BECMI Chapter 428 – Heaven is Coming
Cool and serene power shimmered and played in the Heart of the Darkmoor Pyramid.
It was the ultimate power of the Pyramid: harvesting scattered Immortal Power and Faith at the same time, and opening a way for foreign entities to come into this multiverse.
Gods.
I was pretty sure the Immortals would obliterate me and probably the planet if they knew what I was doing. Unhappily for them, I had already cleared this with Nown, and it was trusting me and willing to take the risk of bringing in the gods.
They, at least, had no real designs upon it, nor did they want to bend it around like silly putty in reaction to their own failed schemes and designs. The Hollow World, the polar openings, the shifting rising and falling of continents, the Doom of Darkmoor that had nearly ripped it open with magnified magical tectonic shockwaves rumbling through its mantle…
No, I could see why druids abandoned the Law/Chaos game, but that wouldn’t save them, just like it hadn’t saved Nown. The megalith had to take a stand, and it needed an ally to do that.
Well, they were coming. The Pyramid in Crescendoom had been pretty much the last thing to go, the space folding down around it and Vortex compressing atop it. It had sent Immortal Power here from the destruction of the plane right up until the end, and then detonated after the nova’s wave swept by and obliterated everything, the shockwave rebounding off the collapsing edge of the plane and incinerating the space itself as it came back, cleaning up everything nice and tidy and delivering the maximum amount of Immortal Power here.
Nown had profited immensely from it all. I didn’t need all of the Immortal Power to send out my call for help, so most of it passed into the land, and Nown sucked it all down greedily. Most megaliths had only incidental Immortal Power gained from it randomly raining down on them from vestiges of battles, destroyed Artifacts, or the endings of Immortal spells breaking apart. Just minor sips and sups at the well, when they could actually process and store utterly massive amounts of it.
They just couldn’t really generate it for themselves, but I was helping with that, too.
I had Sims out there whose only jobs were to put together new Pyramids whose only purpose was to store Immortal Power for the Megalith, and imprison Artifacts within them to provide the Immortal Power draw for themselves.
One IP per ten minutes wasn’t a lot of draw, but if you had several dozen Artifacts drawing that power that you were tapping, well, that was something else entirely!
Those Pyramids were all filling up nicely as Immortal Power coursed through Nown’s molten veins. It needed to be concentrated to be tapped, but that merely required laying long, long veins of metal down in the earth along magical lines and concentrating the power… physical ley line tapping, as opposed to energy lines.
That was what Nown’s own Avatars were doing now, as well as spending Immortal Power to upgrade its own mental Stats and give it more real-time agency.
I watched Runes fill in, power up, glowing with strength and power as they radiated and flowed up and into Doomrose Castle.
Thank you, Gulguz, for making my Castle here an Artifact. It was going to make things so much simpler for managing the Doomrose Dungeon, and greatly expand the DM’s capabilities there, meaning Emeril would have to devote less of his own time to running it...
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“Any response?” Sif asked me in a low voice in the most established tent-tavern in Doomroot. Lady Gina was well-known around here, and I occasionally hired out as a guide to parties wanting to get to specific areas of the Dungeon.
I even restricted myself to traditional elvish weapons, because I could, and to V’s and less. Nobody ever complained, as I still had Halcyon Magic and could basically perform any role in a party if needed.
“No, it’s just sitting down there humming and providing a beacon across the sub-dimensional bands. The Veil around this area is pretty hard, so the idea that the Veil within it is actualized to jump past it in those bands is impossible to discern unless you know of the hollow down there. The Immortals are having too much fun exploring the Dungeon to think there might be an invisible spot that far below.”
There were two Immortals in the area right now, pretending to be competent adventurers here to take the challenge. When they entered and their Immortal Power was completely suppressed and drained, they also lost a lot of their artificial competency. If they weren’t prepared for it, they tended to die quickly, as the Dungeon quickly upgraded itself to match their true natures and took them apart.
Which didn’t deter them in the slightest, as they wouldn’t actually die there. Instead, it just seemed to amuse them and their friends as to how long they could last.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Just how big did you make this place, Gina?” Sif asked me as she sat back, her eyes roving over the very mixed bag of adventurers here for entertainment, including a whole bunch of tourists asking to die inside of there. Rich fools with magic, money, and no training didn’t last long in the Dungeon, but it was their funeral… although they ponied up a lot of money to make sure their bodies made it out so they could be Raised.
“I think you and Briggs have traversed about a third of it?” I hazarded. Sif looked at me in some disbelief.
“Gina, Briggs and I have been going through this place for like ten YEARS now. We’ve been everywhere people have been and come back from, and been places nobody else has gone through.”
I nodded once. “The DM tracks the people who come through and confirmed everywhere you’ve been.”
“And we’ve only been into a third of the place?” Sif asked in disbelief, then shook her head once. “No, no, we’re going to ignore that there’s no way a place so huge could fit even inside the mountain that is your castle. Where is all this extra space at?” she demanded. “My Trembling Domain isn’t to max, but there’s no way I’d miss any secret doors, and you know I go over everything!”
“Do you?” I arched an eyebrow. “I’m the Owner, I’ve got full rights to see the full layout, and a lot hasn’t been touched yet… and the DM is always adding on. There’s so much conditional stuff, hidden stuff, Quest-based stuff, areas that need to be unlocked by doing all the right things before they can be explored by any and all… this isn’t an easy place, Sif. It’s a place meant to challenge teams of veteran adventurers repeatedly.”
“Huh.” She frowned and kicked back, sipping at her mead thoughtfully. “So you’re saying we missed stuff.”
“Yeah, you’ve missed a lot of stuff,” I had to agree. “Which isn’t surprising. You’ve discovered things out of order, actually, since your Trembling Domain is a great cheat, above and beyond mere Tremblesense, so you’ve gotten into some areas that were supposed to be accessed off others by going the wrong way, and the connections were only one-way, so you didn’t look for their entrances.”
Sif wagged her finger at me. “You get to cheat, and you don’t even drop clues!” she whined theatrically, to which I just shrugged.
“The DM would be so disappointed with me for giving hints and clues that weren’t earned. But this place takes a LOT from Exudar IV, which is a Virtual MMO that fit in billions of Federation players and was over four decades old BEFORE the Barshund crashed here. That game was huge and it was popular. It had worlds within worlds you could access inside it, and even the ‘fantasy world’ setting was the size of Darkmoor… as a Dungeon.
“I think even you would have trouble finding everything in a Dungeon the size of all of the Firelands and more, right?”
She whistled slightly. “Are you going to do that? Make a Dungeon under the entirety of the Firelands? That would really keep away any subterranean invaders… or co-opt them…” she murmured, considering the implications.
“Part of the process of making the Firelands involved liquefying the darkstone underneath all of Darkmoor after the Doom shattered it, and moving it under the Castle and outwards.
“It’s all centered on the Castle, Sif, and out for twenty miles past the last of the Fire Rings. This Dungeon can just grow, and grow, and grow… and it’s received a lot of Immortal Power allowing it to do just that.”
“Damn!” she muttered under her breath. “And you’re sure the gods are coming?”
“The link is being held open from the other end, Sif.”
Her exhalation of quiet relief was quite sincere. “Well, that’s good, then. How do you think they’ll come? Breach the Veil and just show up, daring the Immortals to do something?”
I shook my head once. “Being so flagrant would draw in the other Alignments,” I said softly, “and the Immortals here have far more resonance with Chaos and Evil in particular than they do Good, while so many of the rest are Neutral apathetic and will just knuckle under to power once it bears down on them.
“No, if they come in, it’s going to be at a very low level, and they’ll build up to Divinity from inside the system here. There’s basically a roadmap for doing so, and not even the Immortals are going to say they are outsiders if all the power they’ve made is from here.”
“Wait.” She looked in the direction of the Doomgate. “The Dungeon? You’re going to have them come out of the Dungeon?!” she hissed excitedly.
“They aren’t the first adventuring group to suddenly stumble out of a Portal and get dumped into Doomrose, are they?” I arched an eyebrow at her.
“No, that’s happened at least ten times that I know of in the past ten years. Six times from elsewhere on the planet, and four times from other worlds or dimensions with strangely familiar Immortals as Patrons there,” she smirked knowingly.
“There are three other Dungeons attempting to be made elsewhere on this planet, and at least one Hierarch of Thought, Numzael the Spider, has attached a demiplane access in the lower fourth floor of Doomrose… if you are clever enough to figure out how to open it.” The DM naturally knew of the secret connections and addition, and simply worked it into the designs, but I could talk about it because it wasn’t part of the DM’s own work. “There are Portal dumps here from other locations because Immortals like the idea of dropping adventurers into this place and seeing if they can make it out. They even put random treasure chests around in their favorite places to tempt adventurers to go get them and try for the loot, the DM doesn’t even have to set them up in those areas.”
Sif closed her eyes and groaned softly. “That’s why all the chests in the lair of the Sirens are rolls of cloth and frilly dresses?” she asked with a half-snarl.
“Liisana is very enthusiastic about the exploits of her favorite teams, and just had to put her own personal touch on that area.” It was famous for singing swordswomen and harpies, dancing caryatid columns, musical puzzles, dance and music competitions with NPC’s, and even painting contests and the like for the more artistically inclined. Thor had made a pair of scissors for one of the dressmakers there, and received in return a copy of the lost opera of Ordunusk the Blue, supposedly burned in a fire at the playwright’s home and vanished over a thousand years ago. The only whisper of it existing was the persistent whisper itself, which wouldn’t go away.
The world wasn’t exactly in a great state to appreciate the find, but those places still managing to cling to learning and culture had all praised Thor for finding it, copying it off, and making sure it was not lost again...