[Warpworld] Ch 4 – A Vortex to a Fireplume

« Chapter 3 | Index | Chapter 5 »

            The speaker hadn’t introduced himself. I turned my eyes on him and remained silent as I waved my hands, and another hundred and four head-sized Vivic Eternal Lights joined the spirals of the Mana Vortex’s draw.

            “This is Wizard Tyaegaphin, Magi’alaihei, Senior of the Sindalphin Tower, Captain of the Watchguard of the Isle of Sorcerers,” the first elf interjected smoothly for his junior, who actually flushed as he realized he’d also been impolite.

            “Senior Tyaegaphin,” I said gravely, and he actually managed to nod in acknowledgment. “Yes, your Waystones are failing. They were made to conduct pure mana, not this Tainted stuff.” I ran my fingers through a glowing stream, gold and rainbow motes scattering off my fingers. “You are seeing vivic fire burn the impurities out of the incoming Mana. They don’t appear to have reached critical mass in this Vortex of yours, however.”

            “And when they do?” the Elder inquired quickly, all of them looking at the rising, glowing flow of massive amounts of mana... mana that looked to be sparkling, glowing, and even misting now?...

            “Well, the Vortex is made to dump Tainted Mana outside the planet. Pure mana it won’t touch, it’ll just recede into the Land like it should, strengthening the planet itself. So, if all the incoming mana is purified, the Vortex should actually recede and just become a pillar of vivic fire Burning away the incoming Tainted Mana constantly.

            “This should remove the danger of that moon coming down, but it doesn’t stop the long-term danger of your Waystones’ erosion. The polar opening over there needs to be sealed shut for that to happen.”

            They all just stared at me and my blasé tone as I waved absently to the north. How long had the thing been open, anyway?

            I turned around abruptly. “Are there beings trapped inside the Vortex?” I asked in some surprise. Feature had seen some ghostly figures drifting around within it.

            “The High Wizards who formed the Vortex in Ritual were trapped inside of it when it formed, unable to emerge!” the Elder replied, and even sounded a little regretful at the fact. “They have been trapped within it for thousands of years, their invocations giving it strength for all time!”

            “Well, their confinement should be over within a day or two, then. The Vortex will collapse into a pillar of misting unwhite fire, instead of a tightly bound shell of unclean mana. The energy in the mists will sink smoothly into the ground and permeate through it. I expect that the area around here will be green within a week, and the outer edges of the island growing trees and bushes within a month.”

            The elves gaped at me again, like I was turning their world upside-down. “Yes, this is all Truth,” I confirmed, and watched them twitch as their disbelief was smashed and torn down inside them once again.

            “Freeing Sethanon Dragonspeaker and his fellow High Wizards from the Vortex would be a legendary event!” what looked to be the ranking martial officer hissed to the third Caster, his eyes flashing, probably at just being able to witness such an event.

            “If this Human’s magic does what it claims,” sneered the third Caster, hard amber eyes on me, but his contempt fell flat even to him.

            It was all True. Such a cruel thing to inflict on someone! He couldn’t even be properly scornful of a mere apeling of a Human!

            I was coming up on the area of my initial dispersal of the Fires, the sideways-swirling streams of mana that were vivisized winding around and into that massive pillar of overflow mana. As I laid down more and more Fires, the streams closed tightly, seeming to glow more brightly as suddenly the Tainted Mana inside the Formation had nowhere left to go...

            The vivic streams had now joined into pulsing serpentine tracks, spiraling slowly up the side of the Vortex as it pulsed and pushed the Corrupted Mana towards space. I finished up the last of the Vivic Eternal Lights Burning in their little dimples, and all those dimples also lit up at the same time, touches of mana making them pulse with colors in an intricate floral Formation which nicely complemented the active one on the Vortex. The incoming mana noticeably picked up in speed and intensity, yet was cycled right through multiple Fires on its path to the middle, making the vivus stronger.

            The elves gaped and pointed as unwhite mist began to fall slowly from the new lines around the Vortex, but the vast majority of that power was being used to ignite the mana within it, and the strands were growing...

            There was only silence as the streams of vivus finally ignited completely, yet the elves here jumped all the same. The fact I didn’t only made them more nervous as they looked around at thicker, dancing streams of mana converging on the Lights, spreading through the beauty of the Pattern they made, then united as they flowed into the Vortex itself, now looking like unwhite flames burning at the end of a glowing firehose of thick, purified energy.

            The further up I looked, the bigger those vivic flames were growing, too!

            “By the time the traces reach the top, the whole Vortex should immolate, cleansing the entire length of it. If I’ve timed it right, that Mana-Moon should be fairly close to it. Maybe I could even set that on vivus. Mmm, I think that would really piss someone off.”

            The elves were staring at me as if I’d grown another head, especially as I turned away and strolled towards the edge of this massive Waystone of theirs we were standing upon. “Feature, did you find something?” I called out audibly, all my words still in Draconic, if only to mess with the heads of these idiots who were hastening after me.

            “What are you searching for now, Ringlord Aelryinth?” the eldest of them asked warily, all too ready to believe this was part of some greater scheme that would be of horrible detriment to his people.

            “That Moon has to go. It’s just a disaster waiting to happen, and there’s any number of things which could knock it out of orbit and back to the planet, from stray comets to the will of a particularly cruel god or something.” The elves all flinched slightly at my casual words. “So, if it doesn’t ignite when it passes over the collapsing Vortex, I figure I’ll retask one of your Waystones here that is about to fail, set it up as a really powerful vivic furnace, and drop it onto the Moon.

            “It might take a while, but it’ll Burn the whole damn thing away in time, reinforce space and reality around the planet proper, and make such a thing happening again damn near impossible.

            “Huh. That one is actually sputtering.” It was another black polyhedron, about the size of a shed or small barn, and the Mana coming through it was intermittent and unfocused. It was sitting about a quarter-mile away in the shadow of a much larger Waystone that still seemed fine. “Okay, that might just start a systemic collapse if not handled right. Pardon me, I’ve got some work to do over there.”

            I Linejumped right over there with a step, leaving the shouting elves behind me. Feature lazily flew over there above me, marking my location even if they couldn’t also clearly see my hair against this black landscape, and the Orb topping Mortus Dius.

            I pulled an ingot of silver out of my Masspack and got to work. Silver wasn’t worth much as far as goldweight went, but it was a fine metal for doing Runework and similar stuff, and so ideal for my purposes here.

------

            The elves were going to compromise and send one of their number over here on a dragon, but Feature just looked down at the eldest of the dragons and simply shook his head. None of the dragons were willing to come over here, and the elves couldn’t do much about it.

            This particular Waystone wasn’t managing much of the mana coming through, and making an alternate path for the stuff along the surfaces of the surrounding Waystones that formed the local landscape wasn’t all that difficult. If all went well, I’d shut down the source of the problem and the failure of the structures would be a moot point. 

            The Mana-Moon was passing overhead, while the vivic flames had risen to the very top of the Vortex and were preparing to fully ignite. The suction of the Moon should pull everything into alignment...

            If you were watching, it looked like a distant spark went off way, way up in the air. The surrounding mana seemed to twitch for a moment, and then, slowly and grandly, the Vortex began to unwind and spiral out in all directions as streams of heavy falling mist, sparking and glowing as it did so.      

            I imagined some people would be gleeful seeing it fall apart and the chaos that might be following... except it wasn’t going to be that way. This vivic torch I’d built was going to do everything the Vortex had, plus a whole lot more!

            Hmm. I ran some calculations on my fingers and eyed the Moon. Had it just altered course away from the disintegrating Vortex?

            I overlapped the orbital vectors, matched them up, and...

            Yeah, it had changed course laterally to avoid the vivisized mana.

            Huh!

            I pushed the silver ingot against the Waystone there and Shaped it up. Threads of silver only a few hundred atoms wide flowed through the stone, buttressing up its very entrophied internal circuitry in a very specific way, and then I Cast a one-way Portal.

            A glowing, churning circle the exact hue of that unhealthy Moon up above opened right underneath that Waystone. Gravity did its thing, and a second later the Waystone was gone, even as a bright unwhite flame lit up around it, igniting even higher as it was pulled down.

            I wasn’t worried about the Waystone surviving a fall, as the solid Mana would be less obstruction than a downy pillow, all things told.

            Yeah, at x100 magnification, Eagle Eyes could see a tiny, tiny little point of unwhite light had ignited on the surface of that moon.

            It might take a very long time, but it was now inevitable. That Mana Moon was going to Burn away someday and leave the night sky a bit clearer than it had been.

            That little task done, I looked back at the falling Vortex, which seemed to have stopped the disintegrating about a thousand meters up, it taking that long for the incoming Mana to be fully purified and disposed of.

            That didn’t mean it wasn’t breaking apart and changing its nature, it was just the vivus was being flung out sideways up there, spreading like a great misting tree over the island as it did so... totally invisible unless you had magical sight, of course. All you’d see with normal vision was a torch of unwhitish magic going up a thousand paces like a beacon and then fading away.

            I watched the flames seize the full force of the Vortex, the whole nature of it changing as a containment field for unhealthy magic became a swirling engine of purification for it.

            It looked like some of the elves trapped inside the place were stumbling out of it, blinking around in astonishment and alarm at the changes, and wondering what was going on.

            Mmm. Time for me to get going. I’m sure they’d have a celebration or something planned for the trapped wizards, but I had no desire to be involved in all that.

            Feature looped on down even as the guardian elves were urgently pointing my way. I sort of waved in their direction as I directed my attention north and east, picturing the landscapes I’d seen from orbit, and I... paused.

« Chapter 3 | Index | Chapter 5 »