[Warpworld] Ch 1 – Warping Home Again
Added 2025-03-29 03:36:18 +0000 UTCI was moving through extra-multiversal space, a medium you might liken to Chaos if you were a fan of classic mythology, and might liken to protoplasmic arcane soup if you were a Mythos advocate. Both had applicable points, as this was a place where Multiversal Laws didn’t exist, and the wills of the powerful acting upon an unformed existence made the rules.
I had punched through so damn much of this stuff while struggling with that damn Be Gone Curse. That damn Death Titan Demilich had really done a number on me, and I had a long way to go and a crazy path to take to get there.
A Pyramid-powered stream couldn’t equal the power of a high Eternal Necromancer’s Death Curse, but it could power me from one place to the next. The fact that my ‘jumps’ were probably being guided VERY subtly by an unseen silvery hand I chose to politely ignore, as I was pretty sure Mithar and Sylune were doing things a VERY long way from home that certain entities might look askew at, but Good gods being meddlers, they were doing it anyway.
I wasn’t getting any direct guidance, after all. It was obvious to anyone that I was not responsible for getting smashed away to where I had been, and my coming back was going to be haphazard and randomized. If I somehow managed to blunder my way into situations where Good Deeds were warranted, and I might save the day and somehow tuck a new system or world under the aegis of some Good gods, well, hey, that was what the Golden Aura symbolized, right?
Busybody me.
I crashed through a multiversal membrane, hurtling into the dimensions and universe beyond it, one more stop on my path home. I watched it seal shut behind me as dimensions collapsed from high and profound states down towards mortal existences, sliding by them on my course, wondering how the Laws here differed from where I came from, where I’d JUST come from on Zeben’s world, where Korbald was living...
Three Archways gleamed in my Sanctum Sanctorum. They needed to be fully empowered, but they were Attuned, linked to the worlds I’d visited, and so I’d be able to travel to them, helped by the Pyramids I’d made that had sent me along to my next station.
There was the slightest of nudges. Really, if I wasn’t expecting it, I wouldn’t have noticed, and I totally ignored the fact it had happened. My course slid down an ever-so-slightly different course, the equivalent of blowing on a bullet as it came out of the muzzle, the only difference in accuracy to be found far, far down range and away from the point of interference.
I was going to end up somewhere, make another Pyramid, and go home. If that was slightly different than random chance would have assigned me as I made my best efforts at retracing my path on the way back to my home and to Soulshard Zeks, well, I had to make multiple Jumps regardless, and a tiny deviation wasn’t going to add or take away much.
At least, that was what I hoped. Temporal shenanigans between multiverses had already made sure that Zeben/Fae had lived for years where I’d had only months, and I could only assume some of the deviations of the others would be even greater.
On the one hand, it meant that I could potentially stay in a certain place for years solving some problem and setting up things for Good to take advantage of. On the other hand... that could mean more personal years before I got home to Diana and the kids.
Just ugh. I least I was fairly sure I could trust Mithar not to magnify the time I was gone. Coming back home to find my family had been dead and gone for a thousand years and only my twentieth and older generations of grandkids were still around or something would truly suck.
But Terra-Luna had a ton of its own problems to face, and I was supposed to be THERE, not out here. I’d gotten sent out here for doing a selfless deed, and the powers I believed in weren’t going to punish me for doing that.
Time was just one more Law that could be bent between universes, let alone multiverses. I was a LONG way away in Creation, and whole bunches of things could be bent around me and my course of travel.
Or I could blunder right into what looked like some form of lesser plane or large demi-plane right in front of me...
Blargh! Ugh! Emotional and chaotic energy swirled around me, letting me know it didn’t like my presence and it was trying mightily to infiltrate me and play games with my mind, body, and soul.
My Heavenpact pulsed and Burned the shit away. I took note that the seething morass of emotional energy had almost no positive emotions within it, and I was sure that didn’t portend anything bad, yessirree Bob...
Boof!
Okay, I’d just been vomited out in interplanetary space. The system looked small, just a solar system in size, and one planet in the nominal life zone. If there were other life forms in the other locations, they weren’t traditional organics... which didn’t mean they weren’t there, but I wasn’t heading to them, and I wasn’t going to be investigating them if I could help it.
Is that moon made out of congealed proto-Mana?!
I Vatic-looked at the ghoulish mass of almost pure, compressed magical energy, condensed into pseudo-matter by who knew what, and orbiting fairly close to the world in a stable orbit of sorts.
That was... sooooo much magic! What the Hell could have created something like that? It was enough to infuse an entire planet with magic and more, all by itself!...
Is that a Mana Vortex?!
I blinked at the towering column of magical energy that seemed to be venting up streams of pure magic into the upper atmosphere and out into space. It didn’t take much scanning to reveal that a good portion of that magic seemed to be slithering towards the Mana-Moon behind me and was being drawn into its substance.
It wasn’t a natural phenomenon; I could tell it with a glance. Someone had set up a magical Formation of vast size and power to pump all that magic up out of the planet and into space. Unfortunately for them, it was just being sucked into that Mana-Moon which, if it got too heavy and too slow, might fall right back to the planet and unleash all of that mana again.
Given the amount of it, a planet-wide Wild Magic event would probably result, and that would not be good for anyone and anything, except Chaotic powers who would find it a hoot and a hugely enjoyable show.
It also appeared to be where I was heading on my course. Was the Formation drawing me in?
I looked around at the cloud-streaked blue and brown and green of the world below, Feature letting me see the visible spectrum while I looked at a few others.
Hrk! What insane bastard...!
There was an open Vortex to a Transition Realm over there! It was disgorging raw otherplanar magic into the planet from a gaping polar hole! The size of it, the intensity...
The Corruption! The stuff was Aligned hugely to Evil and to Chaos as it came out of there! It would rapidly lose the Alignment without the otherplanar influences on it which had infused it in the first case, but the sheer amount of magical leakage...
I looked at that towering Vortex, and rolled the eyes I didn’t have.
Idiots! Instead of closing the polar breach and purifying the mana, they were just attempting to pump it away!
I eyed the thaumic discharges at the northern pole, craned my head back to look at the Mana-Moon, and grimaced.
Fuuuuck. The composition of the mana was far too similar to be a coincidence...
The Vortex seemed to be located on an island in the center of... a continent-sized calderic ring? How else do you get a circular land of that size with an equally round internal sea?
Magic, you dunce, my backbrain kicked me. I looked at that Mana Vortex, at the lands and sea surrounding that island, and shook my head.
Right. I knew of spells to raise islands, Urlhmenuus and his assistant Angels had told me about them. Raising an island in a ring that large... hrmm! Eternal-Tier stuff...
I glanced at the polar opening. Something was using all that massive mana leaking out. A continent-sized uplifting spell supporting a massive island ring would be an awesome way of using all that power... right up until sometime when the strings were cut, and then it was likely that all that stone was going to go right back into the mantle it had been drawn up out of.
All that magic moving through it would make it a pretty magical place, however, leaving me to wonder just what kind of a people would pull so much stone out of the sea just to make a place to live.
I imagined I was going to find out pretty soon, given the speed I was moving at...
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Well, arrival wasn’t like my first two, it was like my last one. I had the uncomfortable feeling this was going to be a theme.
Moving at miles/second, naturally I was cutting a flaming path across the sky. Elemental Command from Primus meant I wasn’t being ground away by the friction and the heat didn’t bother me at all, but they could certainly see I was coming if they were looking at the night sky, falling star coming down for them...
Still, I was slowing down, atmosphere being good at that for man-sized propelled objects, and the landing as I came down in under the edge of the Mana Vortex, smashing into the dark stone of the island after some magical Wards popped and sizzled when I punched through them, wasn’t too horribly bad.
The Hands of the Angels caught me before I hit, my momentum vented in a poof of wind and friction heat dispersing across black stone in all directions, and I was plopped to the ground by a surge of flowing mana unceremoniously.
Yessir, that’s the proper, stylish way to come to a new world, Ael, I thought to myself, sighing as I collected myself from my ungrateful sprawled position and pushing myself to my feet resignedly.
I took a look around in multiple spectra, and said, “Huh.”
The place was full of black rocks... carved black rocks. Said rocks were engaged in transferring mana from distant places and funneling it towards the Mana Vortex in front of me, now about a mile away. The transfer was mostly invisible in the normal light spectrum, little more than shadows and hints of motion at the corner of the eye, but under Detect Magic at IX was a hundred multi-colored streams of power running together and joining in that massive spiral of arcane power that was venting the magic up into space.
Delaying the reckoning of having too much magic around, but not taking care of the problem at all, really.
I eyed the Mana-Moon over there to the east, looking kind of ghoulish and unclean from down here, a sensation that was as much psychic as visible. It probably had to do with the source of the mana flowing past me, which didn’t portend well, either.
I started micro-Sieging, running the scale of lesser spells to see how the manafield responded to manipulation... and wasn’t surprised when such raw power both resisted and responded in equal measure. Structure and form wasn’t nearly as important as willpower and focus here, it seemed, but once the latter was achieved, the magic accepted the former willingly, almost leaping to be constrained and transformed.
It was very primal, with a very elemental feel to it, lacking the sophistication and intermixing of true arcane power, which meant I had to slurry things a bit and create my own style of handling the difference. I began to layer the stuff, seeing how readily it changed nature and character depending on how my Theurgies addressed it.
Primal power was there, but it was truly raw and elemental, not siphoned and filtered through the living world-weave as was typical of Druidic magic, lacking the touch of a worldmind monitoring it and conveying its desires, replete only with the raw fury and energy of unconstrained sources.
