Outside the Heavens 0.1 - Prologue - The Empty Stranger

When I posted the chapter for SotSD on Saturday, I wasn't actually done with my writing for last week. I had been attempting to write that chapter at least four different times before I managed to make it work then. I already had three hundred words written and those got incorporated into the chapter, so I had only written about 1700 words out of my goal of writing 2000 per week. So I started working on the prologue for this. I got about 900 words done that night. Then, another 900 words or so, was written to complete this over the last day or so.

I have actually written several thousand words of definitions, content, etc... as background, but I am not counting that towards my goal of 2000, because it would be far too easy to only work on my world building if I did that.

So, which too much further ado, here is the prologue to Outside the Heavens:

Imperial Agent Lurona was not having a good day. Any day she was required to execute the grimmer aspects of her office could not be considered a good one, and today was almost certainly one of them.

There was always a chance, if faint, that she was wrong. The qi signature radiating out from the isolated building she could see between the trees as she descended from the air could turn out to be something innocuous. Perhaps some researchers looking into an obscure aspect of qi manipulation, or who had discovered a new way to trip the dimensional sensors. If so, the monitoring array would be adjusted and new schematics would be sent out throughout the Empire. It was possible, every decade or so a slight modification would get send out, but it wasn’t likely.

No, the more likely cause was someone actually messing with dimensional magic. If she was lucky they had no idea what they were doing. They were messing with a technique from an old scroll they had found in a ruin, or were practicing some secret technique, not realizing what it was. If that was the case, the technique would be confiscated and examined. If it was sufficiently harmless they would be given an imperial token that would recognize when they used it, letting the monitoring arrays know it was an authorized use. If it was something truly new, the culprit would either be assisted in developing it, or forbidden from practicing it.

However, she didn’t think she was that lucky. The level of power present in the building was shielded from the outside, arrays carved into the walls dulled the senses of those who tried to gaze within. It was not enough to completely prevent her gaze, and she could detect multiple people within. It was almost certain they knew exactly what they were doing, and that meant people would die today. And, unless an expert at a level far beyond what she could sense was present, it wouldn’t be her.

Her face hardened as she landed on the ground, her boots settling noiselessly into the soft loam of the forest floor. Her robes were still as she moved forward, every inch of them suffused with her qi, allowing no noise to ripple out as she advanced.

The archway ahead of her, twin doors set into it and alight with barriers and glowing seal, disintegrated with a whisper of her qi. The divine fire of her primary cultivation turned them into less than ash, and whatever arrays might have been used to protect the building were useless before her. Save, of course, as a warning, and a pulse of qi rushed out from where the doors had been destroyed, alerting whoever was watching for them.

She heard no shouts, no running feet, felt no presence of incoming qi. Whoever might be here, they were not rushing out to greet her.

A moment later, the faint humming of qi from within the building built into a torrent. Whatever they were trying to accomplish, it was happening now.

She rushed forward. While those within the building were not a threat, something brought from outside this world could be.

It was only a moment more when she entered a large room. Seals covered the floor, intricate geometric designs carved into the stone and studded with crystallized qi power sources. Power ran through them and glowed with shimmering light. An outer circle surrounded a group of cultivators. Qi flowed out of them, into the array below. Whatever purpose the cultivators were attempting, they ignored her entirely, their qi the only sign they were not meditating.

She unsheathed her sword and brought it down against the outer ring in a smooth motion, intent on stopping the ritual from reaching its conclusion. The thin silvery blade was suffused with a faint impression of golden fire.

She was too late.

A moment before her sword touched the line, all the power spiraled into the center of the room. The array broke under her blade, but it was unneeded now. The instructions contained in the various seals had already suffused the gathered power, which sucked into middle and formed into a dimensional tear.

For a moment, everything was still. The power of the tear ripped through space and the sheer strangeness that pervaded from it was enough to halt the function of her mind. The others in the room were similarly stunned, unable to handle a place where the rules of reality broke down. Up became down, in was out, and all the world became a strange and foreign wasteland with no sense and no reason. Her spiritual senses were no less confused, an impression of a thousand impossible shapes overwhelmed her.

And then it was over, and a man in strange clothes lay in the very center circle.

A demon?

She couldn’t take the chance. A swipe of her blade, infused with divine fire, blasted through the room.

It ripped out ahead of her, the cultivators in the way blown away like so much chaff. They burned for an instant before they were only the suggestion of ashes on the wind. The floor beneath their feet burned away, and the walls and ceiling of the building shattered and were blasted into fragments. Everything was destroyed.

Everywhere, except where she had been aiming.

The center circle was untouched and the burning qi of her attack was spiraling in toward the man. A man who was already screaming, tears flowing out of the his eyes as his lungs attempted to express his agony.

This was no demon. If it was a demon, qi would be flowing out from the man, not be drawn in. If a demon had survived her attack she would have expected the attack to be deflected or eroded by the volume of qi and ziu. She wasn’t sure what would draw in her attack like that.

Dimly, she could sense the presence of ziu, a dark mirror to the qi, flowing into the man as well. In fact… that was the only qi and ziu she could sense from him. He had less power in his body than a new born child.

The man did his best to continue screaming, though his breath had begun to run out, as the energy of the heavens and earth continued to push its way into his body.

Who is this stranger?

It was a relevant question, and one that she could afford now that she knew he wasn’t a demon. He didn’t seem to be anything eldritch, either.

She looked around with minor regret, ignoring the man for the moment as he continued to gasp. It would have been good to keep some of the now destroyed cultists alive for questioning. The odds were not particularly good that they would have talked, but it rankled against her professionalism that she was unable to even try.

A larger concern was the mostly destroyed array. Understanding exactly who they had brought through, and possibly why. The only part that had survived was what was protected by the man’s aura of flowing  qi.

She examined the area, keeping the vortex of qi and ziu under the close eye of her spiritual sense. Nothing else had survived. No artifacts, or rings, no jade slips or talismans. That substantially lowered the odds that the group had found out how to perform the ritual and array from an ancient inheritance. Those objects tended to be tough.

The energies surrounding the man on the ground were dying down.

She approached, taking a closer look at him.

His hair was dark, a glossy cross between black and deep brown. She couldn’t see his eyes, they were squeezed shut, tear streaks running across his face. He had a naturally tan complexion, though his face was pale, his skin damp and clammy. He wasn’t screaming any longer, but twitches and shivers showed he was still conscious. His hands clenched and unclenched, his body occasionally tensing. And he was tall, almost ridiculously so. His body was defined with faint lines of muscle obvious beneath thin sheaths of fat.

His clothes were strange. He wore a loose shirt, a snowy white, with a colorful pattern on the front. Below that were blue pants of a thicker cloth. The blue was strange, the threads infused with a  mixture of blue and white. However, it didn’t look like a poor dye attempt, but rather an intentional choice, evenly spread across the entire garment. The pattern was actually composed of separate threads when she looked closer. The pants were finished with a golden yellow thread, the color perfectly even, further reinforcing the intentional design. The perfectly tooled metal button and strange interlocking lines of bronze below added to it. His shoes were perhaps the oddest of all, a mixture of cloth and a rubbery and shiny material mixed in. The shoes were laced with stain white laces.

Overall, the figure was simply odd. She didn’t know anyone that dressed this way, and she hadn’t heard of anywhere, either.

Someone from another Empire? Why the lack of qi then?

The vortex finally died down and the stranger slumped down, unconscious.

She finished her approach, lifting the stranger up with her qi, carefully holding him up and supporting his body. He was painfully weak, his qi and ziu had only just stabilized. He was as weak as a newborn. She couldn’t even detect a dantian. There was no organization to his qi or ziu, and what she could sense of his meridians was completely empty.

He is nothing but sand.

If she had simply sensed him on the street, she would have assumed he was crippled. He might still be, but it was as if he had never been exposed to qi before at all. Which was impossible, life couldn’t exist without qi.

He could have been pulled out of some inter-dimensional prison, and that had been her first guess, but who would lock away a cripple? If he had ever cultivated, there would be traces, but there was nothing. She would feel at least a little guilty if the cult had saved some innocent from being locked away forever. Still, that didn’t really make sense.

She looked below him, reading the seals his body had concealed.

Her lips twitched and then she began to laugh.

No doubt the cultists had intended to draw in some awesome power to assist them, someone mighty beyond all reason. However, they had made a mistake.

There, plainly laid out in the seals, was the purpose of the array. No doubt they had meant to ask for someone from ‘beyond the heavens,’ whose power rivaled the Emperor. The same seal, however, could mean something far different. And if you didn’t even understand what it would mean… well, you could make a crucial mistake.

She looked down at the stranger held up with streams of gossamer qi. This poor man, obviously from the Sealed Lands, had been pulled here by a simple error.

The seal, below her and empty of even the faintest bits of energy, spelled it out clearly.

It asked for someone from ‘outside the heavens,’ and its wish had been granted.