BECMI Chapter 323 – Doom Comes to Darkmoor IV
The mortals staring at the two Avatars gave them wretched smiles of contentment, the Avatars understanding instantly that they’d been played in a very, very long game, one that had involved mental blocks, Geases, and other things so as to avoid even the mindprobes the Immortals often delicately subjected those around them to, looking for moral weaknesses to exploit to advantage.
The doomed mortals looked back, and minutes became seconds as the streak of light came plummeting down, heralding the end of the Avatars’ days among these mortals, the ending of THEM.
A very mortal fate, and one they had helped engineer. Pamissa had completely bollixed up the anti-missile defenses of the city with a rampant growth of mutant spores completely infiltrating the computer network coordinating it, making sure the incoming warhead couldn’t be stopped, and they couldn’t be saved.
Their main bodies wouldn’t even know what happened to them, other than that they couldn’t get out in time…
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The Fugit dome extending from the Darkmoor Pyramid worked perfectly, blanketing the city in a x6 temporal acceleration field. Thousands of folk were materializing on the Seal Foci by the minute, as minutes stretched into nearly an hour. Grandparents clutched children and grandchildren to themselves as the Rune-Tats scribed on them over literal generations were finally used, and together the families, clutching their go-bags and crates of their most precious belongings, commandeered one of the plethora of Mass Disks and hurried down the access tunnel to the Portal at a trot.
The movement of airships and the like didn’t stop, but they were all on automatic pilot now. The troops and pilots had ‘ported off and were hurrying for the Portal with the others, carrying packs of components, nanotech, molmechs, data cores, and the most precious and useful technology they could as they did so, in addition to their own go-bags.
There were a few family pets along for the ride, but what herd beasts could be sent through had already made the trip in secret before with the quiet ‘colonization’ moves.
Most would die with Darkmoor.
I stood on the lip of the hole in the floor, watching people going into the Portal from five different directions, once each compass point and down a slide from above. The Portal through time was locked and fixed, and they would exit in similar manner to which they’d arrived, hurried out and away to make room for those coming behind.
There were tens of thousands of people to evacuate, but we’d had a lot of time to practice this scenario, prepare the Inns on both shores, and magic was helping keep accidents to a minimum.
In Markspace, a timer reflecting the arrival time of the incoming warhead ticked down, already in the two hundreds, but moving at one-sixth normal speed. Over and beyond the walls, the shimmer of the reverse temporal field accelerating the command center and those within it, at a relative x36 to their own speed, also shimmered.
Below the city, and spreading out for miles in all directions, Runes shimmered to life on the great layer of magic-conducting darkstone that underlay much of the North, feeding the Castle and helping with the great Wards put into place over the city itself.
The Darkmoor Pyramid waited calmly for death to come down from the sky.
Standing next to me, Master Lalo sighed.
The owner and manager of the Thisbean Inn could not use the Portal, tied to the Inn as he was by its own magicks, nor could he venture far from it. He had not aged much, however, preserved both by the Inn and the fact he was at the center of a complex conspiracy to preserve the heart and people of Darkmoor, all the while masquerading as nothing more than the supremely content owner of the finest Inn and eatery in all of Darkmoor, famous throughout the North and much of the South for the quality and variety of its menu.
It didn’t mean he couldn’t die. The Inn would not resurrect him if he did so, outside help had to do that. His soul would pass on to his reward for exemplary service, even if the Inn rebuilt itself from less than ashes with its ability to wind back time on itself and restore itself to pristine status.
His family, sons, daughters, and grandchildren, had long since given him their last tearful goodbyes and passed through to the Far Shore. They were safe, and would live on.
He could ask for no more from life.
On the ceiling above us, a Holo displayed the arc of burning flame coming down from the atmosphere that was an anti-matter warhead infused with Immortal power and wound about with magic.
Nothing save another Immortal could stop the thing, and no Immortals were taking the step to save us, content to use the masquerade of technology doing the job to see Darkmoor obliterated.
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“It is strange to see my own doom coming, and be so content with my life,” Master Lalo said to me, smiling both sadly and with great pride and relief. “I have watched the rise of the finest civilization to ever grace this world, and now I get to see it escape from under the very claws of those who would have destroyed it. Who did destroy it all, on the Far Shore.”
“It was a great thing, and going to be greater.” Some of the technology and knowledge would enter the lexicon of the world regardless of how the Immortals tried to bury it, even if only as legends of what was possible. “You performed your role splendidly, Master Lalo. Would that more people had a heart as great as yours.”
He puffed up proudly. He had fought no wars, done no great battles, nor even left the city, but he was the reason everyone here would live. He had built this great Inn, and it existed due to him and his desire for people to have a safe place to gather and eat in a dangerous world!
And naturally enough I was here, and would ensure that the spirit of Darkmoor lived on, even if the people were gone.
“Go, Lady Edge,” he said softly. “Spit in their eye for what they are letting die, and build something even greater out of it.”
I turned to him, pulled down his round head, planted a quiet kiss on his forehead, and released him to head out the door to the kitchen, there to Linejump to the horizon and beyond, where Cirru and Duum were already waiting.
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Master Lalo, first owner and proprietor of the Thisbean Inn, the Inn between the Shores, smiled happily, his eyes brimming with tears as he watched the flow of people hurrying past them through the five Circles that led through the Portal below. They were swallowed up and gone, gone to safety in another timeline where they had not been saved.
Darkmoor was going to rise again, and change the world one more time.
He began to laugh quietly, defiantly, looking at the streak of fire coming down to end them all. He stared into the face of the Doom coming, and knew that it was not Doom now, it was merely a new beginning in a different place, and he was going to see the Light of a new day, and finally step beyond the bounds of the Inn that had been his life and his love.
He held out his hands to the oncoming illusion, and knew that it was time.
“Dreams of the wind at dawn, a new day has begun!” he shouted out, turning heads for those older folk who had remained behind, reducing the burden on the young in their new lands. The old men and women drifted towards him, eyes following him, the death from above a point of light in a blue sky.
It would be a dawn, despite the fact it was already day, and their voices rose with him in practiced cadence.
“Light chases back the dark, and the future lays before us!” he continued in solemn fervor.
“Will it be something bright and new?!” the voices rose all around him in a chant that was more of a song, brimming with Truth!
With Hope’s bright promises!
With Valor’s eternal defiance of the darkness!
“Walk the road before you now, and leave the night behind!” they shouted, sending off the younger generations in pride and goodwill and warmth and love.
“Today is a new day, and the light comes to warm you all!” The legends would call it Doom, but for those who lived, it would be a Dawn!
“Let go the shadows, and behold the sun!” The sun of a new time, a new place, welcoming and waiting for them all!
“The Light has come, as ever it must!” It had brought an elf across the spans of time to save them, to deliver them!
The last souls ran though in the final seconds. The timer above turned over to single digits and less, and the old men and women reached out to clasp hands with one another, raising them against the Doom, knowing that they had won this fight.
“Behold the new day!” they shouted together, and fire took them into a new existence.
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I was two hundred miles away over the horizon when the explosion went off.
The first thing was the brightness of the blast, accompanied by hard radiation shorn from the absolute destruction of heavy matter turning to pure energy. Devasight and Protection from Radiation dealt with all of it as Cirru hovered there, fifty thousand feet above the ground. I was sitting on her carrier (no, it was not a saddle), with Duum on my shoulder, spells shared between us all, watching unblinkingly as a bomb more powerful than any that had ever been detonated in the history of the world went off.
A Doomsday Weapon, meant to scour a nation, or attacking extrasolar enemy, from the face of the planet, and make the cost of taking this planet too high.
Magic writhed and pulsed in new and strange ways, space and time folding and crunching under the assault of a concentrated power that exceeded all standards of mere flame. This was matter going straight to energy, a hundred or a thousand times stronger than mere fission or fusion could deliver… but with magic here, it was something far, far more.
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Far in the north, below a burning mountain, an Artificial Intelligence, bent by alien powers, empowered by magic in unpredictable ways, watched and traced the descent of the power it had sent off in glee, certain of its final victory.
The floor unfolded next to it and a gleaming steel casing rose into place, glimmering with powerful Runes as it was delivered into place.
The Avatar of Gulguz possessing a stylized cyborg there saw it, and instantly tried to flee.
In the depths of the last stronghold of forerunner technology on Nown, a new sun lit off, and a fourth Truename was harvested. The Ei had nowhere to run this time.
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Immortal Power pulsed into the layer of darkstone underneath all of Darkmoor, and magic thrummed. Terawatts of energy flowed through the Darkstone, was harvested, changed, transformed by magic and Immortal energy.
The mantle of the lands shattered, even as fire raced across the surface of the world. Those mortals who had not been able to flee, and were beyond the bright flash of the initial detonation and could still see, watched the orb of fire grow, and grow, and grow, towering up into the sky as it expanded along the surface of the world.
Many screamed. Many sought to flee, but there was no outrunning the fires, and the shockwave in front of them, which tore whole forests from the ground and threw them into the sky, there to be incinerated by the following flames.
Whole forests died along with farms and grasslands, the world was scoured clean. Billions of tons of dust and earth were atomized and hurled into the air, the blast crater stretching for miles and miles. The released magitomic forces shattered the layer of Darkrock underneath all of Darkmoor and ripped apart the land as a great wound, sending the shockwaves reverberating throughout the world with globe-shattering force!