ocean-life BECMI Chapter 495 – Immortal Fallout
BECMI Chapter 495 – Immortal Fallout
In the realm of Crescendoom, meteors fell from the continuous elemental chaos surrounding the triple-sheathed sunworld and the ringworlds about it. They were very precisely aimed, they were moving very quickly, and at the core of their targets, great equilateral Pyramids suddenly flipped atomic orientation and turned into pure antimatter to await them.They were in the perfect places to destabilize the impossible world and start the process of tearing it apart.
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In a score of planes Entropic and otherwise scattered across the Astral Sea, Pyramids buried countless centuries before rose to life, and asteroids launched days before came down, all the while the eyes of the Immortal owners of those planes were all focused on a similar event occurring on the Prime Plane.
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Deep beneath Zanzyr City, Prince Nathanael Jean-Arc, the Immortal Thaum, was completely unaware of the descending doom.
He grit his teeth as he stared at the displays before him, and what he was about to do to save his beloved nation.
Zanzyr was his most precious dream. He had originally come from another dimension, a world called Terra, a nation called France. There, magic was fading and being corrupted, and moreso, practitioners of it painted with evil and called black magicians, warlocks, witches. They were hounded by the foul inquisitors and witch hunters of the Church at every chance, whose hypocritical condemnations turned their noble art and seeking of knowledge into a cursed and damned thing.
He had been the one to find the pathway to this world of Nown, and its full and plentiful magic. He had led his family, his followers, and his vassals here, to this ripe new land where wizardry could thrive, and where he had the power to chase away the pesky churches who had once imperiled his people, and they could now be shooed away like the rats and roaches they were.
He had even been able to found an open university of magic, willing to take any students with the power, and teach them the wonders and glories of wizardry, something unthinkable back at home!
Wizardry, and wizardry alone, had even unlocked the Radiance, and the Road to Immortality for him! That bright and shining Door, stepping through it into a level of existence before which all magic trembled and prostrated before him… and which had given him the true power to make Zanzyr a land of wizards before all!
And now, another land of wizards, unwilling to tolerate an upstart rival, with multiple Immortal Patrons to back them, had come to make his dream and home a burnt crater, and to take away all that had made it possible!
Prince of Verdain, His Highness Lord Nathanael Jean-Arc of Neuva Vascovune clenched his Immortal hand.
He had not wanted to assault Vinndsvoll. The catastrophic draining of magic had far exceeded the attack that he had planned. He had intended it to be merely a day-long suppression of the magic of the area, one that would show he could threaten any magical force and retaliate, forcing the Delphans to treat with Zanzyr with respect and caution and come to the table to parley.
Instead, the power had exploded wildly and completely beyond his control and what he had thought possible, ripping the magic away from Vinndsvoll entirely, while forcing No Magic upon the entire world in its aftermath… save for the wild magic storms that had spun themselves across Delpha, sowing chaos and destruction in their wake!
Aghast at what he had wrought, he had attempted to reach out to the Delphan Immortals and propose an end to the conflict, and had instead been soundly spurned in bright and burning anger. They thought he’d spent his powers and potential with that strike, that he was now weak, and their revenge would be bright, indeed!
He felt the impacts against the Dome above pause, and knew the Delphan Council was preparing a momentous strike, probably fueled by several Artifacts, something that would bring down his city, and his beloved College of Magic. It would doubtless be something that would reduce the entire city to ash and less in mere minutes under the combined power of so many Apex spellcasters.
Very well. If they wished to shatter his dream, destroy his people, ruin his land… then he would do the same to them!
His hand came down upon the controls of the Core of All Magic.
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Multiple things happened at once.
In many, many locations, asteroids moving at great speeds, some via magic, many via fusion engines, hit dedicated locations at incredible velocity.
In many of those locations, the primary Avatars of a rather large number of Immortals were located, fixated on the spectacles taking place on the world of Nown before themselves or their dispatched Avatars. The asteroids themselves were girt in large amounts of cloaking and anti-divination magic, particularly against Time-sighting, and said Immortals had absolutely no clue what was about to happen even as it did.
On the world of Nown, magic PULSED, and was ripped away from the magical control of anything that lacked the Immortal Power to defy it. It washed east across the world, where the ley lines blazed brightest and thickest among a people and continent-spanning nation whose entire realm was founded upon the mastery of magic.
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In Zanzyr, in particular in the Principality of Transyvia, Pyramids thrummed with power from the Pulse, taking it and using it in their own way. They punched their way across the Planes to particular destinations, and stabbed holes into Immortal Realms as they did so.
Deep within the Hollow World, more Pyramids glowed to sudden life as the Pulse swept through them. Many were buried in locations where once great sleeping Immortal Beasts, Annelids used to tunnel through and shape the world, had once laid dormant… and had provided Immortal Power and fuel for new Eternals stepping across a barrier.
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A group of elves came into the haunted and ancient remnants of an ancient Dungeon, a place with walls all of metal, unnatural lights, and artificial things of wicked life that moved to intercept and do battle with them.
This time, there was no Chief Engineer Jorg Turmalez to stop them. There were a bunch of thoughtfully repaired and programmed robots and droids, and the elves’ crude manipulations of the controls of the s transformed reactor were anticipated and accounted for.
The Crimson Cataclysm roared to life as the Nucleus of the Spheres, the Core of All Magic, was born, bathing the world in alpha-, beta-, and gamma-thaumic energies a thousand years after Darkmoor had died, in the center of the lands which in another time and place would be called Zanzyr.
It was another timeline, and another Eternal Avatar was certainly possible and allowed there. I had sent out the Crimson Call and bid the dragons of my Ringlands take deep shelter in their lairs and caverns, and not come out unless they could master a spell to render themselves immune to the lethal radiations of that cloud of magitomic fury erupting to the west of my borders, and I strongly encouraged them NOT to go investigating the place when it finally dissipated.
It would be a place of mutations and weird beasts and glowing rocks that killed for years, and Immortals would be watching it and laugh as they died, or became somethings that weren’t dragons.
The dragons of the Ringlands paid heed.
Deep in the Hollow World there, Pyramids I’d emplaced over nearly a thousand years hummed to life.
Unlike in the other timeline, this wasn’t just a release of energy and an Artifact coming to life. No, this one had already been programmed, taking advantage of millennia of experience by Immortals, particularly Thaum himself. As it roared to life, magic did indeed crash all over the world, but this time, it was particularly centered on certain targets.
One of those was Thanatos. Unbeknownst to him, his Writhing Well had been embedded inside the Core of all Magic, and the Crimson Cataclysm blew open a hole into his Immortal Realm… just as a certain Artifact-powered asteroid punched through the skein of his Realm in another timeline with the authority of his own True Name and obliterated everything there.
The power of the Core of all Magic reached right through that linkage and expanded out into the Realm of Tarterus with hungry lines of magic linked back to Nown, and a whole lot of vivus.
Nown FEASTED.
As the world-megalith fed, Immortal Power imbued into the Core of All Magic by a score of Immortals reached out to their own home realms, using their own power to form the resonance, and blew through them and into them with the hunger of a Prime World, a great deal of vivus, and what was effectively a black hole attuned to their own Immortal Power.
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In a hidden Realm deep behind other Realms, buoyed by temporal flows that had been able to contribute mightily to its growth, a pair of Realms with identical crystalline Pyramids separated on each Shore of a steam of time, long waiting for this moment, received a torrent of energies as multiple Immortal Realms in the Outer Planes began to collapse. The Immortal Power invested into those collapsing Planes was ripped free, then funneled into these two Realms on either side of the temporal divide.
Bereft of the power making such changes possible, the spatial improvements and physics-twisting custom advancements invested into the destroyed Immortal Realms unraveled in seconds.
Multiple solar systems crashed together down into the size of one. Great enchantments and works requiring certain laws of reality exploded, fell, blew apart. Orbital mechanics suddenly reinstated ripped and tore apart worlds and great edifices, flows of energy unbound from custom rules of existence exploded wildly as space and time fluctuated and tore in the grips of the shearing collapse of all laws there.
Suns smashed together, planets collided. Immortal works ended in fire and destruction.
Fifth-dimensional Immortal Storms, torn open by the collapse of these realities, manifested as their Immortal Power was sucked away. The Immortal Masters of those Realms could only scream and flee, if that was possible, even as their Realms poured up into an abyss they had no power over.
Tellingly, the ancient Immortal called Thanatos was not among them, as the combined destruction of his Avatar directly by the Cataclysm and the explosion reaching right through to Tarterus completely obliterated him from existence. A dozen Avatars in distant worlds fell still and dead as he died forever, shocked at his own demise, and completely unmourned.
He would not be there on the Other Shore to elevate Delphax XXII to an Immortal, if even such an Immortal was allowed to develop with my Sims there to change the course of Delpha.
As countless amounts of Immortal Power flowed into the time-lost Realms once called Shadow Kheper, Rules and Laws grew in a very special direction that transcended all others. Like called to like across the stream of Time, led by one particular thread, and guided by the wills of beings who had grown to a level even the mightiest of Immortals would fear, although they knew little to nothing of them.
That cord of contact crossing time, of parallel timelines that were not yet in sync, was enough for the Realms to reach out, connect, and be made one, be made greater, rising above a level where Time could touch them… and yet not in the direction of the Fifth Dimension that limited and defined so much Immortal existence.
It was a place that had always been there, because it could not be forbidden from anywhere. It might be lost, or forgotten, abandoned, empty, or never-used, but it was always there, on a road to place beyond all places inside Creation.
Immortal Power Burned, and a new Heaven took form in the multiverse of the Immortals.
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The entire continent of Delpha shuddered and cracked as the ley lines crossing it flexed.
Earthquakes tore apart the land. Molten seas drained away below them in an instant, and the lands of Delpha began to fall, fall beneath the waves.
Dozens of Immortals fixated on the great drama in Zanzyr, moments of triumph or loss at hand, screamed nearly in unison and darted away, trying to save the nation which had so many of their Aspirants, mortal relatives, worshipers, and followers within it.