BECMI Chapter 326 – The Road to Eternity
The Road through the starry void continued on before me, the impetus of Immortal Wills, measures and standards derived from the very field of magic they used to deny mortals Ascendance, weighed down on me with ever-increasing weight and force. They were trying to hurl me back, back down these steps, back to a mortal life I should not escape without their direct permission.
But I had satisfied ALL their Trials and Quests. My advance continued as they could not enforce their own hypocrisy, and the Road cleared away.
Testaments!
Create and found a kingdom! Build a new Capital for it! Find and train a successor! Gather at least a dozen apprentices and show them the way to power! Gather adventurers of every main character Class and with them advance to power!
Darkmoor, Eismoor, and Eistree all qualified as kingdoms I’d helped found, although only the last was mine alone. I had grown them, expanded them, reinforced them, and basically made all their capital cities for them. I had successors in the Elven Path in Princess Brittabelle and a score of other elves, including Elven Lord Wayander, headed to the Other Shore and to reunite with Brittabelle at long last. I had dozens of apprentices elven and Ranger-trained, whole companies and armies of them, and the Free Company had basically all reached the late teens and 20 and even 30+ for the more ambitious among them.
I had satisfied all their goddamn Testaments and gone beyond them, too!
Task!
Found a dynasty! Live up to the Heroic Ideal! Be acknowledged the mightiest arcane spellcaster within a thousand miles!
Technically, I had no children, no heirs. But I had brought Darkmoor to power, and arranged for its successor state to come into power, with a new Federation to join it and succeed the Regency Council as its successor… and I was on that Council.
Technically, from where Darkmoor was now, I was very, very definitely the most powerful spellcaster within a thousand miles in any direction. The only thing that might have been insane enough not to acknowledge that after fifty years of aura farming to establish my rep was the Ei of Hazz… and I’d killed that, too!
I strode past the last walls of scheming pressure and arrogant superiority, feeling my feet sliding, and I looked down below, where darkness yawned, black and empty.
“I satisfied your conditions, too. I just did it against YOU,” I snarled at the darkness, and it quivered and drew back.
I had slaughtered Entropic Aspirants. I had destroyed the Arch of Fire, an Artifact of its own making, as well as the Cauldron of Souls, and more Toys and Tools of Gulguz, including his Artifacts made to command the jotuns, that damn Crown and Club! I had started the genocide of an Entropic Race, and I had won! I had shattered the Khirifi Empire, my people had divided and broken the Iberon Empire, and at the End, even the self-destructive suicidal tendencies of the Ei of Hazz had served to off three more Avatars of fucktard Immortals, a dizzying achievement by any mortal standards!
It was slaughter, massacre, destruction. It was the hoarding of secrets and the revelations of the same to disastrous effect.
It was Truenames being gathered to give me power over uncaring Immortals who deserved to be put down, whatever they might think.
That I was burning Entropy down and making something new wasn’t something Entropy wanted to support, but it was exactly what it did. That I was making something new out of the annihilation I was unleashing upon them was definitely not what they wanted, but that was how the world worked.
The Duty of Fire was merciless and merciful at the same time. Sometimes, all had to become ash for something new to grow.
I couldn’t stop the Doom, but I could make sure those responsible paid for it, both at the moment and going into the future.
And I was going to bring a lot more doom, death, and destruction in the future, that was for damn certain! I was going to be every bit as devastating as an Entropic follower, and Entropy was going to be among those paying for it!
The darkness shivered and withdrew from before me, in both fear and respectful understanding.
Death and destruction came for everyone, it was just that Entropics didn’t want to believe they were on the menu, too!
My menu was chock full of them, and they were going to join their compatriots in the other systems in learning what it felt to have the big D’s coming for them.
There was a light at the end. No, there was a crack, a splinter, a wedge driven into the edicts and dictates of Immortal Wills, which I had cut right through with their own judgments and standards working against them. Duum clutched my neck, Dread was in my hand, Primus and Funf and Haima gleamed their support. Our wills bent to throwing off the whispers of contrived Law fueled by Immortal Power, and rising past what the Immortals deemed proper for mortals… without following their path to power, at least!
Webs seemed to tear through me, out of me, their roots and grasp ripped free. Lights awoke, possibilities exposed, new Rules and standards… or maybe old, old ones, returning now, finding a home as a mortal once again stepped past mortal limits on the Road to the Eternal… and not the Road of an Immortal.
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“Mistress, are you well?”
Cirru’s voice, at once caring and somewhat surprised, jolted me out of a timeless stupor. I flinched violently, almost thrashing as I stood up, limbs flailing as unseen spiderwebs clinging to me, through me, fell away and were gone, driven off and never to bother me again.
“Hah. Ah, hah,” I muttered, breathing deeply, wide-eyed and almost seething at what I’d seen and felt and done.
I turned slowly around to look at Cirru.
Unseen Laws formed constraints and hooks upon her body, mind, and soul, limiting what she could become, directing her avenues of growth and barring others that should have been intrinsic to her completely from becoming possible.
Cirru froze at my regard, the sneer as I looked around her, into her, through her. She patted herself slowly, wondering what I was seeing, and the anger boiling in my eyes made her flush, for all that she understood that none of my anger was directed at her.
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I held out my hands to the blue dragoness, and she hesitantly reached out to take them. With startlingly little effort, I tugged her down and wrapped my hands about her head as she knelt to embrace my waist.
“You could be so much more,” I whispered to her, kissing the top of her head, and she shuddered as the Truth of that echoed through her. “I can see that dragons have been bound in so many ways so that they are not threats to the Immortals. The chains upon you, less than gossamer, stronger than adamant, binding all your potential, your fates, ensuring you cannot grow to challenge them.
“I can see it all, Cirruluxul.
“Burn these words into your mind, Cirruluxul. You will not see the same until you are a Great Wyrm and walk through that Arch. If you make it to the end, then you will know, though it will take a thousand years, and we shall see then what the Immortals make of a Dragon Eternal.”
Cirru trembled again, holding me tighter, fates swirling around us and binding us together as the weight of my existence tore apart machinations only Immortals were supposed to be able to weave here.
Beneath my boots, the mountain trembled. An Eternal walked the surface of Nown. Perhaps I was the first ever. Perhaps I was the first since the Immortals had barred the way, killing, destroying, or driving off those who came before me.
But now, now, the sky was definitely the limit, although accruing the power was never going to be cheap.
That was okay, I was playing the game against things which generated LOTS of Karma for those who contested with them, they just wouldn’t know it.
I also had fifty years or so before the Thisbean Inn’s Temporal Portal steadied and reformed, as the Inn itself had to gather itself together from underneath thousands of feet of water where the land had been atomized and the water come charging in.
But the Immortals didn’t know the Inn was reforming. Most probably thought it was destroyed, if they knew of it at all, not realizing that with it being anchored in TWO timelines, there was no chance of that happening whatsoever.
Fifty years was enough time for Cirruluxul to get in another Dragonsleep and advance an age category, enough time for me to save people, and to fight other people who were going to be gunning for me… and for me to work out just how things changed going through the Arch of Eternity.
I was Eternal, an elf in the prime of her life, without having to resort to Avatars or de-aging shenanigans like most Immortal Aspirants did. Time was most definitely working for me, in ways the Immortals just wouldn’t realize.
The future of this world was coming the long, slow way. That didn’t mean I couldn’t also visit the past of the Far Shore, and also take the long, slow way through its history if I so needed or desired to.
And I definitely, definitely had to arrange matters so that the Immortals didn’t discover the Thisbean Inn still existed, and as long as it did, the spirit of Darkmoor did as well.
Yes, Nown and I were definitely going to keep that our own little secret…
Yes, and fuck up whatever plans they had in mind. On the Far Shore, some Immortals had gotten it into their bloody heads to really insult the memory of Darkmoor by raising the land up, making it barren and hostile and run through with caverns that couldn’t exist naturally, and then turned it into a homeland for the Nifloids to occupy, grow in, and incarnate evil souls as punishments for their sins in life.
On the surface, it was pretty good idea, making their reincarnations things of suffering and primitive savagery, trapped in the lives of stupidly violent and emotionally undeveloped creatures, never building, only destroying. Most of them would live mean, cruel lives where they were of no importance and no benefit to anyone, a perfect punishment for those who once considered themselves the only important thing in existence.
No, that wouldn’t be happening here. Nown and I were going to have a talk, and the planet was going to be making some moves of its own, not letting these twat Immortals forget about what they’d done, how they’d scarred it… and if they wanted to make another pet race whose entire existence was based around punishing reincarnating evil souls with the shortiest, nastiest, most brutal lives possible, a scourge to each other in addition to all those around them, well, they weren’t going to do it around MY Inn when it rose.
Deep in the heart of the Dark Sea, which had expanded hundreds of miles south with the explosion’s crater swallowing most of Elb and the nation of Darkmoor, and scouring the rest out of existence with flames and catastrophic winds, storms, and radiation, the first cracks of lava from the heart of the world bubbled forth like a bleeding wound, channeling the released energy back to its origin to help reclaim what had been taken.
The volcano began to grow with, well, magical speed and a lot of help from physics and geological pressure, and was going to upset a number of applecarts as it did so, aided by the constant temporal draw of the Inn pulling up the seabed so it could reform…