BECMI Chapter 325 – The Arch of Eternity
I gazed down at the crater and fallen mountains where the Barhund had once lay.
The area was glassed. It was hundreds of miles away from the center of the detonation at Darkmoor, well outside the primary blast radius, but the force of the eruption seemed to have been conducted right to and through it, perhaps attracted by its fusion core.
The ship’s shields had been able to handle the shockwave from overland, but not the one coming from below.
The ground underneath it had detonated, throwing earth and debris a mile into the sky. The great mass of the miles-long starship had been heaved into the sky… and then gone crashing down into a pit suspiciously just the right size and shape to bury it forever, its hull crushed and broken in a familiar pattern and style… while the engineering area with the fusion reactor survived almost unscathed.
Nothing human lived through the energy waves of alphathaumic radiation passing through the ship. There was nobody in cryopods, of course, unlike the Far Shore, all of them long released from such captivity.
Swept clean of life, charged with huge amounts of magical energy, and buried by all the debris of the pit fallen down on top of them, and then thoughtfully compressed and sealed and treated and not a single damn remnant remaining of the ship for anyone who might come looking… not that the entire landscape hadn’t also changed, and the entire plateau had basically been wiped away to accomplish this, along with the dragons and sandfolk who hadn’t run away in time to escape the disaster.
But something wavered down below. Energies seethed as Immortal Power gathered. I smiled to myself as it began to coalesce, a process that might take years, but something was going to survive this, and begin fucking with the plans of the Immortals.
“I’ll be waiting for you, Captain,” I murmured down to the blasted waste where the fallen starship had once been. “Let’s go, Cirru.”
Ignoring the howling winds and remnant radiation saturating the area and making sure nothing that knew of the area was going to survive looking for the missing ship, Cirru and I departed as quietly and invisibly as we’d come.
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The mountaintop was cold and lonely, and not incidentally not all that far from the location that Gulguz would use in the future to form His Arch of Fire as a monument to his own glory.
The giants of the area were hunkering in against the storms that were lashing the mountain, several valleys cracking open and the sea pouring in where they had been, creating what would be the Great Bay of Eislas in another time and place.
The shifting that had occurred on the Far Shore was different here, however. The flipping there had been almost an inversion, a nearly one hundred and fifty degrees spin about Darkmoor. This time, it had been a cranky push of forty-five degrees, ‘north’ shoved away and off into the oceans far to the west.
The Empire of Iberon, which had been below us, in rotation, was now almost east of where Darkmoor had stood, and where the Inn would return.
The mountain here was tall, steep, and unfriendly, showing signs of being raised for some unknown purpose and left here to sit, like a particularly tall and stiff nose-hair jutting up above its broader, wider, shorter companions.
The top of it was shrouded in clouds and ice and haze, nothing ever visible there, but finding my way there was not difficult at all, for it called out to me.
The World of Nown had made its choice. Some Immortal Power had been required to do what needed to be done, but guess who had some Entropic Artifacts, and perhaps some rather stupid non-Entropic ones, ready to be sacrificed to the planet to do this?
No Immortal could sense what was happening here, and no mortal under the maximum limit could perceive the cave leading further into the icy top of the spire.
I was still being carried by Cirru, our Weave of shared magic keeping us both alive during six different ambushes since the Doom, and those despite the absolute hellish weather disrupting the world.
It was like the assassins didn’t have anything better to do, and somebodies kept directing them on where to find us in fits of pique or just cold-blooded attempts to get rid of us.
Cirru landed gently as the passage narrowed, and I glided off her carrier before she Morphed down into humanoid form, looking around in interest.
“You are only seeing this because I am with you,” I told both her and Duum, who was nuzzled against the side of my head with my hair wrapped around him, keeping him toasty warm. “This is not a place you will be able to find on your own until you are a Great Wyrm, Cirruluxul.”
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“This peak, the earthpower flowing through it… it feels like it is trying to reach up and defy the very heavens, Mistress!” Cirru observed warily, following me carefully down a path literally no mortal had ever tread before today, because it hadn’t existed.
“That is not far off. That is the name of this peak… Defiance!” I told her, Footsteps of the Mage bringing me swiftly and smoothly over the uneven terrain, while Cirru bounced along with her lightfoot after me, eager and uneasy all at the same time.
It was not far of a walk, although it wound through crystalline formations of rock frozen into profound patterns and radiant arrays of energy, enough to make the hair stand up on my arms, and then start radiating off the ends of our hair, twitching and swirling somewhat angrily at the ends of them, as if mana was part of the problem here.
Ahead of us was an Archway, tall and narrow and filled with stars in the crystalline light and refractions of the energies around us..
First sight of it imposed itself onto the eyes, it almost seemed to leap forward to dominate our view. The Runes of terrible age and power wrought into it, the weight of the power that had formed this thing, pressing down on reality itself, making this more real than our own reality, standing above and beyond what we knew to be real.
Cirru stopped in her tracks, staring at it. Duum ducked his head behind mine, and Dread and my Rings, well, they metaphorically bowed to something that was much, much greater than they were.
This was the equivalent of a Greater Artifact, the focus of a lot of power of the world, directly plugged into Nown’s ley line network and consciousness, and passively concentrating a whole crapload of energy through here without accumulating a massive pool of it, something that would attract Immortal attention.
No, no Immortal could sense what was happening here.
Cirru knelt down once, averting her eyes, and turned away. She had seen the Arch of Eternity, and would forever be the first dragon to do so, even if she wasn’t the first dragon to use it.
“I will wait for you outside,” she said calmly, and headed back. I just nodded silently, and resumed my way forward.
The Arch was massive, a hundred feet tall, rising over my head with ominous, cyclopean presence, as if it had stood here for ages undreamt, waiting for someone to dare to pass through it.
All of which might be true, given the Weight upon the Time gathered about it. Yet I knew I would be the first to pass through it, and establish the first Road for others to follow.
I paused before the field of stars, only the faintest shimmer of a way forward visible beyond. I craned my head back to look up, up at the overbearing authority and dominance the Arch represented, standing against forces that had imperiled its maker and determined to resist them.
I wondered if Aelryinth would have a similar experience when it came time to cross the barrier to the Eternal. How would Terra-Luna and the gods handle the first mortals on his world stepping across that limit and embracing a higher life?
Well, it didn’t matter, because I was the one who had to do the one here and now. I turned my eyes back down, tightened my grasp on Dread, placed my hand on Duum, whose smaller form was definitely shivering a bit now at the reality-defining, redefining?, power all around us, and I stepped into the Archway.
A path of steps led forward, each sized for a titan to tread upon, and which I negotiated with a combination of pushing staff and Footsteps lifting me up and along without needing to break stride. A minor test of physical power, but the weight was increasing marginally with every stride and step.
Reality roiled around us, and began to take my measure. It pierced through my Aura and my Wards, Astral Ward not standing before it, taking apart my personal Time and Lifeline, reading it all and holding it up to be measured.
I had already told the megalith about this, so this was more a formality, but setting up a standard and a process was good and necessary for what we were trying to do today.
We were carving a path through the Forbiddance of the Immortals, slicing a way through which mortals could be held and measured, and if they were worthy of becoming Immortals… than they were certainly worthy of becoming Eternals, were they not?
Nown drew connections between the promises and echoes of Immortal Ascensions across the millennia, and with them wedged open a new route and road for mortals to take, that didn’t involve tying your soul to another plane and world, and instead involved mortals striding on to do what they did best.
Grow in power, and evolve.
Quest, Trial, Testament, Task.
Quests: Recover Artifacts, succeed at multiple skill-sets. I hadn’t done thievery, but I had done Sorcery, right under the noses of the Immortals, hidden behind my Wizardry. I had an Artifact that traveled through time, perhaps the greatest of them all; we had recovered the Nightingale, an artistic Artifact of Thought, and I had operational control over the Nucleus of the Spheres, probably the most powerful Artifact of Energy in existence.
I had satisfied ALL their damn Quests! The weight of their denial gave way before my feet!
Trials: Travel through time to save a kingdom thrice; Destroy an Artifact of Entropy; create an entirely new magical item with an impossible component; reach 12th+ level in all alternate Classes.
I had saved Darkmoor three times: once when I rescued Antius from the future; now, when I had sent the folk of the northlands into the Far Shore to Eismoor and saved the kingdom anew; and I had saved those in cryopods on the Far Shore, allowing me to awaken them when and where they needed to be.
I had destroyed six different Artifacts of Entropy by now, and I had created a unique item that technically was not an Artifact, but could sense and wield Immortal Power to sustain itself, an impossible feat for a mortal. Dread was of Artifact status itself, and would advance into Eternal status right along with me this time.
I was at Twenty in Elven Wizardry and Sorcery, Ur-Clergy, and Rank M, which equated to Human/30’s, with +6 basic levels beyond those to put me at the apex of the mortal ideal. Thievery was a mindset, I definitely had skills in Stealth, Trap Detection and Removal, Sleight of Hand, and had five Ways of Shadow by now. I could emulate a true Thief… and being able to imitate another Class entirely was basically the whole mindset of being a scam artist, in the end.
I had completed ALL the Trials of the Primary Spheres. The ways were open, my efforts bulldozed its way through this aspect of the new Road!