and infinite machinations of the Sage God, it would've stayed that way. The explosion that never happened would've always happened, it would've been there and not been there forever and never at the same time; a paradox of logic and existence threatening the very fabric of the world. But that's not how this is going to work. And there's one tiny, battle-scarred reason for it. It's an amalgamation of concepts and words with too many Names, spread thin but rapidly dragging itself back together with an awful, incomprehensible force of will. It is a man, because a man is nothing more than an assortment of concepts bundled up in an identity sheltered by meat and, if he's lucky, a few layers of cloth on top of that.
This one is a Wizard. He is a Sorcerer. Most importantly, he is a time traveler. And he is at the heart of all of this. He is more than a character; he is a story, and he will write himself back into existence. He is doing so right now, in fact.
A boy stands in the wilderness of Berevar, and then speaks as a man slamming shut a mausoleum in the fields of Raiaera. He turns and drives a sword into the darkness of the Catacombs, snaps his fingers and puts a bomb in the face of a void that used to be a woman who no longer exists. Twenty years from now he stabs a dragon-man in the neck and fifteen minutes ago his boots landed on an eldritch wooden deck. He lay in a bed as the lost love of his life told him of her marriage and her daughter, he stood in a darkened cave as a woman he didn't know broke his heart with the story of all his worst jokes.
He's shouting to an assembly of farmers and brigands, the dead and the living and all the unforgotten. He's staring into the eyes of a man full of freshly devoured evil, throwing one of his friends out of a fighting ring, and having his pains laid bare by a half-man. He's running for his life down dark tunnels and striding through great doors like he owns them.
Concepts bundling together and branching out. People popping back into existence to fill the gaps where they used to be, defining themselves and defining others in the process; the greatest Hat trick any mage can pull, and hardly anybody will ever know. Between the numbers of physics and time, in the intricacies of asymmetry between here and now, far beyond any mere bridge of souls and the slings and arrows surrounding them, Caden Law willed himself back into existence, into his own likeness, and then imposed reality onto the world around him. Time bubbled out around him. The snowman began to spread wide and thin, crushed between time within itself and time outside.
In the end, it became nothing more than a ripple.
Causality reasserted itself and Caden collapsed to his hands and knees on the deck. A few seconds later, Savas Tigh was standing next to him. Blueraven Brigade literally appeared all over the ship, bringing their significant others and their Kebiran comrades with them. Aeraul collapsed against the nearest mast, biting down on a scream so hard that his jaw looked discolored. Rowan popped into existence not too far from the helm. The rest of the world followed suit.
Something wavered through him and the Wizard almost threw up at the sensation, prickling along the edges of his extra perceptions. He looked up, now that there was an Up to look at, and saw the dragons popping into existence one after another until the sky was repopulated with beasts and their riders, and demons too. There was a great Screaming from between the walls of disparate realities, and the flaming hulk of Hellhand's ghostship arced high in what was now the emerald sky, barrel rolling twice before it came back down and annihilated the tip of a mountain near the range's edge. Even then, a skeletal thing leapt clear of it and began to ascend at breakneck speeds.
Larkatz's fleet was gone.
If it had ever existed in the first place.
Caden's eyes homed in on one of the dragons, distant and indistinct save for its rider. He wore red to all the others' black. And, Caden knew without being able to see, he carried a sword from another Time and Place.
"Well," he rasped. "That makes things more interesting."
"What the fuck just happened?!" Aeraul finally blurted out. It had the net effect of stunning everyone else to thoughtless silence before they could even start panicking.
"I may or may not be looking at the enemy the Drifter told me about," Caden answered as he stood.
"Not likely," Savas said. "I saw someone high above the battle. And, in case you haven't noticed..."
He pointed up.
There was a hole in the sky.
"If that doesn't look like a stairway to Heaven, nothing does," Savas declared, and instinctively Caden knew...
"...someone's already ahead of us."
-
It was a tunnel through space, one that gradually turned the blue and white of a cloudy summer sky the further into it one moved. And the eldritch vessel moved quickly.
It was like an elven sea vessel without sails, its masts instead connecting to an intricate ring-shaped array that encircled the ship from top to bottom, connecting again at several other parts of the hull. The air around the keel burned bright, and so did the ring itself, with an ever shifting mass of colors; green, yellow, light reds, and abnatural blues. It was long and sleek, colored brown, green, and gold, and it was like the whole damn boat had simply grown into shape without any work ever actually being put into an assembly process. Even the metallic parts and the bits that seemed to be glass or crystal had the look of natural phenomena.
Its bow tapered to what looked like an incredibly elegant silver blade or lance-end, shining in the strange glow of outer space that wasn't.
Blueraven and company had adjusted to the whole change of scenery with remarkable swiftness. A sense of apocalyptic urgency will do that. The ship moved with an incredible quickness, leaving behind faint halos of fire every so often. Dragons trailed behind it, some of the riders shooting off spells and some of the mounts spewing hyper-focused blasts of heat; all of it hit a barrier spell covering the ship's rear, causing nothing but pretty lights for the crew's entertainment. The only things able to keep pace with it were Hellhand's skeletal ride and a horde of demons, all of them fluttering in and out of the tunnel at will. They suffocated for long, painful seeming moments on the outside, then dove back in with gasping shrieks and reckless abandon. Most hit the ship's wards and bounced off. A few pressed on and were incinerated. One or two actually made it through, reaching the vessel in such a sad state that the Brigade tore them apart like it was a training exercise intended to boost morale.
"This is entirely too convenient," Savas eventually pointed out from beside the helm, which looked nothing like any that they had ever seen. It included a chair and a small, flexible wheel that could be pushed or pulled for vertical orientation's sake. It was also surrounded by circular wards in a language that looked vaguely Diamonic in origin.
"Never look a gift mantis in the mouth," Caden advised him from experience. He had taken over the role of pilot. It was almost as if the ship had been made for him, or perhaps just someone like him. Just holding the steering wheel was enough to make his Mark light up from head to toe. "You really don't want to see what goes on between its mandibles."
"...not what I meant. This thing doesn't even have a name."
"Sure it does," Caden said. "Hey, Aeraul! What's this ship's name?"
"The Wild Aeon!" Aeraul shouted from where he and a half-dozen others were impaling a demon through its midsection. It was a huge beast, barely intact after its surge through the wards. Its blood burnt away as soon as it left the body.
"...how the hells did you know that would happen?" Savas mumbled.
"I guessed."
"That makes about as much sense as anything else, I suppose."
-
"I'm not seeing things, am I?" Savas asked after a while. He had resigned to letting the rest of the Brigade take care of point defense. He would've felt superfluous if he wasn't busy losing his grasp on what little already questionable sanity he had left.
"You're not seeing things," Caden told him.
The tunnel of atmosphere -- the Stairway to Heaven -- was a spiral. Sort of. It went all the way out into space -- deep, empty, utterly barren space where not even rocks dwell en route to burning up in something's atmosphere. And then it arced back, forming several huge loops until it completely encircled the north pole of the moon, arcing down several thousands of miles towards the equator on the far side from Althanas. That was not the part that nipped at the edges of Savas Tigh's twisted mind.
It was what he saw on the moon itself that hurt him.
It was what lay on the other side of the most benign object in all the night skies.
It was a body. A not-quite-humanoid body, laying in the surface of the moon like a man partially submerged in a bathtub. Knees stuck out, spread wide and arching high, but nowhere near as high as the body's arms. They plunged out into the void like impossible vast towers, which split into great platforms and that hosts more towers still, and everything was crooked where joints -- unevenly proportioned joints -- stood, locked into place with the chains of ages and some unknown but terribly knowable purpose to shape them. The body's face was undetailed, save for its gaping toothless mouth, which looked like nothing so much as an irregularly shaped crater near the south pole.
He spanned the dark side of the moon.
And someone had chained him there, binding his misshapen wrists in manacles so vast that all the iron on the surface of Althanas couldn't have made them.
He was not alone.
The closer they got, the more bodies they saw. None of them anywhere near as huge as the first, the ultimate, but all of them colossal in their own right. They were as big as cities, and some still burned in their own eternal funeral pyres, producing no smoke or light or shadow save what was necessary to see them at a distance. And there were actual cities on the moon too. Dozens of them, bigger than anything that any of the Brigadiers had ever seen. They were like clusters of blue pyramids covered in towers and lights, many of them broken and none of them flaming. Things whipped through the space between them, small specks when viewed from high orbit, but probably vast constructs if viewed up close.
"You know," Caden mumbled as they began to descend. "The real frightening part is that there's something bigger in there. And something even more monstrous hiding just out of Time. We're passing through it right now. It feels...familiar."
"...I'm afraid," Savas admitted to himself. Because he could sense something hiding out on the other side of reality. Something so big that it made the monstrous spirits of Kebiras look like ants. Something so big that the material universe would probably collapse around it if it were ever brought back. And it had been here once before. Long, long ago.
Savas looked out at the sun, flashing so brightly through the arcane atmosphere around the Wild Aeon.
"It's watching you," Caden told him.
"I don't think-I-"
"It's alive, you know," Caden said with almost morbid neutrality in his voice. There were still demons pounding at the ship's wards, still dragons and a skeletal monster chasing after them, still whatever lay in wait, and yet Savas' master was completely calm. "There was a War in Heaven, Savas. And the Sun was one of the losers."
Savas looked around, at the stars just barely standing out along the daylit tunnel walls, and the strangely spreading atmosphere that preceded them.
The sky was full of stars, Savas was realizing for the very first time.
And the stars were all gods.
And they hated him so much.
They hated everyone so, so much.
"Can you...feel it?" he asked, still mumbling as the full weight of epiphany trembled in his knees. "This far out, I...I can't...I..."
"It's like the weight of the world's off your shoulders, huh?" Caden asked.
Savas looked back at Althanas, by now nothing more than a speck of blue and green and brown barely visible over the north pole.
It was alive too.
"I think I'm gonna vomit," he said.
"Do it overboard. And then get ready. I don't think this is gonna be as easy as it looks."
"Easy?!"
-
Imagine a pressure.
One that's with you every single hour of every single day, from the very instant of your earliest memory to the last breath passing between your lips. It's a pressure so utterly omnipresent that it becomes as intangible to you as the very air around you, as easily missed as the clothes on your skin or the hair on your head. It's a pressure that both is and isn't a part of you. Sooner or later, even if you notice it in your quiet hours, when you're bored or suffering easy distraction, you just stop paying attention all together.
Now imagine how insanely disorienting and liberating and maddening the epiphany is when that pressure just stops.
Aeraul had been close to speechless for the better part of several hours; the length and breadth of the time it took to go from Kebiras to the moon. His only words had been reflexive answers to questions whose sources he wasn't even paying attention to. His body moved from nothing but the synergy of the Brigade, every single sweep and thrust of his sword guided by his allies at some level or another. He could sense more than just emotions now; he sensed intentions, read thoughts without words, understood it all so deeply that it was impossible to describe with any language of mortal kind. And he wasn't just connecting to his Brigadiers.
Aeraul connected to demons and the undead, and touched the hearts and minds and empty pits where there should have been souls. He could feel the maddened battle-lust of Kebiran dragons, and the hurricane of emotions belonging to their riders. He could even feel, at a distance, the alien thoughts and emotions of Hellhand, whose actual name rested on the tip of his tongue like a forgotten word from his childhood.
A demon passed through the wards. It was on fire, less than an inch beyond its skin. It was twelve feet tall, half as wide at the shoulders, and so inhumanly muscular that it was grotesque to look at. It carried an enormous sword of boiling red steel and wore similarly boiling armor on its legs and torso, exposing its upper body like some kind of suicidally brazen challenge. Which it was. Aeraul knew it was. Just like he knew one of his men, Liam of Hegel, was mad enough to try and accept that challenge head on. Aeraul seamlessly circled around and sliced the demon across its back with his cutlass. His jian thrust up into the wound and twisted. It was all a distraction clearing the way for Liam to stab the demon up through its chin and into its brain, but there was no rage or defeat; only a placid sense of calm, hateful respect tucked away under layers and layers of obfuscation.
The demon lies, and now Aeraul knew it so intimately that he was almost ashamed. What looked like naked rage was actually calculated performance; it knew it couldn't win, it just wanted to instill fear. The demon went for a deathblow and he cut its arms clean at the elbows, jian to one and cutlass to the other. They were so light now. Everything was so light.
Caden knew why, indirectly, and because he knew Aeraul knew. The world lived. It breathed. And it hated. It seethed with raw, barely tamed hatred. It didn't host life willingly. The Thaynes forced life upon the miserable, stormy rock of Althanas, just because they could. It was an example to the countless worlds beyond, and its parent star had to watch as life ate away at one of its precious children. It all made sense now. It was beautiful. Twisted and nightmarish and beautiful and he never wanted to go back because already, even now, the graveyard moon was preferable to the cancer-riddled planet below it. The moon wanted life, it seemed. It wanted life more than anything else. That's why it had none.
Truly, Aeraul knew, the gods were cruel. Life was a punishment as much as it was a prison. Revulsion to necromancy was literally built into the system. Revulsion to a lot of things were built in, in fact. So much had been engineered in for the sake of misery and...
Misery.
As Aeraul thoughtlessly butchered the demon's face off, noting Liam's withdrawal, he glanced over to Rowan and knew, at a gut level, exactly what had happened to him. Even feeling it secondhand was painful. To understand it was worse than that, because his empathy was now so free that he could gleam feelings from the people in someone else's memories. He felt the love of Liam's family just as keenly as he felt the sadistic hatred and abhorrent joy of Rowan's masters. His stomach twisted.
Another demon broke through.
Something worse was waiting.
Aeraul looked to Caden and mused at the truth of him, but he forgot every single thing he was going to say at the moment he was going to say it. This didn't anger him. He was at peace now, the half-man, half-orc. He was at peace and it was beautiful. He didn't have to worry about surpassing his victory in Scara Brae. He didn't have to worry about anything, really, because Aeraul could feel through space and as his senses decompressed in Space, they began to unhinge in Time.
But all that would be over soon.