Chapter 286 - Panic
17th of Season of Fire, Year 1197 AL
Yew, the Grand Scholar was in his realm, putting the finishing touches to a sculpture in his realm. It was a minor piece, one he had been working on for only eighteen moons, and he was mere days away from completing it.
He pressed his hand against a wall, carefully calibrating his strength, when the entire realm shook. Like glass meeting a hammer, the intricate palace of windy passages collapsed instantly, eighteen months of effort wasted.
Yew didn’t even have the time to feel outraged, opening his eyes and stepping out of the meditation chamber so fast the wind of his passage would have turned into a hurricane, if not for his absolute control of air.
He looked outside, and it was night, but a golden light bathed the world. Up in the sky, a giant golden crack spread like a fissure in space, seeming deceptively close despite being thousands of miles away.
Then, one by one, they came. The abominations from his ancestors’ ramblings. Those few unfortunates who had glimpsed the beings beyond the veil all devolved into drooling living corpses, but their minds crumbled over decades or centuries. And through those ages, they left drawings and texts, fictions or histories that never happened involving the gods Yew’s family still venerated.
They really descended upon the world, he thought incredulously. While he had read and preached about the experiences from humanity’s old world, it was another thing to actually witness the madness-inducing entities that had warped and devoured his ancestral homeworld.
Histories said the fall had taken centuries, but there was no mention of a giant golden crack in the sky.
Yew went to the council chamber. All around the city, people panicked. The folk tales a thousand years old finally became reality before the non-awakened, and even the younger awakened didn’t seem like they trusted their ancestors completely.
One of the rising stars of the Swordpeak family, Dandelion the Second, was calming his panicking lower-realm clansmen. And as Yew spread his senses all over the city, he noticed something that caused him to frown.
Some people, completely random, and completely regardless of their realm, started having epileptic episodes and falling to the ground, spasming. There were around two hundred of them, completely unrelated—.
Cult supporters?
Yew had suspected some of those people. They were ordinary citizens, never causing ripples, but the heresy hunters either watched them personally or their ancestors prior to the exodus.
“Round up all of those that have collapsed and put them in a safe, secure location,” he sent to his aide. “Be sure to isolate them, and if anyone asks, they were having medical emergencies of unknown nature, and we’re trying to figure out how to help them.”
After issuing the order and dealing with the trouble he knew how to handle, Yew was left with a problem entirely beyond him.
What do we do? Can we even resist them? Joining them is folly; the fallacy I had tried to point out and only a handful listened and asked the right questions. But if both paths might lead to likely death, which one do I choose?
One option was to serve, the other to fight. He had spent his entire life serving. It was easy, if despair-inducing, following orders of those less intelligent than you and letting them worry about the consequences. But Yew had never learned not to care about the consequences.
When it came down to it, even if he hadn’t betrayed his family, even if he had stayed in their service, he wouldn’t have followed them down the path of blind devotion. He would’ve sabotaged them as much as he could before they discovered and killed him and his followers. Compared to that, fighting openly and with a chance of winning and perhaps even surviving seemed like good fortune.
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By the time he entered the council chamber, the storm of Yew’s thought had calmed, the effort wasted on sculpting his realm completely forgotten. All that was left was a soothing breeze, gently touching Yew’s back, pushing him forward.
One by one, the exalts entered the room, with Swordpeaks arriving first, their Patriarch calmly nodding after seeing Yew already seated in his place.
“Is this it?” he asked.
“Seems like it,” Yew answered.
“In that case, sending Newstar to rally the saurians was the right thing to do.”
“It couldn’t have possibly been wrong.” Yew tapped the desk thrice. “The problem is, he didn’t have enough time, but I guess things are better than they would’ve been otherwise.”
By the time he finished his sentence, ten members of the council were already in the room. Yew generally preferred to give others an illusion of choice, but the time for games had passed; he might be dead before the week ended.
“We should prepare our forces for Newstar’s arrival. The theater of war will be fought on several fronts, divided by realms.”
“Why do you think that?” Greenthorn asked.
During the attack on his order, the cultists had split into two forces - fifth realm and above on one side, fourth realm and below on the other.
“They have the advantage of numbers and home terrain. While they are fresh, we need to spend energy to reach them. If we enter the range to attack those at the lower realm, we are in range of their attacks, and eliminating some lower realm individuals would expose us, while they could use someone more powerful to block. And once the battle is joined, everyone close to a higher realm comrade might die to blocked or redirected attacks.
“As for why they won’t attack lower realm combatants with the higher realm ones, it’s the same reasons. While they have a fortified position, we will have the advantage of surprise. They won’t know how many reinforcements we have, and if a saurian onslaught arrives with us, they will wonder how many waves are coming.”
The talk of troop deployment and practical tactics grounded the nervous exalts. It let them find courage in Yew’s words and his calm discussions with the Swordpeak and Tidebreaker patriarchs.
The use of saurians as fodder and to exhaust the defenders also made for an excellent general strategy. Their numbers were the real danger of the onslaughts, and making use of them was like having your old nightmare fight for your old sake.
The meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes for those outside, equivalent to ten days for the exalts who moved and spoke at a speed natural to them.
It was fruitful, even if the only thing they had really achieved was calming down all the nervous parties, and they had formed several plans of action, depending on when Newt arrived, what actions he had taken, and how much support he brought with him.
***
Maelstrom wanted to scream Six years of effort! Six years of effort wasted, the icy sculpture sinking into the black sea, dissolving into particles of fine ice. Lightning danced in the black clouds above her, not changed by her displeasure, but a great sign of it.
She left her realm and opened her eyes, ready to shout at the person in charge of guarding the meditation chambers when she felt it. A wrongness she couldn’t describe lingered in the air. It was like a memory of an event waiting to happen, an ill omen of a doomed future.
Her hand moved for the amulet Newt had given her when she entered the ninth realm. She had promised she would wear the chunky thing every day until she reached the tenth realm.
A split second later, she shook her head and snapped out of her daze.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she left the meditation chamber, but instead of an answer, all she got were the panicked screams.
The sense of wrongness had lessened the moment she stepped out, whether it was because the meditation chamber drew it inside, or that the overwhelming amount of sounds, auras, and other noise drowned it, Maelstrom had no way to tell.
The light outside the building was strange, somehow too yellow. She stepped out into the hanging street and looked up towards the sky.
Yellow?
The sun was a golden shade of yellow, then Maelstrom saw it. The light retreated and flowed back to reveal what looked like shattered glass in the sky. A torrent of water flowed out, blazing with concepts and truth of her elements, the likes of which Maelstrom had never experienced before.
She stared as if mesmerized. Then the phenomenon passed, and a landslide of obsidian poured out of the crack, followed by what looked like a black, highly evolved variant of squid-like creatures sometimes pestering Tidebreaker shores.
Something inside her stirred, and instinctive fear and hatred welled up within her realm. The creatures disappeared, and Maelstrom focused on herself, standing at the door of the House of Meditation with two dozen others around her. She tuned out the people and the screams and the woman bleeding from her orifices down the street.
Her full attention was on her realm. Lightning flashed in the black clouds, hiding.
It was afraid.