[Warpworld] Ch 39 – Grand Designs
Added 2025-03-29 04:35:35 +0000 UTC« Chapter 38 | Index | Chapter 40 »
The Ancients weren’t the only ones who could think big. I made Pyramids for a living. Grand and Wondrous Architecture was something I had played with since I made the first Walls back in Aru’s Cut and filled them with fun surprises. That had been a long time and a lot of Levels ago.
Starting underneath my feet, I was building a Thaumaturgic Circle that encapsulated the entire Warp Rift. Pointedly, I was doing it just underground, and I was having to compensate for uneven disturbances in the land, cracks and fractures in the ground, and other such things.
I was being aided in this by the Warp. Why? Because the Rift was a perfect cut in reality, and when reality was reclaimed, it was also perfect.
One inch at a time, unbroken and flawless expanses of stone and earth were being reclaimed from the Warp, and I was working with that perfect stone.
More to the point, I could affect an area 25 inches wide and an inch thick at a time around the entire perimeter of the Rift, every six seconds. A million square feet of area is a lot of square footage to affect, a thousand feet by a thousand feet every six seconds.
It was 276 soccer fields of area, every six seconds.
When my Thundering, Radiant Salvos and the crashing Ritual Waves reclaimed that first inch, my Sculptor side got to work.
Vivus infusions straight from the misting firefall coming down on the Warpeater Pyramid followed the Shaping Stone magic forth to punch right through the Domain field and out and around the Rift at literally the speed of thought. In one second, guided by the Commune that followed the magic and made sure it kept on course, I followed the perfect cut of the stone reclaimed from the Warp Rift around clockwise and linked it back up to me on the other side in an active Circle, a suddenly and completely magically intact, unbroken conduit of energy with some pretty awful and impressive fundamental magical meanings.
Containment and closure were only part of those meanings.
But, it was just a simple Circle. That is, until I started shaping the Runes in between it and the second Circle, then expanding those rings down along the sides of the spherical intrusion, layer upon later, twenty-seven inches of expansion per second, doing in repetition and detail and sheer absolute Quality Level of the Shaping what others might do with massive size instead.
Making Runes a klik across would be dumb and get noticed. Nope, I just did small, human-scale Runes, but I did them at a QL of 60, high Eternal-Grade work, and I began to layer them in concentric rings around a thing with no spatial center Out There, working down as well as around.
The Circles gave the Rift a metaphysical center, imposing Order upon Chaos!
I also reinforced the area directly underneath us and inside the Domain of the Warpeater Pyramid, amplifying and reinforcing the work we were doing, fortifying it against any sudden backlash repeatedly, using the Warp Gods’ own tactic of diverting force into the sphere of the Rift against them.
As the Warp ceded ground, the Circle gained thickness, and vivus energized it with more energy. Like the closing of a fist, hard reality extended around the Rift, and the pressure began to build.
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The attack, when it came, might have been without warning... if I hadn’t been continuously sending out magic into the teeth of the Warp for hours, getting a very good feel for the erratic pressures and flows of the magic and reality on the other side out there.
Also, I had a hundred-plus miles-long measuring stick grinding slowly in, measuring resistance as only the Land could do. It felt the whelming pressure from within the Rift instantly when it started, a subtle distortion and increase on our small area of the Circle, adding up to an immense and building surge upon all of it.
I noted the time and smirked. The Warp Gods had realized that Natural Renewal was a significant time, and were trying to push us back or forestall us before then.
On our first day, we had claimed nearly ten inches of ground around the entirety of the Warp Point!
“There is a massive Warp Surge coming. Be ready for it, but not afraid of it. Continue pushing your waves out into the edge of the Domain, but don’t reach beyond it with your wills. Everything will hold,” I Said, my Magevoice echoing through the complex interlacing of the Sublime Chord still Singing about us and harmonizing everything into a greater whole.
The vivus pouring down into the ground and dispersing into the Circles I had wrought intensified, purified, the ever-increasing smoothness and efficiency of transferred power only ramping up as time went on. I had not expanded the Domain to increase anything, constantly reinforcing it even as the Warp grew thicker, remaining steady and firm.
Now, a massive boiling Warpstorm was raging for us, something that if it broke free might bury half the planet in the writhing chaos of the most broken parts of another dimension, and doom everything here.
Which was all perfectly fine for the Warp Gods. It was the End Times, after all. It was time to start things over, and if I had hurried it a bit more with my deeds, well, such was life for interfering with things I wasn’t supposed to.
Writhing colors across three spectra darkened and began to howl at the eyes and soul, so we closed the one and kept the other tight, letting the power of the vivus flow through and eat the influences trying to spread. A turgid, tumultuous unreality was spit in our direction like blood spurting from a severed vein, vomited out at us to take us out and start the End of Days.
It smashed into the Warpeater’s Domain with the howling roars and maddened shrieks of the damned, pushing back the Domain which couldn’t eat it fast enough, bending it, buckling it… and then it started sloughing off to the side.
The directed force of the Warpstorm found itself pushed sideways, and as its force was dispersed, its pressure lessened with incredible speed. The hundred-mile-long Thaumaturgic Circle, resting comfortably on the underlying laws of magic and reality, anchored in stone, Shaped at a level of skill gods might acknowledge, took on the added pressure across a thousand square miles and more of area, and held without much effort at all.
Just like us againt them, when dispersed a hundred-fold, the distance the Warp Storm could advance wasn’t all that much, and the Circle effectively multiplied the pressure the mortal world could bring to bear a hundred-fold, amplified by an intact Binding Circle to a thousand-fold resistance against this pushback.
The Warp Storm crackled madly and thundered furiously, but it made no progress. Soon enough its entire force was raging against the entirety of the bound Rift, instead of just in our direction, and it went nowhere and did nothing. Its own converted power formed massive quantities of vivus surging through a Circle that I continued to scribe, continued to grow, and the massive square miles of runic structures woven through the erupting crystals inside the Warpeater Domain and beyond it only continued to grow and push back against it!
More and more vivus was pumping through the Circle, a convenient place to put all the energy, even as I expanded half a square mile every six seconds, adding additional width to the Rings, additional acreage of crystals and Runes weaving among them.
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It was the top of the world. Technically, there was no dawn here, only hours of night all the time, or hours of day all the time. Time itself was wonky, timelessness within the Warp was the order of the day, granting immortality by simply not allowing time to pass for those within.
But Natural Renewal would not be denied, and so it came.
“Dreams of the wind at dawn,
A new day has begun.
Light chases back the dark, and the future lays before us.
Will it be something bright and new?
Walk the road before you now, and leave the night behind,
Today is a new day, and the light comes to warm you all.
Let go the shadows, and behold the sun!
The Light has come, as ever it must.
Behold the new day!”
And somehow, there was a dawn, although the sun was on the other side of the Warp Storm screaming and writhing at the edges of our sanity in front of us.
A breath of life and surety into the body and soul. A sudden lightening of the weight upon the mind and spirit from the madness trying to reach us. A wave sweeping past us on the bow of the first rays of the morning, taking the load, renewing, reinvigorating, and expanding out past us with the relentless pressure of a new day, of time turning, of absoluteness and renewal of the mortal realm and its dictates.
Say what you like, Nature has its own Order in the universe, the mortal Realm has Laws, and one tick of the clock of eternity had now passed us by, while another one was beginning.
The pressure and the power followed everything we had seized, and set it in a Veil of adamant reality so hard it felt like the Warpstorm went from pounding on the walls with baseball bats to merely making a racket with some hail.
Everything steadied up in the face of the Warp. The titanic fury expending itself against the Thaumaturgic Circle was downgraded several planar hurricane categories, and the Warp Storm suddenly lost its teeth, despite not actually losing any power.
“Rest,” I told the elves and the saurids simply, lowering myself to float just above the ground, my Dawnstopped Shape Stone reweaving itself with the new day. My Shaping efforts continuing unabated, the #1 grinding thing I was best at, even as more and more vivus flowing into the areas I had opened up pressed back against the Warp with the relentless advance of a spreading tide.
The Weight of the World upon the Warp had just doubled, and as a result, so had our speed of advance. The Ritual of the elves and saurids gently tapered off so all involved could rest and Meditate in peace behind the Warding Circles I Shaped up around them, vivus bathing them in cool mist. I continued my expansions while my other thoughtstreams rested, only shuffling the Sublime Chord around to rest and renew and revitalize with Mortus Dius’ help, keeping the Heartsong going to aid us all.
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The Warpstorm continued to kick and thrash and howl and whine that we were ignoring it, but the Weight and Laws of the mortal plane pressed back against it, mountains of metaphysical reality that were growing heavier by the moment.
Tik-tok, tik-tok….
The Chaos of the Warp allowed it to bring monumental pressures to bear upon specific points, albeit such manipulations of the Warp were difficult to bring about and normally totally random. Thaumaturgic Circles and the like were ways of bringing the Weight of the World into specific places, using Laws instead of Chaos to amplify natural defiance to such intrusions in a specific area.
Feeding it all with vivus, well, that was just adding insult to injury.
The metaphysical force of the Warpstorm was sweeping past and around this Rift now, finding weaker areas of the Warp to rampage through, its attempt to erupt past the Veil foiled and now responding by wandering off in other meta-directions. How long the Storm would last was unknown, given we were dealing with an entire dimension of possible energies… but what that really meant was how much effort the Warp Gods expended to get it to cavort and crash through their Realms and end up here, now, at the exact wrong time and place for us.
The massively-amplified Weight of the World was pushing back, and only getting weightier by the moment. I couldn’t feel it through the Commune, but I had no doubt that when the Warpstorm finally wriggled off into whatever internal infinity was there, we were going to find the borders of the Rift had just weakened considerably, the default pressure there not what it had been, and we would be advancing at greater speed than before.
With all things, a cost.
I didn’t know how much they had paid, and I didn’t know how much they could see through the writhing pandemonium outside the borders of the Warpeater Domain. But I think I would have paid good money to see their expressions when it all finally cleared away and the Warp Gods looked upon the massive Thaumaturgic Circle encircling their precious Rift, somehow even stronger than it was before. The Mortal Plane was pressing in on a vastly depleted expanse of the Warp with more power and onus behind it than ever before!
More time was more weight. Every advance concentrated that weight even more.
Today was going to be a fruitful day.
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