BECMI Chapter 371 – To Delpha
I had long, long intended to take a trip to ancient Delpha. I had placed a Sim near the heart of the Delphan magocracy within a decade of them coming to Nown and leaving behind the ruins they’d made of their homeworld, in the form of Lady Windrose. Much of the Delphan respect for elves came from the example Windrose had set for close to two thousand years now.
Not a single Overmagus from that time era who had not also become an Immortal was still alive, but Lady Windrose had endured, a master of Aeromancy in ways the Delphans simply could not equal, and secretly long since ascended to Primal Air Elemental status as the first Grandmaster of Air on the world of Nown.
My Sims had taken this eventual trip to heart, and rooted out the planar coordinates of Delphaspace with grim determination.
There were a whole handful of Delphan Immortals, some from before the Sundering, some who had risen after coming to Nown… but all of them AFTER the time of Blackmoor.
Which meant I could go there and meet them while they were still mortals. The Delphan Empire had grown over a thousand years, rising to heights of power before the clash between the followers of Air and Fire had come to a head with the disastrous proclamation of Emperor Delphax XXII turning a scholarly debate into an arbitrary law and proceeding right to an immediate civil war.
One event to spark a fire that destroyed an Empire at its height, and an entire world.
Thanatos was going to be there, too.
I couldn’t do anything about any of that, of course. On the Other Shore, sure, I could mess with him. My Sims were going to spend thousands of years hunting the bastard down in various guises and laying a trap for Him.
I was here with Dread for the rest of them.
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Reading about the Delphan homeworld and seeing the difference were two different things.
I walked out through the Gate onto a floating asteroid, adrift in what would be the void in other realms. Sims Alpha and Beta followed me, Duum was perched on my shoulder, and the Gate closed rapidly behind us.
A moment later, the Mirror Portal blinked up, reaffirming that a Mirror of Mental Prowess could indeed reach to other planes. I nodded it off, and it vanished, Sim A1, Sweet Sauce, back at the Innspot and keeping control of the one we’d we’d brought back in time to keep everything coordinated from a secret base… which was not the Twilight Libraries.
It was a beautiful and extremely moving sight.
Ahead of us was all sky. Behind us was all heavens.
Delpha was largely a gasworld, a dimensional plane of lesser size that was more akin to a gas giant the size of Jupiter, surrounded by a Veil that alternately led off to a random part of the skies via dimensional direction, out into the Astral Plane, or to other planes. Part of the rise of the Delphan Empire was when they finally had the power and resources and actually went out to some of those other realms, daring to do what normally only Immortals could do.
Ahead of us, a burning sun flared at the heart of this gasworld, radiating life and light throughout it in an oddly stratified pattern, one missing many of the heat and pressure gradients that should have formed in a place like this. Oh, sure, there were layers upon layers of clouds, but they were separated by dozens of miles, if not more, forming bands of habitation more defined by magic and kingdoms of wind then any kind of temperature gradients.
Indeed, gravity was pretty mutable here, much like in Elemental Air. Earth seemed to be an anchor, as a moment of focus didn’t make me fall away from this floating rock, one overgrown with random brush, moss, and the like subsisting on random ice and water brought in by passing winds or clouds here at the edge of the gasworld.
The air was incredibly pure and fresh, inundated with Primal energy. Both of my Sims began to glow slightly as the magic reacted with their Construct bodies, even though they didn’t really breathe.
Actually, because they didn’t breathe. When they Altered their forms into that of young Delphan women, the Aura around them vanished instantly.
Interacting with the enchanted Ice they were made of?
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The layers of clouds looked like vast and massive skies in the layered hues of a rainbow. Around us was a deep, rich violet sky, like the deepest hues of a storm, or right before the stars came out, bands of white clouds stained myriad colors floating in the sky in streams and islands reaching towards a horizon tens of thousands of miles away.
‘Beneath’ us, shells of cloud layers tinted by the skies sank through purples that segued into deep indigo, then royal blue, and thenn towards sky blue, azure, and cerulean before reaching the hues of emerald, jade, beryl, and leaves. They continued to sink towards the brilliance of golden fields, topaz, sunflower and the like, plunging into the oranges and then pinks of sunsets, before dropping into the reds of crimson and scarlet and ruby and more around the white-hot inferno of that sun in the far distance ‘below’ us.
“We should not be able to feel this much heat from this distance, Prime?” Alpha asked quietly, looking over the tableau.
“Correct. Fire has power here… as does Air.” I flicked up my hand, raising a Note as pure Shards, without my normal Skull and Roses theme, came cycling up around my lace gauntlet in rainbow wedges of combined Radiance and Force energies. They hummed and thrummed in a sublime melody of magical sensitivity. Additional arcs and swirls of color flowed over, around, and between them, forming an impromptu view of the manafield here that could certainly be refined with more proper and directed magicks, but it was a good enough overview for now.
It wasn’t that Earth and Water were weak here, they were just ‘normal’. Fire and Air were strong, and that meant Energy and Thought were both strong here.
They were considered the primary Elements of pure ‘magic’: intellect and creativity, knowledge and power, and the willingness to push all limits and refuse constraints imposed by others.
“This easily explains the high incidence of Powered born among Delphans… and the Forsaken, too. Either the magic suffusing this place sparks any hint of magical ability and brings it out, or your body is fighting it off from the moment you’re born, and all your life.”
“Do you believe we should recruit more Forsaken to the Other Shore from here?” Beta asked calmly.
“If your Time Runes allow it, I am not opposed to it. But that would require Gates be held in memory at all time, and incidents where they would not have survived otherwise. A secondary objective, if it doesn’t conflict with your own.
“That should actually not be that difficult to execute.” I studied the array of magical affinities of this place. “This place is separated from magical continuity of the Prime Plane. I can make a new set of Sims here.”
“Ah, twenty of us to do what we are needed to do.” Alpha considered that as she looked out into the skies ahead/below us. “I count at least ten continent-sized land masses in sight, and what may be at least a hundred smaller ones.”
“Mmm.” I pulled out a carnival Mask of white silk dripping scarlet tears and adorned with black feathers, magic sparkling on it as I put it on.
Couldn’t use Soul Magic externally, but duplicating the benefits of a Mask of Clarity was too useful not to do, especially with effects like Eagle Eyes.
“There’s basically a solar system worth of floating landmasses drifting around in there,” I murmured. “Some of those cloud banks are the size of planets, too. I think we can assume any level with major clouds would be almost uninhabitable due to storms.”
“Ahh…” Duum murmured, looking left. We all turned that way, and lo, there was a storm coming this way.
It was at least a hundred miles tall and probably a thousand miles wide.
“Time to go!” I said, as a lightning bolt crackled from the top to the bottom of the cloud, fanning out from a thick pillar down to thousands of lesser bolts discharging across an immense breadth of area.
“Assay indicates the local vegetation is nigh immune to lightning. Silver and copper threads running through them,” Beta noted professionally as Duum flashed up into full size, respectfully close to a roc at his full size now. Without hesitation, we all bounced into his Saddle, more than big enough for all of us, and he launched himself off the rock.
He found the gravity plane simply by falling through the gravity field until it abruptly inverted and tried to take our stomachs with it. My Sims didn’t have full Prime Rings, so they sighed and just held on.
“Records indicate the Delphans came from a region with blue skies, while the Frier’s realm was further down in aquamarine. So, we’re going to Linejump a few layers down. Duum, pick a point in Deep Blue until we get closer.”
His Hat waggled as he looked ahead-below, picked a point, and I cast the Linejump, sharing with him and so naturally taking all of his passengers along.
The first wave-fronts of hundred-mile winds were just blowing past us from the thunder generated by lightning bolts of that size as the far horizon leapt forward at least ten thousand miles. Clouds mostly white on the outside proved to have a lot of gray and near-black on their insides. Primus informed me that we were cutting through wind bands generating tornado-force winds in passing as we came right to the edge of the Deep Blue, hundreds of miles from any major cloud system.
The wind howled past Primus’ Domain, over two hundred miles an hour, and we could see whorls of crosscurrents generating flashes of static and lightning at the border of the two sky bands. Duum wheeled over smartly, moving with the wind like riding a roller coaster smoothed out by my Ring.
I sighed and Cast the Find the Path, my destination the Delphan Empire.
With a glitter and a snap, the correct direction popped into my vision like a thread arcing behind us, down and to the left… and at least a hundred thousand miles in thataways direction.
“We’re on the opposite side of plane from it,” I sighed with resignation. “If using Linejumps…”
The thread jumped further forward with sudden urgency, as a path had just opened as the skies cleared in a specific direction. “Jumping!” I stated again, pointing, and Duum braced as we shot abruptly off in a new direction.
Hot and cold flashes joined the crackle of lightning as a single thread of uninterrupted vision carried us through dozens of sky bands down and up, tasting acrid winds and layers that could not have supported our kind of life at all, as well as others far too hot or cold to do the same.
Well, lots of sky, and lots of it off-limits, it seemed. I think we almost skimmed a dozen earth-masses of various size, given the gravity planes that zipped past us, and then we re-materialized as abruptly as we’d transitioned.
Duum had to do about a 270-degree flip to shift into the wind, wings tucked and rolling as the sky blossomed pale cerulean around us… and bitterly cold.
Find the Path shifted ahead, up, to the right.
“Jumping!”
We punched through another band and boundary, another twenty thousand miles flitting past in cold, static, and a sudden rush of balmy air as we materialized in a region with pure cerulean skies, a true sky blue.
Duum’s roll was a bit less forced this time, and we moved smoothly into an easy zero-g glide, no working gravity here, and the wind was little more than a stiff breeze around us.
Directly ahead of us was a major landmass.